eat the frog

making friends in your 30s, procrastination playlists, the DMV

Making new friends in your 30s, and I imagine into future decades too, is…strange. But I believe in sparks. And that the platonic kind are just as potent as romantic. And although poets are known to tell stories about falling for lovers, I hope to be a poet that tells stories of falling for friends too. Because it happens, and when it does, you feel young again, but also old. As a new friend put it to me this week, “it’s so weird, we’re all like, what if they don’t want to play with me?”

I recently went on a walk with a new friend. Let’s just say it had been a slow burn leading up to the meetup. She’s a baker and also writes sweet newsletters (bakery newsletters are a genre of writing that I believe deserves more cred) when she has time. Which there is not a lot of when her house is often turned upside down with bread.

Last spring, I gave her a copy of Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West at a local pop up market. The book has lot of references to food, fruit specifically, so it felt like the right move. My fella teased me after the book handoff. Apparently my face immediately became rose-colored after handing it to her. “Yeah, that’s because just like dating, meeting new friends requires making a move.”

He didn’t say much in response to that, because I would never be referencing him in this story had I not made a move on him one snowy night. We then both agreed that life is short and if you want to be friends with someone, you can’t hold back. You gotta do the embarrassing thing and give a stranger a book of poetry.

Energy knows energy. I like spending time with other people who are making things, making moves. I also feel I can be myself around people who are honest about having a limited bandwidth (and by that I don’t necessarily mean just with time, I mean the energy/interest) for engaging with others non-stop socially when you’re in the throws of making whatever it is you’re making, whether it’s poems or pain suisse.

That being said, after she ran around all summer making dough for local markets and I spent all summer hermitting hotly out of season trying to stay the course of editing work, we finally crossed paths outside of the bakery line, shortly after the clock struck autumn. To see the aspens turn in late afternoon light. Yeah, as I said, energy knows energy.

In my experience, hanging out with new friends one on one, which in my case is almost always with women, small talk has no air time. Deep end discussion is the only way. Because we’re all mostly content in our little individual terrariums. And although slightly more secure than in our 20s, we’re still pretty darn anxious (even though we pretend like we’re not).

Someone accepts our invite to a playdate, a coffee, a Zoom room, and then it happens, you’re there beside a stranger that you hope to be more than a stranger—and you’re so damn eager. You end up loosening the faucet. Well, ideally both of you do. And both parties are aware that two faucets are present so there must be this sort of back and forth flooding between the two parties.

We talked about everything. And by that, I mean the things that matter. How we struggle with the season of summer each passing year and daydream about being buried in snow. How we don’t like staying up late very often because it makes us feel sick the next day. How sometimes we simply need one-on-one interactions more than we need groups. How we mange to get shit done when we don’t want to. How we rely on medicines and other modalities to prevent our own thoughts from getting in our way.

I asked her what therapist she recommends in town. Turns out she talks to the same person my OBGYN recommended to me months ago. Sometimes you need to hear it twice before you book the appointment. Sometimes you need to hear something as the leaves turn to jump over the line you’ve been staring at all summer.

In a recent essay by

Leslie Stephens

, the author of the newsletter Morning Person, she mentions a technique of tackling life’s to do’s called “eating the frog”. In other words, swallowing the hardest thing, the thing you’re dreading the most, the thing you’ve been procrastinating, first. Reason being, the longer you wait to swallow frogs, the larger and uglier they become. Toads, if you will.

For the last several months, one of my frogs has been editing old poems. While many people assume every aspect of the writing process is magical, hardly work— that’s not the case. For me at least. The initial writing of something new is always where I feel sparks. It’s the honeymoon phase. Dopamine and steam. Editing is the part of writing that takes my focus and discipline. Where I need to tend to the flame, keep it from going out. Editing is couples therapy for me and the page.

Turns out, the more I swallow frogs, the more I begin to crave them the next day. An acquired taste. Some weeks eating frogs eventually becomes like eating air. The more I swallow them, the easier I can swallow the rest of my day’s demands that create a meteor shower of my mind.

It ebbs and flows. This week’s frogs feel more like toads, I gotta be honest with you. And I’ve been putting them off. Big time. Things like going to the DMV to get a California driver’s license. I’ve lived here for several years and some people in my family who work in legal spaces are going to text me after reading this. When I first drove to California I did so with an expired driver’s license. Had no clue until I was trying to purchase some wine at a grocery store in CO on the way. I gripped the steering wheel and drove slow, especially through Utah.

I’m sweating thinking about how terrified I was to take my driver’s test at 16. I think that’s why the DMV visit has become a gigantic toad this time around. It’s only a written test this time, but still. Tests, man. Give me a blank page not multiple choice. Any time, any day. Give me a winding road, not some parallel parking bullshit. (I still avoid parallel parking. A frog I’ve struggled to swallow since I was a teen.)

Instead of taking care of that DMV toad, I’ve been pouring my spare time into a playlist for myself and my childhood friends. I’ve gone above and far beyond for that task. It’s 9.5 hours of tunes. Other than the poems it’s probably the thing I’m most proud of currently. It’s cringe.

The vibe is late 90s/early 2000s music that my childhood friends and I would hear on the radio while in the backseat of the car doing errands with our parents. And then also the songs that were playing inside those big box stores. As well as dipping into the slightly later time period where we were in cars on those same highways without parents, going to a coffee shop in the next town over.

The playlist is called “On the way to Plymouth” (our next town over growing up). And my best friend from childhood is listening to it on the subway in New York City as I type this. So I guess you could say it could also be called “On the way to the rest of our lives”. Which is what that drive really was to us as kids.

She never has to parallel park and I love that for her. I love that for our little and present-day selves. Even though she went east, I also gave her a copy of Instructions for Traveling West before she moved. And a copy of

Alex Dimitrov

’s Love and Other Poems that I instructed her to open once she got to her new apartment. Because, New York. And because I give away copies of that book to those I’ve known longest/love the most.

My sister is getting married this week! She’s pumped on the playlist, and we’re fantasizing about screaming all the words with our friends after the quaint seaside ceremony wraps up. You know, the old candlelight dinner to Drops of Jupiter pipeline.

On that note, I need to get to the DMV. And to some editing. And to all the other frogs that seem to hop into my house the last few days before I catch a plane. Let me know what frogs you’re eating, or choking on, in the comments. Eating them can be contagious. Talking about which ones you’re choking on can be cathartic, both with old friends and new.