YOU SURPRISED ME
The survey I sent a few weeks ago ended with a prompt to “Surprise me.” Your responses were so fun! Read many of them, along with my responses, below.
Your words appear in bold and each paragraph break indicates a new person’s response; my replies are in regular font. This is loooong so I’ve split it into sections: Confessional, Factual, Dis/Connected, Corporeal, Tasty, Controversial, and Expected Surprises.
CONFESSIONAL SURPRISES
really appreciate getting to be here in a way that feels congenial, but not para social… or, maybe it is para social, but not dependent or toxic or weird.
Congenial and connected is always the goal!
So grateful to have "known" you for all these years!
This genius really knows how to use punctuation!! I’m over here writing paragraphs about parasocial dynamics and they just accomplished the same thing with two quotation marks.
Remember when you experimented in spelling your name “An” ? :)
This is a deep cut. (Junior high!) This person has known me (no quotes; italics for emphasis) for more than 30 years.
I'm 98% sure I saw you once at the Pasadena Flea Market and it took an effort to not accost you. I still wonder if it would have been weird or if it would have sparked a friendship. Probably just weird because of the whole para-social relationship thing. I don’t actually think we’d be friends, I’d be too anxious and disturbingly know more about you – shivers! Years later, reading your maternity leave essays (I was on maternity leave at the same time, my babies were early), I was happy to not know you IRL. There’s also an illustrator whose substack I read and she has twins and her post-partum essay really resonated with me and I think helped put words to my own feelings. Again, I thought, thank goodness I don’t know her! The relief of *not* being in conversation and just letting these ideas come into my inbox, take what I want a leave the rest was a joy! It was freeing to not care what you thought and know that you didn’t care either.
You’re getting at the truth behind that old “never meet your heroes” adage. The relationship that happens between an artist and their audience, through the medium of what they make, is magical and weird and fundamentally different than the relationship that develops directly between two human beings. (PS I love Hallie Bateman’s work, too!)
thank you for not paywalling anything except your pie charts.
Thank you for contributing to our collective newsletter project by filling out the survey.
Ann I would pay a lot of money to read your continued thoughts on parenting!!! I loved your writing about choosing this path and related to it deeply. You articulated so much of what I have felt in a way that I had never read before.
This is very kind. But I am conscious of how molding an experience into an essay has a way of warping it. I also haven’t quite figured out how to write about parenting without exposing more of my child’s life than I want to. (The amount I want to offer the wider world is nothing, nada, zip, zero). But maybe someday!
I have no children nor the desire for children and yet I run a children's museum and it's secretly the best job I've ever had.
That “and yet” is doing so much work. It makes perfect sense to me that you’d have no desire to be a parent and would also have the best time running a children’s museum. One of the biggest scams that the “pronatalist” reactionaries ever pulled was convincing society that people who don’t want to be parents are somehow anti-kid. (Strong plug for The Auntie Bulletin here.)
i've not spoken to my dad since 2001. nothing big happened. he just was never a good dad and he drifted away. it's weird.
For all the press about intentionally “going no-contact” with a family member, I feel like this is more common. Just coldness and inertia, with no one stepping up to reconnect.
Family matters, I learned that too late
I like the ambiguity of this statement.
My former daughter-in-law lives around the corner from us. She is engaged to one of my son’s good friends. After four years of emotional turmoil, this year, we are all able to come together for meals and birthday parties. I feel like we made it to the end of a rom-com where the relationships are reconfigured and everyone is ok. Trying to decide who will be portrayed by Mark Ruffalo.
Get Nancy Meyers to direct.
My favorite people on the planet are my three siblings.
I am always amazed by the absolute dumb luck of feeling this way about your siblings. I’m so happy for you!
I think I'm one of a tribe of women who really do not like their husbands. We do not readily confess this, do not claim it as an identity, and so we do not join up. The world does not know how large our numbers are, nor do we.
A lot of people I am fond of bore me. I’m not sure what to do about it other than tolerate and occasionally disappear.
Saying no to other people/things is saying yes to yourself.
I've always had a secret desire to live the life of a nun.
Did you read Matrix?!!
Saving up money all year in order to spend one night soaking in the hot springs at Indian Springs in Calistoga, CA will make you cry with happiness.
Fun fact: Indian Springs is the super-nice spa that we are at in the opening pages of Big Friendship, having the absolute worst time when our friendship was at its nadir!! I may never go back.
“I do not fear being alone, my dear; I fear being in a room full of people I cannot trust.” – Brooke Hampton
I love hanging out with myself, but I’m not sure I can fully trust her, either.
What does solitude look like for you?
In the car or taking a walk alone, not listening to anything or anybody, letting my brain churn at its own speed. I am old enough to remember when this felt like a common, default state of being. These days it is an active choice.
We should be looking up at the clouds all the time, every day. They are sending us messages
I read this and thought, “Certainly someone has started a cult based on this idea,” and a quick google says I’m right.
FACTUAL SURPRISES
Pedestrians now walk 15% faster and linger less in city public spaces, researchers find.
How did they measure this?!
The pool/stage where O (Cirque du Soleil) takes place is 17 feet deep and holds 1.5 million gallons of water. Everyone in the cast is scuba-certified.
Anywhere you stand on land is part of a watershed.
I really liked Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, too!
lemons float, limes sink
I can hear them now… “People think we’re exactly alike, but we are so different. Why won’t anyone recognize that not all citrus is the same? See the individual.”
Swimming into a jellyfish felt like touching a giant booger.
In Dutch a snail is “slak”, but a slug is a *naked* snail: “naaktslak”.
Did you know that dragonflies are a sign of a healthy and thriving ecosystem?
Did you know that ibises drink with their heads fully sideways like a scoop? I always thought the beak was a straw, what was I thinking!
Did you know that researchers think beluga whales may have names for each other? (I love whales)
You should just look up some facts about platypuses.
In a late night poll of zookeepers, Orangutans are considered the “most deceptive of the great apes”
Did you know the praying mantis is the only animal with one ear? It's in the middle of its chest.
Wombats have square poop but not square buttholes. Anything is possible.
Plants are punk. You cut off a piece of one and you can grow a whole new one without hurting the original one.
A long time ago, I got bit on the face by a wild rat while sleeping in my bed. The next day I learned that rats are not carriers of rabies.
ants take 250 naps a day
An ant is watching TikTok, trying to fall asleep for the 217th time that day. “You are worth so much more than your work!” says the ant-influencer on the tiny ant-screen. “Have you tried single-tasking? Or maybe believing in your inherent value on this earth outside of your capacity to produce? Have you ever even REM-cycled, bro? You deserve it.”
Adult naps are really great. I love them. I laid down to take one right now, picked up my phone and started doing this survey though
I have never been a very good napper. But I’m great at taking surveys.
DIS/CONNECTED SURPRISES
one of the worst days of my recent life was finding out the iphone mini 13 is no longer made - and one can no longer buy a small phone. No iphones fit in my small hands and i feel like this is another form of the patriarchy fucking me over.
I am also a small-phone advocate!! I had a bigger one and hated it and bought a mini right before they stopped making them. Clinging to it for dear life.
I have squandered too much of my time and energy on social media and mindlessly scrolling the internet these past 25+ years. I want my life back. I need to limit myself to a restricted diet of good content, like your newsletter. I always feel more human after reading it, and following the links. Thank you.
At the risk of sounding insufferable, I have been only logging into instagram from my laptop for more than a year, and I’m never going back to the on-phone life.
How do you balance keeping up with people over text when it has caused legitimate issues in life, like I swear to God I’m developing tendinitis from holding my phone so much. I’ve tried talking to my Apple Watch instead, telling people I prefer voice memos or spontaneous calls. I think a spontaneous calls is my love language. People seem to get so bent out of shape over texts, but I just seriously can’t. I thought about going as far as setting aside one hour per week when I respond to everyone’s texts and telling everyone in my life unless the messages is urgent, I will see you Sunday at noon.
I like your Sunday-texting plan. My friend Mercedes introduced me to the idea of pinning texts that you need to respond to. (This is an iPhone thing but I’m sure Androids do something similar but better.) I often pin everything non-urgent and respond to everyone all at once.
We moved recently and I really miss my book club. I've tried a couple here but haven't found one that measures up. I've found one that I sometimes enjoy but am 20 years older than everyone else so it feels weird and my experiences don't often resonate with the other members.
Place a free personal ad and maybe, possibly, meet some bookworms your own age?
My mantra for the summer is "give them the benefit of the doubt" and I'm trying to assign everyone the most possible generous reading of their actions.
Words I live by "if you don't understand someone's behavior you're missing part of the context"
This is a game I play when I’m bored or angry in heavy traffic: Try to imagine, in great detail, the day that a person in another car is having.
I once gave my left kidney to a stranger.
Thats that me depresso
this moment in nikki giovanni and james baldwin chatting: "Your suffering does not isolate you. Your suffering is your bridge."
My three year old told me, unprompted, that “everyone knows I can snap,” so in case you missed this amidst other world events, now you know. Julia can snap with both hands and on one foot.
For a sense of how I’m doing… it took me til the very end to realize you didn’t mean “snap” as in “break with reality and lash out in anger,” but “clicking fingers together.”
My friends joke that my emails are a newsletter you cannot unsubscribe from. I assume they mean this with love. Even when they tell me I email like a grandma
a man recently texted me and tried to get me to go on a date but he wrote with AI.....
“You text like a large-language model.” <<<<<< “You email like a grandma”
I avoid retirement, love working, European destinations and serving ladies.
Did ChatGPT write this
I think all my quirks are actually normal and part of the human condition
I've been thinking about posting a flyer offering "A little help" to neighbors. Maybe they need a dog walked, help moving something, a couple hours of babysitting or something that would be easy for me to offer.
I love it. If you do this, email me and let me know how it goes!
I’m president of my neighborhood association and I want to quit because people are really worked up over a vacant gas station being purchased and reopened by former owners and I really don’t care.
Yeah but isn’t it fun not to care about something that is really animating everyone else? Indifference as superpower.
I'm a mathematician, and I published my first novel in March. Life is crazy!
It all adds up!
CORPOREAL SURPRISES
I’ve been eating way more fiber and my poops are Amazing lately!
The capital A really made this submission sing.
Learn from my mistake and never try to wax your own armpits. I only succeeded in gluing mine shut.
I got bangs last week, and for the first time in my life I knew how to get the right bangs, and I’m actually committed to making them look nice. Am I finally an adult?
Figuring out your hair and how you want it to look and how to actually work with it is an underrated maturity milestone.
The continuum from the invention of mirrors to today's selfie self-obsession, and how it fundamentally changed our relationships with ourselves and each other
"As a lissom 20-year-old I resented my waddly disguise, but came around to a riveting truth: being attractive was less useful to me than being free.” -Barbara Kingsolver
Every year I feel less perceived as I walk around in the world, and while I understand how painful that is for many women, I love it, I relish it
I turn 45 next week and it's freaking me out a little.
I believe life after 52 will be better than ever.
I'm 55.
I’m 67 and not near done.
My grandfather is 104 years old, his girlfriend (that my grandma picked out before she died at 92) is 84 and you would think they're the same age. He parties more than anyone else in the family does!!!
Growing old is a privilege we should all hope to experience ❤️
I think about this a lot, especially when I experience a little unwelcome ick moment at my grays or wrinkles.
I'm going to stop biting my nails this week!
I'm really looking forward to shitting on the hospital floor during labor. When else do you get to do that as an adult and have someone clean up after you?
My kid just tried to eat toilet paper
There are worse things to snack on.
Taking care of others is hard, but taking care of myself is even more challenging.
I call lying around being a potato. I like to potato after very busy stretches of going out and socialising.
There is a gland in your nose that detects pheromones and if you get nose surgery sometimes it changes your sexual preferences.
I believe this! One reason the dating apps are doomed is that there’s no way to sniff through a screen.
Now I’m wondering if everyone thinks they are attractive to mosquitoes just because they get bitten sometimes lol
They are obsessed with me and you can’t convince me otherwise.
So on the mosquito question, they used to love me, but they haven’t since I started taking a monoclonal antibody drug to treat my MS. On the one hand, it’s great news, and on the other, maybe I’m poisonous!
Do you smell different now?!
I’m terrified of taking SSRIs but I have a prescription and was supposed to start 2 months ago. I moved my follow up appointment with my doctor back 6 weeks, it’s in 3 weeks now and I haven’t started. I need them terribly but I’m hesitant to attach my mood stability to the medical industrial complex
This is making me glad I don’t try to write advice. It is often very, very hard to have a body and a political orientation and align those two things.
it feels like there's a zeitgeist to have a medical diagnosis for everything, when people are complicated, weird, emotional beings and sometimes things just don't make sense, but we make do the best we can. it's like we want to medical answer that comes with clarity and a prescription rather than embracing the messy, imperfect, complicated world we live in.
POLITICAL SURPRISES
I'm having trouble finding quarters for my swear jar
The quarters and $5 bills! Where do they go? There are NEVER enough.
My "eat the rich" mentality is growing stronger by the day, and I'm disgusted by the Democratic party asking for my money while their leadership is as tied to money as the right's. Fix the money in politics and maybe I won't want to scream nonstop anymore
Somehow the Democratic party continues to text me despite years of unsubscribing and block-as-spamming. They often address me as “Wendy” (?!). How? Why?
I still read people like you and mourn for your country.
I can't believe the US has hung together as a country as long as it has. We're so big and sprawling and honestly, most of us have very little in common with each other. Maybe it's time we admit we had a good run, but it's time to throw in the towel?
I have Canadian citizenship and I’m reluctant to move back to Canada. I just love my community in Austin so much.
And this is why we mourn.
saw a man wearing this tshirt today: have the day you voted for
What a fascinating distillation of what’s wrong with U.S. politics. Like, it’s not about the long game, it’s not about slowly building a better society, it’s all about how you feel in the moment and want to feel in the next. I think I hate this shirt.
I’m an historian and I want to emphasise that learning from the past is overrated: focus on the present and future that we want and work relentlessly on that.
I am a dyed in the wool nerd/geek. And mostly I am not the kind to quibble too much about liberties taken with science in fiction. But multiverse stories where it's stated or implied that there is like one universe where you are a bad guy or whatever piss me off. If the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds (big if) it implies infinite parallel universes. So there would be infinite variations of each variation. Like one universe where Evil Me had pizza for dinner tuesday and infinite others where it was something else, but otherwise the same.
Infinite universes where Trump picks out a different ugly tie. Infinite universes where a different bead of sweat glints on Stephen Miller’s pallid pate. Same fundamental evils, over and over. Yes, this sounds accurate.
Who is going to finally stop Tr*mp?! Fuck fascism.
My mind has been drifting back to the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin, because it underscores the point that it wasn’t just Hitler. There is no “stopping Trump,” there is only the long hard work of undoing the sentiments he has activated and pain he has exploited. Sometimes this is a comforting thought because it’s the same activist work that existed before Trump and will exist after him. And other times it is so daunting and depressing I can’t handle it.
Being freaked out about the current political moment is overrated, stop letting them determine our adrenaline levels and work on building other things for people to care about
Building things! Yes. The only way forward.
What awaits us after this hellscape?
I can’t figure out if this is a question about death or utopia.
I don’t want to work any more. Let’s get rid of capitalism
I'm "retired" and have too much to do.
I'm an adult and have been getting back into community theater after 10 years. Wow, adults can have extracurriculars?!
I wish I was sewing right now.
TASTY SURPRISES
i really want pickles!
I really want the pickletini to become the new espresso martini.
Martinis are like tits, one is not enough and three is too many. (a yoga teacher told me this)
I recently learned the alleged origin of pink lemonade
I thought the answer was going to be “the World’s Fair,” but it wasn’t!
I just made roasted chickpea chocolate spread and it's HONESTLY KINDA GOOD.
Ok you did it, you really shocked me.
Souffle is one of my all-time favorite words
Someone recently blew my mind by pointing out the only reason “moist” is such a hated word is that it obliquely references female pleasure.
To pick a great summer melon choose one that feels really heavy for its size. This really does work. That might be common knowledge but I taught my husband the trick and he’s 4/4 bringing home primo produce.
Heavy melons. Yes. Of course. <Beavis laugh>
you don't need to wash bras
Some folk wisdom right there.
I’m a dining cowboy
I picture you always turning your dining chair around backwards so you can straddle it as if you’re riding a horse. Or is it that you always wear a wide-brimmed hat while you eat?
Have you ever thought about why cowboy culture existed? I hadn’t until I read (and loved) Lonesome Dove recently. Really puts discussions about economic productivity in a whole new light - we used to walk thousands of cattle across thousands of miles?? And could only walk them about 25 miles per day maximum because they couldn’t graze enough to keep weight on otherwise?!?
love mushroom foraging
Really good apocalypse skill!! (We all need one.)
Some mushrooms glow in the dark
I surprised myself: My search for “bioluminescence cult” turned up nothing.
I don't really like to eat mushrooms
my partner and I love to ask "first date" questions to our friends. my current favorite is this: imagine you have died, and in your will you've stipulated that you must be cooked and served as a meal to your nearest and dearest. what is your 'final seasoning'? (this includes actual seasoning as well as preparation method)
I actually screamed aloud at this. (Roast me til I’m good and crisp, then slather me in butter and sprinkle me with lemon zest and fresh dill and flaky salt.)
You can look at anything and know how it would feel to lick it.
CONTROVERSIAL SURPRISES
God should have just made dogs and stopped.
Dogs rule but all relationships with animals change us for the better
I am not very interested in pets, which is easily one of my most controversial qualities. I’ve had close friends tell me that if they didn’t know personally that I wasn’t a monster, they would assume I was awful based on this fact alone. Someday, perhaps after my mind and heart are changed by a surprise pet adoption, I will write an essay in which I confess to this, safely, because I will by then be a pet convert.
I don't like dogs, and it upsets me to know that many people see this as a character defect.
OMFG.
I wake up every day thinking about that Kierkegard quote about how life can only be understood backwards but has to be lived forwards and this being the dilemma of life / humanity, etc (don't worry, I'm in therapy)
I love that humans are still always trying to understand things forward. To do the impossible and push their lives in a particular direction. It creates a really tender kind of striving.
Several times a year I feel like I get gut punched with the remembrance that I can't actually go back in time. My memories are all I have, and they're just synapses.
I'm nostalgic for writing my initial in squirt cheese on a Triscuit
Never gonna give you up
This year, we've lost David Lynch, Sly Stone, and Ozzy. This year sucks.
Is it worse than 2016 when we lost Bowie, Prince, and this country’s tenuous grasp on democracy???
"Maybe, it's not too late, to learn how to love and forget how to hate" Crazy Train - Ozzy Osbourne rip <3
It always seemed so classic normie boomer to me that John Michael Osbourne went by a nickname derived from his surname. What if my dad went by Friedy Friedman professionally? I’m laughing so hard at this idea. Like “Ozzy” only seems cool because he was a rock star; otherwise it’s just an unimaginative midcentury dad nickname.
Repeat this name three times: Peggy Babcock. Best tongue twister and party trick.
The Booker Prize > US National Book Award
If you own a book you get half reading credit. Library books don't count.
librarian here reporting that we don't care what you check out or how long you keep it, as long as you're using us
It’s summer of so bad it’s good TV
I canceled all of my paid streaming except for Criterion (sorry for being annoying), so I’m watching a lot of Kanopy and Pluto, and I might never go back. Oh wait were you talking about Love Island?
ChickenBob Banana Trap! (an inexplicable exclamation of my five year old)
“SpongeBob SquarePants? Why don’t they just call him SquareHead BlackShoes?” - a thing my dad said once.
EXPECTED SURPRISES
Boo!
Boo
Boo!
Boo!
Boo!
This is a good reminder to start thinking about Halloween. All the best costumes are planned months in advance.
Boop!
Cute!
this is too much pressure to perform
Em esirprus
I thought this was Latin.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I call this little thing Shruggie Otis.
Too tired for surprises
This was harder than I thought it would be.
Life is hard and probably worth it.
I’d rather surprise myself.
Let’s goooooooo