300(ish) Words on Quietly Dropping Things
This will sound ugly, but sometimes it’s nice to realize that I or someone in my purview has quietly dropped something. When we fire off an endeavor — a candle business idea or a podcast about sofas — our friends and some family members give it 96 likes and comment positive emoji/positive emoji/positive emoji. It is a requisite, blissful, and kind short-sighted optimism that keeps us human. There is, of course, some sort of statistical chance that the podcast catches on and you get a book deal, but in the back of your mind, you know when something will probably be an excuse to see a friend a handful of times and learn a little about sofas along the way.
I like to think of a quietly dropped heaven (not purgatory!) where two episodes of a podcast idea, a well-intentioned weekly game night, or a writer’s group that met up four times all exist clumsily and excitedly together. A half-finished puzzle in the sky. Before this continues to sound like a cold cup of coffee, these endeavors that I do and you do and we all do feel very optimistic because we have once again decided to try! Sometimes that podcast lasts for years or that annual trip to a Joshua Tree cabin becomes a decades-long tradition. Other times, maybe you just wanted to hang out with Amanda more regularly last fall. Or maybe you signed up for two watercolor painting classes through a community art organization, and you painted that one really nice thing because you needed to be soothed in October 2016 for reasons that now seem watercolored too.
It’s nearly impossible to remember all the ideas we’ve quietly dropped — sometimes they’re so nascent that they remain simply a funny phrase in a high-school notebook next to algebra equations. We’ve also been doing it our whole lives, since age six when you would start an exclusive club called Puppy Girls with two other kids that would last the length of one playdate.
Eight YouTube videos exist of me at 24, giving advice with my friend Alex while we shared a bottle of melon-flavored Bacardi and I wore an ‘80s prom dress. For about eight consecutive weeks in 2014, our call-in advice show offered a reason to get drunk together and build a friendship, and from what I recall, it was a fabulous outlet for me to try on my newly outgoing, slutty attitude.
I hesitate to break the fourth wall here, to make whoever’s reading this think, “Maybe I…won’t suggest to my friend from junior high that we start a film podcast where we watch every Michael Douglas movie.” Message Brandon immediately! He’d love to hear from you, and he’s probably forgotten how much he loved The Game.
