Unquiet
Things

The following thoughts have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They’re mental marginalia – scribblings in the corners of my consciousness that I’ve been collecting like loose buttons in a drawer. If there’s a thread connecting them, I haven’t found it. I’m sharing them now partly to preserve them, and partly because my blog’s email notifications weren’t working for about a week and this seems like an appropriately random way to test if they’re fixed. So here are some thoughts I’ve been hoarding, presented in all their disconnected glory…

• There’s a scene in DowntonAbbey where Matthew Crawley is absolutely radiant with joy about becoming a father. We all know what happened next.

I find myself thinking about that scene with surprising frequency. It surfaces whenever I become aware of feeling particularly happy or content – this internal warning bell chiming softly: “Remember Matthew Crawley…” As if by tempering my joy, I might somehow slip beneath the notice of whatever cosmic force delights in upending peaceful moments.

Just recently, I was spending an afternoon with Ývan. Nothing extraordinary – running errands, driving around town, feeling productive and at ease. I noticed aloud how pleasant it all felt, then immediately wished I could snatch that observation back like a red balloon escaping skyward, stuff it back down my throat before the gods could hear and decide I was due for a reminder about hubris.

I can trace this tendency to one crystalline moment – driving to school on a familiar route, enjoying mild weather and an ordinary afternoon… until someone rear-ended me. That was the first time it really hit me -literally! – how everything I took for granted as normal and routine could vanish in a poof (or, more accurately, a crunch). Maybe the normalcy was always an illusion anyway. That collision shook more than my car; it permanently altered how I view those quiet, ordinary moments.

Or consider the evening fifteen years later I returned from an utterly unremarkable day at work, only to have my boyfriend sit me down and blindside me with the fact he was leaving me. I wouldn’t believe it in the immediate moment, but his leaving was the greatest gift he ever gave me. What an absolute piece of shit. I think he still reads my blog, unless he’s dead, but one can only hope. Anyway, that was for sure a stark reminder about the fragility of normalcy.

So yes, I’ve become rather vigilant. There’s a part of me that believes if I can just keep my contentment quiet enough, if I can avoid drawing attention to those moments of peace or joy, perhaps they’ll be allowed to linger a little longer. It’s absurd when written out like this – this attempt to outsmart fate by muting my own happiness. Yet here I am, still thinking of Matthew Crawley whenever my spirits rise too high.

• I was slicing pickled banana peppers for my salad today when I recalled my distress at seeing videos of people ordering “chop chiles” on their In-N-Out burgers. Just typing that makes me wince. “Chop chiles.” Not “chopped chiles.” The missing ‘-ed’ sets my teeth on edge in the same way “ice tea” does instead of “iced tea.”

But what bothers me more than the grammatical slip is my own reaction to it. The immediate internal flinch, the flash of judgment about the speaker’s education or attention to detail. It feels ugly and hateful, and I hate myself for it, but I can’t stop.

• And finally, sneezing. I don’t just sneeze – I SHRIEK. We’re talking full-volume, horror-movie-victim shrieking. It’s not for dramatic effect or attention. It’s because sneezing feels like my soul is attempting to violently exit my body, and my vocal cords are simply reporting the situation as they see it.

Years ago, a friend on social media (I don’t remember who) mentioned hearing their neighbor sneeze through the walls – described it as something like a “a full-body moan.” Presumably of existential distress. I’ve never met this neighbor, but I feel a kinship with them. There are probably dozens of us out there, involuntarily vocalizing our brief encounters with corporeal betrayal.

I wonder if the neighbor and I would recognize each other by our sneezes in a crowded space. A sort of acoustic solidarity among those of us for whom a sneeze is less a bodily function and more a moment of profound displacement, announced to the world via involuntary screaming.

Like Veronica Sawyer up there, frantically documenting her thoughts, I’ve just dumped some of my mental marginalia onto the page. Did you get an email notification for this diary entry? Let me know in the comments! And while you’re there, I’d love to hear some of the random thoughts rattling around in your own brain. What’s your Matthew Crawley moment? Do you have strong feelings about linguistic pet peeves? Are you perhaps my neighbor’s long-lost sneeze twin? Share your margin notes below…

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