Notes from Big Suburban Boxes
And my 2025 To-Don't List
Welcome to Mess & Noise. Last issue was about recalibrating after the election. I took a chaotic holiday break since then and paused billing for paid subscribers until February. If you’re new here, I also write about grief, being a working parent, and the transcendental pleasure of sandwiches.
I did way more in-person shopping this year than I had since Covid. For Jeff Bezos reasons, I leaned less on Amazon for the kids’ wishlists and realized all fast and free delivery feels dumb when work is slow and I have time to get something myself.
I went the non-efficient route and walked to the lesser-evil(?) Target, which, despite living nearby for over five years, I’d never set foot inside. It was the most connected I’d felt to my primal hunter-gatherer instincts in years! How raw, to take down a Christmas List Mastodon with my own spear instead of tapping my phone for 30 seconds so underpaid warehouse workers and last-mile drivers can do it for me.
I arrived on the right weekday. The shelves were flush with new toys — a big comeback for supply chains. It was pristine, uncrowded, and hit the exact note you expect from a big box shopping experience: we have everything — stuff you didn’t realize you needed — and it’s available to you right now. (If you can’t afford it today you can open a line of credit and get 20% off.)
This is an anomaly in my Brooklyn neighborhood, a mom-and-pop-palooza with one understocked and overly locked-down Walgreens. I wouldn’t trade it for a bunch of strip malls, but I’d trade all four of our shitty bodegas for one Sweetgreen.
There was more ease to experience in suburban Massachusetts and Connecticut over the holidays. Friendly cashiers and strangers who cheer “good morning!” when you see them on your mental health walk. The tradeoff is you only encounter about one person on this walk, then you wonder if you’ll be the next dead woman on Dateline when the Terminix truck drives past you at a creepy speed.
Anyway, there’s lots of fancy hand soap at the Marshall’s in Fairfield, CT.
Not Aesop fancy but a cut above Ms. Meyers fancy, with middlebrow names like “Amalfi Lemon” at discounted prices. They’re all jumbled together in four different places and if I wasn’t in a hurry I’d smell every single one to sort, rank, and make a final selection. There was one bottle of Pecksniff’s hidden per 30 bottles of other random brands, and that’s how I gamified this novel shopping trip. Digging for Pecksniff’s.
Do I care about hand soap that much? Kind of! When your life is flattened by convenience and dulled by obligation at the same time, a trip to Marshall’s becomes the only texture in your day. The hand soap hunt becomes a vision quest. If I am wiping the butts of small human beings on the daily, I can optimize my dwindling rewards with the intoxicating scent of Gardenia and White Peach. A last vestige of pleasure!
Here are two year-end/new year lists:
Stuff I’m Not Doing in 2025
Taking productivity advice from male authors with wives. (The wife is the productivity hack, dummies.)
Listening to advice from rich people (Spoiler: they were born with it {either the wealth, or the ideal conditions and luck that enabled their great wealth, which cannot and will not be duplicated})
Listening to out-of-touch podcasters blowing rarefied hot air. Murder is bad, obvi, but the pearl-clutching and scolding around the Luigi phenomenon made it so easy to edit my media diet. Anyone who’s baffled/horrified by LM’s popularity must not understand young people, poor people, average people, sick people, America, history, violence, anarchists, and Italians.
Reading or listening to people who confuse consumerism with “culture.” I tried listening to these self-styled “bicoastal elite” bros talk about olive oil and espresso machines and it was as interesting as a middle-aged mom talking about hand soap at Marshall’s.
Comparing my output to that of others. Sometimes I feel bad about how inconsistent I am with this newsletter, but then I remember I’m not a Zennial with securely attached parents and an AuDHD diagnosis who was breastfed Adderall and can write newsletters all day. I shan’t compete with these princesses!
Stuff I Enjoyed in the Last Weeks of 2024
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Broedesser-Akner. The plot gets a little thin at the end but TBA’s voice and style are so addictive and endearing.
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout. It’s a little hokey, but my favorite movie in 7th grade was Enchanted April so I can read prose about women’s midlife crises and their gardens for days, OK?
The new Joe Mande special, Chill.
That’s it for this one. Happy New Year.