Coming up with a prompt is by far the hardest aspect of writing for The Hag. The whole point of this Substack was to write something every week (errr, mostly every week) to keep the writing chops moving and not get hung up too much on editing or over-editing or over-over-editing which I am frustratingly inclined toward. Sometimes I don’t even make it to the page at all because I’m already over-editing the prompt before I’ve even started writing.
So, for the next 35 weeks (roughly through the end of 2023) I’m shifting The Hag’s focus to the Proust Questionnaire, a parlor game, which according to French writer Marcel Proust, reveals a person’s true nature. (Questionably the most intense parlor game ever?)
The self-imposed rules are as follows:
Try and stick to scene setting and storytelling without leaning too heavily on exposition. No one wants to read a bunch of thoughts. They want to read a story.
Actually answer the question, or at least come close (i.e. I can’t just say “I don’t think perfect happiness exists!” and avoid the point of the prompt).
What’s fun (I think) about this exercise is how mutable these answers will be. How in a year’s time, five years’ time, a decade, my answers are likely to be wildly different. It is so thrilling how humans change over a lifetime.
You can obviously follow along in the link above, but I’ll also share out next week’s prompt at the end of each post so we can all spend a little time thinking about the next question. If you want to join in, you can leave comments (of any length!) or shoot me an email, or just talk about these questions with your friends. This will be fun, right?
What is Your Idea of Perfect Happiness?
In college, one of my greatest joys was working as a curatorial assistant for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I made $8 an hour cataloging dead birds, feeding dead ducks to flesh-eating beetles, counting snakes in jars of alcohol, and no other job has ever made me happier. I started at 7am, worked three or four hours, whatever my work-study or course schedule dictated, then headed off to class.
Some days I’d catalog birds for four straight hours, pulling the stuffed bodies of robins or sparrows or exotic birds of paradise onto trays, loading the trays onto an ancient metal wheeled cart, rolling that cart to the equally ancient desktop computer, and typing each bird’s specific set of data into a database. It was 2008 and I had just discovered podcasts, so I’d plug my white (wired) Apple headphones into the desktop and listen to hour after hour of This American Life, RadioLab, and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me to pass the time.
I remember one day in particular, listening to a story from David Sedaris that was so funny and heartbreaking that I invited my then-college boyfriend over to listen to it again that night. We lay in my bed, the heated blanket warming the mattress beneath us, a pile of quilts and down sleeping bags on top of us, giggling to the story as snow fell in the glowing orange light of the sodium street lamps.
For a long while there in Pittsburgh, I didn’t own a car, so I biked everywhere. I knew the ins and outs of the city, the bus schedule, the quickest way to cut through traffic, the path with the most mulberry trees in summer. One afternoon I walked four miles to my landlord’s office to drop off a document and four miles back just to prove a point: That the city could be walked, that a car was utterly unnecessary, that everything and anything meaningful could happen from where your two feet—or two bicycle wheels—could take you.
I spent an autumn learning to make sourdough bread, and baked loaf after loaf for my 6-8 housemates (depending on the season) in an old electric oven that rarely kept an even temperature and always kept me on my toes. I walked the path through Schenley Park watching the rose breasted grossbeaks picking ants out of the limestone gravel. Some nights, I’d sit on the dangerously sagging front porch with a $5 cheese pizza from the college dive across the street, an $8 bottle of wine from the liquor store next door, and read one library book after another, watching the stack grow and change as the semester wore on.
I can’t recall a more perfect happiness than being held by that city, that community—an entire existence just a few miles wide. I read somewhere, some time ago, that we often pine for college days because (for the most part) it is a system designed around community, learning, walkability, flexible, dynamic work schedules and shared interests—a system utterly absent from our “normal” adult lives.
Rarely (in America at least) after those four-ish quick years do we maintain that level of agency over our lives. By the time you are at the ripe old age of 22, there are jobs to be worked eight or more hours a day and gone are the days of taking that work to the library, studying a text offline or just taking the afternoon off to recharge. I have never again found that sort of loose structure of my time and the trust between myself and my community that if I wanted to succeed I’d put the effort in as needed, but otherwise didn’t need to be managed.
So when I think of perfect happiness, I really think of agency, and how every day I can work to dig it back out of the landslide of capitalistic adulthood.