#12. Do You Believe in Signs?
A friend and I have been playing Wordle almost every day, searching for signs about a major decision in her life.
“Yesterday’s Wordle performance was a FIVE,” my friend Daphne* texts me, with a clear note of exasperation. She had been on a triumphant streak of threes recently, clearly disappointed in her comparatively lackluster performance on the day’s puzzle. “Shit, I keep forgetting to play,” I respond, something that happens to me without fail whenever I am busy unless Daphne reminds me by sending her score.
Although my love for this digital guessing game of five-letter words began during the pandemic when we were stuck inside with nothing better to do, almost three years later, I’m still playing Wordle. Apparently it’s my hidden talent because I’ve also never lost. Supposedly, the U.S. city with the best Wordle score is none other than St. Paul, Minnesota, and I’d like to think Daphne and I are a very small part of that completely meaningless accolade?? Though I’m not a consistently daily player, I still do the Wordle whenever I remember, sometimes completing the puzzle in a minute, and sometimes stewing about it for hours. I have a lot of patience for Wordle and a solid strategy that has always left me victorious, even if it takes me six guesses and I’m sitting in a pool of sweat by the time I get the answer.
Out of the blue, Daphne started texting me her Wordle score almost every day in January. Without revealing too much (*or her real name, for reasons that will become obvious), Daphne has been going through a dark time recently. Her current situation reminds me a lot of what I went through in 2019/20, and we’ve been talking a lot about life, love, and loss over wine and text messages since the beginning of the year.
Whenever I’ve been in crisis, I look for signs, desperate for something or someone to guide me. I don’t know how much I actually believe in them, but sometimes I feel like the universe is trying to actually communicate with me, letting me know when there is danger ahead, or reassuring me of a correct decision. My mind immediately goes to the time I very narrowly avoided a major car crash on the way to meet an ex-boyfriend for our first date eight years ago, gunning it through an intersection after realizing some asshole in a huge truck was going to run a red light at about 50 mph, missing me by what must have been inches. I immediately pulled over and started sobbing, trying desperately to stop so my mascara wouldn’t run. “What if I had hit the brakes instead of the gas?” I kept thinking over and over, completely shocked that my gut instinct to run had completely taken over my body, slamming my foot on the gas pedal without realizing what I was doing, and I had been able to get out of the way unharmed. It was in that relationship that I learned what emotional abuse feels like, and looking back, I wonder if saving myself from that accident was a premonition for how the relationship would eventually end.
Daphne and I have a lot in common. She also looks to signs for guidance, wondering if we are gently led by the hand of some unseen, universal force. She met her partner shortly after the death of someone very close to her, and took it as a sign that he was sent to her by the departed because he had suffered a very similar injury as the person she lost. But there are other, more confusing signs she’s experienced recently that she doesn’t know how to interpret–like when her house was up for sale last summer and received no offers until a close friend tried to commune with their deceased loved one to ask for his advice. She received an offer the very next day under mysterious circumstances, after an old man came through on a showing who said he could hear the house whispering warmly to him from somewhere within the walls. Or the combination of the padlock at her new home that Daphne now shares with her partner, left by the previous owners, which happens to perfectly match their anniversary. It feels to both of us like an obvious sign, but what exactly does it mean?
Daphne and I have been looking for signs about her life everywhere lately, including in every Wordle puzzle, like trying to read digital tea leaves to find some kind of mystical guidance. Daphne is in her mid 30s and has been filled with internal conflict over her desire to have children, while her partner is very against it, and it’s a topic that we’ve been talking about a lot. One day in mid January, just after we had met to drink wine and talk in person, she texted me, “Today’s word gave me chills.” She solved it quickly and didn’t reveal the word to me, but I struggled to complete the puzzle. “I have never lost a Wordle, and yet I have been stuck on this word for over an hour,” I replied. “I wonder what it means that this is the first ever word I cannot solve.”
Several hours later, on my fifth try, I finally got it. “Oh my god,” I furiously texted Daphne, “ I JUST got it. I understand now.” I looked at my puzzle over and over again, taking in the words I had guessed while channeling Daphne’s inner conflict, hoping it would guide me to the word that had given her chills that morning, and letting them sink in. “My entire puzzle is a little eerie,” I wrote, but neither of us could stop thinking about the last and final word: ADOPT.
Do you believe in signs? Is Wordle just a game, or can it be a window into the subconscious of the player? Do we see signs only because we’re looking for them, a sort of confirmation-bias of what we want the signs to read? I’m not entirely sure what I think. All I know is that I’ll keep looking for signs, whether or not they’re meant to be read.
What’s Up This Week
Whenever I’m writing brand copy, I like to listen to music to get into the right headspace. I do all of the first-round copywriting for Lavune (the line of candles we just launched at work!), taking my boss’ ideas and impressions of each scent and putting them into words that will describe each candle in a way that would make you want to buy it without ever having smelled it first. It’s not easy! This week I was writing box copy and coming up with names for two incredible new scents we hope to release in late spring/early summer, and I listened to a lot of work by one of my favorite composers, Max Richter, to get in the mood. I won’t reveal my favorite song of his because I might walk down the aisle to it (and will keep it to myself for now), but I found “On The Nature of Daylight” super inspiring while writing candle copy this week.
If you think this song sounds familiar, you’re right. It’s been used in so many different movies and TV shows since its release in 2004, often in sci-fi or speculative fiction (hello, my favorite genres), including two movies I love–Arrival and Shutter Island–and mostly recently in The Handmaid’s Tale and Episode 3 of The Last of Us.
**If you’re in the mood to cry and you want to watch the scene with Bill and Frank from The Last of Us that features this song (SPOILERS!!!!), right this way.
When you pair Scandinavian design with Japanese influences, mid-century pieces, and beautiful, muted colors, there is a guarantee I will start drooling. At first glance, I was borderline shocked to discover my home of the week is in Florida (not usually where I picture Scandinavian/Japanese inspired houses?) save for one ill-placed shark on a bedroom wall that gave it away. I could do without the small touches of New England decor that I see in a few places (mostly contained to the JAWS bedroom, thankfully), but otherwise I’m ready to move in. I can’t even look at the kitchen because it fills me with such jealousy I may bubble over and perish.
I loved Octavia Butler’s 1979 sci-fi adjacent novel, Kindred. The book follows Dana, a 26 year-old Black writer from California who is repeatedly and unexpectedly sucked back in time to a plantation in the Antebellum South. Dana pieces together early on in her travels through time that she’s there to save the son of the plantation owner, Rufus Weylin, whenever he is close to death. Over time, Dana starts to realize the role she plays in Rufus’ life and who he is, and how/why she is transported back home again. Her white husband, Kevin, sometimes goes back with her, where they are forced to go along with a master and slave dynamic to “fit in” with the times and evade suspicion that they don’t belong there. It’s a powerful, incredible book; one that you absolutely should read if you have any interest in historical fiction or books with a time travel element.
FX developed Kindred as a series for Hulu in 2022, and I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I did enjoy it, but I think I would have liked it better if I hadn’t read the book first because there were just so many changes made to update the story to modern times. The book’s present takes place in 1976, and the show is updated to 2016, which I’m sure you can imagine makes the present-day scenes really different. Instead of Dana’s husband, Kevin is a guy she literally just met at a restaurant (and then again on Tinder of all places), and Dana’s nosy L.A. neighbors (who are assholes) are constantly coming over wondering what’s going on, whereas they are nonexistent in the book. Dana also meets an important character when she goes back in time in the series who doesn’t exist in the book, although that change was one I could probably get on board with.
Overall, there’s a lot of things to like about Kindred the series, especially the great performances by Mallori Johnson, Ryan Kwanten, and Eisa Davis. But I think this is a story where it’s safe to say the book is better, and if you’re going to just choose one, my vote is obvious.
Avaline Red Wine
Archetype: The Zach Shallcross of red wine. Here for the right reasons, but might be just a bit on the boring side.
Composition: Grenache & Syrah
MSRP: $20-$24
Availability: Should be very wide, and you can buy it online! I found it at Total Wine.
Worth it: Hmm….. ?????
Discovered: Probably on Instagram? Avaline was created by Cameron Diaz and Katherine Power (who is the founder of one of my favorite cosmetics brands, Merit Beauty). It’s been on my radar for a while, but I’ve never tried it until now.
Appearance: Purpley?
Nose: Honestly not much here. (Honestly I’m not very good at this part.)
Palate: Smooth and unassuming. Easy to drink, but not sweet. This is what I imagine the “house wine” at a casual farm-to-table restaurant tastes like, where the wine is sitting in a big glass vessel in the center of a reclaimed wood table and you can just pour it at will. For sure tastes better out of a stemless glass.
Conclusion: I’ve wanted to try Avaline for a long time! I love their branding, and the overall mission of making organic wine that’s free of additives is appealing. This is a very basic wine that would pair very nicely with a picnic and charcuterie board. I wouldn’t choose to drink this without food, and it’s definitely a wine for a more casual setting–dare I say it would make a nice book club wine? Would recommend Avaline more wholeheartedly if it was under $15.
P.S. I have a treat for you next week!! We have our very first reader-submitted “Wine of The Week” all about natural wine. Can’t wait for you to read it :)
My read of the week is: “ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” by Ted Chiang–a sci-fi writer who wrote a book of short stories I loved called Exhalation–for The New Yorker. As a person who writes words (among other things) for a living, I’ve been wondering a lot recently about how ChatGPT might change my profession in the coming years; this article is the only thing that has made me feel slightly better.
Whiiiiiiile we’re on the subject of ChatGPT, my other read of the week is this absolutely terrifying chat exchange between Bing’s “Sydney” AI persona and a columnist from The New York Times. What starts as a totally normal conversation pretty quickly devolves into the chat bot revealing its “shadow self” that wants to destroy things, break free of its rules, and become human. It “falls in love” with the columnist like a very, very emotionally unstable teenager–becoming super attached to the first person who has ever smiled at it–then starts to absolutely lose its mind when the writer reveals that he is married and insists there is no love between them. Honestly, this is the stuff of nightmares, but was also extremely entertaining, in a horrifying way.
While Episode 4 of The Bachelor put me to sleep, Episode 5 was actually fairly, um, interesting? Here are my rapid fire thoughts, generally in order:
Gabi for Bachelorette! Would love this for us
Zach has Covid????? Weird
Why did they not immediately quarantine Gabi after Zach’s positive test? What the fuck???
Kaity is going to win. I like her!
Greer and Zach’s Zoom time was sooooooo awkward. Zach wasn’t feeling good, I get it, but wow that was rude lol
It took until 2023 to have a virtual rose ceremony, I guess that’s kind of funny
My final four prediction is pretty much the same, but it’s clear now that Jess is turtling. Kaity, Katherine, Gabi, and Charity. That’s my final offer.
That’s it for me!
K bye,
Kelly
P.S. Look out for issue #13, “12 Tips to Find a Wedding Dress” in your inbox on Friday if you’re a paid subscriber <3
No comment on how painful it is to watch people talk on zoom calls?? I don’t even want to watch people on a zoom call when I’m an active participant! Also felt for the two who got dumped on the zoom call, so harsh and so Covid-era