Friday Open Thread (with Release)

Dear Friends,

For weeks I’ve been labouring over a Big Important Job Application (for “labouring” read “unproductively stressing”), but today — with the help of numerous friends, mentors, colleagues, cheerleaders — I sent it off.

It was 80 pages long.

It’s hard to say what I’m feeling. It’s not quite relief — relief was what I felt when I finished drafting key materials for it yesterday. Today, the word I keep circling is “release” — something I’ve been thinking about from several facets lately (one of which is, er, blaseball). The difference between relief and release, somatically, qualitatively; they overlap, but “release” implies, on some level, capture, constraint. I’m not totally read to delve into that in a non-blaseball context (more on which SOON, I promise), but all this to say: I finished something that had been intimidating and upsetting me, and I feel released from it — and like I’ve released something, too.

Have you felt release, recently? What have you let go, or what has let go of you?

There is, of course, a more positive connotation to release: when something long-awaited has been made available. Like, for instance, a recording of the wonderful conversation Arkady Martine and I got to have together yesterday, under the auspices of the Brooklyn Book Festival and NYU’s 370 Jay Project and NYU Skirball! (It fades out just before I thank them, but I did thank them! And all of you who joined!)

It’s just under 1 hour long, and you can skip past the first 3 minutes or so while I flail about, discover my microphone’s unplugged, and try to summon up the dregs of my exhausted post-job-app personhood to be a worthy conversational partner to someone I admire so deeply.

Enjoy!