Voice Memos
A few months back Brooke started leaving me voice memos. Brooke and I talk everyday and by talk I mean text and by text I mean send TikToks and memes, exchange bits of gossip, fill multiple screens about how our anxiety is manifesting and what is causing it, volleyed back with extensive lists of why the other is an inspiring goddess of a human being. Occasionally there’s an emoji but mostly it’s the same three memes.
Our text discourse is a rich text, as it were, but it can be laborious. I don’t always feel up to crafting clever turns-of-phrase in my off-hours (or sometimes in my on-hours, honestly) and if I’m pushing a stroller or walking a dog my communiques can be incomprehensible and their composition life threatening when doing so on the streets of New York. Ergo, the voice memo.
We have so many tools of communication at our disposal and they have somehow rendered most long distance exchanges….flat? In Christine Smallwood’s brilliant novel The Life of the Mind, the narrator longs for the halcyon days of early email (or perhaps also youth and unstructured time) when you could send an epic, descriptive, languorous missive. Today, that would be considered an act of aggression and forced emotional labor.
I love a good old-fashioned phone call, the immediacy of hearing a loved one’s intakes of breath and the background noises of their daily life, but so much must align: one’s mood and buoyancy to converse, timing, time zones, etc. etc.
The voice memo has much of the intimacy of a phone call—hearing the singularity of the cadences on the other end, the jangling of the dishwasher or the baby in the background, the start/stop fragmented imperfection of spoken language—but without the pressure of picking up the phone. You can choose to listen to a voice memo and get the hit of voice at your leisure. And of course a true narcissist such as myself enjoys the profound pleasure of monologuing uninterrupted about whatever topic you wish to gas on about that day.
Some friends and I took it one level further by utilizing the app Cappuccino, which allows pals to create a kind of podcast of themselves. This was prompted when I recently reunited with a scoundrel from my past and asked my friend Emily if I should live text the interaction to her in real time. No, she said, but send me a long voice memo recounting it afterward, a bespoke podcast just for me.
Now we’ve started leaving each other daily “beans,” the hateful coffee-centric nomenclature the app encourages users to adopt. They are three-minute dispatches, which in our group shakes out to part life-update, part existential angst, part big questions. For example: What percentage of people that you meet don’t like you? (Per Emily: “I’m like cilantro. Most of the world gets me and considers me a delicacy. But to certain people I taste like soap and it’s not their fault.”) What do you think of that open marriage essay? (Also per Emily: “Dance like no one is watching, love like you’ve never been hurt, write a personal essay like the internet has never eviscerated your shit!”) I’ve become very invested in Anya’s litigation in small claims court against a rug cleaning company that did her dirty, literally. My frequent b**ns from the gym describing my favorite teachers and nemeses and Emily’s input I *think* pressured Anya into joining and placed her in a real Sophie’s choice of whom to name as the referrer for the in-club credit $$$. We have a group text called show notes, where we link to items discussed.
Sometimes it’s more serious. I was experiencing a bout of destabilizing anxiety recently, the kind that is very rude because it comes out of nowhere when you were just minding your business and maybe even patting yourself on the back for functioning so well and then HI BITCH! THOUGHT I WAS GONE?! In a thin, tenuous voice I talked about it in what I will not now nor ever refer to as a b**n. It felt cathartic and more honest to lay it out with actual words aloud, which I’m quite sure made zero sense but the feeling was laid bare in my voice. A text saying “I’m really super anxious” wouldn’t have conveyed the swirling exigency. I reached out and they reached back, and they pulled me up.
So I recommend to you: speaking into your phone for the ear of a friend who can luxuriate in your dispatch when and where they please. But beware! I sent Brooke a flurry of voice memos last week when she was on vacation with her family and her phone was hooked up to a speaker. They got the pleasure of our typical morning greeting. Sorry.
Won’t you send me a voice memo please? I’ll hit you back.
For your further listening/reading/viewing pleasure:
The new Jean Hanff Korelitz: propelled by something very different than The Plot, but just as satisfying.
LOOT!
This summer pasta recipe—I used cavatelli, which was too heavy. I’d use spaghetti or angel hair next time. Save yourself some heartache and just use ready-made pesto vs. busting out a mortar and pestle. Use the reserved cooking water, as they recommend [NB: Scott and I got into a marital fight over ingredient proportions and the arrogance of “why do you think you know better than the recipe?!” Please, be better than us.] to make the sauce saucier.
Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson.
“There I Almost Am: On Envy and Twinship” by Jean Garnett in the Yale Review which in my Cappuccino I Freudian slipped and called it “The Nail Review,” a periodical I would vastly prefer.
A bit esoteric, but Truman’s teethmarks on the edge of the crib, revealing how he gnaws at night like a little beaver. Hope it’s not toxic!
The new Jack’s Wife Freda, which is touristy and filled with teens living their best lives after New York Film Academy gets out, but it’s bright, spacious, delicious and THAT GREEN SAUCE!
Fire Island and Bowen Yang generally.
Lucid dreaming. I dreamt with smell for the first time recently. It was an unpleasant smell- it was a halfway house that smelled like mothballs, but the experience was very cool.
Laurie Metcalf was also in that dream (I’ve been cut off from talking about my dreams in my Cappuccinos so I’m dumping them here ((This is too good though: I recently dreamt I was playing the role of Tina Turner in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical on Broadway and in the middle of “Simply the Best” I stopped the song and said to the audience, “You know what simply is the best? Cheez-Its!” And proceeded to enumerate why Cheez Its are the best snack and I stand by this in my waking life. I’m available for ambassadorship, would be very on-brand.) which prompted me to revisit this excellent profile.
NSFW by Isabel Kaplan: I heard the authoress read from her novel the other night and I am ALL IN!
Ok, I’m waiting for your voice memo for real for real!