Moon Girl
The Problem with Convenience (Return to Sender: 2/10)
Dear HF-Saint Louis,
I’ve been thinking lately about our conversation from the other day– about how we aspire to be “moon girls” but don’t feel like we’ve quite pulled it off. I’ve thought a lot more about it since then, especially about what exactly I even mean when I call someone a moon girl.
Here’s what I’ve got so far. A moon girl is ephemeral. She has a moody and complex cyclicality that makes her mesmerizing. There’s nothing straightforward about her, but you can tell that there’s a method to her madness, an alternate calendar and with it, another conception of time, but one that is not knowable, only feelable. She wears long skirts and trailing shawls. Her face is smooth because she never raises her eyebrows. She is not skeptical or cynical or shrewd, she’s mischievous and fickle– she has no interest in arguing or being right because she knows the universe is so vast that to her, knowing what she knows does not preclude you knowing what you know, even if they are diametrically opposed
Is there such a thing as real-life moon girls? I wasn’t sure. But I like to believe there are. I, as you know, am unfortunately more of a sun girl. I am straightforward. Long skirts make me look dumpy, and I’ve never once considered trailing a shawl. My eyebrows haven’t come down from their skeptical arch since the year 2000. I am cynical and often shrewd. I like arguing, and worst of all, I very often think that I’m right, and therefore that others are wrong.
I’ve always thought of you as more of a moon girl. I remember when we went to the National Portrait Gallery together once, and you touched a painting, like with your actual finger, and I scolded you like a child. I couldn’t understand why you would do it, but at the time, I chocked it up to your moon girl nature. You didn’t mean the thing any harm, you were just wide-eyed and curious, and it was so beautiful. How could a moon girl resist?
Even though it was years ago, I still think about how– man, I wish I had touched that painting. You didn’t get in trouble from anyone but me. And damn, now you’ve touched a priceless work of art. You know what it feels like to brush your finger against a masterstroke. You didn’t ask, you didn’t go through the “proper channels” (as if those exist), you just reached out and tried, and it worked. You were unbound in a way I don’t know if I ever have been, and I still think about it quite a lot.
___
I’ve been learning the dictionary definitions of a bunch of words recently (a fact I thought you would enjoy, given your linguistic background). I’ve paid special attention to words I’ve learned only through context, by reading and intuition. It’s funny to compare the gap between what I’ve been assuming my whole life that words mean, and what Webster says they actually mean. Looking up words is so easy to do when you can just google them. I’ve considered whether I would still do it if I had to 1) own a dictionary, 2) take down this giant book, 3) flip a million onion skin pages, 4) slide my finger down a page or two, and finally 5) read the tiny print definition. It certainly would not be so convenient.
Convenience is one of the words I looked up recently. It’s a word, I think, that we hear and use so much that it’s kind of lost its meaning, or its meaning has become wildly expansive and vague. Intuitively, convenience is good, easy, helpful, inclusive, accessible, an achievement. Inconvenience is bad, hard, unhelpful, exclusive, inaccessible– an indictment.
It turns out, convenience is “the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty.” Little difficulty, yes, that was closer to what I had thought. When I think of things that are convenient, I think of convenient stores, door-to-door delivery, rideshare apps, and 1-click ordering. Inconvenient things are the one doctor’s office with available appointments being on the other side of town, the place your friend wants to meet being close to their house but far from yours, and the DMV.
Effort, though, was not necessarily part of my thinking about convenience. The more I thought about effort, the more I realized I didn’t really know what that word meant either. I found a couple of different definitions, but one stuck out to me most. Effort as “conscious exertion of power.”
I think the definition of convenience feels a little different when it reads: “the state of being able to proceed with something with little conscious exertion of power.”
Apparently, “convenience” is also a British word for a public toilet.
___
Nighttime, obviously, is the time of the moon girl. She thrives from dusk till dawn, starlight in her eyes, moonbeams in her hair. She is nocturnal, just like you. I know sleep has always been a challenge, and I don’t in any way mean to diminish the struggle of insomnia. But as someone who treasures, and I mean treasures sleep, who can’t wake up before dawn, who feels the dark of winter like an actual, physical burden, I’ve always envied your wakefulness. That and your energy and your attention to the latent, dreamy magic of the world around you.
The moon is a source of light but not heat, so moon girls have to bring their own warmth to the night. Your sun girl over here is more spider and snake, without the sun and her heat, I’m liable to go stiff. My circulation is shit. Maybe I should get that checked out?
___
One type of power we have, as people, is called Will. Willpower.
In the book “Made to Stick,” the authors’ go-to metaphor for willpower is that he is a rider on the back of an elephant. Our feelings and emotions, wants and desires, instincts and reflexes, those are all encompassed in the elephant, and our frail little Will sits atop, trying, when possible, to steer the beast.
One of the takeaways is, obviously, that even if your Will is absolutely jacked, he’s likely no match for an actual elephant. That’s why change is hard and why habits can feel impossible to make and break. We are not, in essence, very rational creatures. We are one rational part facing off against a dozen very powerful and often very irrational parts.
But it also got me thinking. If convenience is about exerting little power, it’s about pleasing our internal elephant driver, right? Convenient things are those that don’t require our dude Will to coax the elephant very far off its course. In fact, the elephant may even be attracted to the convenient thing all on its own, which makes it much more happy to yield to Will.
___
I’ve been thinking about you, and all this, and I’ve been thinking about the cost of convenience. On the one hand, frankly, I’m a sucker for convenience. I’m a sucker for an overpriced food truck at a brewery, or the coffee shop that’s closest to my drive home from the gym. Am I choosing these things because of their convenience? In part, definitely!
Just yesterday, I bought some sweaters because the company sent me a promotional email. Now don’t get me wrong, I like the company. I have some of their sweaters already, and really love them. I’m happy with my purchase. But had I not been glancing through my promotions folder, had I not be momentarily snagged by a subject line, had I not thought the sweaters in the picture were cute, I would never have made it to their website for the first time in two years, never thought, “well I do have an anniversary coming up,” never casually put a few things in a cart, then weeded them down, and checked out. I did it, primarily, because the company made it very convenient to do it. I did it because doing so required me to exert no effort, and in fact, no power.
This is the part of convenience that chafes me. Sun girl I might be, out here trying to soak up rays like a triple ply paper towel, but that doesn’t mean I am powerless. I have power, and I want to use it. What’s more, I don’t think of myself as someone who gets someone a gift for a special day mainly because it’s easy and convenient to do so. I want to be the kind of person, and partner, who thinks, plans, and honors, who does things with intention, not to check a box.
I’m not saying I want to live in a world where everything requires a massive exertion of effort, but I also don’t want to get to a place where “remembering my own anniversary” qualifies as a massive exertion of effort. I want to be strong, and I want my Will to be strong. I want to be able to do effortful things, and use my power when I need to.
But I think convenience robs Will of his daily exercise, making him weak and vulnerable, not just to the pokings, proddings, and enticements of marketing emails, social media ads, and click-bait, but to all my elephantine whims. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More than weakening our Will, convenience robs us of discernment. When we exert power, when we make deliberate and intentional choices, it is a form of personal expression, a way to become more of who we are. But convenience robs us of that power– it insists that a choice is good because it is easy. “You can do this and something else” convenience insists, “why choose between two things when you can so easily have both?”
I know the author of a certain boy-wizard series is persona non grata these days, but the message of her book is resonant here– it is our choices that show who we truly are. Not our abilities, our success, our stuff, our genes. It’s the high and low roads we take, the mountains we climb, the divergences in the woods, the rivers we cross. The path we make by those choices is us, our lives.
And then there is convenience, an LED billboard at the bottom of a downhill cul-de-sac. The reward of convenience is convenience. It is an end in itself. The only thing we get from the easy path is ease.
___
I’m not positive (and please, correct me if I’m wrong), but I think a moon girl would be somewhat anti-convenience. She has a certain disregard for the rules too, not out of malice or lack of care, but because she only pays attention to the things that matter. A moon girl knows that as our boy Will loses his muscle definition, he becomes less and less able to steer the elephant, he becomes more and more overwhelmed, less and less in control. But a moon girl protects her Will. She recognizes that the seduction of convenience is a false fruit, the kind that makes you more and more hungry the more you eat.
A moon girl is a tigress stalking the night, all liquid muscle and camoflague stripes and bright eyes. She is effort– power incarnate. She does not hoard power, she simply has what she needs, and wields it as it suits her. And so the moon girl is also discerning. She does not chase after every wild boar or sambar deer. When she is hungry, she watches and waits, and when she finds the right opportunity, she strikes with purpose and explosive effort, and she gets what she wants. Not what is easiest to get– but what she really, truly, in her heart of hearts, wants.
This is why I want to be a moon girl. Not for the smooth skin, the skirts or shawls. I want to be a moon girl to embody self-possession, discernment, and intentionality. Being argumentative, skeptical, and shrewd are crude facsimiles of these higher ways of being– none of which offer any protection against the allure of convenience.
I think for a long time, I assumed people either were moon girls, or they weren’t. Like it was just part of your nature– not something a 3 (or an ENTJ) like me could really access. But I think that’s a sun girl assumption.
A moon girl knows that no one is immutable (defined: Unchanging over time or unable to be changed). A moon girl knows about the latent, dreamy magic of the world, the power of soaking up the light of a billion other suns. A moon girl knows that the moon itself is nothing if not a thing evolving, always becoming and then undoing herself to become and become again. She is mischievous (defined: causing or showing a fondness for causing trouble in a playful way) because she knows that whatever she is is only temporary, whatever she does is not forever, and that making trouble is not the end of the world, especially if it’s fun. She is fickle because she knows she’s changed her mind before and will again, and she has a powerful Will in her corner to help her steer the ship when she does. The vastness of her universe is directly proportional to the vastness of her dreams for herself. A moon girl is vast, and she is wildly, wildly inconvenient.
The moon girl in me is still small, with wobbly little giraffe legs. But she’s already thinking about writing. The sun girl me has always been dominant, and she’s found a lot of success in making her writing conveniently available to as many people as possible. You don’t need to be very discerning to read my work. Put your email down, and you can get my newsletters straight in your inbox. Just not feeling it today? Two clicks of your mouse, and it’s gone forever and out of your hair. Want to hear more? Check out the podcasts– you can listen to years of work, a decade of my thinking distilled into a convenient, few hour long package, and if you want, you can forget it all by tomorrow!
Would it hit different, moon girl wonders, if my writing were a little less convenient and consumable, but a little more tangible, magical, and wonderous? Surely fewer people would read my writing, or listen, but who cares about that? Wouldn’t it mean more to me to write to and for fewer people who care more, and deliver to them something more lovely, more thoughtful, and more me, than to write bland copy that appeals to the masses? I think it would. Not least because, for better or worse, I care so much. Corny as it may sound, I love these words. I love these thoughts. I love them like I love thinking about you, thinking about our discussions, thinking about the ways you move me, and the ways that I’ve grown, nourished by your moonlight.
To me, when you touched that painting all those years ago, you were a moon girl, through and through. You were a dreamy, magical, fickle, mischievous, powerful, and curious person. But then, I could think of a million moments when your moon girl snuck out, which are a tiny fraction, I’d bet, of all the moments in your life when you’ll be that person. And I just wanted to tell you, in an embarrassing number of words, that I see you, moon girl, and I love you. You are a precious and troublesome little thing, and I hope you always, always are, and that you never let a scolding, from me or anyone else, harm you. Keep reaching out and touching the world– why do you have fingers if not for touching? What do you have a Will for if not to marshall your power to do rare and amazing things? Thanks for always being the moon girl in my life, a reminder that I am not a finished thing.
Yours,
EQ-Albuquerque
(Assistant: Sarah K Mock)
We hope you’ve enjoyed this collaborative epistolary series where we explore the tensions between living and working in the social media/internet age and writing in our overlapping focus areas. My collaboration with EQ does not end with this series. We’ve recently published our first pamphlet together, a WAAL Histories Collection entitled MAFIA CORN SALAD: An American Cookbook. Though it is primarily for local publication, I convinced my bosses at WAAL to release a few second and third editions to be offered for sale here. It is a 36-page booklet featuring four original essays about food, farming, and land that will never be available online. If you are interested in learning more or purchasing a copy of this pamphlet, please fill out this form and you will be contacted about next steps.
