Week 21
Some advice I truly treasure. And Janets.
Hi! Here’s a mostly true story from this week.
I wish I’d come up with a better tag on this. The cartoonist line feels a little…cheap? I dunno. I couldn’t think of anything better so it is as it stands. That’s the challenge of trying to finish something every week!
I often think about a piece of advice I heard secondhand — or maybe fifth-hand. My friend’s stepdaughter’s grandfather once told his granddaughter that whatever she chooses to do, she should make sure she finishes it. She was in that fig tree early-twenties period, maybe had just dropped out of uni to write a book or something.
It’s advice I wish I’d been given — or rather, something I wish I’d understood sooner. I spent my entire twenties not finishing anything. I’d get excited about a project, procrastinate, get angry at myself for not being good enough to make the thing I imagined, then get distracted by something new. If you create something, you have to live with its failures — and that’s hard. But as Sheila Heti wrote in How Should a Person Be: “Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.” She’s right. You only really learn from finishing things.
Anyway, that’s far better advice than “treasure this time.” People tell you that a lot when you have a child — including the man I drew above, who actually stopped his jog just to say it. And it’s sweet. But you don’t know how hard I’m already treasuring. I’ve thought about it a lot, and honestly, I don’t think I can treasure any harder than I already am. I really try to treasure. But time keeps moving anyway. It’s not like I can treasure so hard that I actually hold onto anything. I can’t.
I think of this comic as a cousin to the lemon one I made a while ago. Both are about trying to hold onto something, and both jump through time. I always imagine myself old. Sometimes I feel old — close to the end of my life — and that’s when I’m most overcome with gratitude for the life I’ve led, which is really just the life I have now. Maybe that’s when I do my best treasuring: by looking forward, and reflecting back on the present.
Anyway, if you have a better ending, let me know.
This Week I Learned…
The name Janet is a diminutive of Jane.
I learned this while reading Jane Eyre, when Mr. Rochester calls Jane “Janet,” and I was confused and then I looked it up and it rocked me the same way I felt as a teen discovering, through a Tom Clancy book, that “Jack” is short for “John.”
But Jane and John are connected, too, back through the Old French of Iohannes and the Latin form of the Greek Ἰωάννης, all the way to the Hebrew Yochanan.
If John means “God is merciful,” maybe Janet means “Treasure this time,” because one day you’re a top-50 name in the 1950s and the next you’ve vanished from the charts.