Too Sweet!!!
As a sort of experiment, I started making a list of everything I hate. Things I hate, I wrote as a pinned note in my phone, which was meant only for insignificant things.
As a sort of experiment, I started making a list of things I hate. Things I hate, I wrote as a pinned note in my phone, which was meant only for insignificant things: espadrilles, green bell peppers, hard facts, I cataloged, fantasy novels, shades of teal, tiny holes, anything too sweet.
As a kid I had a strange taste for sweet things. I surprised my friends’ moms when going to get ice cream after school, my order was as practiced: Just the cone, please! I didn’t like the way ice cream sat in my mouth, gluey and saccharine. I never knew if I should chew it or let it sort of fall down my throat.
In Leslie Jamison’s essay In Defense of the Saccharin(e), Jamison writes about our relationship to sweetness and the overly sentimental, tracing the word saccharine when it was first defined as “like sugar” until after the 19th century when it became associated with “too much.” Now, saccharine’s synonyms: soppy, treacly, cloying, sickly, sappy, drip with excess.
The saccharine: glossy cards filled with platitudes, a red velvet chocolate box, language that has been used so much it dissolves on the tongue. (It’s hard to even write these down as if I’m afraid of being too close.) Afraid of feeling something that has already been felt, of being redundant. As if I want to prove, as Jamison writes, that “[I] don’t need the same crude quantities of feeling. . . I will subsist more delicately . . . I will subsist on less.”
My funniest friend has a bit about how people ask for a slice of cake. She presses her hands together to mimic a piece so small you can barely see it. Cut me a piece as if I didn’t exist! she says, Cut me a piece as if I were a mouse! she keeps going and I choke on my glass of water.
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I am sentimental in the way I keep things: a small tin horse that used to hang in the fireplace at my grandma’s house that now hangs above the mirror in my closet, a picture of my mom in her 20’s wearing a suit my aunts sewed, six shells I found on the beach in Maine, all slightly different shades of yellow.
And lately, I’ve been into letting myself be moved by things I didn’t used to. I find myself wanting to watch the sun drop. I’ve been braiding my hair down the middle like some Victorian protagonist, asking people how their hearts are.
“Perhaps if we say it straight,” Leslie Jamison writes, “We suspect we’ll find we’re nothing but banal. . . that our feelings will resemble everyone else’s.”
Or, as Mary Ruefle proposes in her essay On Sentimentality, “Perhaps it frees us.”
It’s the truth in the saccharine that I fear most—a reminder that we are all at once exceptional and not at all. (How true!! Jane Austen supposedly wrote in the margins of the poems she hated.)
Things I read & recommend:
Why Poetry Can Be Hard For Most People a poem by Dorothea Lasky.
The Growing Appeal of Deserts That Are ‘Not Too Sweet’ by Betta Makalintal in Vice.
I loved this short fiction, Folktale About Myself, by Lindsay Vranizan in American Short Fiction.
“Inside, the house has fermented. It smells of the sweet rot of old flowers. Everywhere I look there are signs of my haste, my panic: a stack of folded laundry and an open window, a peeled orange dry and shrunken on the countertop. What did I have to fear?”
This list of small businesses started by Emma Kohlmann.
Two books that would make good gifts: Black Futures + Big Friendship.
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