crazy weather we’ve been having

Yesterday I was over it. I think I’m gonna go back into hibernation for 5, 7, maybe 35ish years, I thought to myself, and the rest of you can tell me how it all shook out later. That’s how afraid of my own shadow I am: I’m always about to crawl back into a hole. I’d cognitively hibernated for 8+ years but it was clearly not long enough. You will not be missed, someone wrote—the last comment ever left on my website, visible only on the Wayback Machine—and then, a little bit inexplicably, they’d written you were absolutely terrible on podcasts. Uh, okay. It’s not the metric I judge myself by, but thank you for noticing. “Well, I was,” I explained to the filmmaker, attempting to describe podcast trauma1, “because I was racing dudes to get my point out.” I’d been explaining to her why I needed to take my time to formulate a full sentence before answering a question. I was trying to keep my nervous system from frying live on-camera. “Well, this isn’t a podcast,” I’d said to her. I’d said…