Quakerism, up to and including calling everyone “Friend” in the most affected voice possible, even though I’m not actually sure they call other people “Friend” (I’m pretty sure they just call themselves Friends?), going on pilgrimages to Philadelphia to sit in churches with the sort of pews that have high wooden backs and stitching my own ‘church pillow’ so I don’t lose feeling in my legs, kind of getting into plain dress, just going full Sarah Plain and Tall

On the flip side, Episcopalianism, probably, I don’t know, doing some light office management work at wherever the Madeleine L’Engle Center is, joining a chamber choir, getting really into “being an alto” again, attending NEHA conferences, doing interfaith stuff (which in my mind is always like…once a year every city has a panel where a handful of religious leaders get together and say ‘You know, we all have a lot to learn from one another,’ and that’s pretty much it)

I don’t think even in the wildest, most unself-aware timeline I ever become a rockabilly chick, but I definitely spend a week or two trying elaborate 1940s-style hairdos and mostly just end up recreating that bump all girls wore over their foreheads in 2003. Do you remember the one I mean? I feel absolutely insane when I try to describe it. You’d have like a high ponytail, and then just this little bump in your hair near the front of your head. NOT BANGS. A bump. And I have like, two dresses with flare skirts you’re supposed to wear some kind of netted petticoat with.

Ditto with the corsets, I become a real fucking stickler about petticoats v. slips and so on, and have a little silk-lined carrying case for all my antique goddamn lingerie that I insist on hauling about with me, despite the obvious fact that it produces no actual joy, just mass-acquiring a hundred garments a year that feel like buttered pillowcases against the skin

Powerlifting…contrast loading…carrying around a little Harriet the Spy-style notebook around with me so I can record my 1RMs or whatever they’re called…hook grips…those tall chalky socks…having disc problems and strong negative opinions about local gym owners

Stranger Things fan fiction

Galettes, just baking a lot of galettes, because the thing about getting really into baking as a woman (“as a woman”) in your thirties is that you feel very conscious about needing to maintain a significant distance between yourself and like, women who bake, especially God forbid the kind who push their baking on everyone and get aggressively crestfallen when you don’t eat unexpected pastries every single time, so you have to stick to baking one thing, just really well, and galettes feel sort-of butch, or at least austere enough that you don’t worry about becoming a Jessica Seinfeld type

Climate change industrial sabotage/Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

Talking a lot about “queer gatekeeping” without grounding it in either a strong sense of power or history

M.F.K. Fisher

Anne Carson

Mary Renault

Learning Latin / trying to make up for not having been a Classics major by rereading Tam Lin or Donna Tartt