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A friend told me about the show Somebody Someplace on HBO, and on the same day, HBO sent an email with a teaser for the second season. We decided to try it because she recommended it knowing that Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi is one of our comfort watches.

Bridget Everett stars as a woman who moved home to her small town in Kansas to help care for her sister before she died, and she’s finding it hard to find her place there long after the loss. She has a job she doesn’t love and a strained relationship with her other sister. But she reconnects with an old friend from high school, who brings her into his friendships with people in town.

It’s the most hopeful show I’ve seen about grief, and Josh and I both gave the first episode a 10, and it has only gotten better from there. Knowing there is a second season coming makes it even better. It’s not the straightforward hope contained in Ted Lasso, but it’s a deeper, more honest, more achievable kind of hope. It’s time well spent watching it.

The article promised to tell me how many clothes the average person should own, something I’m usually not interested to know because I wear the same thing every day. (Well, not the same-same thing. I bought dozens of copies of the same black shirt and jeans or cargo pants, and I wear the same thing for all external appearances daily.) But the twins are thinking about what they need to get as they head off to college, knowing that they’re not going to go shopping while they’re away from home.

It turns out that you need the following:

The researchers found that a “sufficient” wardrobe consists of 74 garments and 20 outfits in total. As an example, they’ve suggested six outfits for work, three outfits for home wear, three outfits for sports, two outfits for festive occasions, plus four outdoor jackets and trousers or skirts.

Regarding the twins (YMMV if you’re sporty), they need eleven outfits for school or weekends, one for exercise, two for festive occasions (one casual, one formal), plus outdoor gear, which feels doable to wrap my brain around. And it makes me relook at all the clothes I’m keeping but not wearing. I think I need to let them go.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a cloudy spot on my glasses. I tried cleaning them, but the cloudy spot remained. And got larger. I could see it out of the corner of my eye when I turned my head.

I was running an errand by the glasses store, so I stopped in to see if they could remove the spot. The man cautioned that a coating was peeling off, and the only fix was to replace the lens. Just what I feared. I would be purchasing a new set of lenses to fix this problem.

The store manager brought up my account to check when the glasses were made, and his brow furrowed. “Did you buy four pairs of glasses on the same day?”

“Yes,” I informed him. “I have glasses fears.”

“Glasses fears?”

“I always fear that I’m going to break my glasses. So I get backups for my backups. I would need to be super unlucky ever to be caught without glasses because I travel with at least two backup pairs. And prescription sunglasses.”

“Oh. That’s. Well, that’s something,” he told me. “You know what? I’m just going to replace these for you. Because you clearly have a lot of feelings about your glasses.”

I had to hang around the area for two hours while he had the glasses remade, but that feels like a small price for free lenses. There really are good people in the world.

I usually don’t use journaling prompts — mostly because I like to use writing as a brain dump — but I thought these were particularly good if you’re blocked for what to write about but know you want to write. Or, if not journaling, they’re also good for just thinking about because they ask you to go deeper than a simple answer.

It’s not “what makes you anxious?” It’s “what makes you anxious, and where does that fear come from?” Should you keep the fear if you can’t figure out the origin?

I particularly liked #59: “What would the complete opposite of you look like?” Or #16 to get at the heart of what is important to you: “If I could have anything written on a massive billboard where you live, what would it be?” Or #26: “Who is someone you wish you had stayed in touch with?”

Have fun (or deep thoughts) with them.

18 years ago, I spent a lot of time crying because I didn’t think parenthood would happen. This last year with the twins at home, I’ve spent a lot of time crying again because it did, and I loved the experience so much, and I’m so sad that it’s over.

Yes, I know. It’s not over. But in many ways, when they leave home in the fall, we’ll both enter into a different relationship. They will always be my babies, but they will no longer be babies. And while I’m excited to see what they do and where they go in this next stage of life, I am sad that I am losing my job.

Or that my job description is changing.

We’re nearing the end of the college cycle. In fact, we’re smack in the middle of decision week, when most admission decisions come in for regular decision. They’ll have a month to make their final choice, but I sense it will happen sooner. I hope that I’ll be more at peace once I know where they will live next year. Right now, I think some of the tumultuousness is not knowing where they’ll be.

It has been such an amazing 18 years. I am so lucky I got to watch them grow up.

It’s just strange to think of those two bookends of parenthood — crying because I thought it would never happen and then crying because it did.