Keep Your Frying Pan Close

sharing some advice I received in 2025 + some reading recs

I have always preferred even numbers, to the point where I probably have more than a touch of OCD about it. You will never catch my thermostat set to an odd number, for example, or the television volume.

alchemical illustration, oroborus, public domain

Even when I was younger, I felt that even was “good” and odd was “bad” - and one of my daughters has the same predilection. In its casual form, this is possibly an aesthetic preference, or ordinal-linguistic personification, a form of synesthesia which associates numbers and other ordered sequences with personalities.

I recently learned that my quiet preference for even numbers also has a cognitive and aesthetic basis: our brains register even numbers more quickly, more fluently, and associate them with symmetry and balance—the small satisfactions of pairs, order, and things lining up. Odd numbers, by contrast, demand just a bit more from us; they carry the faint charge of the unruly or incomplete. The lonely. Even feels like wholeness and justice to me, softer, kinder, capable of being halved and distributed.

As one writer pointed out, there’s a biological basis for our preference for symmetry: “Humans find symmetry pleasing due to its prevalence in nature and its association with health and efficiency, such as in starfish, honeycombs and snowflakes, where asymmetry often signals danger or illness.”

Physicist Alan Lightman reminds us in The Accidental Universe that symmetry feels like a kind of rescue—an orderly pattern in an otherwise bewildering universe, something our minds instinctively reach for the way we reach for the repetition of seasons or the steadiness of friendships. “Symmetry is economy…simplicity…elegance,” he writes, suggesting that our emotional pleasure in these patterns is really a deeper effort to make sense of the world - which for me, lately, has felt impossible.

My birthday is nestled with the holiday season, and I like it that way. As I woke to 46, I felt delighted to be in an even year again, a year with so much softness and possibility, after what felt like a hard year. I drove my daughter to basketball practice at 7 in the morning. When I drove back to my house, snow falling, I looked up in the tree which hangs over my mailbox. A huge and haunting owl looked through me.

I’ve had substantial brushes with owls this last year - and somehow -even though I know owls can represent visitations from the other realm - I knew this owl was a particularly good omen for the year ahead.

Something about the intensity of this last year left me feeling sober and aware of myself and my quirks. I was a target for advice, much of it good - especially from the wonderful mother of a wonderful friend, who, while seated at a bar in Nashville, told me now was the time to “keep my frying pan close” and that “if you can read, you can fix anything.” I’ve been trying.

Sending love & peace to you all - thanks for your companionship and support this year.

xo
MMB

Some good reads I want to share:

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The Man Behind the Fall of Offshore Wind
A profile of the figure whose activism and political influence have significantly slowed U.S. offshore wind development—even as he personally embraces some clean technologies like rooftop solar and hybrid vehicles. The piece explores how ideology and network strategy intersect with climate policy and renewable deployment.

Orange Rivers and Melting Glaciers: Federal Report Shows Rapid Change in the Arctic
This report highlights NOAA’s Arctic Report Card 2025, documenting unprecedented Arctic warmth, unusual phenomena like “orange rivers” caused by thawing permafrost iron, and the broader implications for ecosystems and global sea-level rise.

The Parrot Cartel
An investigative report exploring the illegal global trade in parrots. It examines the criminal networks that traffic these birds, the ecological and ethical consequences, and the people—both exploiters and defenders—caught up in this complex trade.

The Goal of a Realist
An essay blending personal narrative with cultural critique, focusing on pragmatic, grounded approaches to art, identity, and civic life in the American South. It probes what it means to balance idealism with real-world conditions and why this “realist” lens matters.

The Runaway Monkeys: Upending the Animal Rights Movement
A thoughtful feature on how a group of escaped capuchin monkeys became an unexpected catalyst for debates in the animal rights movement, challenging assumptions about captivity, species boundaries, and moral responsibility.

Declared Extinct in 2025: A Look Back at Some of the Species We’ve Lost
A retrospective from Mongabay on species that were officially declared extinct in 2025. The piece reflects on biodiversity loss, the causes driving these extinctions, and what these disappearances signal about habitat destruction, climate change, and conservation priorities.