Whimsy

Henrietta, the Marvelous Flying Pig

Henrietta The Marvelous Flying Pig, © KDZ Photography 2024

It says something that my love language is Acts of Service.

My husband is a Words of Affirmation guy. He says, I love you, you are wonderful, and I would do anything for you. I say, I love you and will go to Walmart for you because I know you hate it.

As a child of an alcoholic single mother, I tried hard to do the right things, the things that would make my mother stop drinking. I tried to anticipate my mother’s moods and her state of sobriety. I kept my mouth shut. I excelled in school. I became hyper-independent and overly-responsible. I became, above all else, practical.

My personality dovetails nicely with productivity culture hustle. My current to-do list for this week contains thirty-six items—from laundering bed linens to returning library books to submitting my father’s Medicaid application to figuring out an investment strategy—and it is only Tuesday. I will, I am certain, be adding to the list as the week continues.

The productivity methods I have tried are legion: the Pomodoro Method (which I am using right now to write this essay); the Getting Things Done Method; the Bullet Journal Method; the Values-Based To-Do List Method; the Eat the Frog Method; the SMART Goals Method; the WOOP Method; the Time Blocking Method; the Five-Minute Rule Method; Mel Robbins’ 4-3-2-1-Do-It Method; the Pareto Principle Method; the Eisenhower Matrix Method. I’ve even meditated about productivity on the Headspace App. Seriously.

These strategies have worked for me in many ways. I have earned a PhD, been a professor at a technical college for a quarter century, published books, poems, and articles. I’ve led scholarly societies. I’ve graded over a thousand pages of student writing every semester and, more importantly, made a difference in many of my students’ lives by giving them the attention they needed. I have been recognized with awards. And I’m tired.

Enter Henrietta, the Marvelous Flying Pig.

Henrietta is a small, plush, pale pink pig with white wings and a magnet in her nose that allows her to attach wherever she may wish. Currently, she is flying upside down over my computer, affixed to the desk lamp. I bought her at a now-defunct kitschy kitchen shop called Razzle Dazzle.

            When pigs fly.

That’s what people say when they mean something is impossible, will never happen. We see pigs pulling their substantial weight around their sties. We see them wallowing in mud. We see them always, always, near the ground. To believe in the possibility of a flying pig is whimsical. It’s fanciful. It’s imaginative. It’s playfully odd and oddly playful.

Katie Fizpatrick and Jonathan Wyatt say, “Whimsy is the oblique, it is refusal, it is resistance to conforming….It is awareness of the arbitrary practices of necessity.”[1]

Whimsy takes us out of necessity and shows us that what we classify as necessary is a choice we have made. It reveals space in our lives for caprice, impulse, spontaneity, extravagance. Whimsy cannot be for someone else. It is an unmotivated action. We don’t “do” whimsy to reach a goal, an outcome, an ROI, or as an act of service. Whimsy, by its definition, is unnecessary.

Before I bought Henrietta the Marvelous Flying Pig, I asked myself, “But do I need it? How can it help me with my long, long lists? What purpose does it serve?”

It turns out that I do need Henrietta and other whimsical items, like a fabulous illustration of a rabbit riding a moped, precisely because I don’t need them. They can’t help me with my to-do list. Instead, they remind me that the list is not my life, that I must intentionally choose joy and fun and pleasure.

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[1] Fitzpatrick, Katie and Jonathan Wyatt. “Whimsy, Ethnographic Writing, and The Everyday: Possibilities, Politics, Poetics” in Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry: Research in a Pandemic, ed. Norman Denzin and Michael Gardina, 77-90. London: Routledge.