I am, my friends, a hodgepodge of emotions today. Dave has been out of town all week, and so I’ve been bunkering alone with the dog, watching old seasons of Jane the Virgin (which I’ve never watched before and am now obsessed with) and trying to eat some vegetables so I don’t get scurvy.

This morning I found out, along with the rest of the internet, that police have a suspect in custody who they think might be the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer. For anyone who’s interested in true crime or listens to My Favorite Murder, you probably already know what this means, but for those who don’t, the police have been looking for this man since the seventies. He’s bad. The thing that made me emotional, however, reading about the case is that true crime writer Michelle McNamara—who worked tirelessly on this case for years, as you can read in her posthumous book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark–died before she could see this day. I don’t know her, I don’t know why this hits me so hard. But the thought of someone’s hard work on behalf of innocent victims finally paying off, combined with the tragedy of that person’s early death, made me cry already once since breakfast.

Also in emotions: my birthday is on Sunday! My niece’s seventh birthday was this week! I’ll be 34, and I’m proud of every year I’ve lived, everything I’ve done. My mom has always had a lot of anxiety around aging (sorry mom, but it’s true!) and I’ve spent time thinking about how I can mitigate that for myself. I think I’ve been successful: there’s no age I want to go backwards to. Of course you can’t save yourself from every fear, every reaction to a gray hair or a wrinkle, but I’ve had good luck letting those feelings wash over me and then—wash away.

Of course I’m still young, so we’ll see, but I do already fetishize being a grey-or-white-haired woman with a severe cut, someday. For now I’ll keep putting my energy into the places I truly want it to go: my work, my family, my friends, my garden. The world. That seems like a good birthday wish.

And finally, I went to the ENT yesterday, and he declared my ear fully healed. In fact he said that the scarring was “fortunate,” in the sense that people who’ve had the same surgery usually have weirder looking ears, I guess? So thank you to my body for healing towards its own ideal, and thank you to modern medicine for being able to diagnose and remedy the weird bone-eating tumor that I no longer have.