Things I Like
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And that’s when I realized what those bastards in Silicon Valley had done to me. They’d wormed their way into my brain, found the thing that was more important to me than Twitter, and cut the connection.
This piece was so funny, but also so true. I loved how her sons reacted when she wanted back on and how they kept giving her things to read instead.
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It is infuriating. It is also entirely understandable. Some days, as I am reading the news, I feel as if I am drowning. I think most of us do. At least online, we can use our voices and know they can be heard by someone.
Some really good thoughts about the online discourse, I'm still chewing over some of it. Over the course of the last six months I've been offline more than I have in years. I've been trying, not always successfully, to find more activities with people in my community. The difference to my mental health and my brain has been pretty amazing. The lack of constant online chatter means I can think, read deeply, and process what I do choose to take in on a daily basis.
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Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol (which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep), pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep. But here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes – which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.
I enjoyed both the science about caffeine in this piece, but also the history. I didn't know about coffee houses in London at all, I may need to read more about it.
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My Gram, whose mother made these clothes, recalls that her mother just delighted in designing, making, and even playing with the doll and her wardrobe. Apparently my great-grandmother didn’t have much opportunity to play as a child; her hands were necessary for farm work. I love that her sewing and knitting skills allowed her to rediscover her playful side as an adult. They are, after all, practical crafts, intended to clothe and keep us warm, but their fullest expression goes beyond that, entering the realm of art and creative play.
A lovely story and the photos of the clothes, wow! As I've been learning to sew I've started following more pattern makers and sewists and this post is beautiful.
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Just as abstaining from flying for moral reasons won’t stop sea-level rise, one person canceling Prime won’t do much of anything to a multinational corporation’s bottom line. “It’s statistically insignificant to Amazon. They’ll never feel it,” Caine told me. But, he said, “the small businesses in your neighborhood will absolutely feel the addition of a new customer. Individual choices do make a big difference to them.”
I could've quoted several different things in this article, but this one is the one I came back to again and again. My local businesses notice that I'm there, I go out of my way to not buy things on Amazon and I haven't had prime for a long time. Free isn't free, someone is paying a price, and this article illustrates that very well.
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But now, in my late middle age, the check mark serves a different purpose: It is the visible symbol of my realization that who I am is defined by what I do. I am a writer, so I write every day. Maybe you are a writer, too. Maybe you are not. The point still stands. The check mark is more important than whatever comes of the daily work whose completion you’re marking. The first represents actual living; the second, merely a life.
I really enjoyed this article and it's old school way of tracking work done.
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But the paradox and masochism of busyness is also laid bare: the study found that while people aspire to be more like a busy person, they also con- sider the busy person to be less happy. An obsession with busyness also taints how people spend what little leisure time they have, Bellezza said, by wanting leisure to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible—called “productivity orientation.”
I've written on this site about my disdain for the word busy and people wanting to be busy all the time and this article really nails how much it's a signal to others that you're important as well as a privilege to bemoan how busy you are.
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This post-pandemic summer is evidently expected to be one long orgiastic reunion, after which, once that’s out of our system, it’s back to work, back to school, to what we used to call “normal.” And if the pandemic had ended, say, last June, after a couple months of lockdown, we probably would’ve returned to our lives with relief and jubilation. But after a year in isolation, I, at least, have gotten acclimated to a different existence—quieter, calmer, and almost entirely devoid of bullshit. If you’d told me in March 2020 that quarantine would last more than a year, I would have been appalled; I can’t imagine how I would’ve reacted if you’d told me, once it ended, I would miss it.
I've been every so slowly getting out and about and being around people. But I'm not gonna lie, I enjoy a quiet, slow life, and so I'm being careful and choosy about what I do. Being busy isn't that great, having time to be thoughtful is so much better and I'm hoping to find a good balance as we "open up."
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But this rosy story about how alcohol made more friendships and advanced civilization comes with two enormous asterisks: All of that was before the advent of liquor, and before humans started regularly drinking alone.
I probably think about alcohol too much, but it's been a problem in my family and so I constantly evaulate what my relationship to it is. I found this to be one of the best articles I've read in a long time, the history is fascinating and I'll be reading the book Julian references, but I also found the difference between Americans and much of the rest of the world fascinating: we drink alone.
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Questions like, “Who’s got the power?” “Who has the money?” You could figure out a dynamic — who was profiting, who was being oppressed. That doesn’t really work anymore, or at least I don’t have the skills to apply that analysis because it’s much more complicated and crazy. I feel like people have just really lost their minds.
I've read both of Bechdel's previous books and want to read her new one, I love her style of writing and drawing, but I was mostly drawn to this interview because of the way in which she talks about how the world has changed over the course of her career. And I completely relate to the above quote. How do things work these days is incredibly opaque and difficult to figure out.
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So much of what I’ve wanted is to get past the wobbling stage in my writing, to get to that point where the book has momentum. Part of that is realizing that I “can’t write the good sentences without writing the bad sentences first.” Or, as Jessica Brody suggests, realizing that writer’s block is actually perfectionist’s block. (This blew my mind.) It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about. It’s that I have to accept and contend with the fear of being bad.
I absolutely loved the idea of the wobbly state and it could apply to so much more than just writing (for me it's drawing and sewing).
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The internal struggle doesn’t make things any easier. How do I learn to get along with others when it seems I can hardly get along with myself? How do any of us, as we emerge into this post-COVID world, which feels in so many ways like an ushering into a gathering inferno? Things aren’t going to be the same. They can’t be.
I loved some of the quotes in this piece as well as La Tray's vulnerability and honesty. It's a weird time right now, how to do we come out of our shells? I read another piece today that talked about maybe not wanting to totally come back out and I relate to that so very much.
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When we scale up the individual to a body politic, it is the private sphere that’s crucial for our capacity for democracy and self-determination. As individuals, we need privacy to figure out who we are when we’re no longer performing the self. As a collective, we have to be able to distinguish who we are as individuals hidden from the norms and pressures of the group in order to reason clearly about how we want to shape the group.
I'm currently reading a book on lost cities and the transition humans made from being nomadic tribes to living together in large cities and reading this piece on privacy at the same time has some thoughts percolating in my head, thoughts about how we're meant to live and how we actually live, and more that I don't even have words for yet. But I've now subscribed to this blog, feels like some good writing and thinking happening here.
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Monet gave the paintings that hang in the Orangerie to the French state after the tragedy of the first world war. A century on, Hockney has shown again that painting nature is a resonant response to a great crisis.
I really wish I could see this show, but I'd also settle for the catalog book with wonderful pictures of the work.
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Take a few minutes and watch a relaxing video of a many in his 80s paging through his sketchbook. I loved every minute of this and have watched it a few times. It probably helps that Hockney is my favorite living artist, his use of color and line quality are so amazing to me. And he's still producing so much work.