👉🏽Next Sober from Bullshit 💘 Recovery Club is Monday, April 19. Register here.
👉🏽April writing workshop is live 🌵 Get your spot here (Sunday, 4/25, 10am - 12pm PST).
👉🏽 A most humble reminder: In honor of slow motion sober’s birthday, subscriptions to this newsletter are 20% off this week. Your support not only means the world, but truly makes this publication possible - thank you for considering ⭐️ and I love you!
Unexpected joy and incidental recommendations from this week:
Getting a fancy-ass manicure and spending time with a true artist in the process (SF - you can see her too!)
Being extra with my skincare routine and being grateful to FINALLY have clear skin, even if I’m the only one who gets to appreciate the glow (I’ve been digging this kit [affordable!] and you can’t go wrong with anything by Luxaskin [Local! Organic! Created by two beloved boss ladies!] I also like this SPF!).
Walking in my neighborhood and laughing after an awkward exchange with my neighbor when she wished me “Happy New Year!” (It’s OK, neighbor, I don’t know how to talk to people anymore, either).
Impromptu apple crisps around the kitchen table with beloved housemates (Katie made this last night and it was a dream for my tongue!)
This video, a visual meditation (y’all it’s so beautiful please watch and cry):
OH I also filled the air up in my tires after driving around for a week with the light on in the dash. This is the type of task that feels me with dread, that seems insurmountable, and for which I had to process with friends and crowdsource peptalks before I made my way out into the world, in search of a gas station with a functioning air-machine-thingy (you see? Not my wheelhouse [heh]).
Anyway I worked it out and you can bet I drove around feeling like a badass the rest of the day. The smallest things are everything, you know?
How about you, my dear people? Anything bring you delight this week, however humble or silly?
Would love to hear…
big heart squeezes, tuya, xxoo
dani
⛓ ’s aka internet things that made me go 🤔 this week:
🥗 The Activists Working to Remake the Food System: “‘This goes beyond simply having reliable access to healthy food to recognizing the importance of cultural context, ecological stewardship and a fundamental right to have a say in your destiny. “Are you eating an organic banana because you think your body is a temple, or because the people affected most by pesticides are farm workers?’”
🍩 Roxane Gay coming through with a mic-drop in response to the free donuts at Krispy Kreme manufactured drama last week: “The public obsession with bodies is pathological. It is nearly impossible to talk about this because so many people are so deeply invested in demonizing fatness and fat people.” (really, I wanted to quote the whole damn thing).
👚 LET IT BE KNOWN: Y’all might need to bust out some brain-bleach after this one (not gonna lie, I was, regrettably…fascinated).
🍪 I loved loved loved this extended metaphor that compares perfecting a chocolate cookie recipe to the joy and pitfalls of moving from the margins to the center: “But the center is nothing, if not, a messy middle. We distrust centers, given as they are to centrism. We understand the edge differently for a reason. It’s the cutting edge. The radical edge. If my cookies tell us anything, middles are, if you are not careful, breaking points.”
It is wrenching to know that the occasion for the renewed interest in your work is the murders of black people and the subsequent “listening and learning” of white people. I’d rather not know this feeling of experiencing career highs as you are flooded with a grief so old and worn that it seems unearthed, a fossil of other old and worn griefs.
and
While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm.
🤸🏽♀️ Anne Helen Peterson and her brain: “That’s what most of us crave, in some capacity: the ability to mold our work around our lives, not our lives around our work.”
Thank you so much for being a part of this community. If you like this newsletter, please consider leaving a comment, sending it to a friend or subscribing (remember: subscriptions are 20% off this week!). Or email me and say hi, I’d love to hear from you.
I had an accident on one of those motorized scooters (NEVER get on one of those- so dangerous!) so my unexpected joy has been laying in bed reading, watching movies, and just thinking and not feeling guilty about it. Plus that inevitable belated gratitude you feel for your heathy body when all of a sudden you can’t do the things you normally do...
CATHERINE! I'm so sorry to hear this :( I had a Vespa for a while and got hit by a car, it's so scary. I'm glad you're ok, but yeah, don't worry, I'll steer so clear of those death traps...
I had an accident on one of those motorized scooters (NEVER get on one of those- so dangerous!) so my unexpected joy has been laying in bed reading, watching movies, and just thinking and not feeling guilty about it. Plus that inevitable belated gratitude you feel for your heathy body when all of a sudden you can’t do the things you normally do...
CATHERINE! I'm so sorry to hear this :( I had a Vespa for a while and got hit by a car, it's so scary. I'm glad you're ok, but yeah, don't worry, I'll steer so clear of those death traps...
And DAMN that is a mic drop by Roxanne Gay- thanks for sharing.