So much good stuff this Friday! Event reminders + guest post from a beloved + hella links for your beautiful brains š„°
ā Come write with me tomorrow. Itās free, itās rad, and I have a super special prompt planned. Come down.
š Bridge Club is Monday at 7pm. Also free, also rad.
xxoodani
Ok now for the goods:
How to Survive a Wedding, Sober. by slow motion sober pal, L.G.
How to Survive a Wedding, Sober.
Come prepared to turn down champagne toasts, politely decline red or white, and correct people when they assume, youāre just hungover from the previous nightsā festivities.
Find another person (or two) who also seem like getting plastered at a wedding just isnāt their thing anymore. A great go-to, a pregnant woman! Sheās not going to take shots at the brideās insistence and will happily split a can of Pamplemousse La Croix in that champagne flute. The downside, she will also leave at a totally respectable hour and youāll be left hanging with the party guests who are shouting rather than talking and are leaning rather than standing.
Wear lipstick. It demands your attention and maintenance, and is a great excuse to leave a slurred conversation so you can run to the bathroom and ātouch upā. Also, just wear lipstick because itās fun, a little bold, and is a great accessory to your crisp speech and your unfogged cognition.
Perhaps the most important: Remember why you quit drinking in the first place. Not an all-out reliving of bad nights or terrible decisions but rather, bask in all the reasons you made sobriety, and not intoxication, a priority for your life. And then, as the night carries on, you will be (whether you like or it not) reminded over and overā¦and over, of why you chose to quit drinking: the mother of the bride being carried out of the backyard to a car waiting to take her away, the loud and tasteless speech of the best man who keeps making reference to the groomās weed problem in high school, the future in-laws making rude comments to the bartender who offered her time as a wedding gift (and is also sober!). And then thereās the bride. Even as much as you adore her and have since you were teenagers, itās hard to witness her now, eyes a little glassy and stories on repeat, telling you (loudly) that she loves you (she does) and you wondering if sheāll remember these final hours of her wedding.
Look to the next morning. Yes, you will probably be tired. But hungover, you will not. Breakfast will still sound appetizing, your skin will look just fine because you did indeed remember to wash it the night before, and there will not be that unnerving feeling of what you may or may not have said/did/kissed the night before. Because you will have remembered it all and survived to tell the tale of yet another (sober) wedding.
L.G. is a licensed clinical social worker and lives in the Bay Area. She has been sober for just over two and half years, and just donated the last of her bridesmaid's dresses to Goodwill.Ā
ā LinkavitchĀ Chomofskyās (if you get this referenceā¦send me your address and Iāll mail you a postcard)
š¼ The Extraordinary Life of Ethiopiaās 93-year-old Singing Nun: āAfter becoming a nun, she spent a decade living barefoot in a hilltop monastery in northern Ethiopia, and when she eventually returned to music, she wrote her own compositions, infusing the classical training of her youth with the pentatonic chants she was singing in church.ā And hereās a link to her music!
š” Was so excited to see an interview with local Mission High principal in the Atlantic: āThe support is not specific to African American students. The support is about good teaching, because thatās the belief behind anti-racist teaching. If you pay attention to the information that African American students are giving you, you will become a better teacher to all of your students. Itās almost like frogs: The frogs areĀ the first onesĀ in a polluted environment to die, so the frogs give us information about how toxic an environment is. African American students are the most vulnerable students in the classroom. They give us the first level of information about our teaching.ā
š āWhat I want to report is that Iāve done absolutely nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.ā I had to lay down for a while after this one.
š³ This one gutted me too, in a (ahem) most delicious way: āDuring this Broken Time, I find that I grab ginger a lot. I cling to it in my kitchen like a talisman in each of my increasingly out of body soup moments. As I begin to make the first soup, I think about what ginger does for a body, its dedication to the gut, its taming properties. I smell the hunk I hold in my hand and I think about my hunger. I have been trying to curb my hunger my whole life. I go through this world, full of desire and longing, carrying all of my interrupted dreams in an overflowing pocket. Hunger is the thing I canāt bear the most about myself any longer. Sometimes my whole life feels like one big hunger pang.
So. Ginger.ā
š¦ One of my favorite June Jordan poems in case you need some medicine.
š² Ursula LeGuinās legit magical house is for sale in Berkeley and you can watch a video of her house and think writerly thoughts.
Thank you so much for being a part of this community. If you like this newsletter, please consider sending it to a friend or subscribing. And donāt forget to share your resources/practices below!
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š¤øš½āāļøsome joy for your friday (+guest post +event reminders) (open thread #9)
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So much good stuff this Friday! Event reminders + guest post from a beloved + hella links for your beautiful brains š„°
ā Come write with me tomorrow. Itās free, itās rad, and I have a super special prompt planned. Come down.
š Bridge Club is Monday at 7pm. Also free, also rad.
xxoodani
Ok now for the goods:
How to Survive a Wedding, Sober.
by slow motion sober pal, L.G.
How to Survive a Wedding, Sober.
Come prepared to turn down champagne toasts, politely decline red or white, and correct people when they assume, youāre just hungover from the previous nightsā festivities.
Find another person (or two) who also seem like getting plastered at a wedding just isnāt their thing anymore. A great go-to, a pregnant woman! Sheās not going to take shots at the brideās insistence and will happily split a can of Pamplemousse La Croix in that champagne flute. The downside, she will also leave at a totally respectable hour and youāll be left hanging with the party guests who are shouting rather than talking and are leaning rather than standing.
Wear lipstick. It demands your attention and maintenance, and is a great excuse to leave a slurred conversation so you can run to the bathroom and ātouch upā. Also, just wear lipstick because itās fun, a little bold, and is a great accessory to your crisp speech and your unfogged cognition.
Perhaps the most important: Remember why you quit drinking in the first place. Not an all-out reliving of bad nights or terrible decisions but rather, bask in all the reasons you made sobriety, and not intoxication, a priority for your life. And then, as the night carries on, you will be (whether you like or it not) reminded over and overā¦and over, of why you chose to quit drinking: the mother of the bride being carried out of the backyard to a car waiting to take her away, the loud and tasteless speech of the best man who keeps making reference to the groomās weed problem in high school, the future in-laws making rude comments to the bartender who offered her time as a wedding gift (and is also sober!). And then thereās the bride. Even as much as you adore her and have since you were teenagers, itās hard to witness her now, eyes a little glassy and stories on repeat, telling you (loudly) that she loves you (she does) and you wondering if sheāll remember these final hours of her wedding.
Look to the next morning. Yes, you will probably be tired. But hungover, you will not. Breakfast will still sound appetizing, your skin will look just fine because you did indeed remember to wash it the night before, and there will not be that unnerving feeling of what you may or may not have said/did/kissed the night before. Because you will have remembered it all and survived to tell the tale of yet another (sober) wedding.
L.G. is a licensed clinical social worker and lives in the Bay Area. She has been sober for just over two and half years, and just donated the last of her bridesmaid's dresses to Goodwill.Ā
ā LinkavitchĀ Chomofskyās (if you get this referenceā¦send me your address and Iāll mail you a postcard)
š¼ The Extraordinary Life of Ethiopiaās 93-year-old Singing Nun: āAfter becoming a nun, she spent a decade living barefoot in a hilltop monastery in northern Ethiopia, and when she eventually returned to music, she wrote her own compositions, infusing the classical training of her youth with the pentatonic chants she was singing in church.ā And hereās a link to her music!
š” Was so excited to see an interview with local Mission High principal in the Atlantic: āThe support is not specific to African American students. The support is about good teaching, because thatās the belief behind anti-racist teaching. If you pay attention to the information that African American students are giving you, you will become a better teacher to all of your students. Itās almost like frogs: The frogs areĀ the first onesĀ in a polluted environment to die, so the frogs give us information about how toxic an environment is. African American students are the most vulnerable students in the classroom. They give us the first level of information about our teaching.ā
š āWhat I want to report is that Iāve done absolutely nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.ā I had to lay down for a while after this one.
š³ This one gutted me too, in a (ahem) most delicious way: āDuring this Broken Time, I find that I grab ginger a lot. I cling to it in my kitchen like a talisman in each of my increasingly out of body soup moments. As I begin to make the first soup, I think about what ginger does for a body, its dedication to the gut, its taming properties. I smell the hunk I hold in my hand and I think about my hunger. I have been trying to curb my hunger my whole life. I go through this world, full of desire and longing, carrying all of my interrupted dreams in an overflowing pocket. Hunger is the thing I canāt bear the most about myself any longer. Sometimes my whole life feels like one big hunger pang.
So. Ginger.ā
š¦ One of my favorite June Jordan poems in case you need some medicine.
š„ Collaboration between (gasp) SPIKE LEE and DAVID BYRNE
š² Ursula LeGuinās legit magical house is for sale in Berkeley and you can watch a video of her house and think writerly thoughts.
Thank you so much for being a part of this community. If you like this newsletter, please consider sending it to a friend or subscribing. And donāt forget to share your resources/practices below!