read with me: january 2024
I’m back home for good after five months of being on the road. I didn’t realize how much I missed this place. I missed the eucalyptus air, the smell of the Pacific, and that the sun shines bright in January. I missed biking on hilly roads, talking about the NBA with the cashier at the nearby bodega, and the Sunday ritual of eating pho at my local spot. I’ve missed my community. My people. Feeling like I can give back instead of just soak up experiences.
I’m answering a lot of the same questions. “How are you adjusting to the return?” It’s hard. I feel like I’m in a liminal space. “How were your travels?” Amazing. The most fun I've had and the freest I’ve ever felt. “What are you going to do next?” I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m figuring it out.
And maybe you can help me! I’m on the hunt for new opportunities, and I’m open to lots of different work. I’m looking for the following types of roles:
- Freelance communications gigs: copywriting (think… reports, emails, blogs, messaging, op-eds etc.) media outreach, project management and vendor coordination, website project management
- Full time communications/ advocacy roles: I’m particularly interested in continuing to work on climate/ energy issues and campaigns
- Research projects
- That thing you’ve been putting off doing. I can help you. I promise.
Please reach out if I can help you out on a project or if you know of any full time roles you think I might be a good fit for. ❤️
And as always, please let me know what you’re reading, enjoying, watching, and doing.
Sending all of my love,
Julia
Books:
What Are You Going Through
This book won’t leave my brain. Searing passages about the inadequacy and myopia of mindfulness and therapy? Check. Contemplation of death and dying? Check. Gorgeous vignettes about the futility of trying to communicate our deepest feelings to others? Check. Analysis of impending climate disaster? Check. I’ve never read anything else by Sigrid Nunez, but now I want to gobble up everything else she has written.
Fidelity
One of the many reasons I love my book club is we’ll inevitably end up reading something I otherwise wouldn’t have picked up. Fidelity is one of those books. I didn’t know anything about Wendell Berry, but apparently he is a leading thinker in the slow food / agriculture movement, and his writing and activism inspired food people like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters. Fidelity is a collection of pastoral, nostalgic short stories set in the fictional agrarian community Port William and it's the type of calming, slow burn reading where you’ll want to read all of the stories a second time just to make sure you caught everything.
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
I’m on a spy thriller kick after watching Slow Horses and my dad handed me this because apparently Nick Herron was inspired by Le Carre’s writing and anti-hero secret agent characters. This is another slow burn, twisting, well paced classic that is perfect if you happen to have access to whisky or a fire or both.
Poverty By America
This slim nonfiction book by the author of the incredible book Evicted explores why the hell we still have poverty in America, the richest country on Earth. Desmond writes forcefully about all of the programs that could have / should have continued after the pandemic receded, which were finally meaningfully putting resources and money into the hands of Americans who need it the most. This is an important book for anyone who cares about effective social policy.
Reads:
Wise hope
The Agoraphobic Fantasy of Trad Life
The Running Novelist
It’s good to remember: we are all on borrowed time
We’re sedating women with self care
How millennials learned to dread motherhood
A Palestinian poet’s perilous journey out of Gaza
My months were better because…
Visiting Orr hot springs and Montgomery Redwoods, the most amazing hidden gem old growth redwood forest. the retrievals, the boy and the heron, peanut butter braised chicken, sally kempton tribute, ezra klein's interview with rabbi sharon brous, SLOW HORSES which might be the best TV show I’ve watched in years, soup for dinner every night, catherine newman’s house, the anatomy of a fall, for a new beginning, target fuzzy socks, hirsch wines, my amazing brilliant book club, coastal cabins, watching the celtics, working at the coziest yoga studio in the bay, trying to slow down.