head vampire of scorpios drake
there is so little to be grateful for in the wider world lately and i don't want to write and every day i'm more "behind" on the notes that support these notes, which are just various unstructured blobs of fragments in my phone's notes app that i mark down when i am grateful for something in the moment and think i might want to write about it in the future. the problem with this practice is that if i don't write them up soon enough after putting them down, then they become just cryptic little cairns of text that i cannot really locate the memories or ideas for, such as "rip off my shirt in the middle of a resto then order off menu" (we were on vacation and it was very hot?) or "the beatings will continue until morale improves" (no idea grimace emoji) or "what's up ghost malone" (there was a situation in which i thought this would be extremely funny to say but i didn't write down the situation). most of them i can remember at least some of the underlying thought, though (i have one of the world's best memories, sorry deborah) and so now i will run through the some of the queue lightning round style:
"head vampire of scorpios drake", "me and the name justin heard aloud timberlake"
there is the concept of the "head vampire" where like if you kill a vampire it also kills the vampires he/she/they created such that if you kill the oldest vampire you would kill all vampires that vampire made. this is why i am so annoyed lately at drake, who is the most famous and culturally important scorpio and who made perhaps the ultimate scorpio mistake which is thinking that just because you are really good at thinking of mean things to say about other people you can take when other people return that trash talk and drake very stupidly crossed this line with kendrick! this is deeply painful for me, both as a card-carrying scorpio and as a person a person who generally likes listening to drake's music much more than kendrick (who i recognize as a generational talent in terms of lyrics but rarely ever is someone whose music i actually want to listen to (don't @ me)). (the justin timberlake thing is a second order thought about him similarly defaming "justins" after i heard someone say my name in a crowded restaurant, triggering my fight or flight, only to realize that they were talking about him)
"mushy savory not my thing mushy sweet okay plantains with sweet chili sauce", "push notification hyper vigilance"
we were at a bar waiting to meet my family eating plantains as a side to our cocktails and deborah identified, which is that while i like mushy sweet things (i.e. plantains), i am almost always physically repulsed by mushy savory things (i.e. mashed potatoes)(we came up with a few exceptions that prove the rule but i can't remember them). also we were walking and i got a push notification and i said to deborah "i got a push notification" and in a way that was comical to me (though i understand not fun for her!) her hyper-vigilance and sense of threat instantly kicked off and she made concerned noises and i derailed and commented on this that the reason it was funny, completing my initial sentence, is the push notification was from yelp telling us that the place we get expensive delivery sushi from is one of their top 100 sushi restaurants in the country.
"space shuttle bit"
i devoured adam higginbotham's book about the space shuttle/the challenger disaster (he is the writer of the book that was adapted to the chernobyl tv show, both of which i also devoured, despite how grim they are) and it was as well done as i would have expected (and less grim! or at least grim in a less slow-motion irradiated way), though i was ultimately disappointed for reasons not having to do with the quality of the book but failures of my memory and imagination. that is: i had remembered there were two space shuttle disasters, one where the shuttle blew up almost immediately after taking off and another one where it took seemingly superficial damage during takeoff but that during at the outset of its week in orbit NASA identified that the damage was actually critical and would cause the shuttle to break up on reentry and there was no way to fix it and no way to rescue them but NASA didn't want to tell them since there was nothing they could do and so NASA and the whole world knew they were going to die but the people on the shuttle didn't because NASA controlled all of their communications. i thought the book would be about the latter one since it's more dramatic so was surprised and disappointed when the shuttle blew up "early" and i realized it was about the former one and then in the epilogue they do go into the latter one and i learn that my memory is wrong in that while NASA knew there was probably something badly wrong they didn't release this information to the wider public so the global dramatic irony of the thing was just something i made up in my head i guess (better than reality IMO! the writing on reality is just terrible, in case u weren't aware; God should not be getting any awards!).
"gay wedding microdose sexuality polyamory microdose queerness", "comments are notices staightiolab", "freudian payment is part of it capitalism new yorker critics"
various things from podcasts i listened to. the bit on a recent episode of straightiolab where george posits that weddings are an opportunity for gueer people to microdose straightness and polyamory is an opportunity for straight people to microdose queerness; maybe the same episode where he or sam makes the claim (i agree with) "comments are notices" which is to say that when people say things like "your hair looks so nice today" and some people internally receive that as "your hair looks like shit every other day" they should not do that, because the point of the comment is not about its specific content but about expressing "i notice you! i see you!" and people should take it as a gesture of affection in this vein. the new yorker critics thing is from their episode about couples therapy where one of them mentioned something about how freud considered payment to be a necessary component of the therapeutic exchange.
"hannah email", "andrea long chu", "autism mary hk"
friend of the pod hannah is writing us beautiful emails again (you should subscribe!!). also, two truly incredible pieces of writing from the current issue of new york: new andrea long chu triple flames emoji HERE ARE MY RECEIPTS eviscerating rachel cusk (ICYMI see also her amazing important thing from earlier in the year on children's rights, my favorite working critic/thinker) and mary hk choi on her adult autism diagnosis, which i found very thought-provoking and moving and despite playing with this in an essay i think my various debilitating mental issues are not autism per se but just overlaps in symptom (i think the thing that has always made the idea of that particular diagnosis hard for me is that for all my limitations i believe i am very very good at reading people and yapping keeping the ball of a conversation up in the air), but i had several moments lately (discussing my intense sensitivity to ambient noise and how much i love wearing earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones with a coworker who also got a late-in-life autism diagnosis, catching myself in the middle of giving my mom and sister-in-law an incredibly long and detailed summary of how to play brotato, reading various moments in this article) that made me have fresh meta-thoughts about my placement on the spectrum.
"wasabi is the dab", "kettle brand salt and vinegar chips things i hate", "oranges, onion"
wasabi is the dab (sung to the tune of "stillness is the move" shoutout 2 my millenials) is the idea that wasabi is a much more temporally concentrated and ephemeral peak experience of spice vs. chilis that build and linger (but actually the metaphor is probably better as "wasabi is salvia"? since dabs do last despite coming on fast). a new entrant to the list of Things Reasonable People Love That I Hate, which is Kettle brand salt and vinegar chips, which may seem surprising as a person who loves a) kettle chips and b) salt and vinegar chips but they are ALWAYS disappointing in a way that at first you can say "maybe this just isn't a good bag, the seasoning is off" but i have let myself be fooled enough times by these devils and no more, i refuse, they defame the good name of salt and vinegar chips with their blunt crude seasoning! to go with our charcuterie one night, deborah beautifully supremed some oranges and then, based on a tamar adler suggestion (she has been on a tamar adler kick and i got her a paperback copy of an everlasting meal) / a noble desire to reduce food waste, she put leftover pickled onions from our tacos on them, which personally was a bridge too far for me even as someone who loves onions but i still appreciated the experimentation, especially because that was something she didn't feel confident enough in the kitchen for in the past (and am also thankful that the next night she did oranges and nectarine instead, with another trick she got from tamar adler that i do appreciate and want to pass on, which is salting the cut fruit for your fruit plate)
"smoking joints with my family", "rollercoaster", "baggage claim"
we saw my family and while that was sometimes and ultimately tiring in the way that travel (and especially family travel) always ends up being, i know my mom really appreciated the gesture of us joining her 60th birthday trip and i'm glad we could give her that and and grateful that i have a family i love and can enjoy spending time with. i'm thankful that my parents are healthy and energetic and thoughtful and kind and have good politics and good taste in food and i'm thankful that my brother, after some long deep troughs, is thriving and that he and i get along so much better as adults than we did as children and i'm thankful that i also really like his wife as a person (i learned this trip about various treasured video game overlaps we have, including dead island and fallout 3). i'm thankful that we introduced them to dim sum and had ramen and fresh churros and a number of other delicious meals. i'm thankful for frozen cocktails in peak summer heat and i'm thankful for how much the rest of my family also loves weed (must be genetic!) and for all the joints we smoked in the street on the way to somewhere else. i'm thankful this trip to have given myself an improbable late-in-life diagnosis that i somehow like rollercoasters now after having deeply hated and feared them all through my childhood (when all the other members of the family loved them). i'm thankful that standing in line for a big rickety wooden coaster with my dad and my brother and sister-in-law we all passed around a vape and took deep hits before climbing into a machine designed to deliver us to further heights of excitement and joy (it worked). i'm thankful that on our return flight home, our bags were on the carousel immediately upon arrival.
Previously on this day:
- 2016 (extra low-cut socks, doing errands, to suffer for pizza)
- 2017 ("i'm thankful for the opportunity to revisit the fragmentary notes i kept in my phone over the past week as a way of processing my experiences and adding them to my textual scrapbook", trip to california)
- 2017 (2) ("to have woken up in my own bed")
- 2018 ("how much fun d is having playing the new assassin's creed game, which is set in ancient egypt")
- 2019 ("i didn't start the workday yesterday by crying", "writing down funny ephemeral quotes people say during meetings as a way of trying to keep them as joyful as possible", "how the bachelorette reminds me of my experience teaching creative writing to undergraduates when i was in my MFA")
- 2022 (drowning practice by mike meginnis)