Some Books, Some Sports, and a Cocktail in a Cute Little Can

Plus some uncomfortable honesty about mental health (yay)

Hi, friends. I made a deal with myself back in 2022 that I would write this newsletter every other week for as long as it was fun. As you may have guessed from the tone of my last few newsletters, any kind of writing has been difficult at best for the last few months. Blame it on not enough sleep, too-hot weather, house renovations, moving to a temporary apartment across town for said renovations, and ill health, mostly mental but also some physical.

So I haven’t been here. It wasn’t an intentional break, really, more the hollowness of a pebble rattling to the bottom of a dry well every time I opened a blank page. Then feeling unworthy and beating myself up for my lack of productivity like a good little Puritan descendant, because brutal self-criticism is exactly the thing to help myself blitz thousands of words. Yup, yup, yup, absolutely.

So yeah, I’ve been in a not-great place for a while.

But finally, I woke up this very hot and bright morning feeling like there was something I wanted to say, that there are nice things in the world, too. So, in that spirit, here’s some stuff that has been making me happy lately.

Books! Never doubt that I’m still reading, even if I’m not writing reviews. I especially need good stories when life is harder going than usual. Right now I’m immersed in the scuzzy joy of 1990s queer San Francisco with Michelle Tea’s Valencia, and I loved going to space with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere and back in time to postwar Sussex with Helen Simonson’s The Hazelbourne Ladies’ Motorcycle and Flying Club (please don’t be put off by the cutesy title, this is elegantly angry feminist historical fiction that tackles money, class, and xenophobia.) I also really enjoyed These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean, Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria, The Trouble with Anna by Rachel Griffiths, and Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa by Cato Pedder.

Watching sports. Now that we’re staying in a place that has a TV in every room except the bathroom, I’m watching Wimbledon in the afternoons and the Women’s Euros in the evenings. I grew up in a house where the Giants/Warriors/49ers/Sharks (that’s baseball/basketball/American football/hockey for non-Californians) were on our TV almost every day, and I’m enjoying the comfort of half-listening to the soothing babble of sports commentary while watching human beings achieve extraordinary feats of athleticism. Football-watching friends, weren’t the Lionesses MAGNIFICENT last night?

Treating Instagram like admin. Fellow social media denizens know that the user experience of Insta has always been very carrot and stick, moments of joy and hilarity and occasional intellectual stimulation mixed with shouty self-promotion and shoddy ads, the whole thing leaving me feeling like I’ve put my brain in a bowl of warm water. But these days, for me at least, the carrot’s a desiccated shred like you’d find in a shit bag of salad, and the stick is a two-by-four with nails embedded pointy end up. Recently I’ve been logging in for five minutes at the end of the day to check DMs and tags, then deleting the app for the next twenty-four hours. I’m sure the Instagram algorithm will take my carrot shred away entirely for this truly despicable behavior, and I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it up (it’s designed to be addictive, after all, and I’ve tried to stay away before multiple times), but for now, I have the fragile resolve of being newly clean(ish).

Whitebox canned cocktails. My beloved home bar is packed away in storage, so my mixing repertoire has shrunk a lot by necessity. These cute little cans are a nice way to add variety without buying more bottles to crowd my tiny kitchen - I am particularly fond of the Pocket Negroni and the Vieux Carre. (The latter is especially cost effective if you don’t have a home bar of your own - buying bottles of rye AND cognac AND Benedictine just for one drink is not cheap.)

This song, a dryly funny and very catchy tune about the much dreaded/desired “U up?” text. Worth translating the lyrics for this one.