I’m a fan of all! four! seasons! and can find beauty in each, but winter’s last gasp does occasionally test my spirits. This year has been especially challenging. (Not the season’s fault, really; just some personal facts.) Seeing late Feb not as a last gasp, but as a liminal state, really does help. There’s plenty of evidence: We now have daffodils and crocuses. We have a pink tree across the street, always the first flowering tree to bloom. Everything is positively quivering with life, ready to bud-burst, let loose. You just have to look closely, past the gray, into bare branches where life squirms unseen.
You can also…curl your body into a bud shape on the couch and thrum with quiet delight as you consume media offering upon media offering. I think this is what late February is for. I’ve realized I tend to go deep on film and music and a few juicy reads this time of year. It’s Oscars season, so there’s that. I finally coaxed my crew to watch Anatomy of a Fall this week, and ummmm, that was an intense choice for family movie night. Ahem! Not a bad choice, though. My husband and 15-year-old daughter are tough customers when it comes to movies, for different reasons, but both hung in for the 2.5 hour film, hooked. For my part I was amazed that, for all the buzz I’d heard, I had no idea this movie is about the unraveling marriage of a successful writer and a failed one. Whut. Like, there’s a scene where a lawyer tries to use the successful-writer wife’s novel plot against her in court! We had a good time discussing that.
I’ve been reading this Steely Dan book that I bought months ago, and listening to a lot of Steely Dan, which loyal FT-ers will know is nothing new. Alex Pappademas’ writing is SO good, and if you don’t already realize that “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” is a perfect jam, I can’t help you; but sometimes I’m like, What am I doing, reading a 200-page book about Steely Dan?
Brand new music releases to be stoked about and drive or walk around grooving to for the next six weeks include:
Mama Zu, Quilt Floor — I loved discovering this new music from the late, beloved Jessi Zazu via Celia on WNXP back in early Jan as I ferried Thalia to driver’s ed. A sweet sweet radio moment, hearing “Lip” and immediately Shazamming.
Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Past Is Still Alive — I’ve been a HFTRR fan for years, and and this reminds me of some of their earlier work. Loving it.
Brittany Howard, What Now — Already mentioned, but bears repeating!
One fun (and helpful) thing I did this week:
I attended a virtual tab-closing party!
It is just what it sounds like: A bunch of strangers gathered on the internet via Zoom, taking 30 minutes to go through the eleventy-six-thousand tabs open in their browsers and close out those puppies once and for all. We were, as one partygoer put it, “body-doubling to get rid of the digital detritus,” and our leader in this pursuit, Kat Vellos, did an incredible job; check out her book on cultivating better friendships and her Unbusy Camp, which sounds like the only kind of camp where I’d want to be a counselor. One thing I loved about her approach: She let introverts be introverts and did not force us to go into breakout rooms to chat up our experiences; instead, she welcomed us to type reflections into that chat; and better yet, asked us to wait to hit “enter” on our responses until the same moment, so we wouldn’t feel overwhelmed/distracted by others chiming in, ping ping ping!, as we were composing our own thoughts. Dude. Genius!
I am a person who has frightened others with my open-tab count. I figured this was my chance for redemption. And it was! I whittled my tabs down to an amount where I can see all the icons, not just a wall of tiny gray earths. Among other things, I did away with:
a NYT piece about the happiest man in the world
another about how dangerous American drivers are now
a Fast Company feature about the origins of Spotify, which I realized was paywalled—in fact, several stories I’d held onto since, seriously, 2022, were paywalled. (Also, I read the first couple of grafs of that Spotify piece and immediately felt disgusted by the depiction of the tech bro that started it. Cue internal ethical crisis. Shake it off and keep closing tabs.)
I won’t neglect to point out that this tab-closing party was a “FieldTrip,” offered by Creative Mornings, one of the many such free, online FieldTrips they offer each week, and truly one of the most wonderful things the internet has to offer these days, in my humble opinion. This F I E L D T R I P loves FieldTrips, it’s true. They can be an incredible resource for learning, or just for fun. A fellow partygoer wrote, “It is helpful to be reminded that a little bit of time can be useful/well used — not in a pressure sense to always be doing something, but in the sense that if I want to work for a short time, it will be worthwhile.” Applause!
One thing I wondered about this week:
Why are more and more internet orders showing up in these sturdy, resealable plastic bags, the kind with the zip-top closure that you slide back and forth to open and close? They scream REUSE ME!, and that’s great, I have been stuffing them in a drawer with all the other resealable bags that came in the mail, but…why? Why the move in this direction? They seem like more packaging, not less.
A bonus thing I wondered about this week:
Credit goes to Brittany Ackerman, who wondered it out loud first, but I’ve also wondered: Where are the mozzarella sticks? Why no more mozz sticks on menus? When might we be so lucky to see their return in the appetizer trendcycle? Because they are delicious!1 We have this new old-man bar in our neighborhood—sneer all you want at the idea of a faux/nouveaux dive bar; I like the place and find it a good addition to the neighb—and honestly, mozz sticks should be on the menu here. I may be the pushy middle-aged broad that I am and suggest it to them, then look at my phone and pretend to ignore while they softly roll their eyes. Customers, amiright?
Todd and I have a whole thing about mozz sticks, because once I told him a VERY long and involved story about how ALL the mozz sticks in the world come from this ONE company in Iowa; I gave it a name and a whole history, and at last he believed me…. Now neither of us can remember the name of the fictional mozz-stick company. Anyway, I do get massive cravings for them from time to time. I feel one coming on now.
Loved the Field Trip, Lov You!
What Now is definitely worth a repeat mention. Love the Tab Closing Party. I need one! lol Hope this week is real good to you, Susannah!