🫖 Tsundoku is my semiregular recommendation column for paid subscribers. This week, I’m broadening beyond just reading recommendations, to suggest all sorts of stuff. Am I copying other people? Definitely! But, I think this will be more fun. Upgrade your subscription if you’re interested in the whole shebang. 🫖
🙏 Gratitude
Hear me out on this one lmao. I’ve had a few recent instances of immense, touching gratitude, and I must say it’s a pretty incomparable feeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know there’s a lot to be bitter about. But, even if you don’t believe that grateful is something you should be, you can at least benefit from some self-serving pleasures.
Sitting in the park, I watched lemon yellow leaves flutter to the ground in a beautiful death spectacle. It struck me that
every leaf on every tree only gets the chance to live once, and I felt blessed to witness their final moments of beauty before they disentegrate into the earth, serving a new function in the ecosystem.
Emerging from work at my new office in the financial district, I was beckoned to the Battery by the pink dusky sky. As soon as I caught a glimpse of Lady Liberty I burst into a goofy grin, and laughed at myself a little for my earnest jubilation. I was filled with thanks for everything in my life: the place I live, the friends and family I love, the new opportunities granted to me.
Gratitude might be one of the few feelings that is actually a choice. And it seems to work the same magic, whether applied to the small scale or large. Give it a try!
🎃 Over the Garden Wall, HBO Max
I poached this rec from a recent post on spookiness (as distinguished from outright scariness) on Dirt. It’s an animated miniseries that is delightfully whimsical and nostalgic. The swell of music at the beginning of each episode was enough to fill my heart with a beautiful melancholy feeling every time. I like when shows for kids are able to balance darkness and light. With 10 episodes at 10 minutes each, the whole thing adds up to the length of a short movie. Binge away, this Halloweekend!
📚 I Want You to Lick Me, The Unpublishable
In this piece, Jessica DeFino explores the beauty industry’s prevailing food analogies, from her upbringing in the early aughts to the present day. It’s a super compelling discussion of how the commodification of beauty is inextricable from consumption. And how all these eating metaphors do little more than chew us up and spit us out, weakened prey for the next marketing scheme.
💊 Modern Medicine
I had not taken antibiotics since childhood, and was filled with dread when a doctor named Muna prescribed them to me at the urgent care on 14th and 3rd. In a world of post-pandemic germaphobia, it was Mother Teresa-like, when she entered the room and confidently shook my hand. I could have been any type of sick. “A classic case of tonsillitis!” she explained upon examining my throat. I picked up a bottle of pills that were the Platonic ideal of pills, carried in a vessel that was the Platonic ideal of pill bottles. And guess what, guys. They totally worked! After a week long cold and four days of a stagnating sore throat, I saw immense improvement after just one day on medication that merely kills all the bacteria in my body. Pretty cool!
📚 The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
This is a book to change the way you think about the world. You may know Pollan for his diligent work at getting Gen Xers to try mushrooms (i.e. How to Change Your Mind) — he’s also behind this fun newsletter that I occasionally peruse called the Microdose. Botany explores the case studies of four plants in conjunction with four human desires. He suggests that plants are not mere passive objects of evolution and human machinations: they, too, exert their desires upon us. An absolute page-turner, which I rarely say about this kind of book. It also put the fear of God in me regarding pesticides, something I had previously chosen to not think much about. I’ll be out here scrubbing my apples and potatoes until the asbestos in my 1872 East Village apartment gives me cancer.
🫖 If this sounded like the ramblings of a person who’s barely left her bed in a week, you would not be wrong! Thanks for bearing with me! See you on Sunday for Insecure Tea #22, when I’ll be writing about none other than the day itself: Sunday. 🫖