“She could peel an apple in one long, curly strip…”

Oh, hi again. What’s new? Nothing! I’ve found a new park in the area that is longer than it is wide. It’s basically a long trail between two neighborhoods, with water chuckling down one side and occasionally across the path, ultimately leading up to enormous Sound-of-Music hills and ?? I still haven’t made it to the end of the trail. It certainly doesn’t loop back in a circle, like many trails, and I’ve walked at least 1.5 miles and not reached the end. Because, as far as you walk out into this semi-wild park, you have to walk the same distance back. It’s been meditative and exploratory and I’m not mentioning the name of the park because I don’t want spoilers about the end of the trail. Stay tuned, I guess?

1. Why You Should Wear Inside Clothes During Coronavirus, Refinery29. “It’s understandable that one might associate inside clothes with a kind of ailment or defeatism, a sign that you’ve given up on ever going outside again. An introvert’s badge of honor. Conversely, wearing your street clothes at home feels like a headstart on life, like you’re always up for anything at a moment’s notice. If outside clothes are an opportunity to express your best self, an embodiment of your most optimistic plans, then inside clothes are seen as an admission of your worst inclinations and your dashed desires. There’s probably some truth in that for some, but it’s certainly not true about my inside clothes. I’m more inclined than ever to believe that inside clothes are our one shot at understanding the pleasure that comes from really dressing for yourself. No matter how comfortable you are with your own style, when you’re dressing for the outside world, you’re still adhering to codes and expectations. Not so with inside clothes. In my oven-mitt Korean sweatpants and souvenir T-shirts, I am fully dressed for my own eyes, actions, and plans.”
2. Cereal In My Mouth, Gawker. “It would be extremely easy to blame this chaotic tableau on the lone individual who was in the house during the hours when the crime occurred. It is very tempting to abandon critical thinking and simply assume that—if there is an empty house with only a dog in it, and you leave that house, and everything is clean and in its place, and then you return a few hours later and the kitchen floor is strewn with a hurricane of cereal, and all of the cereal boxes have been opened not by the easy-open flaps on top but instead by being torn and chewed from the side, and there are tooth marks on the boxes, and you’ve seen the dog on multiple occasions push his nose into the crack in the cabinet door and work that door open because he smells the marshmallowy Lucky Charms within, and the dog of the house is hiding in the corner of the living room upon your return, and in the hairy area of the dog’s snout is a good quantity of bluish-white powder consistent with smashed Lucky Charms marshmallows—then the dog of the house is the perpetrator of the crime. Yes, it is quite easy to make this assumption. But where is the proof?” Okay so this is an oldie, that I found in a Twitter round-up of “foundational internet writing,” pieces that define this time period. I’d never seen it before and it is a delight. I like when people write from the perspective of dogs in a way that sounds clever and authentic.
3. Yoga With Adriene is a YouTube sensation, Vox. Ah, I’ve been a fan of Yoga with Adriene since a friend recommended her 5 years ago. She made me feel like I could do yoga, and that even if I’m a little clumsy or not quite getting the poses, a “little goes a long way” to “finding what feels good” in your body and your breath. If you haven’t tried her yoga videos and you’re curious, she has 7 and 10 minute videos, as well as videos marked for beginners. I loved this: “Sequences are plotted out, but dialogue, apart from her go-to opener, is not. It’s breezy, conversational. She can get silly. She breaks out into show tunes and ’70s R&B, makes Zoolander references, and amps up a Texan twang as needed. She laughs at herself. Her blue heeler, Benji, is forever splayed beside her yoga mat, and she’s not afraid to pause the flow to marvel at his deep, contented sigh or real-deal downward dog. The Today show likened her videos to “doing yoga with a really nice neighbor,” and, true enough, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood provided the initial inspiration for the channel.” No wonder I like her vibe so much!
4. A Secret Love, Netflix (trailer). Just watched this last night with my husband and sister-in-law. It’s a story of two women in their 80s, who’ve been a couple since 1947, living together as “cousins” or roommates, and who have recently come out to their family. It turns into a story of aging and weighing independence with care, but as my sister said, “The most powerful thing about this story is knowing it’s true, that they’ve existed all this time.” Plus there’s so much good primary source material — photographs, silent footage of the women on the beach in the 50s, in cocktail dresses at parties, playing baseball (oh, did I not mention that one of the women was Terry Donahue, who played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, aka the “league of their own”?). Loved it. It’s so tender and real and Canadian.
5. Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown. Been working on this book for a few weeks, going slow to absorb it and understand it (and also because nonfiction digests slowly for me compared to ~novels~). She uses metaphors of change and transformation from nature to talk about the best kinds of community movements and individual efforts at changing the world for the better. Dandelions, who use the wind to spread their seeds and influence wide. Ants, who are parts of a whole. Fractals, patterns that repeat from a small scale to a large, like the leaves of a fern or the structure of a snowflake. It’s really good and the more I read the more I would recommend it to you. “Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves — how do I learn from this?”