August is your new bicycle
dahlia and faded hydrangea season
One of the best thing I’ve done in the last couple of years is just read* more, and I’ve been reading fiction, and it’s been great. I recommend it to everyone. (Sincerest apologies for linking to something which includes an andr3w t@te embed, although the embed itself is a lolsob illustration of the issue.)
I recognize from that piece a lot of the reasons I used to not read much (any?) fiction for several years: It didn’t feel ~productive~; it felt like I could get more immediately-applicable-to-my-daily-life information from nonfiction; mayyybe something gross in my subconscious saw money spent on a Serious Nonfiction Book, that I ultimately didn’t enjoy, to be less frivolous than money spent on a novel that didn’t click; I do genuinely enjoy a lot of nonfiction. But: novels are great and I feel more like a human than a conscious mannequin after reading a truly excellent one, and libraries are one of the crowning achievements of humanity—the sign of a community rather than an HOA. Kamala’s platform could include “ban every app except for Libby” and I think it would be a landslide.
Speaking of, do you remember Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle? Well, Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle. 🥹
Here are some other things I found at least sort-of-recently:
I read this after having a very delicious sandwich at our local “shoppy shop”.
“the reality is that despite all the leaning in and girlbossing that women have done in recent decades, having a child still affects only one parent’s earning potential: the mother’s.” oh also “in most US states putting a baby in day care now costs more than in-state college tuition”**. The rage, the despair, the feeling that everything is going backwards.
"an internet culture that is on the whole much frattier than it was in 2014".
I’ve talked about this before but I’m glad(…?) to see someone else doing an actual breakdown of the depth of P3t3r Th!3l’s LOTR obsession — which somehow still saturates 2024’s economy and political landscape? If you’re already so, so rich, you can stop trying to make lembas happen; it’s not going to happen. If it isn’t obvious… this isn’t about coolness or making fun of nerdy interests: I say this as someone who could probably, to this day, quote along with the entirety of all of the LOTR films’ extended editions.
this is cool (hot?)
:sobbing_face_emoji:***
the kids are alright, part 235574 of infinity. (the ~brands~ quoted in the piece are, as ever, annoying.)
despite not diving deep enough/at all into how Anyone But You is the spiritual and stylistic heir to My Best Friend’s Wedding — including Dermot Mulroney passing the rakishly-charming-and-handsome-but-ultimately-safe male lead baton to Glen and at least one whole-cast group sing-a-long — A Unified Theory of Glen Powell actually made me watch (and enjoy!) a couple of his movies. I still don’t know if I would say movie star but I see the charm.
I’m at the retail bank branch, I’m at the suburb-wave coffeeshop, I’m at the combination retail-bank-branch/suburb-wave-coffeeshop/knockoff-WeWork-in-a-deadmall.
this is a thing with a some things that I’m thinking about lately
[as of… right now?] I’m making a list of true stories of 2010-20s tech exuberance that would be implausibly far-fetched if fiction, to serve as inspiration for my very unlikely novel/memoir/cautionary tale about being in 2010-20s tech. this one has everything, and this one has, somehow, everything plus Guantanamo.
* also to listen to audiobooks while gardening, cleaning, doing other Rosie-the-Tradwife-Riveter stuff like powerwashing the driveway or sanding and painting the exterior of the house that would be made vastly worse if I were listening to, like, podcasts. there was some recent chatter about listening to audiobooks not “counting” as reading, which is really sad (but feels like something I probably thought to myself between like 2013-2019); it echoes the message that your content consumption needs to concretely and immediately add up to something you can spend. that it’s less valuable to marinate in a narrative and slowly digest ideas and themes over hours or days than to attempt to forcibly extract some earnest insights from the 8-13 minutes between BetterHelp sponsorship shoutouts. my thinking has evolved from “everyone wants to have a podcast” to “everyone wants validation that their Oprah-interview-in-the-shower-thoughts are really profound” to “regardless of the actual content being consumed, getting it from a non-small-screen source is probably [on average] better for you than getting it from a small-screen source”. I don’t know how to fit “movies” into this screen size framework but I’m working on it.
** which, like, on an academic (sorry) level is actually reasonable to me? early childhood education and care are crucial for everyone, whereas college is not really essential for anyone (again, on that unrealistic, hypothetical, academic level).
*** I would also vote for a candidate who forced Apple to reintroduce clickwheel iPods, assuming the rest of their policies were acceptable.