Here is an apple pie our friend Elizabeth made. I weep.
Hi friends,
Previously, paid subscribers got a custom designed piece, a sort of dark ombre themed visual letter to the city. I used my nice Japanese brush pen to write in Chinese and trace it into Illustrator and stitched it with some pics. Subscribe today ($5/mo or $50/yr) for the full experience.
Every year there comes a point where all the burdens of life seem to build in a slow motion cataclysmic collision, in timing and scale and stakes. I’ve learned one of the best ways to manage this through embarking on a temporary spiritual fast—simplifying what I put into my body from the outside so it can focus on recalibrating on the inside. It is an acknowledgement of burden, in defiance of burnout.
Alas I am weak and have returned right back to my beloved trifecta—more caffeine, more alcohol, more sugar—right on the heels of two weeks of abstaining. I have gone too long without writing so I’m just showing up here today, in hopes that this will be the day, or at least the first, of release. My words are clawing their way out of the prison rungs of my anxious self-inflated mind, but why can’t I just unlock and open the gate?
Anyhow instead of stringing together a coherent piece of words, today we’re playing the game where the subject of the next paragraph has to start from the preceding paragraph. A warmup for the mind.
The other day one of my roommates mused that I might be a secret psychopath, given that I watch precisely (one) episode of The Office at a time, and I don’t laugh when I watch. (Jokes on him! I do laugh, just in my head. Which maybe proves his point more so.)
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Why is there a “medically-proven” article that comes out in a reputable news publication every quarter about how laughter is the best medicine?
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I finally got new medicine for my skin condition, a clear steroid cream that my new insurance got me for a blessed one dollar$. It only took me one whole year into independent contracting to realize I have been overpaying for health insurance (but it also took a pandemic to spur me to get health insurance lol) so I finally applied for a government subsidized plan and wow I can’t imagine navigating that process if English wasn’t my first language or if my parent subsidized college education didn’t instill in me a sick love of keeping meticulous financial records or if my parent subsidized trauma of being a minority in America didn’t burn into me a holy fear of the system.
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Is the world of private health insurance not a hoax? Is Oscar not duping young people who worship the gods of predictable UX design and presumptively renounce the devil of government benefits? When in reality their god might be the devil in disguise?
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Wow was not expecting to set myself up for writing a paragraph on tech exploitation, so I will instead just leave you with a reminder on how we are all regressing to the blah bland mean, as Vicki Boykis relays in her newsletter Normcore Tech:
“This means that if you’re listening to EDM, Spotify will recommend you...more EDM. And EDM sounds like EDM sounds like EDM, which begets more EDM.”
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My friends Dami and Jamila make good playlists, using their very own organically generative human minds!
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Another person who makes good music, you should read NYT Magazine’s Bad Bunny profile (by Carina del Valle Schorske) in all its glorious tension of a jittery Puerto Rican reggaetonero watching you read words you don’t understand.
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I am not a legalistic person so this next paragraph will deviate on an unrelated note but I think that’s more fun anyways. Like when mid-autumn festival happened during my fast so obviously I broke it to eat 月饼 mooncakes, or when I walked past my favorite Texas breakfast tacos stand and conveniently forgot about my dietary restrictions. Okay, point proven, now to another point from Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World newsletter:
“Death is a fact but it’s easy to forget and there are lots things like that right where you know them to be true but you don’t know them know them like someone could ask you what the capital of Uruguay is and you’d go shit shit hold on then they’d say Montevideo and you’d go I knew that. And you did know it too you just couldn’t access it. Death is the capital of Uruguay is the point.”
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Uruguay reminds me of a subtle racist encounter I had in the city, at fancy restaurant in a nice neighborhood run by one of my favorite chefs in the city who is an immigrant from Uruguay. I popped by the bar one day for wine and cheese that was more expensive than I realistically should’ve treated myself to but I just wanted to feel taken care of and I had hoped that my friend Desiree was going to be working that night. She wasn’t there and instead I got a frat bro masquerading as a bartender who could not have paid less attention to me, sitting the the middle of the bar, vis-a-vis every other person he traversed the length of the bar to serve. While this is a common theme in my life—white males who don’t know how to interact with me, so they just don’t, or they shield themselves in aloofness—but I wasn’t here to pay a premium for neglect and borderline snark. It was dark by the time I biked home but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and then the night only got better when I narrowly avoided being run over by a motorcycle.
I told the staff the next time I went and they said they would address him about it, and I can only hope that they did.
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And I am again reminded of the insidious nature of aspirational consumption, a disease I am not immune to and so find myself seeking self-inflation from imperfect hospitality. And then I read these words from Eugene Peterson:
“But if we take the energies that make for aspiration and remove God from the picture, replacing him with our own crude self portrait, we end up with ugly arrogance.”
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But at least there is one experience of hospitality that has never failed me, that I would gladly let define me as below:
Now someone please make a McD’s apple pie horoscope for me because that is my spirit animal. RIP the halcyon era of 2 for $1 pies, that my hyper-metabolizing elementary school self inhaled alongside 6 pieces of chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce and a chocolate milkshake.
I hope you and yours are well, what mcdonald’s meal are you?,
Vicky