10 Things: Boundaries, Passions, Baking
All my recommendations for what to read, listen to, watch, think about, consider, dream on, and more this early autumn week.
Hello!
There are so many good things to recommend this week, it was hard to choose just ten! As usual, the first three are free, and paid subscribers get an additional seven, including my favorite recipe maybe of all time (!?!?), the best album of the fall IMO, and an important video about football. Also breaking news courtesy of Kat.
READ: Real Self Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness by Pooja Lakshmin, MD
This is going to be a Holy Book Shelf book, plain and simple. It’s not just because Lakshmin spends, like, 15 pages talking about (literally) how you are doing a good enough job and about practicing starting from a place of “good enough”; there are also thick, deep, important, systemic, powerful practices on every page of this, made accessible by Lakshmin’s compassionate and thoughtful writing voice. Lakshmin is careful to center Black and brown activists and writers who have come before her, as well as the science that that backs up the importance of setting boundaries and building value systems. It has a lot of exercises and practices, too, so if you’re looking for something that you can truly work through, this might be just the thing for you.
I started with this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” hosted by the always magnetic Tressie Macmillan Cottom, so if you aren’t sure about the book, this would be a great place to begin:
OBTAIN: A little visual clock timer
I used to have one of these in my classroom when I taught first grade, and it was my most valued possession. I don’t know what happened to it, but IT IS GONE. I think about it all the time.
Well, I grew up and bought one for the grown up adult self I have become, and I wonder, from the bottom of my heart, how I lived this long without. Sure, sure: things can’t make our lives better. But on the other hand: can’t they!? I love that I can perch this on my window sill and have a visual cue for how much longer I’d like to spend cleaning the upstairs. It’s perfect for when I’m writing and I want to turn my phone off and totally tune into the page. I use it multiple times per day. I imagine that when T is old enough to need time limits, this will help her understand them better, too. But for now: I am old enough to understand time limits. I’m just incapable of comprehending what they look like. Or, I was: BEFORE I GOT THIS PINK CLOCK.
It was an accident that I found Jo Firestone’s newsletter. Two weeks ago, I was drooling over her self-published murder mystery, Murder on Sex Island (which, BY THE WAY, if you’re not listening to — WHAT ARE YOU DOING? This is the best thing to exist on the internet since the internet was invented. Remember when we went in chatrooms and pretended that we were handing each other a rose by typing this? @}}>----- ? WELL, THIS MURDER MYSTERY IS BETTER THAN THAT.)
Anyway, when I typed her name into Substack, I learned she had a newsletter. And when I clicked on her Substack, I learned that it was great because of course it is. Her Substack is about her passions, which she puts in bold. (Limonata is one of them; same.) This week, Joe Pera took over her newsletter, and he did a good job. It’s a very good newsletter.
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