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You know it’s bad out there. I know it’s bad out there. I’m incredibly proud and grateful and amazed by the bravery and good I have seen people do. I’m going to talk about some pop culture type shit now.
I re-listened to the entire Decemberists discography in order this week and it was deeply enjoyable. I’m probably a bigger fan of their later catalog and The Hazards of Love remains my favorite album, but there really aren’t any misses in the bunch.
I also listened to Yasmine Hamdan’s I remember I forget — loved it right away and four or five listens later I am only more enamored. (Shoutout to Tommy for the rec!) — and Gully Boys’ self-titled album also got a handful of listens this month and is a great time, though my biggest repeat by far is “Big Boobs (ft. Zora)” which is an absolute banger.
We’re still rewatching The West Wing and frankly the less said about it the better (though that won’t stop me from posting later babey!), but I am fascinated by how much North Dakota gets mentioned and I really wonder who on the staff has the connection/random attachment. Also who’s the hockey fan because I don’t think there’s any American show that’s ever referenced it so much.
We also finally watched episode six of Heated Rivalry which was fine! I think I was always going to be hard on the show because the book does so many things I love. I did think the family stuff turned out fine, but I will remain disappointed by the changes made to Shane’s mom’s character (and Scott Hunter’s backstory, but that’s not relevant here) and it made it all less impactful, though if I’d come in without having read the book I’m sure it would’ve been great.
Okay, I think that’s it! We’ve been throwing money at various local groups and food drives, so I am recommending mutual aid through Liberation Twin Cities today, if you can spare it. Thank you! I love you!
Recently we went back to the city in which we lived previous to this new one and while sitting in the office at my job eating lunch with my dog and my coworker, the delivery guy came in. I held the dog up closer to him so he would know he was contained and the guy reached out while looking to make sure it was okay and Bruno sniffed and licked his hand while my coworker signed for the package and we all said goodbye and have a nice day and what have you. And then the delivery guy came back, maybe a minute later, back through the chill between his truck and our office and said, “Does your dog like treats?” and I said, “Of course,” and I held him up again so that he could take a chunk of treat from this guy. It had obviously been torn to be more siza appropriate and Bruno took it with the polite gentleness we have tried to train into him and I said thank you so much and the delivery guy left again and I was so struck by how sweet it was that I teared up. To take that extra time out of your day — in a job where any sign of what corporate deems inefficiency is punished — to be kind to my tiny little dog. To come all the way back. To carry treats because you see dogs on your route. I believe that kindness is inherent to humanity in many ways, but to make it action takes effort. What a lovely thing to witness.
Other good stuff:
– Smelling woodsmoke/campfire outside my living room windows on a chilly night because Minnesotans love their firepits
– The sound of a distant plane passing overhead
– Driving to one of the less developed areas around the cities on a Friday night and seeing lines of planes in every direction either preparing to land or taking off to parts unknown
– The absolutely unreal show of fall color we got for our first couple weeks
Okay! Not a bad month, I must admit! I donated to a local teen health clinic and RAINN. As always, please let me know if you have a charity you’d like to share: ashrocketship [at] gmail.
Not only is the world as it is at the moment, but personally it has been a complicated, stressful couple of months and it’s about to get more stressful, so I’ve been trying my best to stop scrolling and enjoy things when I can to mixed success.
I’ve been trying to not spend all my time on my phone partially for obvious reasons and partially because I am literally fighting a repeptitive motion injury in my wrist from scrolling for [redacted reason to be revealed later maybe] and it hurts, so I have been doodling in one of these KingArt sketchbooks. I’m not an artist and I’m not using a medium more complex than Sharpies, but the paper has a pleasant enough texture and it fits in my bag with my Moleskin journal and Leuchtturm planner without screwing up the careful balance of garbage I carry with me at all times. And they were cheap!
The only book I’ve finished so far is Pokko and the Drum by Matthew Forsythe, which I do highly recommend! Such a fun story and such sweet illustrations. We’ve been watching Murderbot, which is not as good as the books (Adaptations rarely are! Life sucks!) but is really fun on its own.
My coworker got us some blind boxes to open together–it’s funny that this has become a big trend again when they were so big in the late 00s (We have a pretty big collection of Vinylmation from Disneyland from that era!) and I wonder if it’s like… a comfort in uncertainty kind of thing–and that’s been extremely fun and now I will always have a cute little Space Molly reminder of it!
What else… Oh we tried the Tate’s Bake Shop chocolate chip cookies and those are pretty bomb. I really like the Walmart brand bettergoods creamy oat milk (especially with Frosted Flakes) which is a nice find. We also recently housed a package of the Keebler original EL Fudge cookies which were bomb. (Lots of sweets in our house right now… Stress? What’s that?!) Crystal used Biotone starter fertilizer to plant all her annual containers this year and they look fantastic, so I highly recommend that too, which feels weird at the end of a bunch of food, but whatever.
Okay, that’s it! This month we made donations to CHIRLA, Jail Support LA, Clue Justice, and eSims for Gaza and I hope you’ll join us if you’re able! If you have any particular charity you’d like to recommend, shoot me an email: ashrocketship[at]gmail, please!
I have been deeply preoccupied this month so let’s do a rapidfire recap of stuff I have been into recently:
– Mother’s Original Circus Animal Cookies (Not the mythical creatures ones! Only the regular ones!)
– Roasted chicken and veg loosely following this recipe with added parsnips (Fast, cheap-ish, delicious!)
– Who Gives a Crap bamboo toilet paper (Cheap, feels less environmentally evil, nice branding/packaging)
– Little Caesar’s Pepperoni Crazy Puffs
– Lipton Fusions (Both flavors are bangers!)
– Phlur Strawberry Letter (Because I woke up one morning and was like, “Why the hell don’t I have any strawberry perfumes?” and this one is great.)
– Uni-ball Signo 0.5 (With the cap, not the click!)
– Ooly Color Layers markers
– The Accountant (Genuinely!)
– DoorDash Arnold and his rainbow finger
This month we made donations to help feed people in Gaza and Sudan and I hope you’ll join me if you’re able! If you have any particular charity you’d like to recommend, shoot me an email: ashrocketship[at]gmail, please!
Okay, that’s it! We had several days in the 80s-90s and then dropped back down to endless rain and below freezing temps at night, which I prefer because summer is the devil, but wow, what a mercurial-ass May. Is this what this part of the midwest is like without weather modification? Or is it the new extremes of climate change? Who knows! I hope you’re well wherever you are and getting to do something you enjoy in the face of it all.
The last month has… certainly been about thirty days and though I have been chugging along through it all, I have very little to say about anything, which sucks because I love saying stuff. I, in fact, live for saying stuff. And yet!
Books I’ve read lately: Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball (Fine to good), Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (Bad to embarrasingly bad), Natalie Sue’s I Hope This Finds You Well (Great). Yaffa As’ Blood Orange (Desperately wanted this to not be Good but it was Bad), Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (Almost Very Good, but disappointing instead), Lexi LaFleur Brown’s Shoot Your Shot (So Bad I DNFed at 25%).
I watched What’s Up, Doc? and reviewd it glowingly but truly, my god what a movie! Movies used to be fun! We used to believe in laughs! Shirtless men used to have chest hair and not look like they were dying of dehydration! We used to get to fall in love with Barbra Streisand!
This month’s donation went to the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance which is a North Dakota based charity working to close the news gap for Indigenous communities in the Great Plains.
Okay, spring is here! We’ve had snow and rain and sunshine and (already) too warm weather all in a couple weeks but the world is still turning and there are buds on the trees and though things may be no less fraught, I have felt a cool breeze on my face and the sun will rise again, etc etc. We must keep on truckin’.
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