#29 May Cause Excessive Sweating
double dutch, folk music, and anti-depressants
Happy Wednesday (It’s Friday),
Lately, I feel like I’m the first in line to jump into a game of double dutch. I love double dutch. It was a big thing at my school in fourth grade, and if you didn’t know how to jump, you wielded very little social currency on the black top. If you know about jumping rope, you know that when you’re in the center, it’s easy to keep jumping. It’s light. It’s fun. You’ve got your rhythm down, your feet know where to step without thinking much of anything at all. You’re in a groove with the turners and maybe you’ve even got the confidence to spin or add some flavor to your hops.
But from the outside? Once you’ve left the eye of that hurricane, it’s harder to read the ropes, more difficult to see the opening and will your feet to move toward it at the right pace and at the right time. There is the pressure of the kids behind you, screaming at you to just duck in. They’re all waiting.
But you’re out of practice and overwhelmed with worry that one of those hard plastic ropes is gonna smack your forearm or nail you in the head. It will hurt. Your turn will be skipped. Everyone will laugh. The failure will make it harder to try again. You remind yourself that the stakes are not that high, and that it feels good and fun in there. You want, more than anything, to be back in the middle where everyone else seems to find the rhythm easily.
This is how I feel about my career currently. I was double dutching all the way through my twenties, and then I ducked out of the game. I left teaching. I had no plan other than to address my anxiety and depression and maybe find something that made me happy again. In the almost three years that I’ve been doing that, I’ve seen so many of my friends climb into management positions, celebrate promotions and negotiate raises. There are always tradeoffs.
I’m back in graduate school for Library and Information Studies. It’s been a learning curve and a much more technical education than either of my first two degrees. But I am feeling a confidence swelling in me the more I learn, and I am remembering the joy that comes with being a beginner again. Coming off the bench is hard, but for the first time in a long time, I trust my skills enough to play.
Short and sweet intro this week. It’s been a while so I’ve got beefier sections this week. (Beefier?) Anyways… I’m too tired to proof-read so if you see any typos, no you didn’t! Scroll all the way to the bottom for a mental health update. As always, I love hearing what parts of these behemoths you enjoy.
XO,
M
Here is another new(ish) section highlighting Bay Area food culture and fun places to check out.
65th Annual White Elephant Sale
January 31, 2024 @ 9:00 am – February 24, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
Put on by the Oakland Museum of California’s Women’s Board, The White Elephant Sale is “the largest rummage sale in Northern California” and allows up to 2200 shoppers into the warehouse at a time. Described as “recycling on steroids” and “colossal, stupendous, and mind-boggling,” the White Elephant Sale is a thrifter’s dream come true. Money raised goes toward acquisitions, exhibitions, and educational programs for the museum. Win-win-win!
2025 Lunar New Year Parade
Saturday, February 22th, 2025 10 AM - 4 PM
“Our 2023 parade was Oakland Chinatown's first Lunar New Year Parade in more than 50 years, and we aim to continue that tradition. We're working to make 2025 an even more special event! Bring your enthusiasm, come dressed in your most festive outfits, and support the community!”
Black Joy Parade
Sunday, February 23
“Black Joy Parade is a hyper-positive non-profit based in Oakland, CA that celebrates the Black experience and community's contribution to history and culture with its signature parade and celebration, partnerships and events.” They’ve got events that have been going all month long! Check ‘em out.
🎧 The Con: Kaitlyn’s Baby (True Crime, Scam)
This podcast has everything…doulas, con-artists, law-suits, Canadian “sorries.” It’s wild.
🎧 Sea of Lies, Season 32 (True Crime, Scam)
I have been loving this podcast. It starts with a discovery on a family fishing boat in Devon, England and descends quickly into a web of financial and violent crimes that span several nations. Hosted by Sam Mullins, the reporting and interviewing are of superior quality. If you like British or Canadian police procedurals and ponzi schemes, this one is for you.
🎧 Fresh Air: The Secret History of the Rape Kit (US History, Women’s History)
Tonya Mosley interviews author and investigative reporter Pagan Kennedy about her new book The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story. I haven’t read the book, and some folks out there have noted that it may have worked better as a long form article, but nevertheless I found the story about Marty Goddard fascinating.
I’m never surprised when I learn that women were behind some of the most ubiquitous inventions and discoveries, and I always get a little (a lot) emotional when I realize credit nor compensation came their way.
🎶 Elizabeth Cotten: The Lefty Folk Singer
When I was eight years old, my father bought me a guitar for Christmas. It was a little, black and white electric Fender Stratocaster, and I instantly fell in love. My sister was learning how to play, and like a lot of younger siblings with a decent age gap, I wanted to do everything she did: sketching hands on the back of my homework, trying out for softball, parting my hair down the middle, and playing guitar. Unlike my sister, however, I am left handed, and when I picked up my new instrument to investigate how to play it, I held the neck in my right hand so my left was free to strum and pick the strings. My father put his head in his hands. “I’m sorry Mooch, I totally forgot.” The 6th string was on the bottom and the 1st string was at the top. It was a right-handed guitar, and I was attempting to play upside down.
Last night, I came across a video of Elizabeth Cotten. Shamefully, I had never heard of her, but now I cannot stop listening to her music and reading about her life. Born in or around 1893, Cotten was a left-handed folk musician from Chapel Hill, North Carolina who taught herself how to pick her brother’s right-handed banjo with her left hand. She started looking for work at age eleven to save enough money to buy her first guitar.
My father did not return the guitar he purchased to exchange it for a lefty-strat. He restrung the guitar so I could play it left handed. When I came across the video of Elizabeth Cotten last night, I thought she was doing the same… until I looked closer.
She was playing left handed, just like me, with her right hand wrapped around the neck of a right-handed guitar. However, she hadn’t restrung anything: she was playing the most beautiful riffs with her low E string on the bottom, the 1st string on the top, just as I had tried to do the first time I lay the guitar across my lap.
I’m left-handed, very much left-handed. I do everything left-handed. I play my guitar, my banjo left-handed. When I was trying how to learn to play, no one would help me because they said that I was playing upside down. I taught myself how to play. No one helped me and I give myself credit for everything you hear me play.
- Elizabeth Cotten
Sometimes we learn about things — people, histories, lessons — far later than we’d hoped to. I am thirty years old, and I still haven’t really ever learned how to play the guitar, and I have only now discovered Elizabeth Cotten’s music. Or, at least that’s what I’d thought. But music, like water, fills the container that it’s in. It changes color, consistency, aroma when things are added to it, but in its elemental form, whether tea or tears, all water is borrowed. Like notes. Like love.
When I got to “Shake Sugaree”, I of course recognized the words. Daughter of a Deadhead, “shake it, shake it, sugaree” is in the air as often as oxygen. Down the rabbit hole I went. Upon listening to “Shake Sugaree”, I also realized I had heard the song before. Covered by Rhiannon Giddens of The Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Shake Sugaree” had been on folk playlists of mine this year. Each time it played, I could feel tension leaving my body, offering the kind of fresh, languid sweetness familiar to anyone who’s sat on a porch after a summer storm.
Elizabeth Cotten recorded the original version with her great-granddaughter on vocals in 1965. Brenda Evans was only twelve years old at the time, but as Elizabeth Cotten describes on stage before playing it to a live audience, Brenda was one of the songwriters: “This is a song that my seven, eight grandchildren wrote this, this song. I mean great-grandchildren. Shake Sugaree. Each child got a verse.”
And isn’t the way it’s meant to be? That one of the most beloved songs in folk music, which inspired one of the most beloved songs among Grateful Dead fans, was written by children while their grandmother picked away at the guitar, is just the only way it could have gone, isn’t it? How many of us are first introduced to music, to rhythm, by sitting on the knee of our grandmother. Or, in my case, standing on the feet on my father so that I could dance before I walked. Or, like Elizabeth Cotten, sneaking into her brother’s room to play his banjo (and break his strings) whenever he was out of the house. Music, like water, fills the container that it’s in. It changes color, consistency, aroma depending on who adds what to it, but in its elemental form, whether tea or tears, all water is borrowed. Like notes. Like love.
Though many media outlets tend to center the white musicians who either discovered, sampled, or covered Cotten’s work, (the Seegar family, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan) a combination of racism and sexism prevented Cotten from earning credit, copyright or royalties for many of the songs she wrote. Apparently, Jerry Garcia, after learning that she wasn’t earning royalties, recorded a cover of “Oh, Babe, It Ain't No Lie,” which finally earned Elizabeth Cotten compensation.
Despite her being covered or sampled by some of the most famous musicians of the 20th century, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame only recognized and inducted Elizabeth Cotten posthumously. However, acceptance into these sorts of institutions are not the only or even the most important markers of a musician’s legitimacy nor an accurate measure of their songs’ impact on the people around them. From the accordion player busking in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, to my eighth grade students turning Ticonderogas into drumsticks, to the Second Line celebrating a loved one that has died, music does not have to be famous to meaningful. It only needs to be heard.
In a 2022 Rolling Stone article commemorating Elizabeth Cotten’s posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Rhiannon Giddens discussed Elizabeth Cotten’s impact on American music and the role women often play as the keepers of cultural memory: “women hold traditions in a certain way, because so often they are domestic, they are in the house, they’re not out there performing…And then the fact that it’s her great-granddaughter [Brenda Joyce Evans] singing [on the most well-known recording of “Shake Sugaree”], there’s the multi-generational aspect of it.”
“Shake Sugaree. Each child got a verse”
I think about Jon Batiste’s Oscar acceptance speech, and how special sharing music is. It can connect us to one other in a room and connect us more deeply to ourselves, but it can also reach back in time and connect us to those who have come before. Even if you can’t remember all the words. Even if you play it a little different. Even if the title and the writer’s names have been lost to time. Their memory survives in your fingers, in your hums, in your drumming on a bucket or tapping on a table. Music is a memory, I am learning, impervious to death.
Man, you know what's deep is that God gave us twelve notes. It's the same twelve notes Duke Ellington had, Bach had. It's the same twelve – Nina Simone. And all the nominees, I just want to first point out that every gift is special. Every contribution with music that comes from the divine into the instruments, into the film, into the minds and hearts and souls of every person who hears it. The stories that happen when you listen to it and watch it, and the stories you share, the moments you create, the memories you make. Man, it's just so incredibly special.
-Jon Batiste
Song has always been resistance and connection. Voices are unshackled by chains and unrestrained by bars, their songs able to pass freely where bodies cannot. A message of hope, or love, of gratitude or grief. Songs “of unknown origin” started because someone was moved to sing what they could not say or hum where they could not go. And those songs have been heard by more people than they could ever meet, traveled to more places than they could ever walk. There are so many songs that we don’t even know where we learned them. Passed down in the air and in the water of growing up. Their melodies as familiar and unconscious as our native tongue. They are proof of what it means to be from a place and belong to a people.
Most of what I’ve learned about Elizabeth Cotten comes from the research and curation efforts of Tatiana Hargreaves, a professional bluegrass fiddler, lecturer in the music department at UNC, and a graduate student at UNC’s School of Library and Information Science. (Shout out librarian students!) Home to the Southern Folklife Collection, UNC Libraries are responsible for the research, preservation and curation of music archives of the American South, which, thank god.
Elizabeth Cotten: Resource and Subject Guide
“So much of the writing about Elizabeth Cotten is marred by misogynoir – the combination of sexism and racism. Music writers often underplay Cotten’s musical and technical skill, instead describing her as gentle and humble. Many of these writings also focus on her childhood and then skip to her musical career, avoiding discussion of the first half of her life doing housework for white families. While her style and repertoire has influenced many other musicians, she remains under-appreciated and undervalued. There are not enough secondary sources about her life and music, but hopefully this LibGuide can be a starting guide for anyone interested in researching and writing about her.”
- Tatiana Hargreaves
The right song played at the right moment in a TV show will send me to outer space. (Anyone who watched the season 2 finale of Grey’s Anatomy on May 15, 2006 while Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol crescendoed as Alex scooped Izzy up from Denny’s side will understand this). Well, this week it happened again and reader, I was gutted like a trout on the first day of fishing season. Absolutely and brutally done for.
In the pilot episode of the incredibly tender and heart-felt “Shrinking,” Jimmy Laird (played by Jason Segel) has a strained relationship with his teenage daughter in the wake of his wife’s sudden and tragic death. Unable to grieve and parent at the same, Jimmy spends most of his days working and most of his nights partying while his teenage daughter raises herself, often finding solace in the more stable environment that the empty-nester couple next door provide.
Sean, one of Jimmy’s clients, is having difficulty knowing what to do with all of the anger and pain he feels after returning from fighting overseas and tells Jimmy that each time he remembers being happy, he becomes angry because it’s over. And no matter what, he will not get that time back. Here, Jimmy admits to him that he has been struggling similarly when his thoughts bring him to his wife: “Sometimes a really great memory of her will just sneak up on me. It’s usually like a dumb, little thing. You know? And when I come out of it I just…It’s just so awful here without her.”
As the episode nears its end, Sean convinces Jimmy to go to his daughter’s soccer game, one of the first attempts that he makes to show up for her in the way she wants him to since her mother’s death. In the final scene, Jimmy’s daughter, Alice, thanks him for coming to her game. Jimmy responds that he would have come earlier but, “you just look so much like her.” They then look at each other in this way that you just have to watch the scene to understand. The closing credits roll, and “Endangered Birds” plays, picking up at the chorus.
“I'm peeking through the bandages
To see if I can handle it
I hope I don't remember this
I hope I don't forget again”-Endangered Birds, by Christian Lee Hutson
PASS ME THE KLEENEX, for the dam has broken and there is nary a levee in sight.
Shows With New (Great) Seasons Out
Bad Sisters - (Dark Comedy) (AppleTV+): ★★★★★
I adore this show. Though I’m not sure anything can live up to season 1, Sharon Horgan’s writing is flawless and the performances of the five sisters are just as strong. As my creative writing teacher Robert likes to say, “suspense is asking a question and artfully delaying the answer,” and Sharon Horgan understands how dark comedy lives within a similar architecture. I love Fiona Shaw, and though I found her character grating beyond measure, I do think she was exactly right for the role (as she always is). I enjoyed the depth and development each sister got this season, and I could watch a show with the Garvey Girls whether they are planning a murder or a birthday party. There is so much heart in this show. I just cannot say enough good things about it.
The Devil’s Hour - (Thriller) (Prime Video): ★★★★☆
Okay this show is absolute batshit, so you cannot do any other tasks while watching it or you will be completely lost. There are time loops. Parallel universes. Slight alterations to the continuum etc. But it’s also a police procedural. And Peter Capaldi is as excellent as ever.
🎬 The Missing - (Police Procedural / Thriller) ★★★★★
I bought a STARZ 7 day free trial to watch this show and it was worth every (non)penny. At first I wondered how I had missed this show when it came out, and I remembered that I was a junior in college and was relegated to mostly Youtube videos, library books, and YikYak for entertainment. Season 1 is better than Season 2, but they are both great. Each star a family of a missing child and the gentle, Bee-keeping, French detective who comes out of retirement to help them solve the case.
Incredible performance by James Nesbitt, who until last week I thought was the same person as Titus Welliver. I blame “Sons of Anarchy” for this because Titus Welliver plays a man for Northern Ireland, and James Nesbitt is a man from Northern Ireland. It is painfully obvious now, hearing them speak (Titus is American and has a God awful NI accent), but I truly thought these were the same person for my entire life. Live and learn!
🎬 Shrinking - (Drama / Comedy) (Apple TV+): ★★★★★
I have only seen one episode of this so far, but it is so good. (The one I wrote about in my “Lyrics I Love” section). Five stars. Idk why but I feel like Ayo Edebri would be a perfect addition to this show. (Did she do something with Jason Segel that I’m blanking on? I’m too lazy to look that up). I just think her humor betwixt him and Harrison Ford would be the thing of legends, and also let’s have more than one funny, smart Black woman in a multiracial show! (Jessica Williams is incredible, and I wanna see her with Ayo).
🎬 Companion - (2025 - In Theaters) (Comedy/Horror): ★★★★☆
Honestly I loved this freaky movie. My advice: do not watch the trailer. I never watch any trailers lol, but I have read in multiple reviews that the trailer really spoils the twists in this dark-comedy, sci-fie, horror flick. I found myself really f**king disturbed in moments where other people were laughing and vice versa, which, I sort of wish there was a discussion group afterwards where we could really get INTO that because I wonder if there are some gEnDeR things happening. But this movie does comedy and horror very well without venturing into the land of parody. I’m sure others will disagree with me, but I think “Companion” achieved in 97 minutes what it took “Barbie” nearly 2 hours and a seemingly inexhaustible budget and press tour to accomplish: make the audience uncomfortable with the insidious brutality and absolute nonsense of patriarchy while ultimately entertaining them with satisfying twists and clever quips.
Benjamin Lee at The Guardian, whose 2 star review even more hilariously drives home the point of the film (which he entirely misses), writes that the film “belongs at the back of the long line of post-Get Out social thrillers, standing behind Fresh and Blink Twice, using an outlandish conceit to comment on something we’re all too aware of.” Forgive me, but…are you, Benjamin? Aware of this “something” you cannot even seem to name? Describing the script as saturated with “smug jokes about programming and simple, grasping gender commentary” I cannot help but think that Benjamin is the exact type of white guy in my Humanities courses who dismissed any centering of a woman’s experience or any contribution she offered as a bit too on-the-nose or a tired attempt at subversion, hiding behind his walls of pretentiousness and shamelessly blinded by his own arrogance.
Side Note: Just last week I had the misfortune of listening to two men in my creative writing class talk about how “sloppy” and “poorly written” they believed Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” to be, chalking up her use of the passive voice to her ignorance of strong action verbs. (!!!) Even though I am used to the everyday ways in which many men embarrassingly and unknowingly show their cards, sometimes it still shocks me? Rebecca Solnit’s 2008 essay “Men Explain Things To Me” will never not be relevant, I fear. I highly recommend a read, or re-read of this masterpiece. (I refuse to use the word “seminal” because though the word is defined by New Oxford American Dictionary as “strongly influencing later developments” it also means “relating to or denoting semen,” which just goes to show how important men think they are that they’ve even defined importance as synonymous with their progenitive contributions).
Where was I? Oh, right. Benjamin. He ends his review of with “For a film about advanced technology, it’s all awfully simple.”
I 👏 want 👏 to 👏 bang 👏 my 👏 head 👏 against 👏 my 👏 desk.
I do not think we need to look much further past how differently Benjamin reviewed “Companion” and “Don’t Move” (a film in which a man stalks, drugs, and abducts a woman in the woods, rendering her speechless for the remainder of its 85 minute duration) to understand what elevates a film beyond 2 stars for Benjamin. It’s not a strong, female lead, I’ll tell ya that much.
I’m not miffed at the 2 star rating — I do not think “Companion” is winning any Academy Awards for technicality or developing a cult following among various subcultures — but I think it is worth noting how some men are reviewing it in comparison to women film critics. Benjamin writes an ignorant, arrogant and frankly, mediocre review while critics Jeannette Catsoulis, Peyton Robinson, and Alison Willmore demonstrate their talent and training as writers with rich sentences pregnant with compelling analysis for The New York Times, Roger Ebert, and Vulture respectively. (See below).
Wrapped in a membrane of smoochy retro-pop and bubble gum colors "(the sharpe-eyed cinematographer is Eli Born), “Companion” takes potshots at the male desire for dominance, while profiting from a warped sense of fun and the logical rigor or Hancock’s script.
“Hancock’s world is filled with individuals who feel they are owed something, someone, and whatever they want despite their actions. “Companion” asks, “What if there was a commodity to give people carte blanche not to change for the better?” And what if the seeds of this technology are already planted in our culture?”
“Companion” tells more than it shows, not engaging too deeply with the consequences of mechanized misogyny and the implications of accommodating a culture of non-consent. Its existence insists upon its themes rather than picking apart the meat of the world it purports we may be headed toward.
…the movie’s correct in grokking that what’s intriguing about artificial intelligence so far aren’t the bigger philosophical questions about consciousness and personhood and ethics. No, what’s compelling is how we’re looking to this tech to address the absences in ourselves, and what it means to desire a partner who’s always available and interested without having any needs of their own.
Every single one of their sentences are better and smarter than every single one of Benjamin’s sentences, and I get to say this because this is my newsletter! Goodbye, Benjamin!
🎬 Nickel Boys - (Drama) ★★★★★
Adapted for screen from Colson Whitehead’s 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Nickel Boys”, Nickel Boys is a beautiful and gut wrenching story of two Black teenagers trying to survive an inhumanely brutal reform school for boys in the Panhandle of Jim Crow Florida. Based on over one hundred years of survivor, staff, and state representative testimony of the atrocities enacted by administrators at the now-shuttered Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Mariana, Florida, both the book and movie attempt to showcase what children endured and what lives survivors were able or unable to build for themselves in adulthood after leaving through the story of the fictional Elwood and Turner.
I don’t want to give too much away, but the director, RaMell Ross, takes some beautiful artistic risks in this piece while paying respect to the source material. After watching the film, I felt compelled to learn as much as I could about the school and boys who survived it. I listened to nearly every interview with Colson Whitehead from 2020 and RaMell Ross from 2024, read all of Ben Montgomery’s reporting in The Tampa Bay Times chronicling the investigations of unmarked graves on school grounds, grabbed a copy of “The Nickel Boys” and also read “We Carry Their Bones,” the account of forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle’s fight to identify and reunite the remains of students with their families. I probably thought about this movie, book, and history every day for a month.
It has me drawing parallels to “Small Things Like These,” which was also adapted to screen last year from Claire Keegan’s short but powerful historical fiction novel detailing the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries (of which, even today, there is very little written) and of course, the atrocities enacted against indigenous children in the residential schools by the Catholic Church and the federal governments of the United States and Canada for over a century. All of these “reformatories” separated vulnerable youth — already marginalized by oppressive religious and governmental institutions — from their families, relied on the stigma of the children’s reputations as “delinquents” to strip them of their credibility and dignity, and tortured them mercilessly, hiding evidence of their crimes beneath the earth to be discovered decades and centuries later.
Journalism, literature, and film that investigate these schools, indict the systems that allowed them to continue, and pose questions about what our collective responsibility is to memory and to healing are more important now than ever, as recent executive orders attempt to scare educators into withholding this history from their students and archivists into withholding it from the public.
Further Material on Residential Schools, Reformatories, and Laundries
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
“Sugarcane” (2024 Documentary) about Residential Schools in Canada
The Woman in the Wall (6 part BBC drama) about Magdalene Laundries in Ireland
stars Ruth Wilson (Luther) and Daryl McCormack (Bad Sisters)
Florida To Pay Millions To Victims of Notorious Reform School (NYTimes)
📚 No One Can Know by Kate Alice Marshall (Thriller) ★★★☆☆
Plot: Three estranged sisters are thrust back together at their family estate decades after their parents’ murder. DUN DUN DUN.
Thoughts: Honestly, fine! I was entertained. There were some satisfying twists. As is the case with nearly every book of this genre, characters are sometimes stuffed into the plot with hand wafting explanations that do not justify their motivations or align with previously established interiority but alas.
📚 What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall (Thriller) ★★★☆☆
Plot: I’ll be honest, I read this only a week ago, and even re-reading the summary failed to elicit clear memories. Did I read this in a fever dream? Anyways three friends come back together decades after testifying against a serial killer. It goes pretty off the rails tbh.
Thoughts: I was entertained! I never really know how I feel about 1st person POV, but this worked. Some words were overused, and it felt like she was trying to hit a word count at some points, but I liked the twists and turns. This is the 2nd book I’ve read by this author, and she loves a trio of women with secrets and a traumatic past. Sometimes there were too many characters and things that went no where but I listened to it over the course of 2 days cleaning house / running errands. It was totally fine!
📚 A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham (Thriller) ★★★☆☆
Plot: Chloe is a therapist who has had trust issues ever since her father was exposed as the serial killer responsible for a string of murders in Louisiana when she was a teenager. When another girl goes missing, Chloe is thrust into the spotlight as the press dredges up the story of her father once again. Can her proximity to her father’s previous crimes help her figure out this new one? Dun dun dun etc.
Thoughts: I felt so incredibly vindicated when I called the twists so early on. Woo hoo for me. I liked it.
📚 All The Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham (Thriller) ★★★☆☆
Plot: A woman struggles to sleep in the year since her child disappeared from his crib in the middle of the night. She participates in True Crime podcasts to keep his name alive and meets a particularly motivated podcaster who says he wants to help her tell her story. It gets fairly ridiculous at the end.
Thoughts: This was probably the best of this week’s round up, though I’m probably just more partial to Stacy Willingham’s writing. I don’t love the young ambitious woman gives everything up to become a wife and mother trope, but there was enough decent plot here to keep me engaged.
🧑🏻🍳 Chickpea Stew (NYTimes, Alison Roman) ★★★★☆
Zach made this stew when his godfather came to town, and I snuck back into his house the next day and stole his left overs. It’s that good. Eat it with pita bread!
🧑🏻🍳 Fennel Apple Walnut Salad (NYTimes, Melissa Clark) ★★★★★
Okay, I make this like once a week now. It’s so yummy and SO simple. Plus if you aren’t huge on lettuce, it’s a great salad that contains exactly zero lettuce. This is also the only recipe that has ever made me want to purchase a mandolin. It just slices everything so thin and uniform! Ugh!
East Oak Bouquets - Local Florist and Flower Designer (Oakland, CA)
I met Romi through Jenna (@theladywholunches), which, of course they are friends! They are both so cool and creative! Jenna sews and Romi gardens and we all dance at the same dance studio. Anyways, Romi is a local florist whose passion for planting and community is clear in the arrangements she makes. With lots of holiday pop-up sales and community classes, East Oak Bouquets is a labor of love. Check it out as flower season descends upon us!
Personal Mental Health Update: My Hands Are Sweaty, But I’m Doing Well!
I am writing to you from my living room, the sun illuminating the absolute absence of leaves on my neighbor’s maple tree. We have survived the winter, though more is yet to come, I am told. My fingernails, cut shorter than my actual finger tips, are painted an iridescent blue and my keyboard is more slippery than usual. It has been almost two months, but I am not yet used to just how damp my hands have become since starting my anti-depressants.
I’d never previously had clammy hands. In fact, growing up I used to make fun of my cousin for how wet she left papers and countertops in her wake. It seemed back then she had the power to dissolve anything with just a few minutes of touch. Her palms were an ocean sometimes wielded as a weapon on the back of an unsuspecting neck or leg. I would shudder. She would cackle. As we got older and people were getting injections in their lips and foreheads to bring evidence of aging to a halt, she was getting botox in her hands to shut off the sweat glands. Or something like that. I don’t know the science. All I know is that when our thirty-year old hands reach out for one another now, mine are the ones that are wet.
And reader, if I were to be honest, sweat is now a daily occurrence on the soles of my feet as well. Socks, it seems, are less slippery than my skin. But guess what isn’t as slippery? My mental health. F**k yeah!
I become self conscious with this newsletter whenever I mention my struggles with mental illness because I know how self-absorbed depression can make me, but then I remind myself that I began this newsletter as a way to cope with that exact thing, so no sense in pretending its not a major thread that ties all these posts together.
I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, sometimes referred to as clinical or unipolar depression but for the sake of simplicity I will just call it “depression”, four years ago. (My hope, dear reader, is that this is the least interesting thing about me). Though I had been in therapy with various psychologists for nearly a decade before this, I hadn’t ever allowed myself to see a psychiatrist for a formal diagnosis for anything other than my issues with attention. I was, for the first three years with my current therapist, militantly against the idea of medicating the moods that were veering far out of my control.
Depression is a mood disorder, and I have learned that if I treat all the symptoms, without helping to stabilize the mood, it feels like treading water in the ocean. After a while, regardless of hydrodynamics of my swim suit or the clarity of my goggles, my legs will get tired, and I will struggle to keep my head above water.
My last go ‘round on anti-depressants I didn’t change anything about my life or my habits; I just took them, crossed my fingers, I was relieved to find I felt better. This means that when I eventually went off of them, I was fine for a bit with my snorkel and my flippers, but then…the water got harder to tread and the waves more challenging to weather.
This time, I am pleased to report that instead of three years, it only took me three months to go back to my psychiatrist. By this time I had become the Sherlock Holmes of my physical and mental health, ruling out food sensitivities and outside stressors, and I had narrowed down the start of my depressive episode to about 3 months after I changed my oral contraceptive and thought there might be a link.
I feel loads better since stopping that brand of birth control (if you’re prone to depression — check with your doctor and do you research before starting or switching an oral contraceptive!) and taking the new anti-depressant. I am sleeping better (lighter, and more restful), waking up earlier, working out consistently, getting interviews for job applications, staying on top of my school work, and generally able to executively function. The most unbelievable part is that my dishes and laundry get done without heroic effort. I remember to put gas in my car before I’m on empty, I log my transactions in a spreadsheet and filter my email-inbox according to genre and priority. I took social media off my phone and only let myself engage with news media the way people did before the internet: for 1 intentional hour set aside in the evening. I have gotten back into reading, buying myself a weekly bouquet, watching good television, and dancing 4-6 times a week. Basically, instead of taking the medication and hoping I feel better, I am capitalizing on the increased energy it has afforded me to set up healthy routines and habits for myself.
Not all of these habits were established at the same time, and I have not been doing them long enough to even rely on them yet, but I’ve folded about one new one in a week, and it’s been going pretty well so far. The theory is that if I build these habit and routines (which I spent years figuring out what these actually were but depression kept me from having the energy and motivation to actually set them up and follow through with them) then, if I go off of the medication in the future, I’ve got a solid foundation that keeps me afloat.
What I’ve noticed is that it isn’t the medication that makes me feel better, is the medication that allows me to do the things that are healthy for me (cook meals for myself, pay my bills on time, socialize with my friends, create art, stay on top of my hygiene, study, work out) and these things are what make me feel good. They replenish my energy, connect me to the world, and increase my confidence and resilience.
Anywho! Obviously I’m not a doctor, so please do not take any advice from me about anything related to medication. I talk about my own mental health experiences to mitigate my own shame around living with mental illness. Reading about other women who are constantly finding ways to manage their chronic physical and mental illness always makes me feel less alone, so maybe it makes you feel that way too. Or maybe it’s insufferably navel gazing and so hideously boring that you stopped reading thirteen minutes ago! If you made it this far, I love you, as Jon Batiste always says “even if I don’t know you!”
Shout outs to:
Oh man, Oh man. Where do I begin?
My mom for doing an old-fashioned shopping trip with me this week. It was fun to pretend I lived in the suburbs for a second.
Drew for sharing a home remedy with me when I texted her “any tips for psoriasis on my eye lid?” ALL HOT GIRLS HAVE RASHES.
Deb, my friend from ceramics, who made me the most gorgeous pour over coffee contraption and was so persistent about hanging out despite my horrifically delayed response time.
Sam, the librarian at my old school who took time to answer my questions over chips and salsa and connected me with other teacher librarians in the Bay.
Zach, for, oh God so many things. Today, for driving five hours north with me to visit my 81 year old grandfather just to cook him food and watch the Daytona 500.
Elizabeth Cotten for picking up that banjo.
Ceilie for MOVING TO WASHINGTON WITH THE LOVE OF HER LIFE!
Joy for texting me out of the blue and randomly having a BABY and being a PROFESSOR?! How cool to see how our lives wander and change.
Kara for somehow going on runs after being a lawyer all day when it’s like 4 degrees outside. That’s wild.
Lauren & Carol for your solar returns! Happy Birthday!
Pareesa for cleaning out her closet. Me and Courtney are so lucky.
Courtney for catching me up to speed on the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni drama
Meg for being the best snail mailer I’ve ever known
Tessa for our 34 minute talk on the Bay Bridge a couple weeks ago <3
Devon for a GORGEOUS deconstructed (?) upside down (?) chicken pot pie (?) It was my first chicken pot pie, and I could not be more grateful that it came from your hands.
Lana for getting a new hair cut and falling back in love with a new book series. It’s so fun to see the world through the lines you love.
My brother and his fiancé for moving into a new place!
Toni for flying to Miami and being such a #girlboss but like, in a really cool, alt way.
Colleen for emerging from a sinus infection like Rocky Balboa
Hilary for her students amazing MAP scores — her students achieved like…6 years of growth?? Everything is exhausting and yet…you keep doing the world’s most impossible job like very, very well.
Lea for getting the part of the MARCH HARE in her theater program. I cannot wait to see you perform!
My dad for getting over the flu after traveling 482390 times and somehow not contracting pneumonia. We love a healthy dad!
My grandpa for losing and then swallowing his own tooth at breakfast and simply…shrugging. You are a legend.
Gemma for getting through some h a r d weeks at work. Nurses are such heroes.
Brigid for a new hair cut and finished taxes #slay
Simone for helping me battle my dentist about shady billing practices!
Teddy for crocheting the coolest teddy bear blanket
Masha for amazing new arm art!
Sina for sharing hilarious stories about the children you teach.
Erin for being an absolute smoke show in that blue jump suit
Lyric for getting in those mental health walks
Alicia for educating me on all things #cycletracking
Olivia for breaking a leg on opening weekend!
Emily for getting through roughly 7.5 million snow days with a middle schooler
Leo for picking the coolest backsplash on SALE
Laura for being on her FITNESS game with a toddler somehow. holy crap.
Holly for navigating WILD federal employee challenges with a new administration.
Cassidy for starting the wedding dress shop!
Quinn for pursuing certification for Lactation Consulting! woo hoo!
My aunt for sharing the oranges from her tree with me :)
Ending Note:
Turn to your poets. Lean on one another. Be safe and love hard. <3
XO,
M
Oh how I've missed these!