Category: links

Thursday Links To Love: April 30, 2020

This is the house I grew up in.

This house is where I spent the first few years of my childhood in western Maryland – one room, three floors (if you count the dirt basement), and no hot water. It’s strange to miss a time of life that you don’t remember except through pictures, but there it is. I miss it.

This week’s links are below. As always, hold on to the ones you love, and let the rest go.

Goddamn, Glennon Doyle. Untamed is about as fierce a book as I could ever hope to encounter in pandemic-induced fits of insecurity. On what she was taught as a child versus what she has come to know as an adult: “Good girls aren’t hungry, furious or wild…I understand myself differently now. I was just a caged girl made for wide-open skies. I wasn’t crazy. I was a goddamn cheetah.” And the heart-wrenching question that comes in just the first chapter: “Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?”

Khristian seemed a little judge-y about this, but I loved The New York Times’s guide to meditating outdoors. It is ironic that I am looking at it in bed on my computer screen, and I got a little annoyed that the actually natural rain sounds outside drowned out the NYT’s recorded nature sounds on the video. Sigh.

Speaking of New York, I was reading The New Yorker interview with Tori Amos and clicked on the link for her performance on David Letterman a week after 9/11. Even 19 years later, I can conjure up the horror and grief of that sunny day, and this performance of Tom Waits’s song “Time” is a heartwrenching document of that moment in U.S. history. Not ashamed to admit that I was teary by the end, feeling the fullness of sorrow and gratitude mingling in the memory of my own personal losses, wrapped up with the loss of so many people. It’s in moments like this that I think how far away from each other we have become, and I wonder if we are that far away in reality.

Finally, for all those of you who fancy yourselves writers and want to give poetry a go (or if you’re just interested in the weird ways that words can be strung together), here’s a list of 100 poetic forms and links to what they are. Clogyrnach, anyone?

You’re all goddamn cheetahs; go out and meditate in nature this weekend.

Be well. Wash your hands. Love each other.

Thursday Links To Love: April 23, 2020

Sunset behind clouds as viewed out a rowhouse window
Less pollution = less dramatic sunsets? Here for it. Happy Earth Day.

This week’s Links to Love, friends. I hope you are ignoring the idiot-in-chief’s stupid plans to re-open the country without any plans for widespread testing and no real hope of a vaccination. Please stay safe – stay home.

That said, as always, take what you need from this week’s links and ignore the rest.

“The best way to treat the common cold is with contempt“: only one thing actually works to treat the common cold, and it’s probably not what you think.

I am thinking that these sculptures look how time feels right now.

“Quarantine cooking”: since we are not actually under quarantine, this is a misnomer, but ti’s not going to stop me from making this roasted beet dip with Aleppo pepper crackers. Beets are especially delicious this time of year, and I am here for it.

And I may have missed making these buffalo and bleu deviled eggs for Easter, but since I don’t celebrate Easter it doesn’t really matter. Anything deviled surrounding an organized religion makes me laugh, and although I am not generally a fan of deviled eggs, these are delicious. 10/10 would recommend.

Everybody keeps talking about how much our dogs are going to miss us, but what about cats? I think they are eyeing us with contempt, coming so late as we are to operating on cat time.

Finally, maybe we can take this time to experience some post-traumatic growth. The linked article from The New York Times posits that it’s not the Pollyannas who make it through adversity with no lingering effects – it’s those who take a tragically optimistic outlook. The recommendation by an overwhelming majority of researchers who study this topic of resilience suggests that looking for meaning – not happiness, and especially not happiness via consumer goods –  is the way through this pandemic.

How’s your outlook this week?

Thursday Links To Love: April 16, 2020

William the Orange keeps watch at our hotel in Amsterdam (2018). One can dream.

Well, here we are, another Thursday. I am starting to use these Thursday posts as markers of time passing, like slashes on a tree to mark time when stranded in the jungle (we just binged season 3 of Alone on Hulu – 10/10 recommend).

This particular Thursday post is accompanied by a fat cat from Amsterdam. Two years ago right around this time, I fell in love with an orange cat and a city, and I despair of seeing either ever again.

Ah, well. Here’s some stuff for you. Read it all, click selectively, or ignore it. Up to you.

Well, of course it’s grief we are feeling, but my take on it was not featured in The New York Times like this person. Sigh.

And speaking of New York, the quintessential New Yorker says you can pry her city from her cold, dead hands (and her cigarettes, too, COVID be damned).

Among the best things I have read is this quote from a lovely, long recommendation list of things to read, watch, and do during quarantine:“…the concept of “guilty pleasure” is banned, canceled, absolutely not relevant. Nothing is guilty — any pleasure to be found in this time is to be seized and celebrated!” I love that and wholeheartedly agree.

Missing your office noises? Not me, but if you are feeling lonely without the clicking of your officemate’s laptop keys, try this website of virtual office noises.

Finally, if you have not already seen this, go ahead and click to see John Krasinski’s new Project Some Good News (episode 1 and episode 2). I have already known he was a good guy, but this new project is beautiful, surprisingly not saccharine, and pretty much exactly what we need right now: some good fucking news. Spoiler alert: if you are a fan of Hamilton, start with episode 2.

Be well, love each other, wash your hands.

Thursday Links To Love: April 9, 2020

Sigh. Bill Withers. Rest in peace.

At this point, stay-at-home orders seem an endless spooling of time towards the horizon, except there are few of our standard markers of measurement (when did I last shower? Have I brushed my teeth today? Who knows?).

Anyway, here are some Thursday links for you. Click on what’s interesting and ignore the rest.

Whether or not you have children tugging on your sleeves, locked in the house with you, you are aware of the compelling power of boredom. But boredom can be just a pit stop. In this link, Agatha Christie notes, “…there’s nothing like boredom to make you write.” I am still waiting to be bored enough, I suppose.

Bored or not, go watch Portrait of a Lady On Fire. Best viewed in HD, this lush love story is nothing like you’d expect (and not nearly enough nudity, but ah well. We can’t always get what we want.).

Sigh. Potential COVID vaccine in the works. I don’t even like putting this in the links, but if it helps you feel better, go ahead and read all about the vaccine, how long it might take, and what’s next.

But…there is some good news. The SXSW Film Festival may be canceled, but Amazon is putting films from the SXSW festival online, for free, for what would have been the ten days of the festival. Bonus: filmmakers who screen their films will still get their screening fees. As of the time I typed this post, there was not yet a set date, so mark the site and check back.

Thursday Links To Love

From yesterday’s chilly walk along Stony Run. Hope in the weeds and the art of graffiti.

Dispatch: still not quite certain what day it is. Each seems to flow like water into the next. Here are some links to keep you afloat.

First, something to watch that is not the human depravity that is Tiger King (AVOID). The Barkley Marathons is available through Amazon Prime and is an example of the kind of value you can get for $1.60 in Tennessee. Essentially, a race with fewer than a dozen winners in its 25-year history. 11/10 would recommend.

Back-up viewing if you don’t have Amazon Prime but have someone’s Hulu password: the documentary on Margaret Atwood. She is a badass from way back. Turns out, a word after a word after a word is power.

Next, something that is incredible to look at, and even better to participate in: the Getty Museum’s call for people to recreate famous artworks from things readily available at home. Locally, the American Visionary Art Museum is leading the charge.

For those “working” at home and looking to bone up on some skillz that are business-related, Moz wants to give you some free classes for SEO, backlinks, and other interwebs-optimizing topics.

It’s challenging to find links these days, it seems, that aren’t filthy with news of COVID-19, and we don’t need more of that, but here’s one for my freelance/self-employed/contractor friends anyway: yes, you are now eligible for unemployment. Here’s a direct link to Maryland’s online unemployment form, and another link to find instructions for your state.

In books, KWeeks and I are nearly done reading Michael Pollan’s book A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. One of the things that struck us both today was the following quote from JD Steddings:

“There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.”

Pollan adds, “Small mistakes in the finished product revealed the hand of the worker; perfection was opaque.”

Also, from Ruskin: “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”

May your work, whatever it is, be scarred with the beauty of imperfection, and may all of your errors be honest.