Greek gods, Ozempic, doorknobs, Daisy, and more

Seven thin(g/k)s I explored this week

Dear Reader,

Greeting from a recovering human sans one wisdom tooth. By the way, if you don’t have a dentist who chats all things existential while you have tooth extraction instruments shoved into your mouth, rectify asap.

Tiny housekeeping: Going forward, I’ll be sending these out at 3 p.m. Eastern every Friday. I revamped my newsletter’s About page with some new info, so do take a look!

Here are this week’s seven links to bits of the world I have been exploring, shared with the hope that you will find them to be an inspiring springboard for deeper thinking.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche and how art helps you grow as a person. This prompted me to reconsider how we categorize art by genre/time-period, and made the case for viewing art as oscillating between Apollonian (think truth, rationality, idealism, order) and Dionysian (feel the feels of emotion, pleasure, instinct, chaos). I particularly loved Nietzsche’s premise that “the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality,” meaning we are neither to stifle our drive to understand the complexity of the world, nor to fight the urge to succumb to reality in the way Rilke gently reminded when he said “live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

2. Life After Food, by Matthew Schneier—a look into the diabetes drug Ozempic that copy-cats a natural hormone of ours to curb hunger, and how people are jabbing themselves with its off-label active ingredient for the sake of shedding weight. I was gripped by this sentence—“She looks like an Instagram version of herself but in real life”—both because of its allure and its creepiness. I admit Instagram was partly responsible for pushing me to question the flabbiness of my arms, among other bodily imperfections, which served as a wake-up call to how inactive I was day to day. I don’t yet know if this visual reckoning with my sedentary lifestyle is damaging to the psyche and my relationship with food. But, damn do I relate to the feeling that meal prep and workouts and counting calories for the sake of body maintenance are all harsh components of pretty much a nonstop 24/7 job. And yet, that’s not to say I don’t find irony in swapping out what might be one form of obsession (i.e., gluttony) with another.

   “But for Arthur, a longtime gourmand, getting it has been a relief. ‘It’s a bit of a pleasure to not be so hooked to this stuff,” he says — meaning food, not Ozempic. ‘You’re suddenly a normal human being. I don’t need to eat this giant haunch of dead flesh.’”

3. Good conversations have lots of doorknobs. This part I found especially beautiful:

   “When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating.”

   And especially lasting in my mind will be the point that “we overestimate the awkwardness of deep talk,” and thus rob ourselves of potentially meaningful conversations, settling instead for shallow ones.

4. The rise of ‘anytown architecture,’ you know the ones, “complexes with roughly five wood-frame stories atop one concrete podium, known as 5-over-1s [that] have become popular across U.S. cities for their relatively low construction costs.” Is it just as disturbing to you as it is to me that the below photograph might as well be Seattle as well as LA as well as San Francisco or Denver or, or, or…?” This is like the fast food of architecture. But then again, the article points out, brownstones of NYC were once hated, and look at them now (). However, it’s one thing to be cookie-cutter in style; and another thing altogether when you tack on cheap materials and abhorrent dormitory-like color schemes to buildings. In the latter, you might as well be visually stuck in your college years, in perpetuity, and not out of nostalgia.

   

   Source: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

5. But on the subject of uniformity, let me tell you, it doesn’t always have to be bland. In this case, it can be spicy and sweet and a kitchen neat-freak’s dream come true: I present to you, one of my weeknight projects in process. I got these glass jars to swap out the eye sore that was my spice collection in my kitchen cabinet. My husband G called it nothing more than a transfer of old-to-new jars, and “you paid for this transfer!?” Whatever, he doesn’t understand :p And I stand by my decision, thank you very much.

   

6. At the risk of warping into a teenage version of myself glued to what I assumed would be a cheesy and glitzy romance story, I still happily joined the Daisy Jones & The Six (the show on Amazon Prime) bandwagon and already wrapped up the finale. Watched it on my 3.5 miles-per-hour treads in the gym, and had no need to pause for breathing or mental breaks. Not mad about that. First, Sam Claflin is, yes yes, adorable, and the contrast of his character here with, say, his performance in Peaky Blinders is a great testament to his acting skills. Second, Camila Morone and Riley Keough are phenomenal. Third, what Roxana Hadadi laments in Daisy Jones & The Six Is Too Big to Feel This Small—that the show “checks all the boxes of cool-girl protagonist and emotionally complicated main guy, pockets full of pills and closets overflowing with Bohemian-style outfits, hotel rooms littered with empty liquor bottles and the pieces of smashed guitars. There’s an enjoyable indulgence to all this muchness. But where [the show] hesitates is in connecting this tableau to an atmosphere that would give it solidity”—is frankly pretty much enough for me and what I wanted out of the show, an indulgence I could handle on the treadmill, not a full-blown exposition of the 70’s. To quickly iron out a wrinkle: I don’t think the show was mindless entertainment just because I watched it on the treadmill. I watch pretty much all kinds of things on the treadmill because the allure of something I love, film, is the driving force behind getting the energy to hop on a ride.

7. A painful, but necessary, reminder of how badly hurt my attention span is, as measured by my tolerance level for stream-of-consciousness writing styles by way of Virginia Woolf. To elaborate just a bit: In university days, I’d welcome the thought of reading convoluted, meandering sentences like a champ. Now, I cower at the sight of them because my mind is often distracted and thinking ‘why are you reading right now when there should be X number of things you should be prioritizing instead? (X = a million) Blah. Not a fun feeling. Anyone who can relate?

---

quick updates:

• watching: Vikings (History Channel’s), and fascinated with Ragnar Lothbrok (enough to spend 12-2am googling whether he existed in real life, in what capacity, etc. etc.), and mesmerized with the connective thread between how religions are portrayed in the show and what Nietzsche said about art up above. Like, here we have Pagan Gods who mirror humans with all their shortcomings and frailties (hi Dionysian?) and that’s juxtaposed in the show with Christianity (hi Apollonian?), and here I am nerding out.

• listening: Fleetwood Mac made a great companion for all the moody, rainy weather this week.

• eating: someone on IG talked about blending cottage cheese with honey (in my case, maple syrup) and freezing it to make high-protein ice cream, and I’m just passing along this intel for your taste buds, not you.

• using: a candle by Malin+Goetz called dark rum that makes home smell mysterious and alluring.

---

New weekly addition hello: curious to know about some of your recs! Here’s this week’s inquiry:

Recommendations From You: Nonfiction books?

I’ve been looking for something along the lines of Patrick Radden Keefe’s great writing in Empire of Pain. Love the book and the writing style; looking for something just as engaging; open to topics. Would love your recs in the Comments section below. If I’m speaking into the void and talking to just myself, which I’m 97% sure I am, I think I’ll pick his other book, Say Nothing, about Northern Ireland.

---

affiliate links: sometimes, I include links to my Amazon storefront (often for books or other recommendations around the home/self I’ve found useful and hope you will, too). This means I make a few pennies whenever someone makes a purchase using the link. It doesn’t detract from my recommendations coming from a place of a genuine desire to share with you. It just helps provide a few tangible tokens for my effort.

support: I love writing these newsletters and creating deeper threads of connection to you in this absurd world of ours, but in any case, it is a time-consuming endeavor. If you are enjoying my journey, and if able, please consider supporting it by way of interaction (follow along on Instagram, YouTube, or leave a comment/like here!), subscribing to my paid-tier here on Substack, or by buying me a coffee here! It is hugely appreciated, and my gratitude is with you.

---

Until Sunday, friends, for Essay No. 1. (for more info, head over to my ‘About’ page :))

Have a lovely weekend!

Hugs,
Ani