Sister of the more happy Jack
The Lowest Most Awful on Monday 1 July
The Lowest
Pictured above clockwise L-R'
After our house ended up with an accidental glut of bananas (because I can think of nothin worse than grocery shopping as a couple), I ended up making the Almond Butter Banana Bready from Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes. I can’t find the recipe online, but I will say this book is absolutely worth buying if like me you love to bake a quick little something sweet without it turning into a massive project.
This article on the meme-ification of Anthony Bourdain, was vaguely interesting as long as you don’t think of it as actually being about Bourdain. I thought it was an interesting way to review how even the most authentic of persona’s are still just personas. And persona’s can morph and shape over time even when we are gone. This reddit thread largely begged to differ with the whole thing as a nonsense waste of time, but we can’t argue with the longevity of “It’s 11 a.m I’ve got like 6 drinks in me”.
Reading Brother of a More Famous Jack after multiple recommendations from the wonderful Ann Patchett (I might have seen the same video a few times). I’m halfway through and I’ve settled in once I accepted there is no titular Jack involved. My favourite passage so far is:
She appeared to me a wonderfully spirited parasite. She visited beauticians and she bought shoes. Her major pleasures were spending her husband’s money and bedding his friends. And she would talk so disloyally about the poor chaps afterwards that I soon could not look at the Bernards’ friends without knowing which was obsessed with anal sex and which had what she called ‘potency problems’.
Got a new box of tissues from Who Gives a Crap and the lid (?) said “You Smell Like a Fancy Candle”. Is it just me or is this the very worst of branding? I do not need a compliment from my tissues or a reminder that I am using them because I can no longer small anything.
Can’t remember where I saw it but also read Grace by Lisa Taddeo in Esquire. Taddeo writes sex and relationships so well and I can only assume this piece was even more of a fantasy in April 2020 when it was published. In other raunchy news - The Sims 4 is introducing polyamory. A treat to know that if my laptop could handle playing again, I wouldn’t destroy entire families for one casual woohoo with the pizza delivery man.
Most Awful
The older I get the more willing I am to stick my hand into a hot pan. To quickly flip over a stubborn piece of food, or shift a hot tray from one place to another. Getting more cautious about life doesn’t apply to the little risks that you’ve gotten away with time and time again.
It’s the risks with the known outcomes that are the easiest to take. If I burn my finger, I know roughly how much that will hurt. Even when I am too lazy to spend an appropriate amount of time running cold water over the burn. But why can’t I learn from the things I do that are beneficial and do those again. Do I have to make my goal of a daily walk seem more risky so that I am able to consistently factor it in? I already have to face the rickety lifts in my building in order to get downstairs. I don’t know how much more risk I could handle.
I am currently in the middle of a plateau. A place of stagnation where something needs to happen in order for me to progress and live something closer to the life that I want. I’m trying to make it a considered risk. Something that feels like it at least has the potential to push things forward. And while I’m waiting to build up the courage to take that risk, I will keep taking the little risks of writing every day and daring to figure out what it is I might want.
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