Friday Lunch Special: Big Dreamy Head, Anon, Please! Cicadas, DNF, and Mole Pain au Chocolate!
A little bit of everything!
Welcome to another addition of Friday Lunch Special. Once upon a time I was a girl who wrote long, winding, heartfelt captions on Instagram. Now I’m a girl who has Instagram blocked on my phone for most of the day, and I use it primarily for IRL connection and sharing this newsletter. As you may know, I try to write every day. Most of the time, what I’m writing isn’t in any state to see your inbox, but some of the time there are tidbits that I like. Those bits and bobs will live here, along with some recommendations and links. Friday Lunch Special is a little bit of everything. I hope you enjoy!
P.S. Check out past issues here: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04
Big Dreamy Head
When I say I got that dawg in me, I mean I was a teenager who liked to pretend sometimes that O Town’s Liquid Dreams was about me. In fact, one of the great pastimes of my teenhood was pretending that the songs the boy bands and girl groups were talking about a world with me in it. In adulthood not much has changed – I still want the songs to be about me. In the past couple of years, I’ve gotten to live a literal teenage dream of having an occasional song have me as a footnote in the story, for real. One of those songs is Big Dreamy Head by Silvie. And the best part? The song is incredible– played and produced to perfection. Silvie is one of my favorite songwriters and this song is, for me, the song of the summer. Secondarily to it’s pristine quality, is the fact that it is also partially about my friends, which is just the honor of the year, and well– a lifetime. As I type this I am sitting across from the Billi from the song and if I wanted we could be smoking ciggies right this very moment. I love my friends and I love this song. Listen to it here.
Anon, Please!
If you missed it, I started an advice column and WOW. This has been so much fun for me. I have gotten such good q’s and I look forward to future newsletters answering some of them!
Here are a few that have been submitted:
Should I plant a garden? How do I start!!!
Will you be my mommy? (this is an example of what not to do!)Â
How do you read? I feel like I’m too distracted to make a serious habit of reading, but I enjoyed it a great deal when I was younger. I know you read a lot and it seems like you love it. Any pointers on diving back in?Â
Talk to me about making friends as an adult!!
What do you do when you have to start over?Â
How do I stop spending so much money on sh*t I don’t need?
If you’d like to submit an anonymous question, you can do so here:
Cicadas
I arrived home on Monday afternoon to the buzz of cicadas. I spent the weekend in Austin seeing Instagram stories of the broods (multiples!!) emerging from the ground in my home of Nashville, and felt a little bit of remorse about not being there to see them for myself. I hoped they’d stick around for a while, and quick google let me know that they’ll probably be here for several weeks.
Thankfully, I can hear them from my home office. I can also see probably 100 of them swarming around a large oak tree. I am obsessed with them, with their weird extra terrestrial winged bodies, and their buzzy little demeanors. I like the song they sing, I like how it’s constant background noise. I feel like I can count on it. To me it sounds like the summers of my childhood, like being sticky from the remnants of a popsicle while sitting in the bed of my dad’s truck at a fishing pond.
The cicadas sound like home. They fully embody each phase of their life, carrying the time they spent underground with them. They have lived full lives before finding themselves in flight and looking for love or something like it. Just as their emergence from the ground to molt, mate and die signifies the passing of time, so do the southern summers. In every one of them I only carry myself with me too, both the girl I was as a child, and the woman I am now.
DNF
I wrote up a post today about reading and how to steep yourself in it for a future This might hurt a little… and one part I didn’t include was the fact that sometimes I won’t finish a book. Reading, for me, is about immersion. I want to be devoted to what I’m reading. It works out better for me if I can give myself over to it. Sometimes this means not finishing a book. Sometimes this means picking something up, getting 70 pages in, and realizing that it’s the wrong time to tackle it, or the content isn’t interesting to me at all. Maybe one day I’ll revisit, maybe I won’t.
This practice is relatively new for me. Once upon a time I was hell bent on finishing everything I read. As I’ve gotten more into creating a life that is joyful and pleasurable, my dedication to things that don’t hold my attention has vastly diminished. Why would I finish a book just because? Who does that benefit?
Mole Pain au ChocolateÂ
There’s this pastry that has been haunting me for the past few weeks. It’s a Mole Pain au Chocolate from Loba in Chicago, their Sunday special. Spicy, complex, lamination by God herself. I don’t have anything more to say about it except that it was exceptional and so good it has turned up in my dreams multiple times. I can’t have it because I am not in Chicago, which is a compelling downside of travel. Instead, it is just going to live here, in this newsletter, in memoriam.
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