Emchap's Shit from the Internet 01/30/19 🍠
I've spent this week in Boston, which I mostly remember from one of my first adult trips up north. I was 21, and it was for New Year's Eve of my senior year in college. I was tired all the time, and my mom was dying and I couldn't do anything about it, and I was terrified for all the normal what-does-the-future-hold sort of reasons college seniors are terrified. I spent a lot of time during that period of my life crying in cars, but for that week I mostly didn't, because I was with a dear friend and we spent our team eating dumb food and looking at tourist attractions and drinking beer.
I had applied to MailChimp because they had a funny ad on a podcast (not the Serial one; they'd paid Merlin Mann to write a rock opera and I was the sort of nerd-ass 21-year-old listening to Merlin Mann's productivity podcast), and I'd figured out that they were in the same town I lived in, and I figured I might as well apply anywhere I could, and maybe I'd eventually get a job and wouldn't have to flounder about with that once I graduated. MailChimp was the first place I applied, more or less.
I'd gone through a few interviews with them, but since I'd not really worked at official companies before (just student worker jobs and weird freelance internet writing things) I didn't know that that sort of meant I'd hit a final round stage. I received a call on my cheap smartphone on the 31st, while I was preparing to go out and do dumb/fun 21-year-old New Year's Eve things, and it was a woman from the MailChimp HR office offering me a support job for what seemed like an absolutely bananas amount of money. (In retrospect I have no idea why she was at work on the 31st, and it must have been the last thing she did before heading home, because it was already 4 or 5 pm by the time we spoke.) I of course accepted, and cried a bit, and went off to get drunk with one less anxious thing sitting on me. I worked full time for the last semester of college.
I wound up at MailChimp basically on accident, and it was only because of working at their sister product that I knew about Trello (they were my nicest users, so I went to go work for the people who wrote the emails to me), and it was because of having those two jobs on my resume that I got my current gig at Help Scout (who of course uses both of them in their own stack). I have been so lucky to have wandered into interesting work basically on accident because of a podcast ad when I was a deeply unhappy 21-year-old.
Shit to read
Obviously I loved this piece about Animorphs.
RENT is terrible and I loved it with my whole heart as a child. I watched the live version from my hotel shower.
An unexplored reason why the shutdown fucked people over.
As Atlanta prepares for The Big Game this weekend, I loved loved loved this piece on the neighborhood that the stadium destroyed.
Breakups don't have to be anyone's fault.
So the aliens are trying to talk to us apparently.
We're all now old enough that the famous internet pets are dying.
Cochlear implant videos are not great.
This essay about monks who tried to make a digital scriptorium would be amazing if that's all it was, but it's also about labor and its place in a well-lived life, and about the economics of monasteries, and it's my favorite thing I read all week.
Fuck the gig economy. (Tl;dr: tip app delivery folks in cash.)
Now I'm sad about starfish.
Shit to eat
Get up at a weird, grumpy business travel hour.
Put on your face. Hate your face the way you always hate your face under hotel bathroom lighting.
Decide to try to ignore it.
Put on your clothes, all of which you suddenly hate.
Bundle up against the cold, which you also hate but that part's not new.
Follow Google's direction against the grain of traffic, and walk half a mile into the North End.
Find the pastry shop that you are looking for.
Order a mint cannoli, even though you know it's kind of a weird flavor and an almond or normal one would be better. You have never been able to avoid ordering mint anything.
Carry it back to your office, switching between hands because you refuse to put on gloves.
Avoid falling on ice, and carry your treasure upstairs.
By this point you won't be hungry anymore, but save your weird breakfast treasure until 11 am, and eat it in a meeting.
Worry if your coworkers think you're gross. Decide they probably don't, and even if they did it doesn't matter that much.
Shit to listen to
Spotify has me pegged with this warbly female vocalist alternacountry waltz about loneliness.
Shit to buy
Universal Standard is making Lunya for fat bitches; get on it before the trademark suits begin. (Plus $50 off the robe if you get it.)
Dessert.