Emchap's Shit from the Internet 06/19/19 🍠
I've recently started seeing a new therapist, which I'm 60% certain I mentioned last week and am 100% too lazy to go confirm. (Yes, I am going to talk about therapy; yes, I realize this is exactly as exciting as hearing about someone else's dreams.)
It is a running joke for me that I am always nominally going to therapy for dead Mom reasons but the therapy basically immediately winds up being about normal ways in which I am screwed up due to internalized family whatever, pre-dead-mom.
This therapist has been a useful right-person, right-time sort of match; we've mostly been focusing on my strong dislike of feeling my feelings, which should be familiar to anyone who's had a conversation with me in the entirety of my 20s. It involves a lot of crying and then sitting and describing whether my shoulders hurt while she guides me to stop, like, asking questions about what oil she's using in the oil diffuser. (It turns out that rather than feeling my feelings, I like to hypothesize around them, exhibit A being this newsletter and the 16 years of blogs preceding it.)
Anyway, all of that is to say that I've been focusing on how much tension I carry in my shoulders and my jaw, and have been trying to listen when the soft animal of my body expresses a "fuck this" via exacerbating my TMJ. It turns out this is my default state; if I'm not paying attention everything snaps back.
I've been watching what happens when I drop my clenched jaw on video conferences; it changes the shape of my face, and it is sort of distressing to think about how much of the world basically knows my face only in that configuration.
I spent part of the last session speaking about community, and specifically the community chorus I participate in, and how I so value having a third space of people who don't necessarily know me well pointed towards a common goal. I love the building the chorus is in in the way that I loved the various theatres where I spent my childhood and early 20s. Last rehearsal, our director told us about a piece she's putting together where she's transcribed constellations to a staff, to be sung by opera singers, while the same stars are overhead, and it was one of the few times I caught myself with my jaw sitting loose. She's making ceramic bells.
Shit to read
Someone sent me this poem and I enjoyed it.
God please read this deeply compelling look at what happened to the missing Malaysia Air flight.
I am convinced that T Swift is a Boomer who is somehow Benjamin Buttoning, and I loved this analysis of her latest music video (I think her music is generally the Biden campaign of socially progressive pop but ymmv).
I want to make Palm Beach brownies now.
An ode to quesadillas, which the bar probably won't fuck up too bad.
I love ¡Hola Papi! normally and especially loved his explanation of why Mothra is gay now.
I have no experience with being trans, but I have a fair amount of experience with expressing myself inexactly in French, and I liked this exploration of both.
More Fleabag content, this time about the fourth wall more than about the priest.
I liked this Ask Polly, and identify to some extent with the letter writer and to a larger extent with Polly.
Shit to eat
Make a hotdog. How you do this is up to you.
Toast a hotdog bun.
Cover the inside of the hotdog bun with mayo.
Add hotdog.
Top with carrots that you've grated and left to sit in seasoned rice vinegar for a while.
Add in some cilantro that you have inexplicably managed to grow from seed in your own pocket garden.
Squeeze some limes you forgot that you had in your fridge on top of the whole mess.
Eat alongside whatever mess of summer fruit you were overoptimistic about being able to finish before it turned to mush, sitting in front of a fan, listening to bossa nova.
Shit to watch
Daniel Ortberg linked this Wells for Boys SNL sketch in his newsletter, and I hadn't seen it before, and it has made me cry laughing. "Some kids like to play. Others just sort of wait for adulthood."
Shit to buy
I want this boilersuit so much.