Emchap's Shit from the Internet 1/10/18 🍠
I spend a lot of my time jealous of slightly older people around me. This is mostly good—low-grade professional jealousy of people whose lives I want leads to my puppy dogging around them until they accept me into their ranks and eventually offer mentorship or advice or rich-but-confusing friendships punctuated by just ceaseless, ceaseless trolling. But, spending ages 15-25 or so as consistently the Bright Young Thing in the room made me anxious in a way I didn't fully realize at the time.
I was reminded of this recently—over the weekend I caught up with an ex from a few years ago who I hadn't spoken to in a few years. The age differences and time delay are such that I'm the same age now as he was when we were together. When we were together, I remember being so jealous of his professional network, of the internet-famous folks who he knew through assorted sundry online means, of the events that he somehow knew the organizers of. He had moved across the country for a few years, which I hadn't ever done, which was mortifying to me.
At the time, I was a year out from my mother having died, and living in the same town I'd lived in since I was 12. I was surrounded by a profoundly loving community that also felt like it was smothering me, and felt a flat desperation that the kind of personal growth and reinvention that I'd read about people going through was never, ever going to be accessible to me in a city where I never left the house without seeing someone I knew, and couldn't make the transformation into an art kid that I was absolutely too embarrassed to admit I might want to make. I had migraines all the time and routinely characterized my unhappiness as an animal willing to gnaw its leg off to get out of a trap. My life felt small and sad and uncool.
And as we caught up, I realized that most of what I was jealous of when I looked at him, really, was time. I have done all of the things I was jealous about him having done. I moved across the country and forged new groups of friends a few times over. I worked at a company and a product that was (in its space) something I could brag about at conferences. I spoke at conferences!, including the one run by the woman whose career advice column finally convinced me I could leave Atlanta, and who I spent ages 23-24 idolizing HEAVILY.
Early in the catch-up conversation, I asked about how he knew a woman I met at the conference where I spoke last year. She was fantastic as a speaker and knew her shit and I'd enjoyed meeting her immensely, and Twitter had shown me they followed each other. I figured that he knew her from when he'd lived away from Atlanta in the same town she lives in, a time period in his life that was opaque when we were together and is more so now.
It turned out that no, he'd met her at a conference where he saw her speak, just like me. We befriended the same woman at difference conferences almost a year apart. Given a few years to bake, I'm floating in the literal same pools as someone who'd seemed like an impossibly cool space alien when I was 23.
As someone who has almost no patience and has a weirdly high percentage of 34-year-old friends, this has been a comforting note on which to start 2018. Stuff takes time, but it happens without even noticing it.
Shit to read
This is about American Girl Dolls and a woman shoving a dildo down her shirt, and it's very funny.
The intersection of French court clothing politics and the American slave trade is the sort of shit that I read Racked for.
Go read this essay about/interview with Tonya Harding.
Katie Roiphe was going to publish an article for Harper's outing the woman who started compiling the bad dudes in media list. Nicole Cliffe (cofounder of the Toast, former hedge fund employee) offered to pay people the money they'd lose if they pulled their pieces from the issue if they'd do so, and has apparently paid out $20,000. (Money is a tool to make your principles manifest in the world.) I had no idea who Katie Roiphe was, and this article on her provides some useful context to how my internet blew up these last few days.
Glossier makes no sense to me. Please read this article on its cofounder and send me your thoughts.
I do not understand the culture of the northeast AT ALL and jesus christ it's so cold here.
Shit to eat
Press a block of tofu between two cutting boards for a few hours, weighing the top with a cast iron pan.
In a bowl, shake out around three teaspoons of Adobo and a teaspoon of cumin, if you have some around that you need to use up because you're moving.
If you don't, try a teaspoon of cumin and a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of oregano or thyme and some red pepper.
Add three tablespoons of water to the bowl and stir it up.
Heat up the skillet, now freed from tofu pressing duties.
Add two tablespoons of oil and a spoonful of minced garlic.
Cook it for five minutes or so.
Tear the tofu up a little bit into egg-ish chunks and toss it into the pan.
Cook it, stirring and scraping the brown bits off the pan bottom, for 10 minutes.
Add the spice water and stir it in.
Cook for another five minutes.
Divide into four servings, and put one each into a tortilla.
Wrap the breakfast burritos into plastic wrap, and place in the freezer.
Enjoy your delicious breakfast treat each morning, rather than trying to make yourself like egg muffins.
(This is a riff on the vegan scramble from Veganomicon, which I am enjoying immensely.)
Shit to listen to
I am really enjoying this 90s-adjacent female vocal track that sounds like if a pop-punk band got ahold of a Jeffrey Lewis album in 2007 (or, like, Paramore). Spotify fed it to me because it seems to know I feel feelings but has decided I'm no longer in the middle of a divorce, which is a nice switch up for its feelings about my life.
Shit to buy
Veganomicon! I got it for Christmas and want people to tell me which of its recipes are worth anything.
I LOVE this bingo-themed cropped sweatshirt, and am informed it's of good quality (and it goes up to 3XL).
I have been overcome by a desire for a mid-thigh-length structured skirt with no goddamn ruffles on it for, like, going out to bars? I guess? I don't even do that anymore but now that I'm no longer the youngest person in the room ALWAYS and doing the resulting slightly-older drag, I'm really wanting to dress my age? Anyway, long lead-in to say that I like this skirt and may order it.