nice things lately
mochi, ceramics, and pilates for fall? groundbreaking.
ube mochi ice cream
Fie upon you, Trader Joe’s. Mochi ice cream is already very good. Ube mochi ice cream is even better. I don’t know why this stuff is so good. The ice cream itself has this beautiful light consistency that might remind my fellow fat kids of what it tasted like to eat a frozen tub of Cool Whip. And it’s purple.
“In Your Head,” Nilüfer Yanya
As I’ve said: I’m a pop simpleton. I want hooks. I don’t want breathy sad stuff. I don’t want whispers at dawn. My brain is already 85% whispers at dawn and fairies covered in dew. I need the right guitar sound and I need something bouncy and I need a nice, low voice. I need something wistful that doesn’t sound wistful, because that’s kind of what the world seems like to me: yeah, OK, maybe it’s a slow song, but we’re in a roller rink. You know?
beginner wheel throwing class at Green & Bisque Clayhouse
One complaint I have about writing is that it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything. You could have done a hard day’s work—legitimately, figured out many things about a novel’s structure or finally realized why a character does what they do—and have nothing but a word document that is 368 characters longer than it was yesterday. Can you tell the difference between a writer who is productively hunched over a laptop vs. a writer who is reading r/burningman in a schadenfreude way? No, you cannot.
But taking a ceramics class on the other hand—you have nothing but proof that you’ve been doing something. There are tools and aprons. Tangible artifacts. Clay on your hands. Glaze on the toe of your shoe. As I wrote about here recently, it was lucky for me to be taking a wheel throwing class while I was also feeling the sting of rejection. It gave me a venue in which to appreciate myself being messy and trying.
Los Angeles is full of ceramics studios. It’s a little bit of a trust fall to pick one and pay upfront for a class, not knowing anything about how you’ll like the space. I chose this one because it was close enough that I would be able to practice wheel throwing often, but I ended up really digging it for many other reasons. Mainly, it’s a studio that houses lots of excellent craftspeople. Not students, but real artisans who make unbelievably beautiful things. As I came to find out, Green & Bisque is highly sought after by the real deal artists, and it has a two-year waitlist for studio membership. That means that as you struggle along with your extremely basic cylinder pull, you can look over and see someone making a four-foot-high vase. It’s just incredibly comical. And if you’re going to be not good at something in public, you really do want it to be comical.
“An Account of the Otter,” Patrick Cottrell, BOMB magazine
In the book world, one flavor of blurb goes something like this:
“I have never read anything like [X]. You don’t even read [X], it reads you. [X] will steal your wallet. It will melt your face off. The last person to write a book like [X] probably died in the year 2500, which is not yet here. [X] is for readers who want to have their own attention spans pulverized by syntax and sold back to them as a sniffable drug.”
Tragically, when you pick up books like these (and I always do, because I absolutely want to have my attention span sold back to me as a sniffable drug), they often fall within a few degrees of some known prose form. Or it’s a spare, a-sensical lyric poem written by a skinny scene kid.
But Patrick Cottrell’s short story is genuinely alarmingly alert. Its hairs are standing on end. I kept reading it because it kept surprising me, and brother, I am not easily surprised.
That’s all I’ll say. I have too much dignity to tell you that this short story will read you and steal your wallet. (But I do think it might follow you into your therapy appointment and tell the therapist what you really think about love.)
Move With Nicole pilates
I have been a devotee of many, many forms of exercise. My Zumba years. My weight training years. My years of listening to Girl Talk on the elliptical machine for a full hour every day, when I had just quit drinking and needed a way to burn the hours. My time in the Tracy Anderson cult. I go way back with Richard Simmons and Billy Blanks, as I have documented here previously. Pretending to be a jogger when I lived in Austin, running at night once the temperature finally dropped below 100 and jumping over the pencil-sized snakes that also came out at that hour. And last year, hiking—my AllTrails stats topped 50 miles of hiking in November alone. I was a fat kid (see: Cool Whip), and doing physically demanding things was an identity shift that made me feel really good about myself.
But over the last few years, I’ve noticed that high-stress forms of exercise stopped working so well. If I pushed myself in a certain way, I would end up bloated and unwell. I retained so much water after hard hikes that my jeans would be tight for a few days. Sure, I have done my time in the pages of Shape and Women’s Health. I understand that muscle growth causes fluctuations blah blah blah. But this seemed different, and it really puzzled me.
I haven’t done like, a home hormone test or anything like that (blow me, Everlywell, you’re never getting these white lady dollars, no matter how many commercials you show me during Vanderpump Rules!). But I hypothesize that I might have some of that getting older/more sensitive to cortisol thing going on, because when I started doing gentler forms of exercise and getting more sleep, I felt so much better.
Getting older is funny because for most of your 30s, people dismiss it when you observe the passage of time in yourself. You’re not old!! God shut up! What are you even talking about lol. And then you turn 39, and you are suddenly “pushing 40” (whence am I pushing it? To what end? Am I Lady Sisyphus?) and the world is like What up, old bitch?. SO FUNNY!
Anyway, this is a nice kind of pilates because it’s challenging without being stupidly impossible, and that’s all I’m really asking for. And I like Nicole! After you exhaust your butt doing dainty little foot circles, she advises you to “give your glute a nice little hit.” Charming.
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