Cruel compendium #14 🍯

Come get your honey

Aug 21, 2020

I’m reading

How to start treating your feelings as feedback by Aisha Beau

1. What event triggered my emotion?
2. What assumptions am I making about this event?
3. Does my emotion and its intensity match the facts of the situation? Or, does it just match my assumptions of the situation?

Life always gets hard again by Heather Havrilesky in her newsletter, Ask Polly

I still need to make a sign that says LIFE GETS HARD AGAIN. Because I forget, too, when I’m doing well. Maybe we all need a reminder that there are always rough seas ahead, always always always. You don’t just stop getting flattened by life. The only benefit to getting older is that you just start to accept that new bullshit arrives like clockwork. You stop taking it personally.
But that’s all the more reason to MAKE A COMMITMENT TO JOY. Make a commitment to feeling joy in your body, and giving yourself what you need to feel joy, as much as you can. That means daring to believe that you, a sad insecure person (like me and almost everyone else alive), deserve to feel something as lofty and impossible as joy.

How to feel better when you don’t know what’s wrong. How a sheet of simple, soul-filling activities can help you through tough days.

The joy of sober sex by Lauren McQ

How plants can help people grow by Danya Issawa. Marcus Bridgewater (Garden Marcus) gives lovely advice on plant-care as self-care.

I’m listening to

The podcast Song Exploder talks to artists about how specific songs are created. I listened to Robyn’s episode about “Honey,” a song I’m deeply emotionally connected to, and shed a few tears while on a ferry ride.

Back in October 2019, I started working on a project I was really excited about: Culture Trip’s first podcast, Only in New York. My co-host, Alex Shebar, and I went all over New York City reporting on one standout place in each of the five boroughs. We covered House of Yes in Brooklyn, Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, Enoteca Maria in Staten Island, The Queens Museum, and the origins of hip-hop in the Bronx. Now, the podcast is finally out! Obviously I no longer work at Culture Trip and only had the chance to be an integral part of the editing process for about half of these episodes, so I’ll be listening to the final cuts along with you. But I’m happy this project Alex and I worked hard on is out in the world. The first episode, interviewing the incredible founders of queer Brooklyn nightlife phenomenon House of Yes, is now live. Take a listen.