A jarring reminder about everything you've tried to forget
or other click-worthy headlines
Hi!
Thanks for opening this email / reading this post.
Let’s do this.
As a fashion-enjoyer, I am cautiously optimistic about the Met Gala tonight - hoping it captures this vibe more than this one. Can Doechii and Law Roach save Anna Wintour from herself???
I learned so much from this longread on the delicate and mysterious nature of seed banking and the preservation of plants!
Challenge for legacy media: don’t be super weird about Black art.
One of Trump’s picks for a top military position also happens to work at an arms manufacturer that is owned by major Trump donor, Palmer Luckey. I’m personally psyched that this definitely won’t incentivize this wall-to-wall dipshit convention of an admin to start wars. And, sidebar, but if you are pathetic clown with terrible fucking name and long track record of abject failure and criminal activity, this is your time to shine, baby!
And, it’s almost Mother’s Day, so let’s talk grief! One day, no matter who you are, a holiday or season change or birthday will absolutely rock your shit, due to the absence of someone you love. It’s a privilege of a life well-led and an inevitable downer. And even though I lost my mom eight years ago, it’s still pretty brutal to get hit with an email subject line like, “HEY DID YOU FORGET YOUR MOM?” (Ad people - what is this style of aggressive copy called? Bully marketing?). But in those years, I’ve been able to train my coping muscles. Sure, the first Mother’s Day without her, I got drunk backstage at a butt-rock concert and ended up in a Hell’s Angels clubhouse in Lynn. An unsustainable way to deal with grief, sure, but I was new to the game. Now, I have lots of time and practice just FEELING. I know there will be sadness and I make lots of space for that. A good cry doesn’t mean I’m broken and a little jealousy over the Instagram carousels of twenty generations of women enjoying mimosas together won’t kill me. So, I make time for that. The other, I think more important, mindset I’ve adopted is one of mental flexibility. I don’t give myself much space to fixate on what could have been, despite how easy this can be in a world where we must constantly meet invisible standards. There is a really long list in my head of how different things could be with my mom still here. But, why? How does that serve me as anything other than as a cudgel, a checklist of slights against me by an uncaring world? It’s like the guy who thinks he could have gone pro if he didn’t bang up his knee sophomore year. Instead, I can use that mental energy to go crazy with love over all the other moms in my life who are real and here now. I watch friends I’ve had for decades create new little friends for me and attend to them in the gentlest ways, fostering minds and personalities even better than the ones we’ve been blessed with. I focus on my intense gratitude for the mother-figures in my life, like the moms of close friends who treat me with the same love they have for their own daughters and sons. And I work hard to enjoy the memories of my own mom. If you’ve lost someone, you know sometimes it can be hard to move on from the final moments. But I think it can be a disservice to that person you are mourning to endlessly zoom in on the worst couple of hours you had together. When I make these adjustments - celebrating the present with gratitude and receiving the past with tenderness - I feel a little bit like I cracked the code. So this Mother’s Day, I’m going to dance in my living room to Genesis and buy some flowers and loudly appreciate the moms in my world. That’s the key - working really fucking hard to just have a good day. I owe it to myself and I owe it to my mom.
Tunes to start the week with:
MIKE put out a great rap album at the end of January. Now he has a new single that also rules. He isn’t joking when he says, “I never learned to skateboard but I learned to grind.”
My group chats have also been blowing up with this Moon Safari remix album from Vegyn that is great vibes and makes me miss when life was simple and we listened to Air.
xx