The Friday Dispatch: April 21, 2023

If you're feeling very sleepy...read this email

Oh man! Hi! Happy Friday! Are we all planning to nap until Sunday afternoon, wake up, feel a little grumpy that the weekend is over, and then go back to sleep? Sweet!

NaPoWriMo Confession Corner

I forgot that the third week of NaPoWriMo is the hardest. During the first two weeks, I’m always chock full of ideas, and excited to write every day. But by week three, I’m tired, I feel like I’ve covered all my bases, and I end up writing tiny short poems or long, rambling, inane poems that are really just pointless lyric essays. That’s where I am right now. I’m 1.5 days behind – I haven’t finished Wednesday’s (ultra-long) poem, I have an idea for Thursday’s poem that feels stupider and stupider every time I start to write, and I have no idea what I’m going to write today. But, I’m going to get it all done tonight, since I can stay up late. And by Monday, I know exactly what will happen: the panic of “only one more week left to write a poem every day!” kicks in, and suddenly, I’m inspired again.

Sending good thoughts to everybody else who’s hit the 2:30pm slump of NaPoWriMo.

Google Knows Everything About Me Anyway

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve started using Google Keep to draft poems/as a repository for ideas. I’ve also started using it to draft essays, and now I’m using the Google Tasks toolbar to track my daily to-do lists (thank you to Gabe who made it magically appear in my Gmail when I could not figure it out!).

My friend Chloe and I both use Notion, but I’ve found it really only works for me when I’m doing longer-term creative projects. I used it for NaPoWriMo last year, and I have a dashboard for my novel progress in Notion. For day-to-day work, I need something that will annoy me, something ubiquitous, something that goes where I go and does not ever allow me to escape its view. I needed Google.

And so far, it’s working as I’d hoped!

There’s a Name For That Thing Where a Pill or a Tiny Piece of Tortilla Chip Gets Stuck in Your Throat And it Doesn’t HURT But it Feels BAD, And You Drink Six Different Beverages Out of Desperation Until it Finally Goes Away And You Forget About it Until Next Time

It’s called globus pharyngeus. Or globus sensation.¹

I Am Consuming…Conspicously

• Fellow Tumblr users, beware: I have started watching Supernatural. All my friends are super horny for the two main actors. I do not get it. Sam (the floppy-haired one) looks my brother, but with his cat McFly’s face. Dean (the mean grumpy one) looks like any man my dad has ever worked with. So far, I am only attracted to the car. But it’s a good show!

• I barely read this week, but I just caught up on Ted Lasso. The most recent episode is very cute. I want Trent Crimm’s shoes.

• I THOUGHT I finished the One Day at a Time reboot, which is adorable and went through a number of different cancellations/relocations. I thought it was three seasons long…but, surprise! There are a scant six episodes in the fourth season, and I cannot watch them without a VPN. I think running a VPN would make my computer get hot and explode, so I will just wait until a cool criminal uploads them to DailyMotion in seven-minute chunks.

• I fell into the rabbit hole of the “scams” subreddit, and man, there are some horrible scams out there. This SF Chronicle article about phone scams targeting therapists was a bleak read, but it’s a good reminder to be suspicious. Also, I am not, generally, a trusting person, and I attribute that to this live-action Winnie the Pooh special, Too Smart for Strangers, which I adored as a child and which all my friends find terrifying now.

What I Did Not Buy This Week

• I’m lucky enough that, for the last several summers, I have had a good pair of brown-and-black sandals. It’s important to have a pair of brown-and-black sandals, because they go with everything. When I was home last, my mom gave me some great heeled multi-tonal neutral sandals, which I already know I’m going to wear into the ground. I’ve also been keeping my eyes peeled for a pair of flat brown-and-black sandals, and I saw these, but did not buy them because they’re…vaguely scrotal?

  

• I’m considering buying, but have not yet purchased, a $3 Target spray bottle. I want to fill it with 50:50 normal water and cheap rosewater from my grocery store. A beauty tip I saw this week was to spritz your face with a little bit of water in between your serum/moisturizer, and with summer ramping up, I think this is a good way to keep my face from crumbling to dust.

• I went into a Le Labo store to sample Another 13. It smelled delicious, BUT! I did not buy it! Because I have a knockoff, and it lasts WAY longer!
  Ok, this is sort of cheating because it’s me talking about something I DID buy already. But a few weeks ago, I broke my moratorium on buying fragrances by going halvsies on an Oil Perfumery order with my friend Sophia². We each picked $15 dupes of designer fragrances, and one of my picks was Another 13 by Le Labo. I'd never tried the real deal on myself – I'd smelled it on a lady on the train platform, and yelled after her to find out what it was – but I've been wearing the Oil Perfumery version and loving it. When I walked past a Le Labo counter in Nordstrom the other day, I went and spritzed myself with Another 13 (real). When it came to wear time, it didn't even come close to Another 13 (fake). The oil has surprisingly good sillage/projection, too. It's not overwhelming if you wear it in the office, for example, but you don't need to be spooning someone in order for them to smell it.
  This isn’t an ad or anything. I just LOVE Oil Perfumery and the scents have yet to disappoint me.

Note for Paid Subscribers!

I owe you an essay after last week, and you’ll get it this weekend. I didn’t want to double-email since I’m doing newsletters every weekday right now! Double-texting apparently bothers people; I assume double-emailing is even more severe a faux pas.

I’ll Leave You With This

The internet is bad at meaning. I remember getting verrrrry mad, when I was 15 or so, at how online discourse slowly but firmly changed the definition of “peruse.” I don’t care about this as much anymore, and in turn, I’m slightly less unbearable. But it’s still something I notice. For example, on TikTok, people often use the term “POV” when really they just mean “imagine this” or “this happened to me.”

The internet is also a home for weird fanfiction tropes, which I guess could be seen as a negative. Things like, “When you turn 16, your soulmate’s initials appear on your wrist,” or “Everyone has a pair of wings that only their soulmate can see.”

Anyway. This video is supposed to be a “point of view” video but instead, it’s more like “POV: you are watching someone else live out the scenario described.”

The scenario in question is a common fanfiction trope: “on your 16th birthday, the first word your soulmate will say to you appears on your wrist as a tattoo.”

I watch this and cry-laugh over and over. Happy Friday.

1. I started taking probiotics and forgot I am NOT a dry-swallow pills person.

2. It’s important to know which friends will enable you to buy stuff. Sometimes when I want to buy something, but it’s not enough to meet the shipping minimum, I text Sophia “hey should I get this?” and then we BOTH end up buying stuff and combining the shipping.