Grace is here!
I am so pleased that Grace Wolf is guest writing the newsletter this week. Grace guest writing is representative of something I love about this newsletter, and just life in general. I would call Grace a friend in the same way I call almost everyone a friend. But in a truer sense, she’s a friend of a friend. Her brother was in my RUF intern class, he also drew my tattoo. Grace was in my cousin’s wedding. I love following Grace on social media, but I don’t think we’ve ever like shared a meal. But Grace rules. I think when you have an abundance of good people in your life, you can trust that those people in turn have good people, so then those second degree people just become your people. And it’s just good people and I’m grateful.
Anyway, Grace is a long time Five Things reader, and she’s sharing some great stuff this week.
Now feels like a nice time to have a “what’s RUF?” refresher. Reformed University Fellowship is the college ministry I worked for for two years after graduating from Baylor. RUF collects good people. I usually tell folks, “you’ve probably never heard of it unless you grew up Presbyterian or in like Mississippi.” It’s on the smaller, chiller side of things. Something that RUF people say a lot is “God is at work.” The other thing is, “We are a rest stop for weary Christians and a safe place for skeptics.” And lastly, “looks like we’re singing ‘On Jordan’s Stormy Banks’ again, I guess.” And in my experience at least, that’s all true. Anyway I love RUF, and am so grateful for all the people that are friends of friends now because of it.
This sentence now has links to the my instagram, and old issues of the newsletter. Also sign up to get my Christmas card, I mean it.
As usual, I’ll let Grace introduce herself
Hey all, Grace Wolf here. I’m feeling pretty psyched to be guest writing Five Things this week! I’m currently living in NYC, which is where I’ve lived 90% of my life except for two delightful years in Atlanta (hi RUF). I spend most of my time working in nonprofit admin and drinking Old Fashioneds at different locations around the city. I first met Katherine in Florida at an RUF conference, and have so enjoyed getting FT in my inbox on Sundays these past few years. I don’t really have anything to plug, but you can follow me on Instagram or Twitter @gracelyncw.
Number One: Bodies, images, and body image
If you are a person alive in 2021 but particularly if you are a woman, you are likely absorbing a wild amount of input each week about your body. How it should look, how it shouldn’t look, how it should feel, how much money you should be spending on your beautification (or “self care” as we are calling it these days), and so on. We’ve seen the documentaries, the articles, etc.; I know I’m not the first person to bring up unrealistic body standards at happy hour when my friends would much rather be talking about anything else.
But more specifically, something that’s been ringing in my ears this year is how we as men and women talk about our body practices. The one I hear most often is “I’m doing it for me.” “I don’t spend 45 minutes doing my face in the morning for my boyfriend, I’m doing it because I enjoy it.” “I’m getting lip fillers for me, not because of Kim Kardashian.” I’m not trying to come for anyone’s beauty routine here—but I am trying to challenge myself to ask why I want to do these things. This is already getting too long-winded, so I’ll just say that if you want further reading I highly, highly recommend Perfect Me by Heather Widdows or Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. Or just DM me on Instagram and I’ll talk your ear off about this.
Number Two: Documentary Now
Every single day, I bring up “Documentary Now” to someone, and pretty much every time they say they haven’t seen it. This is unacceptable to me. “Documentary Now” is a pet project from Fred Armisen and Bill Hader wherein they make immaculate parodies of documentaries. There’s currently three seasons available on Netflix, but I’d just like to highlight Season 3 Episode 3, “Original Cast Album: Co-Op”, which is John Mulaney’s take on the Company cast recording documentary. It’s pretty niche Broadway fan humor, but they wrote six original songs that sound like they’re straight out of a 1970’s musical.
Number Three: Young(er) people
The original purpose of Number Three was for me to text my sisters (19 and 20 years old) and ask them what the Gen Z-ers are into these days, in an effort to update the millennials of Five Things. They responded with:
90’s and 00’s fashion
TikTok slash TikTok dances
Squid Game
Tiny purses and sunglasses
And these were all things that I already knew about Gen Z, or, in the case of Squid Game, something that millennials enjoy as well. So nevermind.
In the process of researching Gen Z with my sisters, I remembered a conversation I had with the younger one recently. She asked me if anyone actually enjoys college—or if we all just struggle through in order to get a degree. And it really killed me because she was sincerely just asking the question, a semester and a half into her first year of college, and straight up miserable about it. I told her the truth, which is that there’s a lot of both struggle and enjoyment. But more importantly it made me think about how it felt to be a little bit younger than I am now, to be kinda lost and unsure pretty much all of the time. So I wanted to use Number Three instead to encourage you to encourage someone younger than you—someone who just graduated from college and walked into church in a new town totally alone, someone who is having trouble envisioning the good in their future just because they haven’t seen very much life yet.
Number Four: Read the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments
Full disclosure, legal history slash criminal justice history is what I studied in grad school, so I’m going to cut myself off here before I write too many words on what is a truly depressing subject for Sunday evening. The shortest possible version of my criminal justice happy talking points is this: read the Bill of Rights! Specifically the 4th-6th Amendments. Suspects in criminal investigations have rights. Indicted defendants have rights. Convicted criminals have rights too. And the way we talk about these fellow human beings (who have the image of God embedded in their person) really matters! Here are a few thoughts, tweets, or articles on the subject I’ve found interesting recently.
Number Five: Come to New York City
I’m sure no one has ever suggested a visit to NYC to you before, as it’s a relatively undiscovered and off-the-beaten-path destination. But I’m serious—it’s so much more than buildings, although the buildings are pretty cool, and some of them have interesting things going on inside of them. It’s where I grew up, and it’s where I met a wild amount of beautiful and kind and hilarious people, and it’s not just a coastal elitist stereotype of a city. Once again, if I get started on this topic, I’ll never stop and Katherine’s read rate will go down, so let’s just cut it off there. If you visit, I will 100% meet up with you and we can eat dumplings together. Not kidding.
Bonus: We’re all doing the 15 and Mahomies Challenge, and we’re all going to do something nice for a teacher this week
It’s me, Katherine, again. First of all, thank you Grace!
Secondly, we’re all, all of us, going to do the 15 and Mahomies challenge. Which is just reading 15 minutes a day for 15 weeks. Honestly 15 weeks has got to be enough time to build a pretty robust habit. I was in a first grade classroom this week when the kids got their books from the foundation, and they lost their minds that Patrick Mahomes wanted them to read. It’s going to be fun.
Do something nice for a teacher this week. We’ve all had a tough time the last *gestures wildly* but I think it’s fair to say that teachers are bearing a lot of the brunt of that. Bring someone coffee, or write an e-mail; whatever seems low effort-high return to you. If you’re local and don’t know a teacher, let me know, I’ve got a lil list.