Happy Severe Weather Preparedness Week!
I’ve rebranded and am currently wearing press-on French Manicure nails. If I said I was inspired by the middle schoolers at church, I would be telling the truth. Typing is a challenge, being insufferable is not.
I’m grateful it’s March. I’m grateful for fake tans and the hope of real tans.
Locals: Ghosts has been returned to me after five friends borrowed it, if you want to read it next, get in touch. Sisterhood of the traveling book that will only sort of melt your brain.
Over the course of writing this newsletter, I have ripped off all but three of the press on nails. I think I have greasy hands.
This sentence now has links to the my instagram (let me know if anything cool is going on over there, I gave it up for Lent), and old issues of the newsletter. I hope today is beautiful for you. Also my Outdoor Voices link for Hannah.
Number One: Mari Andrew’s Newsletter
Mari Andrew is a cute follow on Instagram, but her newsletter is RICH. (It is hosted on Facebook’s version of Substack, so I feel like I’m a Diet Coke girl recommending Pepsi.)
Mari writes about the human experience so beautifully. She puts words to emotions deeply held. It’s not a Wordle of a newsletter, it’s a Worldle, it takes time to read.
I’m not giving up on the world so fast.
Avoiding sadness at all costs doesn’t feel truthful, and plunging into despair from a coffee shop doesn’t feel truthful either. Both actually feel like avoidance: The “Everything will be okay” messages completely obliterate 99% of the human experience, while “The world sucks” declarations ring equally as false when we put down our phones and see the eyes of someone we love across the table from us. Both of these statements ignore most of what happens in life: the in-between, the undefined, the fragile.
“Manifest a new job” dismisses the ache of disappointment, and “We’re living in a hell scape” ignores the gentleness of joy. Both extremes disconnect me from my fragile human body, which is freshly susceptible to horrors and sunbeams with every new day. I ache for someone to tell me the truth: to tell me how I feel so I can reflexively nod: That’s it.
Number Two: Chameleon - Wild Boys
My friend Maci recommended this podcast to me, and it’s fascinating! True crime in a non-murder way and well produced. My only complaint is that the transition into ads was a little too seamless. It’s the kind of podcast where you’ll enjoy listening on a road trip, and then six months later fully forget what the plot was until someone brings it up at a function, and you’re like, “YEAH, and the thing with the fruit!”
Number Three: A little word on happiness and social media
Normally I hate reading a Q&A, just not the format for me. But I liked this one with Laurie Santos who is a Yale Professor on happiness.
Social media, Instagram in particular, offers almost infinite capacity for negative comparison.Whistleblower documents showed that Facebook, which owns Instagram, was aware that teenage girls reported that the app made them feel worse about themselves. Would quitting social media be the most important thing your students could easily do to increase their happiness? We go through a lot of the work on social media. One of the things is: Delete all your apps right now. You can see their faces. They’re like, Uhh. But all these things are tools. You could use them in ways that are positive for your well-being or negative. Instagram is worth mentioning in that sense of its totally infinite potential for downer self-comparisons, but students also use it to connect with communities — about eating disorders and anxiety. So we talk about how you can nonjudgmentally try to be present enough to notice how these things are making you feel. I teach students — this comes from the journalist Catherine Price — the acronym W.W.W.: what for, why now and what else? When you pick up your phone, what was that for? Was there a purpose? Then: Why now? Did you have something to do, or were you bored or anxious or fighting some craving? And then, what else?: actively noticing the opportunity cost. It could be studying. It could be talking to your roommate. Based on seeing students in the trenches, the biggest hit of social media on their well-being is that they spend a lot of time on it thinking that they’re being social rather than talking to other people. I do that too. There’s times when my husband walks into the room and we could have a nice conversation about how our day is and I’m looking at some crap on Reddit. It’s like, I have a husband who’s here. I could talk to him! We’re not always making good use of the humans around us.
She also had an interesting tidbit about how it’s the actions of our faith that make religious people happier, not the faith itself, and I could kick the ball around on that for a while.
Number Four: A thoughtful commentary on youth incarceration
In high school, a defense attorney came and spoke to our AP Government class on the death penalty. I can’t remember exactly why this attorney zeroed in on presenting to high schoolers, but what I do remember is they said something along the lines of, “it costs the government ten times as much to put someone to death than it does to incarcerate them for life.” My memory might exaggerate, but the point is, I’ve been anti-death penalty for Libertarian reasons ever since - just seems like a poor use of tax dollars.
I’ve been reading more about ending mass-incarceration, and I don’t have a fully baked opinion yet. Like I dislike the hold that the prison-industrial complex has on our society, I don’t know the best way to release that hold is. There are some people who need to be removed from society for a time or for forever, where that line is, I don’t know.
I do think this op-ed on ending youth incarceration is worth reading.
It’s statistically proven that youth prisons are ineffective at reducing recidivism, as 70% to 80% of youth are rearrested within a few years. Additionally, Pennsylvania spends $211,000 to incarcerate a child, compared with the $16,000 we spend on average to educate a child — resources we could use to fund community-based supports such as diversion programs.
Number Five: Just me talking about lent for a second
I gave up Instagram for Lent because I kept finding myself checking in on people who just made me mad. There was this anti-mask lady that I was fascinated by. And a bit like what Laurie talked about above, I felt like being on social media was me being “social” but it wasn’t.
I miss it. I want to post the photo of me and Brittney Griner from sophomore year on stories with “Free Brittney.” I want to look up my crush. I want the cheap connection.
I still have the app on my phone because I run an account for work, but that account pretty much only follows other schools and like “fun things to do with the kids in KC” accounts, so I open and immediately close the app.
Per the invitation to a Holy Lent, I’m also taking up a new prayer habit and doing this thing where I stare off into space for ten minutes at a time. Some may call it meditating, I call it what it is for me, which is staring off into space wondering what’s happening on Instagram.
Also yeah, some people let themselves break the fast on Sundays during Lent, but I think it would be better for me to just hold the line.