It's So Hot, I Can't Come Up With A Sweaty Pun.
Mein Liebchens! Happy Tuesday from San Francisco, where temperatures yesterday rose to 35 degrees Celsius, an insane high in a city where practically no one has home air conditioning. I came home to my top-floor apartment and my carpet was hot. THE CARPET. WAS HOT. Anyhoo, send literal chill vibes our way, mmmkay? And thank goodness for cold compresses, box fans and internet commiseration.
Let's do this!
Can someone tell me why I went down a Taylor Swift / Brandon Urie research rabbit hole after reading about Big Pop Flops and hate-listening to the god-awful single Me!? And yes, of course I will listen to TSwift's new album when it drops, and no, I am not anti-pop music, as indicated by the Carly Rae Jepsen tix I have for later this month (EEEEK) and the litany of humans I’ve freaked out with my rants about anti-pop snobbery over the last few months. You see my friends, there’s GOOD pop music, there’s BAD pop music, and there’s GOOD-BAD pop music and oh dear, now I can’t turn myself off…
Speaking of rabbit holes, I could click through the Smarter Living newsletter archives for DAYS. Their brief and cheerful takes on daily struggles, like investing in everyday topics like personal relationships big and small (“social interactions with the more peripheral members of our social networks contribute to our well-being,”) recovering from mistakes (“The first step to correcting a monumental blunder is to be honest and critical with yourself and to acknowledge that it was indeed a mistake,”) and finding happiness at work (“Understand what it is that lights you up. Understand what you run toward. Understand where you are at your most energetic, your most creative, your most alive, and then volunteer for that more and more and more,”) are lovely little nuggets of personal improvement #content that I enjoy consuming.
What’s the opposite of personal improvement? Because I am HERE for this kind of investigative work: How the former employees of Theranos explain themselves on LinkedIn.
This piece is a couple of years old, but I don’t care, because after Keanu Reeves’s delightful appearance in the new Netflix rom com Always Be My Maybe--which is a lovely rom com of nostalgic proportions with an absolutely off idea of what houses in San Francisco look like--I feel like revisiting this film: Still Traveling At 50 MPH 20 Years Later: Why ‘Speed’ Was The Pinnacle Of ‘90s Action Movies.
And finally, if you need some joy today, watch Bill Hader meeting Keith Morrison for the first time. I’m quite pleased that even comedic geniuses get flustered around their idols.
You’re swell, you know that? Be kind to each other.
Xoxo Amy