#279
Have some leftovers
I’m struggling to believe I am writing anything of value here lately, so I went back into my pile of forgotten drafts to see if there were any bones worth picking. First up, a list of things I like and always buy. Maybe you will try them and also like them, or maybe you have already tried them and liked them (or not!). Feel free to declare yourself in the comments!
Apparently, I drafted this list after reading an essay about how we should try to resist framing joyful things in the sadness/suckiness of our present reality:
The theory goes that it diminishes small good things to say, well, the world is burning and everything is shitty, but congratulations on graduating eighth grade, Olivia!!! We are still allowed to enjoy and celebrate things. No disclaimer is required.
And I agree, but I do think it is hard. There is a lot about my life that is good and lucky but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I constantly feel an invisible hand tugging at the hem of my wrinkled Bombas t-shirt, pulling me back to earth. DON’T FORGET, it says (yes the invisible hand has a disembodied voice), THAT EVERYTHING IS ALSO VERY BAD.
However! [slaps away invisible hand] I must endeavor to enjoy things. Things I enjoy buying on repeat include:
This Sebamed face and body wash, discovered by me in December 2016 when I forgot to bring face wash to Ireland. One day of using Imperial Leather-scented body wash on my face was enough to send me running into the Wicklow Mountains, scratching at my flaking skin like a banshee, so when my brother-in-law went into town to get something I tagged along. “Town” was more of a village, and the pharmacy was very small, so my selection was limited. I purchased this face wash and immediately fell for its nuclear green hue and clean, hospital-adjacent scent. I know, I’m really selling it! But it is very gentle and lasts a long time and the smell reminds me, though probably not you, of a small Irish village. While it is easily available on a site that rhymes with Schmamazon, you can also just buy it directly from Sebamed. You will pry this soap from my cold dead pH balanced fingers.
Homeoplasmine, which you may claim is the same as Aquaphor or Vaseline, but you would be wrong. First of all, Homeoplasmine is much less greasy. I use it on any skin that is misbehaving, including on the tips of my dog’s ears when they wouldn’t stop cracking open and bleeding all over dog daycare, which, as you can imagine, caused quite a stir. It’s even a lip balm, if you want it to be. You can get it from French Pharmacy if you hate Amazon.
My friend Miriam helped me find these rechargeable light strips, which I put in my kitchen pantry and our linen closet. Now, you do have to remember to recharge them, but that’s just modern life, right? They have a motion-sensor option and mine tend to last a pretty long time, even when my dogs are walking around turning them on and off. As a bonus, you can carry them around with you in a power outage.
I may have mentioned Intake Breathing before, but I still use them every night instead of Breathe Right strips. I HATE when I run out of the stickers and have to punt with an old Breathe Right, I can’t explain it but the clear or flesh colored strips look way dorkier than the Intake clip, which looks cool-ish in a Dune sort of way.
I am a Donna Karan Cashmere Mist deodorant believer. Also available in aluminum-free, if you swing that way, though I can’t vouch for it. I only buy this on sale because it’s dumb but I can’t help it, I love my fancy-smelling armpits very much.
These very happy Swiss toothbrushes, which I think I found through Samantha Irby’s newsletter, though I cannot now remember exactly. I don’t recommend the floss though if your teeth, like mine, are very close together.
Here I am holding forth on stuff I am sick of seeing on Substack:
I deleted Twitter a long time ago and I don’t really use Facebook anymore, but it’s possible I’ve replaced these addictive substances with Reddit and Substack. Both, in my biased opinion because I am, as I mentioned, addicted, are “better” than the apps they supplanted. But, nobody needs to scroll this much.
Substack is actually insane because so many people are literally just forcing it to be Twitter, and, guys, have we learned nothing? Also, maybe it’s just my algo or whatever but everything seems so geared toward optimizing your temporal experience fka “being alive” that it’s getting kind of weird. “I Am A Gastroenterologist, Avoid These Five Foods” is followed in short order by ‘The Three Things You Can Do To Change Your Body Today.” Scroll a little further and it’s “The Two Minute Rule For Always Looking Your Best” right on the heels of “Eight Skirts To Buy This Fall.”
I understand the rationale behind these titles; I’ve worked in marketing and journalism for 25 years and I suspect many Substackians have too, or at least, they have read all the Hubspot articles and LinkedIn posts. They have done the Googling, they have asked ChatGPT. I mean, at a minimum they have picked up a magazine or read The Strategist. This is not, as they say, rocket surgery. It’s how you get people made squirrel-brained by social media and clickbait and streaming to pay attention to you, even if it’s only a 6 MIN READ.
But I also think it’s a tempting thought – you can read an article (by a doctor! No less!) and cross five foods off your list (good luck, it is mostly all the good stuff) and also cross WORRY ABOUT COLON CANCER off your list for good. Done and dusted! Don’t have that one to kick around anymore! Also, you mean to say some person has looked at all the skirts on the internet and boiled them down to the EIGHT I should consider? Very well, take that task off my list too.
YOU DO NOT EVEN NEED A NEW SKIRT FOR FALL (though, if you want one, I am not judging). But this list is not “taking something off your plate.” In fact it is dumping more on there, heavy carbs on a flimsy bargain paper plate, like in that commercial where the mom ruins her kid’s school diorama with what looks like three pounds of whatever’s hot at the Old Country Buffet.
Finally, here is something I started to write when my parents’ basement flooded this summer. I think I stopped writing it because “having elderly parents” is a very big topic, and one I think about every single day, and maybe I just found it too stressful to finish my thoughts. But here are some of them:
A few weeks ago, we had some bad storms in the area, and our neighborhood lucked out. We sat in the basement for 30 minutes or so while the power flickered and tornadoes messed up communities all around us. But that night, we watched TV with the lights on and slept soundly. Lots of other people were less fortunate and lost power, trees, and whatever else.
The next day, seemingly out of nowhere, it poured rain for a little while. At my parents’ house about 45 minutes south, the rain must have just set up shop and stuck around for an hour. Something like six inches came down, and basically, if you had a basement, it flooded.
My parents are 84. They live in a small two-story house with an unfinished basement and have given up mowing the lawn and repainting the house. Other people do these things now, but my dad still works upholstering furniture, and my mom still cooks, putters in the garden, and does laundry. Occasionally, she has a cleaner for the house. It’s the house I grew up in, a small beautiful house, but I am beginning to think it is time for them to be rid of it.
The impetus for my line of thinking was helping with flood cleanup, which they neglected to mention was a sewer backup rather than just a lot of rainwater, which would have been a mess and highly inconvenient but less gross and also maybe less dangerous. My dad ran their old carpet scrubber (which then promptly died, probably for the best) and we got down on the floor to scour the hard-to-reach places, but there are many things that need to be tossed or at least more thoroughly cleaned. We helped, of course, and I threw money at the problem in the form of a big Instacart order of cleaning supplies and a new dehumidifier via DoorDash.
The thing is, my parents have capitulated on stuff like painting the house and mowing the lawn, but I think there really is no point at which you stop wanting to be able to take care of things yourself. Duh, I know. But they were so remarkably caahhhzzzuualll when I offered to drive down and help them that I now also suspect they are underselling literally everything, up to and most definitely including health issues, which they much prefer to address with me after the fact. Case in point, when my mom FELL OFF THE BED after becoming dehydrated when she had covid and my dad had to call 911, and I found out…two days later. I’m not sure why that made ME feel guilty but here we are!!
And now, here in the stormy present, I will schedule this remarkably disjointed newsletter and clear out my drafts folder, which will feel good.
(By the way, my parents are doing well at the moment, they just got back from a trip to Florida with their “young” friends – the friends are 78 – and they had a very nice time.)