Healthy Soda + Feelings
Did you know that artificial sugars are up to 200 times sweeter than regular?
Hi people, it’s me, SOPHIE! To begin…
One of my most favorite weekly errands to run is to the grocery store. A chore to some, I came to love it when I moved out of my parents’ house. Where I had no control for many years, in terms of food choices, ultimate freedom was granted to me through the sheer breadth of options suddenly available for me to curate for my own gastronomical desires. My personal favorite aisles are cereal and candy!! Anyhow, these days I often find myself standing for a long period of time in front of the giant beverage cooler endcaps, full of kombucha, tea, seltzer, water and soda, wondering which will meet my need that day. (I always like to buy myself a “surprise" treat at the end of the trip, to reward myself for existing Lol)
Anyhow, recently I am finding myself actually unable to resist buying the “healthy -unhealthy” drinks at the store when I’m in this predicament. These drinks are the perfect storm to me—a drink that tastes as sweet as a soda, gives you the carbonated feeling, and simultaneously improves gut health, too?? I think what bothers me is that they’re posed as a solution to a problem that I would argue doesn’t need fixing—in theory, making something that is healthy taste unhealthy. These drinks are the rice cakes of beverages, yet I still find myself reaching for them. Not sure why! They just don’t deliver. Images to follow…
Where I think I personally draw the line is at the “VYBES” drinks, which cost $1000 and they’re the urban outfitters of corner store drinks.
Idk I think what the frustration comes down to is having a moment of actually deciding to pick one of these drinks, which I know I have a 50/50 chance of actually enjoying, when I really want the grape soda I know that I love, and people who say they don’t like junk food…..I fundamentally distrust them. How can you not enjoy food specifically engineered to taste amazing??? Would love to hear some thoughts on this. This newsletter is NOT here to promote health food, I want to make that loud and clear.
So anyhow… what just turned into a roast of health drinks is a perfect segue into some more complex angsty emotions this week. Emotions I’ve been mulling over, again and again, because what else is there to do once you’ve journaled? Warning um just cuz I did indulge myself in *many* platitudes for today’s newsletter…
Ow… ok pain, yeah, as I’ve alluded to in my past newsletter, I’m in it. Lol, I’ve just been feeling pretty sad, and it feels good to just say that here. I don’t look for sympathy but acknowledgement in knowing someone else will read this, as the single most helpful thing in comforting me lately has been the gentle reminder that others, in fact, feel the same emotional pain I feel, too. (Seems obvious, but a great affirmation if it helps you) In different ways and at different times, sure, but it makes me feel so much less alone to know…I’m not alone. Blah…I know that pain often leads to periods of transformation, and that at the same time, feeling intense emotions doesn’t magically present you with a trophy for endurance either. But just saying this to my email audience makes me feel a little lighter, because I’ve also realized at the end of the day, I feel most responsive to other forms of media/writing that share and delve into these parts of life. (Not that I think I’m an influencer, lmao)
Anyways, you know when you find something right when you need it, so much so that it does feel like a sign? For example, since I’m going for this look (below)
I went out to thrift in search of a very specific thing: a pair of BRIGHT VELOUR SWEATS. To my astonishment, I found a pair of pink velour pants in my size and now I can’t take them off. I really think it was a sign from my guardian angel!
Ok, pants analogies aside, the same thing happened to me when I randomly found out about the show “Midnight Gospel” on Netflix this past week. It was EXACTLY what I needed to watch in a weirdly coincidental way… WOW! —and to say WOW is an understatement. I’ve been on an animation binge lately, but this show really did it for me in a unique way. It’s made by the creators of Adventure Time and it’s sooo beautifully animated. The show centers around the main character, Clancy, who is a “spacecaster” and has a machine that lets him visit alternate universes. Each episode has a moral or theme that is philosophical or related to mindfulness, and the dialogue is from real interviews with interesting people, so you really feel like you learn something when you watch.
I also find I’m in the place mentally and emotionally this week where I’m needing a sort of buddhist-centric reminder of suffering/silence/duality as they relate to pain…and this show totally gave it to me. You know when everything feels inspiring or revolutionary because you’re on the lookout for it? In that same way, every piece of advice I receive feels special.
In dark places, at at the deepest points of my sadness, when I’m in victim-woe-is-me-mode—which I do believe can be helpful to embrace when you need to…I am only reminded of the endless cycle of pleasure and pain that life presents to us, the fact that other people do feel this same feeling, the fact that everyone has already or will experience these feelings at some point, the fact that change is inevitable, the fact that all of this intensity really is just a part of life and the only way out of it is through it, as terribly cheesy as that is.
Taken together, all of those thoughts circling around in my brain do make me feel like at a base level I am HERE and ALIVE and EXPERIENCING life, and it gives me a fresh, kind perspective I can take on when I’m out in the world. <3
In thinking about the pleasure-pain…cycle? circle? I am reminded of the feelings wheel (pictured below), which I discovered this past year and has been an interesting exploration into the shades and depth that emotions can be described in. Some of the more specific feelings, like “fragile”, or “isolated”, being sourced from the “big” emotions, like anger or sadness in this chart, are interesting to think about if you’re into that kind of thing like I am!
…Continuing on into the spectrum of emotions we can feel, the graphic format relates visually to a representation of the “notes” in fragrances…inspired by watching Youtuber fragrance connoisseur Jeremy Fragrance…. chaos
OK and lastly it’s the week before my birthday, which always sends me into a hole of reflecting on my entire life so far…so much so that I feel I’ve usually made peace with my age (I have no control anyways) before the actual day of my birthday comes around. Wow! Cheers!
I’ll try and end this somewhat cohesively here with this quote from a Longform interview with writer Carvell Wallace, when asked what his “one note” is; a.k.a., what is something about life that brings him joy… that I’ve lovingly transcribed here for you!
“I don’t love the act of writing. I do love having the hold of an idea…when I have this idea that I’m thinking about for a piece, and I’m seeing it all come together…That’s where I feel like—"I love this.” That’s what makes life a journey, is that you don’t get to stay at your place. You have to leave home. You have to. So a lot of days, I feel wonky and confused, and…ugly inside, and dry and crusty, nothing makes sense. But I’ve learned over the years that you just have to walk through those days, you don’t get to avoid them. You just get to see how they change—because everything does change. So, when you feel good, that will change. When you feel bad, this also will change. But I think that’s my one, I love having an idea and working it and finding how they all link.
Ok….I really was tryyyying to keep it light here today, but I’m ultimately failing because I’m just in the midst of so many emotions lately. So thanks for being here! It’s comforting to know others are here with me, if but for a brief moment.
Love always,
Sophie
Random Recommendations This Week:
How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning - an AWESOME article that covers some of my favorite topics to learn about and potentially reimagine for the future. It’s all about how “elite” education has warped and affected how American culture views higher education in general.
The most obvious pitfall of this competition is that only the privileged can reliably access the lifetime of schooling needed to win: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale together typically enroll more students from households in the richest 1 percent than from the entire bottom half…The pressure to beat these odds drives even the most well-resourced applicants and their families to immoral and self-destructive schemes. In the recent Varsity Blues scandal, sophisticated and otherwise sensible people with family wealth to spare paid bribes to arrange fraudulent athletic resumes and rigged test scores for their children. Setting moral principle aside, what besides an overwhelming fear of losing caste could lead parents to think that their children’s development is best served by giving them, behind their backs, false credentials?
Who Cares? - by Sarah Jaffe - super very important, focuses on EDUCATORS and PARENTS (specifically mothers) and how childcare as labor is ultimately still invisible/not given enough respect as work in society. So scary to read, honestly, but very well written …lots of great thoughts here. So I have included three separate quotes if you don’t feel like reading it but are still interested, OK?
The workweek we have somehow accepted as natural is a product of a time when the people in charge expected a worker to be a man who had a wife working constantly in the home. This situation itself—the “nuclear family”—was constructed much more intentionally than many might realize. Henry Ford had an entire department of inspectors whose job it was to ensure that his employees’ wives were engaged in “full-time domesticity,” as sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin put it, in order for those employees to qualify for his famous $5 a day family wage.
It’s particularly cruel that the reason teachers are so easy to scapegoat and exploit is that their work is considered to be close to that of mothers. It’s the very fact that they care that makes it easy for us to take out all of our anxieties on them; as teacher and parent and author Megan Erickson wrote in her book Class War, “the failure of teachers is like the failure of mothers—unthinkable, monstrous, disgusting, the final antisocial act that threatens not only the fabric of the political economy but its perpetuation.”
One cruel trick of heterosexuality was always that women were convinced that men couldn’t really learn to care—we just had to accept the little bits they might offer because that was how it was. But if there’s anything we should have learned in this bloody awful year of grieving mass death and intimate losses simultaneously, it’s that actually, care has no gender, and we can love each other across six-foot distances and locked-down cities and the world’s oceans.
:——0 Ohhh my god……
The End of Kimye’s Wild Ride- Vulture -The pop culture obsessed part of me ate up this article, it chronicles Kim and Kanye’s love story to now divorce…one I’m intrigued by, not wholeheartedly invested in. If you don’t care for Kardashians, just don’t read it, it’s not really a critique, but I found it pretty fun to read.
This brand of red licorice has REALLY been hitting the spot lately…
This video of the Atlantic and the Pacific ocean not mixing. Lol
Ok….. and lastly, lastly, lastly, I swear, just let me leave you with this quote by author Sheila Heti that I’ve been thinking about since I read it.
Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.
Hehe
Oh hi, Jess and I have screen printed precious SHIRTS for you all, with the help of our amazing friend Thomas! Would you like one?
We are so excited to share this with you all!!!!! : - D
Want to know how they might look? Well, we have a brief promotional video for you!
If you would like a shirt, please fill out this google form with your name, size, preferred color and venmo username and we will make sure one gets out to you, supplies are somewhat limited!
We’re all in for a BIG TREAT this month, because we’ve got our SUPERSTAR friend BASIL!! providing us with another enlightening edition of…
☺ ASTRONOMICAL NEWS FROM UR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD ASTRO-FREAK ☺
May 19, 2021
Hello to my fellow fans of the Daily Enjoy. To those of you on the east coast of the US, I hope you’re enjoying your evening views of Mercury, Venus, and Mars, visible over the Western horizon just after sunset. Mars will be the highest of the three at sunset, not setting around midnight. Visibility for these planets is fine, not perfect, but neither is life. For my night owls and early risers, Saturn is very clear, rising at 1:15 AM and visible before sunrise.
This week I did a deep dive on satellites. Much astronomical news uses data from a little lady known as Hubble. I find that, in my astronomical education, my professors took for granted that I didn’t need to understand how space telescopes worked, only that they delivered results. I, on the other hand, like to understand what’s orbiting our planet, and I hope you do, too. As of January 1st of 2021, there were more than 3,300 satellites orbiting the Earth. 1,897 are US satellites, 377 of which are US government or military (including around 40 for NASA), and 1,486 of which are commercial. I am not kidding you when I say that 900 of those were SpaceX satellites, and they really refuse to stop launching them, so the numbers as of May are more like 1,400—UGH. I digress. I think it’s fair to say the most famous of these satellites may well be Hubble.
Almost everyone has heard of this superstar of the space world. The solar-powered Hubble Space Telescope launched seven years behind schedule, on April 24, 1990. 336 miles (ish) above sea level, and circling Earth every 95 minutes, Hubble houses multiple instruments for space observation, including the Advanced Camera for Surveys, aka ACS, which is actually three cameras in one, which has taken many extremely badass photos, such as the notorious Hubble Deep Field image. The latest member of the Hubble family—added in 2009—is the Wide Field Camera 3, the most ultra badass, upcycled princess of the gadgets aboard, Frankensteined from parts of the retired Wide Field Camera 2. Images from these two cameras are often compiled to make the images that we know and love as posters in our nation’s dentist offices, such as the below image of a galaxy cluster.
Wavy!
Because the telescope is in low earth orbit, astronauts can make repairs to it, and it has been repaired or serviced 5 times. The last time astronauts repaired the telescope, they added a gadget called the Soft Capture Mechanism, which will allow Hubble to be removed from orbit, if it ever dies (probably by 2040).
But there’s a new girl in town. The astronomical community has been waiting for her since 2007, and she is finally set to launch on Halloween, 2021—though, of course, this will probably be delayed, too. Her name is JWST, aka Webb, aka the James Webb Space Telescope, and unlike Hubble, Webb will be far outside astronauts’ reach—in fact, instead of orbiting the Earth, it will orbit the Sun, 930,000 miles away from Earth. That’s way, way farther away from the Moon. Since it will still be tugged by Earth’s gravity, it will orbit the Sun at the same speed as the Earth, like a little poodle that walks alongside the Earth, between us and Mars—a 10 billion dollar poodle, full of cameras, with a parasol the size of a tennis court. Webb’s light-collecting mirror is almost three times as large as Hubble’s, and instead of UV, visible, and some infrared light, Webb will take images in primarily infrared wavelengths. This means it will be able to see things completely invisible to Hubble, and, because of its huge mirror, in much higher definition.
Infrared light is our key to the Universe’s past. You may have heard the asinine cliché that most of the stars you see in the sky are already dead—their light takes a long time to reach us, so we’re looking at the outdated image of a star long torn apart by its own desire to shine, blah blah. This is true. If a star is 3,000 lightyears away, we’re seeing it how it was 3,000 years ago—boring! If it’s 10 billion lightyears away, well, now we’re cooking with gas. The Universe is 13.4 billion years old, and those “young” stars will tell us a lot about the origins of literally everything, from olive oil to punk rock—and those stars are best (sometimes only) visible in infrared. Webb will allow us not only to see them, but to do so with extreme clarity. I am extremely excited for the first Webb pics to drop, and I hope you all will come to my JWST Launch Party, whenever that truly may be.
The JWST has cost about $10 billion since the year 2006. The proposed 2021 US military budget includes $11.4 billion for seventy-nine (79) fighter jets, out of $740 billion total.
Until next time, be loving, humble, and strong!
Hey everyone—this is Jess!
the pic above made me LOL - S
I’m riding the fragrant high of recently having mowed my lawn—a sensation that I have come to know just within the last year. In the household of my youth this chore was reserved for my father and younger brother, and discovering it in adulthood has allowed me to fully appreciate the pure, raw American dad energy I get from yanking that thing around my backyard. My mower is about 25 pounds and it’s also electric, meaning that I’m pushing with one hand while carrying the cord in my other, so I end up looking like I’m vacuuming rather than bringing home the bacon for my 1950’s nuclear family but we all do what we must to get by.
I spent last weekend at my parents’ house which always leaves me feeling both lighter and heavier; when I’m there I am magically relieved of my self-evaluations, and the direction of my life is not a question mark because it is no longer a concept that owns space or consideration (I am a child), but the tugging on my heart that pulls me towards this place feels especially tight in the time following my departure. It is very peaceful to be there and the soundtrack of my life becomes the slopping sound of my dog eating his food with the two (2) teeth he has left, and the soft breeze passing through a single wind chime.
I was home in part due to it being Mother’s Day, but my primary purpose in being there was to help my mom in her recovery from a recent shoulder surgery. All is well and she’s expected to regain the full functionality of her arm—something that she hasn’t had for nearly two years—but the road there is somewhat lengthy and she needed a buddy in the immediate aftermath. We spent most of the weekend in her bed where I worked on my laptop while also getting her hooked on my new favorite show ♥️♥️♥️ SURVIVOR ♥️♥️♥️, and on Saturday I drove us along the route of our daily walk to visit the cows…she loves them and they were really giving it back to us on this day.
I digress, but this time with my mom felt very special because it gave me the opportunity to reciprocate the care that I have received from her for all of my existence. There have not been many instances in my life in which I’ve found myself truly depended on by another adult for their basic needs, and though I was performing care for this other person I felt just as healed by it. If pleasure is the opposite of pain maybe care is the access road between the two. To tie to what you’ve said, Soph, about feeling most alive—the act of direct care makes me feel a deeper link to life and to everyone around me, because in the purest way it exists outside of conventions or judgement and is about helping someone that needs you. Also it feels very timeless, like I’m a haggard Regency Era physician, which I romanticize even though I absolutely should not because I definitely don’t have the heart to bloodlet my own mother. Or maybe I do…never underestimate your will.
I hope this email finds you well, and am grateful for all of you reading this right now! Nothing is ever perfect, and my wish is that whatever the pain is that you’re carrying with you at this moment feels a little lighter soon.
xo,
Jess
Other Stuff
Something to Listen to: Black Opera: Leading Women for a transcendent morning experience. Draw the curtains back, the world is waiting for you!
Something to Read: This Washington Post article about the 2021 return of the 17-year cicadas! I love them.
Brood X — pronounced “Brood 10,” because cicada broods are labeled with Roman numerals — is one of the largest of 15 broods of periodical cicadas in the United States. (Three broods come out every 13 years and 12 come out every 17 years.) Three species make up Brood X, and they are known for their fire-engine-red eyes, their loud choruses and their dramatic emergence every 17 years.
Something to Watch: While I was home I watched Mikey and Nicky, another Elaine May movie, and was surprised by the portrayal of such an intimate male friendship. My mom slept through the first 30 minutes and when it was over said “that was really weird”. Highly recommend!
Alternatively, if you’re looking for something quick Natasha Lyonne’s chaotic Day in the Life video is really great and I wish I could be her friend.
That’s all! Love you,
Sophie and Jess
I love junk food