threads and pieces

showing reads love by cementing them into my thoughts

I don’t do this often, but I’ve consumed so many thought-provoking pieces recently, and I want to understand them and why they stood out to me so much. I’m writing those thoughts out to clarify them for myself. But hopefully a positive byproduct of that will be that others will be able to enjoy them as well. Reading and reflecting on the same things together = love language. So here we go, together 💛

articles, essays, and pieces:

• “research as leisure activity” by

  Celine Nguyen
  - I’m excited about this piece because I’m often surrounded by conversations about academia that see the academy as too rigid, unforgiving, and single-tracked. And it can be those things. However, this article reminds us that research can be essential to the artistic process and a way to process various streams of information. If you want to merge art and research, this is your read.

• “I Regret What’s In My Camera Roll” by

  Totally Recommend
  - This hit home for me because I’ve been thinking so intentionally about how I want to capture my photos. I think about how I want to store photos in Google Drive. I’ve created mini projects for polaroids, film photos, and DSLR shots. I’ve been trying to prioritize “behind the scenes” shots of what goes on in a gathering, not just the pretty and pristine that’s in front of a camera and shared on social media. While traveling Europe recently, I handed everyone a disposable camera so that they could each capture their favorite moments (shout out to my friend Harsh for this idea). I wanted to see that kind of beauty from their perspectives, to see what was meaningful to them. I’ll develop some of the film this weekend.

• “you should probably have a kid” by

  benedict
  - Having a child can be a sensitive subject—prone to questions about preferences, lifestyles, gender expectations, disabilities and more. By the end of this article, I felt so touched by the perspective on this process. As someone who wants to have kids in the future, it felt like a piece that could transform the difficult into the magnificent. Two quotes stood out to me, especially:

  • “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”¹

  • “Your kids get direct hardwired access to your brain stem, the part that instantly spikes your heart rate and crunches your shoulders up to your ears, and they aren’t shy about using it. But that’s what you’ve been training for all this time, right? To manage your own emotions and subjectivity, so that you can help them handle theirs.” 

• “Letter to My Younger Self #7: Life Won’t Wait, but Writing Will” by

  Grace Loh Prasad
  in
  Oldster Magazine
  - Such a needed wake up call to the ways that living life and writing can both be prioritized. The quote comes to mind: “you can have everything, maybe just not all at once.” This article shows us that’s OK—both processes feed into each other. What matters is “…writing has never been just about the output; it’s also about the process, the mistakes, the learning, and ultimately growth.”

• “Ultra-Processed Love” by

  Michelle Albanes-Davis
  - This is the reminder that I knew I needed that the food industry is not looking out for us. In the face of productivity, cooking is looked at as an inconvenience. The question is often: how can I cook quickly and nutritiously enough so that it doesn’t interfere with other aspects of my life? But this article reminds us that food is a core sustaining force of life. What’s more, it can drastically improve our quality of life. Deferring to default options won’t be enough.

• “we are all palestinians” by

  Pranay Somayajula
  - Grateful to find a collection of articles for topics that are top of mind such as encampments, Palestine, solidarity, politics, and balancing life.

• Anything at all by

  Dia Becker
  in
  Broke But Moisturized
  . Some of her recent brilliant pieces have been “The House We Bought and Lost”, “No, I am not pregnant (yet)”, and her recent comeback of Daily Drip. I will read anything written by her. I appreciate all of the tender care that goes into her writing. I’m a fan of her Daily Drip series because I just want to know how she thinks about her daily life. I think the pieces are all that good!

books:

Since January, I’ve started several books, only to leave them 90% read. While on vacation, I picked them back up in my e-readers, and finished several at once and loved them:

• The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke - I will read anything by Rilke. I will obsess and quote most things by Rilke. This book is so focused on the process of life. Some of the essays include: on life and living, on work, on solitude, on art, on love, on loss, dying, and death—such a magnificent collection.

• Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar - To read essays by

  Cheryl Strayed
  is a lesson into how to process the events of your life.

• Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born - This is a book on how to think about creativity and process. It solidifies them down to a digestible “how-to”. It’s so good that it unblocks mental roadblocks.

• Currently in the process of reading: The Creative Act: A Way of Being and Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos and Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. They’re all books that illuminate how to think and bring in different aspects of yourself into a cohesive whole.

• I’ve been seeing The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity crop up as a suggestion by multiple people, so it’s currently on hold at Libby.

academic:

• I’m reading Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means. It’s an academic book, but I love it so much that I feel I could read it at the pool, or beach, or lying in the sun. If you’ve ever wondered why some processes dealing with government are so easy (social security) while some are so difficult (signing up for health care) it reveals the intention behind all of these policy decisions. It has so much to do with what I’m researching. I love that it’s a research topic that’s been made accessible via its public-facing writing style.

• “The Health Costs of Cost-Sharing” - It’s a pretty seminal piece, showing causal evidence that higher costs can lead to lower use of necessary drugs, leading to more death.

  • P.S. I’m trying to start pieces that translate academic research into more digestible essays. If that sounds like your thing, feel free to send me a message or comment.

my notes:

Oh and not to mention, what I’ve been consuming the most is probably the U.S. swimming Olympic trials. There are so many culminating forces leading up to these single moments, decided by milliseconds. The process of it, the behind-the-scenes that we don’t see, is so fascinating to me. I still remember when gold medalists from the last Olympics were being interviewed, and they said they’d go on a short vacation but would then need to start training for the next Olympics. Going in depth in anything requires that much dedication, no matter which way you permute it.

1. Attributed to a quote by David Foster Wallace