Happy Independence Day to our loyal and beloved readership <3
To-do list:
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Links:
Book Brah sent me this essay by Becca Rothfield on how nobody tolerates a dour wench. [I agree with the author on the futility of self-help and therapy, but she never asks “how did happiness come to be a virtue?” and I suspect that has a lot to do with the rejection of holiness as the measure of a man (or woman.) She devalues happiness in a way that is inappropriate for the Christian, who has been commanded to rejoice in the Lord always (yes I am “happiness and joy are synonyms”-pilled.) Anyway, I think it is often the glory of a woman to be strong in the face of misery. –Sarah]
You’ve probably been analyzing American Girl memes wrong, or something. NYT wouldn't get it…
Tweets:
[Apparently everybody knows about the Staples Easy Button? I did not know about the Staples Easy Button. –Sarah]
Would you?? Please respond and let us know.
[I’m looking for my old Bill Clinton fleets– please respond if you still have screenshots. –Sarah]
Food:
Sarah
On Saturday she made pasta e fagioli for her family. It’s an Italian soup with pasta, beans, sausage, and tomato. They liked it!
She followed this instant pot recipe, with modifications for stovetop. She heard that twitter user “teddy raccovelt” is going to cook this for his roommates this week and looks forward to publishing updates next week.
[I’m okay with this as a first attempt but it’s not the quality of workmanship I can take pride in, fruit arrangement-wise. I used Mel’s Kitchen’s recipe for this and I can’t say the shortbread was my favorite. –Sarah]
Clare had a very, very dear friend visit this week. He got to town on Tuesday afternoon which meant that she scalped him from the bus stop and immediately made him go to church with her for her Tuesday thing—you know, the Tuesday thing—and make ten thousand million(ish) gallons of broccoli cheddar soup. Not the kind of thing anyone wants to eat on a blazing summer day! Nonetheless, that was the situation. It honestly made the both of them nauseous to look at, but when they finally brought themselves to try it, it was, like, completely normal and fine. The next day they went on a hike and ate all kinds of great things, including pizza from a little joint called Frankly…Pizza! (Exclamation mark theirs.) Um, and then the day after that she made him a little breakfast, pictured below, and then dropped him off at the airport, at which point she cry, cry, cried in her lonely heart for a little bit, because it’s tough to say goodbye!
Hymn:
Be still, my soul
Author: Kathrina von Schlegel; Translator: Jane Borthwick (1855); Tune: FINLANDIA
Be still, my soul; the Lord is on your side;
bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
leave to your God to order and provide;
in ev'ry change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul; your best, your heav’nly friend
through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.Be still, my soul; your God will undertake
to guide the future as he has the past;
your hope, your confidence, let nothing shake;
all now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul; the waves and winds still know
his voice who ruled them while he lived below.Be still, my soul; when dearest friends depart
and all is darkened in the vale of tears,
then you will better know his love, his heart,
who comes to soothe your sorrows and your fears.
Be still, my soul; your Jesus can repay
from his own fullness all he takes away.Be still, my soul; the hour is hast'ning on
when we shall be forever with the Lord,
when disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
sorrow forgot, love's purest joys restored.
Be still my soul; when change and tears are past,
all safe and blessed we shall meet at last.
[Oh, I love this one… We sing it at my church sometimes and it occasionally makes me choke up. —C] [I was very moved today by this line: “Be still, my soul; your Jesus can repay from his own fullness all he takes away. –S] [Okay. 🥺 —C]
Music:
Sarah went to a patriotic outdoor concert tonight where they didn’t play the 1812 overture (?) because of Russia or something? The woke left is taking away a piece of my patriotic heritage I neither knew nor cared about.
Clare wants recommendations for a playlist for when she drives out to West Virginia with her dog on Tuesday. She’s sort of feeling like a really sappy one so she can get deep down into her own interior drama. Think Patsy Cline, Britney Spears, and Lesley Gore.
Poem:
Morning Song
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the fat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window squareWhitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
Sylvia Plath, from Collected Poems, 1960 [This poem was positively inscrutable for me when I thought too much. Now, it all seems so clear. And I want to talk to you about the integrity of the lines, the dexterity of the movement from image to image, and Plath’s relentless pacing. But I’m going to leave it! I’m going to leave it. —C]
What we’re reading:
Clare didn’t read much this week, she is afraid; she plummeted into the depths of an exceptional intellectual sloth. She is embarrassed, because someone she knows sent her, in an act of very sweet vulnerability, some of his own brief writing, but because she is a cow, she didn’t see it in her inbox, so tonight her acquaintance found himself in the awkward position of asking her if she’d read it. The question placed the associate editor in the even more awkward position of blinking, completely clueless as to what he might be talking about, and then profusely apologizing for unintentionally casting him into a churning sea of insecurity. She is going to go read them now. She hopes to be delighted; she wants to return to him with nothing but the utmost delight.
Sarah didn’t read either! Except the Bible. She spends June and December in the Proverbs and the rest of the year in the Psalms, and she’s glad to be back in a Psalm month. She really should finish The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Exhortations:
Be still, your soul!
Request for approval:
Is this okay?