The Internet Personified: Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself

Newsletter title from the poem Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

This is my end-of-year, stuff-I-love-that-has-changed-my-life recommendation newsletter! (I'm doing the book recommendations as an article this year, link up soon.)

* It's my birthday today. I've just turned 37, depending on the sort of person you are. (There are two types of birthday people--the ones who believe that you are the age you turn, so I'm in my thirty seventh year, or the ones who believe you've FINISHED thirty seven and are now in your thirty eighth year. I'm in the former camp.) One of my birthday presents from K (the second one is a lovely artsy poster of Bojack Horseman which will hang in our living room and confuse anyone who doesn't know the show. "I didn't know you were so into horses," they'll say) was a mechanical keyboard, which is not a piano thing, it's a computer thing. A mechanical keyboard is basically this keyboard with sticky-out keys which make noises when you type and feels very tactile. It's beloved by gamers, and when we were in Bangkok, K took me to a game shop to look at one, and at first I was inclined to be all like "who needs a clackety keyboard" until I realised I do. I need a clackety keyboard. Writing as a craft is not very exciting, there's not much you do with your hands, and even though the word count rises, it never feels as satisfying as crocheting something, for example. I mean that feeling that you have constructed an object where before there was no object, a book has come into the world out of your fingers! There should be something that feels like you're adding words, no? Chain by chain, letter by letter? This keyboard does that. In fact, in part, I am writing this to you today, so that I can feel the springs under my fingers, the letters bounce back, it's like a typewriter almost. I love it so much. (It's very big and heavy though so not easy to travel with, which is sad.) (The brand is Red Gear, if you'd like to get one for yourself.)


* Speaking of books! I have a new book out, the second in the Girls of the Mahabharata series. It's called The One Who Had Two Lives and everyone who has read it thinks its amazing, so you should read it too. Here's a link to buy. I'm having a discussion + reading in Kochi at HC bookstore on the 22nd, and one in Bangalore, TBD, between the 27 and the 4th-ish, so if you're in either of those cities, please come. In Delhi, I'm having a reading on January 10, and I will send you a reminder closer to the day. Oh, also, in case you need further persuasion, here's an excerpt that ran on Scroll of the very exciting swayamvara chapter.

* Having some fun with Amazon Music. It is not ideal, as it doesn't even have a "if you liked this you will like that" but it's bundled into my Prime subscription and works with Alexa, so it'll do for the time being. I made a playlist which is quite good (mostly cobbled together from Spotify playlists, but Spotify isn't HERE now is it?) and it occurred to me that you might enjoy this playlist too. It only works if you have Amazon Music, of course, but since most of you probably already have Prime, this'll work for you. Wouldja let me know if you want more playlists? I have loads and this could be like the RJ career I've always dreamed of. (Seriously. DREAM. JOB.)

* Now I will reveal my age and tell you that one of the best things I bought in 2018 was an orthopaedic pillow. No, seriously. I have awful posture from sitting hunched over my keyboard for hours on end, and this has solved any lingering back and shoulder aches I have. You know how I know? Because when I came back from my sojourn abroad, my neck and shoulder were KILLING me and it was a familiar, unfamiliar pain, like, you again? And I realised I had not felt it at all for so many months--which means, ta-dah! PILLOW. Get one, you'll be amazed. I miss it when I leave, but it's a good reason to come home again. (Here's the one I bought, hopefully TinyLetter will let me send you affiliate links.)

* Facewash routines, eh? SO BORING. (Well, for me, and I am a person with very little patience. Yesterday I was at the beauty salon getting a haircut and a blue streak--yes, I have a blue streak now---and I had to sit there for a THOUSAND HOURS, because black hair has to be bleached before it can be coloured, and I watched all the women there and wondered how they did this, because I was so fidgety, I wanted to run away with aluminium foil in my hair.) While in Saigon, I bought an exfoliating face brush shaped like an octopus, and it's so cute and so easy to use (rinse, lather, scrub, rinse, done) plus my skin looks great now. I am, unfortunately, at an age where I have to be slightly mindful of skin and hair otherwise I'll look like a crone, and I'm not quite ready to look like a crone yet. (Link.)

* One thing I bought as an impulse purchase and now can't live without is a little ring stand for my phone. I have a Moto G5S, which comes with handy-dandy gestures to open the camera and the flashlight (you twist it in your hand, very Harry Potter-esque) and with the ring I can hang on to it easily, plus hold to look for directions in a crowded street, plus when we're out of the city and on the back of a scooter, for example, it's a good grip so the phone doesn't slip from your hand. Otherwise, you can use it to prop up on your bathroom counter while you poo, or hang it off a nail for a short charger. I like mine so much that when I change phones, I'm going to take this off and Fevicol it to a new one. (Link.)

* And finally, all my travel would have been harder if I hadn't had the PERFECT pair of pants to travel in. I've long held that Decathlon is amazing in terms of clothes--my ski jacket from there is super warm and kinda fashionable as well, it's held up well in both Delhi and German winters (except, sad, we're having a warm year this time), and so when I bought mountaineering pants from there this summer, I wasn't expecting to MOUNTAINEER (hah, as if), but I did want easy dry comfy pants that I could wear on planes and trains and buses without looking like a complete schlub. These are those pants, and they also convert into shorts if it's hot. The pockets are very small though (why do designers think women don't have anything to carry?) but they will hold a slim phone and your cards and so on. (Link.)


Okay! Those are my amazing things of 2018, not a lot, but it hasn't been a very consume-y year. Write in or just reply to this email with your amazing things and I'll put them in a future newsletter.

This month in stuff I wrote:

My essay on online and offline personas came out in India Quarterly in October, but has only just been made available online.

Another story: I go out to dinner to a friend’s house. Around me are some people I know and some I don’t. It has been approximately a year since that Telegraph article came out, about eight months since my first book was published. One of the men asks me, “Are you that blogger lady?” “Yes,” I say, somewhat warily, because I am used to all sorts now. “Wow, you’re really not as hot as I thought you’d be,” he said. I was speechless. It was almost as though he was accusing me of cheating him of something. How dare I—someone “not as hot” as he thought I would or should be—write these hot-sounding stories of my life?

My book recommendation column to end the year--three books about lonely women.

I’m talking about Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, now a Netflix series, but also widely considered one of the best literary terror books ever written. (Fun fact I learnt while researching for this column: ‘terror’ is the anticipation of something bad about to happen, ‘horror’ is the feeling of revulsion after the bad thing has happened) In the book, four strangers go to stay at Hill House, a well-known ‘haunted house’, in order to study it.

And my latest mythology for the millennial column: four reasons why Brahma is super problematic.

The story of Brahma is a bit like the story of the very first domestic hamsters, which I read about online recently. The first hamsters were captured by this scientist — a mother and her litter. The mother started to eat her babies, so he killed her and then thought his experiment was sort of doomed, because the rest were just brothers and sisters, but it turns out that hamsters have no such compunctions, so most of our domestic hamsters today come from that Lannister pairing. Brahma = hamsters in this metaphor, except, he had no sisters, only a daughter he created out of thin air and then wanted to have sex with very badly.

This week(ish) in stuff I loved on the internet

Inside the mind of a digital native.

Her younger siblings, aged 17 and 18, have a totally different relationship with social media. They’re not into sharing and mock her for the relentlessness of her Instagram. It’s like how she used to be with Snapchat where she’d have stories – a sequence of images from a 24-hour period – that were 200 seconds long and her friends would be like, “oh my god can you please stop”, and she’d be like, “sorry I was drunk”. Now Snapchat is over, and Alexa only uses Facebook as a photo archive, to publicise an event or announce a relationship. Becoming Facebook official, as she and Olly did last year, remains significant. “Does it matter?” Olly asked at the time. “YES IT MATTERS,” said Alexa. But if you were to post a status on your wall these days you’d be a goddam social pariah.

The male gaze in art and why it matters. (I LOVED THIS ESSAY.)

The male glance is how comedies about women become chick flicks. It’s how discussions of serious movies with female protagonists consign them to the unappealing stable of “strong female characters.” It’s how soap operas and reality television become synonymous with trash. It tricks us into pronouncing mothers intrinsically boring, and it quietly convinces us that female friendships come in two strains: conventional jealousy or the even less appealing non-plot of saccharine love. The third narrative possibility, frenemy-cum-friend, is an only slightly less shallow conversion myth. Who consumes these stories? Who could want to?

A list of things this guy learned in 2018 which are actually very cool

Researchers found that Starbucks customers in northern China are more likely to move chairs out of their way, while customers in southern China will move themselves around the chairs. The researchers attribute this to ancestral food production. In the north, the primary crop is wheat, which is grown by individual farmers. In the south, farmers have to collaborate to grow rice. So, they believe, people in the south are less individualistic.

Honeymoon planners for billionaires (actually got this from the previous link!)

But sometimes trips go wildly awry, like when a couple in Paris got stuck behind a car accident on the way to the airport. Ezon immediately arranged for four motorbikes to pick them up in the middle of the highway (two for the travelers, two for their luggage) and zip them between gridlocked vehicles to make their flight.

I am here for this nostalgia piece on Sweet Valley High

Around Jessica and Elizabeth was a clutch of friends, strategically placed above or below the twins in terms of looks, popularity, wealth, and social status. Lila Fowler, Jess’s filthy-rich bestie, was a classic mean girl who loved Jessica as much as she loved competing with her. Enid Rollins (the only other Enid of my life was the British children’s author Enid Blyton, so naturally I was immediately on board with her) was Elizabeth’s bestie. Enid had a shady past, but she was now a sensible, supportive brunette of nonthreatening (read: lower) socioeconomic status whom I have thought about a lot over the years, because, well, was she a little bit in love with Elizabeth?

And from that previous link, here's a great essay by a former SVH ghostwriter

Sweet Valley High set its fables of “same and different” in a 1980s world of new wealth and upward mobility, latching on to an innovative publishing reality: create a mass-market paperback series for young female readers, keep the price point low enough that it could be absorbed by a middle-class allowance, and use the books themselves to advertise each other by “seeding” the plots of each subsequent book in the final chapters. After almost a decade of new realism offered to teen readers by Judy Blume, whose heroines had scoliosis or weight problems or pimples and worried about getting their periods and struggled about whether or not to believe in God, Sweet Valley High offered a pastel, romantic antidote: a world of action instead of contemplation, a world in which bodies were seen soft-focus, free of the slightest blemish or appetite. Mysterious illnesses aside, this was a disembodied world, where corporeality was hinted at solely through actions: the twins “sped” in their shiny red Fiat Spider convertible; “dashed” to the mall; or “raced” upstairs to phone a friend. Rhetoric mattered here as much as action—the books were filled with dialogue, and talk was everywhere—gossip, confidences, promises, avowals, protests, demurrals. I never knew, before I started writing for Sweet Valley, how many synonyms there were for the verb “said.” The twins by and large didn’t “say” things—instead, they chuckled and giggled and whispered and murmured and sighed. They “gasped” over good news or bad. They lived in a fantasy world, these girls, and as long as I was writing about them, to some extent, so did I.

And finally, a Very Special Birthday Link: that awkward phase in your mid-30s no one tells you about

You are never more aware of how special and unique you aren’t, then at 35 when you’re just paddling along and doing things and not breaking any records for being old nor young while doing them. Yet you’re racing against the clock to get, as Glynnis MacNicol surmised, a clear sense of what you’ve got and what you’ll do with it, so you have precisely zero time for anyone else’s drama. You are more on your bullshit than possibly any other time.

Have a great my-birthday and an excellent week ahead!
xx
m

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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