The Internet Personified: The Just Links Edition
A lot of lovely lovely things for you to read
Dear Ones*
*which is, incidentally, the way Elizabeth Gilbert begins her missives to people. Dear ONES. It sounds sort of pretentious when I say it, but maybe coming from Elizabeth Gilbert you’re imagining yoga pants and blonde hair and sweet-smelling candles. Imagine me instead: my room sort of smells of cheese because I found an old hunk of frozen camembert in the freezer, BARELY left it outside long enough to defrost and then just clomped big gooey chunks off it to eat plain, with my fingers, so there is a distinct camembert ODOUR in my small room. I am wearing a comfortable but torn t-shirt and comfortable but also torn shorts. My hair is half-shaven as an experiment, which I love, but the half that isn’t shaven has gone very straight and also frizzy from a shampoo so in order to keep it out of my eyes I have braided it on side and tucked it behind my ear. I am no Elizabeth Gilbert.
Perhaps, you, like me, are feeling distinctly unproductive the last two days. I’ve been approaching my Mysterious Writing Project That I Have Been Alluding To Coyly full steam, like the little engine that could, but every now and then I need a brain break. Brain break days are somewhat bleak these days*, because I just wander around feeling sorry for myself and eating my feelings (see: camembert chunks) (we have just ordered a lot of early dinner from Teekoy’s Kerala Kitchen and if you are within delivery range from them, I highly recommend) and also reading the internet and keeping a little list of links I want to send you and today I looked at that list and it was really long and I had nothing new I wanted to tell you guys anyway, so I decided you’re just going to get a newsletter of links this time, no life updates. Well, maybe some life updates will sneak in there between links, but totally inadvertently.
*in the OLD days, you would find an unproductive Meenakshi messaging a friend or twenty and asking if they wanted to hang out and distract her. In the OLD days, a vortex of productivity could emerge from the unproduction, so that I’d be deciding what to WEAR on my night out just now. In the NEW days, I feel like I have to put in a little privilege disclaimer—yes, I know I’m lucky, if one of the major things I miss is seeing friends pfft—at least I have my health, at least people I love (TOUCH WOOD, TOUCH WOOD, TOUCH WOOD) have their health too. But I do, I do miss my friends, more than having clean FLOORS or someone to cook for me, I miss evenings out, and random conversations you didn’t have to type or shout into a video call void, I miss other people’s PERFUME and yes, oh my god, other people’s HOMES, my own has grown so familiar I can’t even see it any more.
I’m not dividing these into COVID and non-COVID because thanks to my general blahs, I have decided that this plague year is a plague year and we might as well accept that all stories from here on out, unless referring to the past, and even then sometimes, will have a reference to the plague.
Okay, here we go!
Barkha Dutt (whose field reporting during the migrant crisis has been phenomenal) on why she went from being pro to anti-lockdown.
Risk rates ie how likely are you to get corona from deliveries (low) or from meeting even a small group of friends (high) (sighhhh)
Can’t explain this essay called Fuck The Bread, The Bread Is Over but it made me sigh-smile also. (Sighmile?) Also I enjoyed it, in case my sighmile description wasn’t enough.
Art critic Jerry Saltz on his appetites is a weird and fucked up true story which is also nice and blog-evocative.
I think we too should have a party in a …. Google Doc?
Is flying safe? Nooo, says one of the people who took a flight. Okay, so this was the US, where they are not forcing everyone to get a random contact tracing app, but that random contact tracing app isn’t really going to save you either, so, try and not fly unless you absolutely HAVE to for the next few months. Like, if we’re giving ourselves a deadline, should we say August? Does that work for everyone? Let’s just be super paranoid till August, extend—like the government—if needed.
Think about your extroverted friends a little extra. This piece really resonated with me. I did one of those Meyers-Briggs HIGHLY UNSCIENTIFIC tests and it said I was not an extroverted introvert like I always thought I was but, in fact, an introverted extrovert, and whatever they said about that sort of personality rang true to me? So while I like having alone time more than a full extrovert, I still get some energy from being around other people, hence my general ennui. Like a vampire unable to feed. At least I have K, and we are (still) quite chatty with each other despite being in each other’s company 24/7 for the past two months. (I am finally able to go see my mother though after Delhi’s extremely long mega lockdown had us on opposite sides of the city, so we are doing that this weekend!)
Women writers credited with inventing totally new words for the first time.
A history of the ultra-processed food in your shopping basket. Focus on England & South America but could totes be here too. In faaact, I had read an article about malnourishment and obesity in India linked to how much packaged food there is now, let me see if I can pull it up for you, ah, here we go. This is a good read too from 2015.
Do you remember the Hey Ladies series from The Toast? There’s an updated quarantine version! (For everyone else, the article includes links to the older series. You’ll love it.)
I had asked for fun cookbooks since I’ve been using a lot lately and someone pointed me towards the Hawkins Pressure Cooker cookbook, now online! Someone else told me about Usha’s Pickle Digest, and I found it because the author has made it free to read online (see tweet below) plus an interview with her which was great fun to read. (It’s not just pickles, it’s also how to like, wash and store things, which I found useful.)
While we’re on the subject of domesticity, here’s a lovely story about the spinny mop’s popularity in India now, which I too succumbed to recently and am happy to report, it is only a LITTLE crappy (it has lost its lock mechanism already so it keeps collapsing, unless you hold it at a certain angle), but mostly useful.
Robert Pattinson seems weird and cool.
Stanley Tucci seems lovely, AS SUSPECTED.
A little American media gossip, since we’re all starved for it. The New York Times called Ronan Farrow (who broke the Weinstein story) a bad reporter. Tweet storms followed.
An artist becomes besties with a wild bird, which makes me jealous because the mynahs checking out our outside kitchen space seem to have found a BETTER PLACE TO BE, so FINE, Ashok and Shanti, I guess you just took the oats we left for you FOR GRANTED.
And finally—phew, we’ve been here a while!—Robin Sloan (an author whose newsletter I recommend highly) on a weird piece of music called the Integration Loop.
That’s all from me, have a great week and a good time clicking on alllll those links. This week’s featured gif animal is the goose, a scary and awesome bird.
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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