Hello and happy Friday! Boy oh boy, I love a month with five full weekends in it. In my French class this week, we had to talk about our plans for the weekend (in French!) and when I said my plan was to read at least two books, everyone said “Ooooooohhh!” My most recent read is Back After This, the newest Linda Holmes, which I cannot recommend enough. Linda Holmes is a longtime audio producer, and the (non-autobiographical!) novel follows an audio producer working at a mid-market podcast studio who finds love and learns the true meaning of Christmas follows her heart. I’m not even a podcast girlie and I loved it.
My other Big Weekend Plan is listening to the new Rosalía album, Lux, in its entirety, with headphones, in the dark, no other stimuli. I’d listened to Rosalía’s previous work idly, then read some articles about her career trajectory and vocal training, and when I learned about this album and its strange, mysticism-infused orchestration, I knew it would be a Listening Event. I haven’t listened to the album yet but I’ve been replaying the lead single, Berghain, over and over. The composition/guest vocals/energy bring back how I felt listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy1 for the first time.
Spoiler alert for the video, a bird sings with Björk’s voice. Bjird.
There’s also a new Underscores song! Yay!!! I have blabbed about one of her prior projects, an album called Wallsocket, in this newsletter before. I really like this new song and I am EAGER to hear it in a slightly-too-cramped bar/concert venue, hopefully in the near future. This is the second Underscores song I know that heavily features a questionnaire (in the video!) so that’s a fun Easter egg for Wallsocketians everywhere!
While I’m sharing YouTube links, I guess I am the last person on the planet to see this one, the “We’re Just Normal Men” video. A CBBC presenter (puppet) makes another CBBC presenter (human lady) laugh uncontrollably. The context: on this kids’ channel, content about the show Ice Stars had just aired, but our hosts, Lauren and Hacker? Well. They’re NOT Ice Stars!!!
The best part IMHO2 is at 0:09, when Lauren visibly swallows a laugh. It’s a split second where she thinks there’s a chance that she can keep the giddiness/hysteria at bay. The 0:13-0:14 closed-mouth guffaw-snort is pretty great too, but it’s that early “No…no, I can do this, I can keep things under control until the cameras aren’t zoomed in on my perfect MAC D for Danger3 lipstick!” Here’s a longform, unabridged accounting of the clip’s history and proliferation. It includes the delightful bit of copy, “We dove with salmon-like deftness into the replies section.”
Re: that French class I mentioned. To supplement my in-person classes and my homework assignments, I’ve been trying to consume more French media. On a “Top French pop hits” playlist, I heard what I thought was a French cover of Sheena Easton’s 9 to 5 (Morning Train). But then the lyrics were VERY DIFFERENT. Turns out that Sylvie Vartan re-recorded a different version of the song, titled L’amour Cest Comme Une Cigarette, or, for us Anglophones, LOVE IS LIKE A CIGARETTE. My new French Fluency Goal for the immediate future is to perform this song at karaoke. Hell yeah.
And one more media recc: the full first season of ’s podcast Movies To Fall Asleep To is available. If you’ve ever wanted to listen to my voice while falling asleep, hey, freak, great news! Tristan made it possible.
They Should Make an App for Smells
Here’s a question I recognize sounds…wild. Why haven’t they made an app for smells??? Why did we abandon Smell-O-Vision technology with the slow sundowning of Nickelodeon Magazine? To me, the most grievous sin of modern consumer technologies is the pure uselessness on display; the world does not need an alarm clock which only works with an online subscription or an AI-generated video of James Gandolfini on Dancing With The Stars. What we do need is an app or a device with Smells in it. I want to have Smells in my House.
Easy and most obvious example of this is fragrance products. For example! I really want to smell the Diana Vreeland perfume Full Gallop, but I don’t want to spend money on a sample vial, and I don’t want to do my typical thing, which is “Look up 4-7 perfume stores in NYC which may or may not have it, and go try to sniff it in person.” It’s 2025! I should be able to smell my phone!!! If Bath & Body Works is going to name its products stuff like “Muted Snowfall” and “The Victory of the Angel: Night Resurrection Edition,” I should be able to smell them virtually before I commit a whopping $1 to the pocket-bac hand sanitizer. Other uses cases for smellular phones4:
Click a button and SMELL a recipe you’re cooking, to see if it smells correct
When I randomly get scared at 2am because I think maybe there’s a gas leak, download a .snif file of what an actual gas leak smells like, and SMELL IT and go back to sleep
Send farts to my friends. Like a Rickroll. But it’s a fart. THAT THEY SMELL
Volunteer my personal information to entertainment news websites and, in exchange, I get to SMELL celebrities. If I consent to tracking cookies, you should let me sniff Adam Sandler. Okay?
SMELL movies!!!!!! And if you pirate the movie, the smells will all be slightly off-kilter from the actual film’s olfactory track. Oh no, I didn’t know Doc Ock was gonna be in this movie, but then I smelled him before he appeared! Oops!
The Calm app can add SLEEP SMELLS and then I can go to sleep while listening to A Tale of Two Cities and rain sounds AND while sniffing the smell of marshmallows. All the comfort and delight of a scented candle or Scentsy, with none of the fire hazards associated with bedtime!
Ok, But Here’s an Actual App I Like
On Sunday, I went to a virtual meetup for DreamNudge, a goal-setting/long-term planning community that holds events online and in NYC. I’m so glad I did! Because it turns out that the founder, Amy, is also a comedian, and she is very cool and I’m gonna make her be my friend in real life. She started DreamNudge (the meetups, the planner, the APP[!!!!]) because she wanted an all-in-one space for concrete capital-P Planning, visualization and manifestation. There were lots of resources for affirmations, lots of habit trackers and focus-timers, lots of multistep workbooks for “Reaching the life you want 10 years from now!” but no all-in-one. So…she just built it. And it’s REALLY COOL.
The online meet-up was a just-right balance of reflective journaling, goal-setting for the week ahead and shared group affirmations. After the meeting, when I started exploring the app, I was impressed with just how comprehensive and beautiful it was. Personally, I like the web version, but the iPhone version is beautiful and great to have on hand—I’ve been exploring its interface when I’m waiting for a meeting to start or standing in the vestibule anticipating a delivery. Hopefully, for the next in-person meetup, I can go and see some of you all there too. And then all our dreams will come true together, amen. Go to the DreamNudge website for more!
WIDNBTW
Okay, the soundtrack to a random episode of How I Met Your Mother playing in the background is making me cry, so I gotta go soon. But hey, first: Consider establishing a Free Fridge or Free Pantry in an area near you! My building has one of these now, literally just a plastic bin with “Take what you need, leave what you can” signs. Pasta, beans, tuna fish and cake mix have been cycling through it this week, which is great to see. Some friends of mine have also converted Little Free Libraries in their neighborhoods into Little Free Pantries, which is great because anyone can access them at any time. If you or someone you know could use it, here’s a map of community fridges. I think most of the ones currently on the map are in the Eastern US; if my midwest, southwest and west-coast friends want to add to the map, I bet you can contact them. Also, you can fund or support maintenance of the refrigerators, in some cases!
Okay. Here’s What I Did Not Buy This Week.
Any/all of the adorable KC Royals gear from this website, Tiny Turnip. There are SEVERAL tube tops that are NOT made for my torso that I AM coveting! They have allllll the MLB you could ever need, so baseball fans, get to shoppin’.
This perfume from a company called I Hate Perfume, cause I CAN’T SMELL IT THROUGH MY PHONE
Painted Denim Horse Stuff
This adorable fragrance wall plug-in that looks like a stand mixer
This adorable (exorbitantly priced) fragrance wall plug-in that is somehow also a theater and a wall-projector???? I don’t want or need this but I LOVE the Nutcracker so I have no choice but to tell you all Look It’s So Pretty
Crafty accessories from this website, including a sewing pincushion hair clip and a bumper sticker that’s also an ad for Michaels
Alright, comrades, that’s it for this Friday. Godspeed and farewell to you. I’ve got a bunch of book-empties to write up for you soonish but it’s November and dark and quiet so maybe…I’ll just read more in a big comfy chair. We’ll see! Have a great weekend and I will chat at you soon <3