Hope you are staying as healthy as possible in the midst of this Omicron craziness… It’s been another doozy of a week.
Quote of the week:
“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” –William Faulkner
What I’m reading:
Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Commitment and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown
What I’m listening to:
The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse
I listened to a couple really illuminating podcast episodes recently too: “The Anatomy of Trust” on Unlocking Us with Brené Brown, and “Be Still” on We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle.
What I’m watching:
I have not been able to focus on any shows lately. I keep up with Dexter: New Blood and that’s about it.
Writing news:
I wrote an essay this week about how abortion bans affect women who want their pregnancies.
Next week, there’s going to be a Goodreads giveaway for my new book, Ways the World Could End, which comes out May 10. It’s awesome to start seeing advance copies of the book on social media. Thank you, bookstagrammers!
What I’m talking about:
- Omicron. Somehow, my household has escaped it thus far, but I assume it will be our turn soon. My daughter’s preschool class shut down yesterday due to a positive case. Sigh. We can’t find home tests anywhere. I’m not sure how we’re nearly 2 years into this pandemic and there are still issues with testing
- The ongoing Great Resignation. More than 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November, the highest number on record. I feel like there is so much collective fatigue and it seems collective mental health is reaching its lowest level of the pandemic. I quit my full-time job recently so I guess I’m part of the Great Resignation
- The deaths of Joan Didion, Betty White, and Sidney Poitier. More collective grief
Interesting things I learned this week:
- To Kill a Mockingbird was named the best book of the last 125 years according to a New York Times survey of readers (there were 200,000 ballots cast!)
- When asked for a word to describe 2021, these were the top contenders among readers of The Lily: Relentless, disappointing, messy, clarifying, fragile, unexpected, grief, change, survival, enlightening, tumultuous, transformational, lonely, exhausting
- Hamsters can handle their liquor
- Discarded food is the single-largest component of US landfills. The US dumps about 80 billion pounds of food per year (more than 200 pounds per person per year!)
Weirdest thing I googled this week:
“MIT artificial intelligence breast cancer.” I heard about this so wanted to read for myself. Researches at MIT have built an AI that seems to predict with unprecedented accuracy if someone will get breast cancer. Fascinating!
What I’m grateful for:
I’m so grateful for a new year, even though this one has gotten off to a rocky start. While I know it’s possible to “start fresh” at any point during the year, there is something clarifying and motivating about January. I have a lot of big goals for this year. I anticipate my word of the year will be “transformational.”