Syllabus #54

And just like that, another week has passed.  Now that we're bumping up against June, I guess I should probably put away the sweaters and corduroy pants I was wearing to work when I was last in the habit of regularly exiting the house.  I've pretty much been wearing the same 10 year old fleece zip up and 20 year old lounge pants that used to be part of my gym uniform in high school, for the past two months.  It's been super cute.

What did Internet Santa bring us this week?

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I find myself feeling very shook by Lynn Shelton's passing, which seems unwarranted because I obviously don't know these people personally.  Even so, Marc Maron is such an open book on his podcast, and the bits that he has shared about his life in quarantine with Lynn made them like real people to me.  The way he mentioned her non-COVID sickness in the episodes leading up to her death, it's clear how utterly shocking this all must be.  I don't mean to fixate on one specific death when there are tens of thousands of people dying every day.  But can you imagine doing everything you can to avoid coronavirus, and then suddenly, unexpectedly losing the only person with whom you can currently have human contact to another illness entirely?  That's bonkers, man.


John Oliver shared this on Last Week Tonight, but some Dutch products are not meant to be kept to oneself, and must be shared with friends - a delicious Gouda, a fat spliff, and Jelle's Marble Runs.


I went to the dentist on Monday, and it wasn't much like this article described.  I wasn't allowed inside until my chair was ready, there was one other patient in the whole building, and every employee was wearing a mask.  The hygienist wore a full face shield as well as a mask, but she did the cleaning by herself, and I DID NOT receive a goody bag.  Probably because I told them I had an electric toothbrush (thanks, Mom!) and they knew I didn't need their bullshit free toothbrush.  Also, it would have been a real slap in the face to receive a travel size toothpaste.  Cool cool cool, can't wait to use this in my own bathroom while staring at a picture of a beach on my phone.

Dammit, Joe.

 Jonathan Safran Foer with a poetic endorsement for vegetarianism:  "With the horror of pandemic pressing from behind, and the new questioning of what is essential, we can now see the door that was always there. As in a dream where our homes have rooms unknown to our waking selves, we can sense there is a better way of eating, a life closer to our values. On the other side is not something new, but something that calls from the past — a world in which farmers were not myths, tortured bodies were not food and the planet was not the bill at the end of the meal."

This smiling loaf -

I combined two recipes, Joy the Baker's tahini banana bread and Izy Hossack's sourdough discard banana bread.  Really, what I did was eyeball the two recipes and decide it would be okay to swap the portion of white flour in Joy's recipe with the portion of sourdough starter in Izy's recipe.  It's good!  It's not life changing, but it gets the job done.  Next time I think I'll swirl some tahini in at the end for a marbling effect in addition to the portion that gets fully mixed with the other wet ingredients.

Analog Reading:

Finished Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson.  Witty.  Nihilistic.  Recommend.

Almost through with The Woman in the Window  by A.J. Finn.  It's like Rear Window has a prescription drug- and alcohol-addicted baby with the The Sixth Sense, but saying that is kind of a major spoiler, so if you haven't read it and intend to, please forget what I just said and I'm sorry.