Stuff I loved in 2023
My “best of” list for 2023. It’s not comprehensive. Thanks for reading Observables this year! Here’s to feeling more hope in 2024.
Best lawyer-thriller series:
A Nearly Normal Family. Watch it in Swedish with subtitles, I beg you. It’s a better experience.
Best gentle movie:
Past Lives—which I wrote about here.
Best reading:
Violet’s note for Santa. Let me confirm that she has requested a Tesla for Simon and a ring or a computer for me. If Santa doesn’t know what ring to choose, go with the computer, she writes.
Letters to Santa are especially tender for me because December is close to heart check up time, which brings me right back to the feelings of January 2014. I have blocked so many things out—weird things. Elsie said she has trauma around getting her teeth pulled. I don’t recall. My sister reminds me of the time we went to an outlet mall to buy lipstick and I yelled at her because she made my mom cry. Blocked. But maybe those things happened between 2013-2015 when all I could think about was survival that looked like feeding my infant vials of iron supplement, assessing every moment she was out of breath, handing her over to a nurse at 6 a.m one Monday in January of 2014.
If you were my friend in 2013-2015 and had pain I should have been paying attention to, let me formally apologize.
Best substack post which confirms thy WHY of community:
has a great post called “no good alone” in which she talks about our Western approach to friendship: go to therapy (alone) to discover the toxic people in your life that should be expelled - versus sticking with them and healing together. I find her ideas quite radical. She writes,When we insist that we could only ever effectively love someone who’s been perfectly “healed” — who will not struggle, accidentally hurt us, trigger us, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, or participate in any other uncomfortable display of humanity — we are reinforcing, and perhaps projecting, our own beliefs that we have to be perfect in order to be loved.
There is one way to reject this: make the choice to love someone who is as flawed as you are.
I have equally learned about the value of community this year from
. A constant refrain in her writing: “Widen our circles of care.”
Best outfit:
Although, one of Violet’s friends has me rethinking fashion in general. I accompanied her class on a school trip and got to chatting. She explained to me that she’s not interested in jewelry, piercings (nonsense!) or fashion. I said maybe it’s a way for people to express themselves. “Not for me,” she said. “People should be looking at what I’m like on the inside.” Mic drop.
Still a girl has to wear shoes.
Best comfy shoe purchase:
Best musical experience:
Hadestown, based on the myth of Orpheus who gets afraid and turns back to see if the woman he loves, Eurydice, is still following him out of Hades. He’s not supposed to check. He’s supposed to trust. Checking means being condemned to Hades without her. That moment when Orpheus….looks back. And then add the tear-inducing 5-part harmonies to the mix. There was a collective inhale.
Elsie, Simon and our friend Dave just thought the whole thing was weird :)
Best random item:
My favourite example of me doing what I want: buying this very random day-timer. I thought it was a book with family-themed stories. Turns out it was a day timer with exceedingly random quotations and bits of photography about broken families. Take this quotation from Zadie Smith which I will enjoy the week of Feb 12-Feb 18:
I think of that wonderful Jerry Seinfeld line: ‘There’s no such thing as fun for the whole family.’ Somebody’s going to have to give up something: it’s only a question of how much and to whom.
I’m very happy with this purchase. Movies/books/tv shows or day-timers about a dysfunctional family? My jam.
Testimonials:
A new friend from Germany says about Observables: “Your articles are a breath of fresh air!” Thanks, Yael.