Song to describe the month?
'While my Guitar Gently Weeps - Anthology 3 edition' by the Beatles. How are you feeling lately?
I'm adjusting to the pace of things, to not take things personally and speculate unenecessarily.
Three words to describe the last month?
fresh, housekeeping, doomscroll
What was your relationship with the digital like this month?
My digital life was spent on two opposite ends of the spectrum. On one side was quiet, tending to my blog, learning logseq and tweaking my terminal tools. The other was doomscrolling trying to make sense of the world.
Did you read anything great?
The best thing I read was "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating" by Geneen Roth. I read it after reading about the Semiglutide/Ozempic/Wegovy craze. For the uninitiated those are injectible weight loss drugs that supress apetite and lead to rapid weight loss. A lot of celebrities have been using it as a shortcut to a bikini body when it was initially intended for obese and diabetic patients. I read this book after coming across it on reddit by a user who described a 'life changing' approach to eating and mindset.
I have always been sceptical of weight loss culture - calorie counting, excessive excercise and the bulk/cut cycle that never ends doesn't seem like a sustainable way to live. It feels like a natural extention of the disiplined, restrictive and ascetic ideal that is sold to us. In Roth's words "Society warns us to be afraid of ourselves". In her book she advocates for eating to satiety and eating so that we are satisfied. She provides practical tools and advice to ensure we eat when/what we truly want and reframes eating as a mindful process of discovery. It's an amazing book and I can whole heartedly recommend it.
Another great book I read was "Earthlings" by Sayaka Murata. As with many other east asian works in translation the subject matter is difficult and painful but the tone and reactions are aloof, austere and whimsical. Murata beautifully renders the universal yearning for escapism from the pain of living.