I thought about some things for you

An intermission from my deep dark feelings

Hello and happy Monday! I hope your weekend was spectacular and included a few adult beverages and some pleasantly chilly weather. I love saying “adult beverages” because it makes me feel like I’m a cheeky 30 year old who still likes to party.

I am writing to you from a cafe that smells like confectioners sugar and looks like this:

In all the excitement of starting a Substack, I spent the last few weeks burdening your inboxes with loooonnngggg essays regarding my creepy thoughts and feelings. I had the best time, but I think I speak for all of us when I say I am sick of my own emotions! So this week I want to ~swerve~ in a completely new, not-that-deep direction. Yeehaw!

Since settling into Hanoi, I’ve found that the best part of my new part-time-teacher lifestyle is how much time I have for boredom. It is so luxurious to mill about without much of anything to do. I could go on a big fat rant about how everyone deserves time to be bored, and the disservice that is done by an economy that pushes people into long working hours. But for now I’ll say that Jenny Odell says it better in her book How to Do Nothing, which is a life-changing read on the topic of un-productivity. I could not recommend it more. (Shout out Colin for gifting it to me!!!)

But I digress. ANYWAY, boredom, and the chance to spend hours being unproductive and contributing nothing, has given my brain the chance to indulge in curiosity. It has been a joy to wander further into the dumb, meandering thoughts that usually only have room to breathe on hiking trips or the painfully boring drive from Duluth to Minneapolis.

Sometimes, in the throes of contemplation, I convince myself that what I’m thinking about would be interesting to other people too. I’ve been collecting these particular thoughts in a phone note titled “writing ideas”. It includes genius topics such as:

• “Trees - they’re so crazy and special”

• “Mayo!!!”

• “what’s the deal with sugar cereal”

Since committing to sending out a newsletter every week, I have returned to this list for writing schemes. But more often than not I find that “writing ideas” isn’t really full of topics that would make good articles. Rather, it includes subject matter that would be nice to chat with a friend about or that would make a good couple paragraphs. Sometimes it’s things better kept to myself, though I’ve never been good at that.

So this week I am going to dedicate some time to these Two-Paragraph-Kind-Of-Interesting thoughts! I mentioned in my welcome e-mail for this newsletter that one of the purposes of Kitchen Sink was to fiddle with dead end writing ideas, and my parents raised me to be a woman of my word. What follows is honestly kind of a disaster. I hope you enjoy!

Three Things I’ve Been Noodling and Googling With…

1. Football and Soccer

Maybe this is something you already know but I’m sharing it anyway because I think it’s interesting and I didn’t know it!

In multiple conversations since being in Hanoi, Ellie and I have chatted loosely about how it’s crazy that the U.S. just calls it soccer when the rest of the world calls it football. It’s one of those classic “silly America” things, like inches or Fahrenheit whatever. Never in my entire life have I entertained the idea of figuring out why we use different words for the same sports game. This week Ellie googled it!

I’m not trying to play the blame game but turns out it’s actually Britain’s fault :0

Apparently a couple hundred years ago, different versions of “football” were being played all around Britain, some resembling what we know as the game today and other’s resembling something more like rugby or American football. In 1863, a fancy group called the Football Association formed official rules so that different British university teams could compete at the same sport. This sport became known as Association Football and was eventually shortened to being colloquially called “Soccer”. It is suggested that this shortening is due to the English penchant for adding “er” to the end of words to slang-ify them. “Association Football” became “Soc” and then “Soccer”. So cute!! In the 19th century the Football Association’s “soccer” was basically what became the game we know of today as “soccer” all over the world - played with feet on a field with 22 players.

As the game hopped the pond to the U.S., Americans adapted the word soccer from Britain, so now everyone was calling it soccer. Later, the U.S. began to use the word “football” to refer to the game that is today played by the NFL with their hands on a field also with 22 players.

Then, in like the 1980’s, Britain was annoyed with America for some reason and it became culturally popular to refer to soccer as “football” in Europe. So, the U.S. borrowed the term “soccer” from the Brits who eventually turned against it entirely. Huh!

This will henceforth be a sports newsletter.

2. Peppermint Mochas

Just kidding!

It’s that time of year and I won’t even pretend to be ashamed about it. This week I made my annual pilgrimage to the heart of holiday cheer: a Starbucks located inside a hotel mall. It was a gross, rainy day and I traveled the 1.2 kilometers by bicycle. By the time I slogged up to the door I was feeling resentful of the whole establishment, until I opened it to be greeted by the comforting faux wood floor, the long pastry case filled with crusty cake pops, the smell of slightly burnt coffee. I was home.

I shit you not when I say I drank my grande peppermint mocha while staring straight ahead listening to Taylor Swift’s ‘tis the damn season. There was a plastic Christmas tree in the corner. I felt a sense of peace and cheer that had evaded me since my last Starbucks holiday beverage.

Every November since we’ve known each other, my dear friend Edie and I have made a point to ring in the Christmas season with a peppermint mocha. It always happens on a day with not much going on. We get a crazed look in our eyes and cackle all the way to the nearest Starbucks. It’s one of those ongoing bits that, at least for me, is weirdly rooted in a deep, almost instinctual sincerity. You know how scientists found that seeing a picture of Jennifer Aniston lights up a particular part of your brain? There is most certainly a neuron in my head that can only be illuminated by a nauseating holiday beverage.

I poked around on the internet for articles about the peppermint mocha as an institution, with searches like “why is the peppermint mocha so important to me”, but I mostly just found lame facts. The peppermint mocha debuted in 2002. It has 175 milligrams of caffeine. Nutritionists (the Grinch incarnate) don’t want you to have it. There was this unnecessary timeline that I downloaded for you:

I was left to my own devices to consider the importance of this beverage to me and my answer is pretty lame. It’s! Just! Nice! To! Feel! Christmassy! Feeling the magical joy of Christmas fade with age and independence sucks, and things that can bring back that unadulterated sense of cheer feel so valuable, almost medicinal. It’s funny that for me this comes in the package of overpriced corporate coffee, almost emblematic of the consumerist Christmas we are supposed to despise, but that’s just the truth for me.

I’d love to pretend I’m better than the Instagram girls or the busy young professionals, but what’s the point. For me it’s not a tree full of presents or a roaring fire that make me feel TRULY jolly, it’s a stupid yule tide tummy ache drink consumed far too fast in a slippery brown leather chair. A peppermint mocha centers me in the moment. It reminds me of life’s little joys. It’s cozy. It makes me want to buy one for a friend. It reminds me that I should call my mom.

And isn’t that what the do-gooders like Cindy-Lou Who tell us that Christmas is all about anyways?

3. This short story I like and the feeling of goosebumps

The other day on a walk I started thinking about this short story by Tobias Wolff. It was shared with me by my first ever college journalism professor when I was 18 and it pops into my head sometimes. I think you should read it but if you don’t I’ll say that I think it captures perfectly how it feels to read or hear something that just sounds nice. Like a lyric or a sentence or just a few words that fall out of a friend’s mouth and sound different than you’ve ever heard them before. It also just reminds you about the little happenings that stick with you and make you feel things years later.

Anyway, there is a particular line in which the protagonists describes the “hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will.” I always liked the idea of being able to make yourself feel some type of way just by having something memorized. I know people who can give themselves goosebumps with certain songs, with ASMR videos, or just by thinking about things. For me, I can give myself that tingly feeling from reminiscing on old photos and memories. I have always found it weirdly nice to inflict nostalgia on myself.

I did a lil’ research. According to Harvard Health, goosebumps are caused by teeny muscle spasms in the skin. Biologically, they happen in mammals in response to threat or fear. A dramatic example would be a porcupine’s quills and a tame example is the way you shiver when water drips down your back. But more specifically, the goosebumps we get from aesthetic experiences, like music or writing, are called frisson. There are a number of proposed reasons why frisson might be a part of the human experience, but from what I can tell none of them are conclusive. It’s one of those scientific mysteries that make you wonder why we try so hard to boil everything down to a science.

So, in the pursuit of being able to give myself the shivers “at will”, I have set out to memorize a poem like the protagonist in the story. I shared this idea with Ellie and the next morning she had come pretty far on committing “Since Feeling is First” by EE Cummings to memory. I am still working on “Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks” by Christopher Citro. I’m not cool enough to know what makes a good poem, but I think you just know it by the frisson.

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Anywho… Some bullet points!

• Ellie and I have been slowly rewatching the Twilight Saga and I have been startled to find that I’ve turned team Edward. Has anyone else had a similar experience? I swear I used to be in love with Jacob, most ardently.

• I had a month to watch Dune before it left HBO and I didn’t do it because I was stubbornly trying to finish the book first. This has generated a very specific form of self loathing.

addicted to swan boating

I keep asking you guys questions at the end of these and you keep not answering them, but nevertheless I persist!!!! One day I will hear from you.

I’m stealing one from Ellie’s book this week: would you rather love or be loved? Comment or reply and let me know please ;)

Hugs and smooches<3

Ryley