You Are Doing A Good Enough Job

All my recommendations of what to listen to, read, think about, appreciate, discuss, cook, and more this week. Hello out there, and happy Friday! This week, my suggestions are all just a tiny bit challenging, in a way that I think is appropriate for fall. I’ve got the first three above the fold — under the paywall is a very old photograph of me with a person, my foolproof hummus recipe, and lesbian robins. Enjoy! October is here! 1.

Hi Erins, Happy October! Over here, September was over-full: going back to school alongside the desperate trying to squeeze the joy of the outdoors left in the last days of summer. Kat and I took a trip to Wisconsin, Diana had a birthday party and made mint mojitos in the communal Slushi machine. Tanager got started at her first year at a public elementa… Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Sophie Lucido Johnson. Or purchase a paid subscription.

PLUS: Pre-order calendars, a big announcement, starlings, and more 0:00 -16:39 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. (THIS IS THE BIG BI-MONTHLY EMAIL!) A major complication about teaching a class about analyzing humor and comedy at a school where a significant percentage of the population is not from the United States is that comedy does not always travel well. At least, a lot of what’s funny to you and to me can easily get lost in translation.

Time to talk essays! We’ll gather to discuss How to Be a Living Thing by Mari Andrew this evening. The discussion begins at 7 PM CENTRAL TIME. Here is the Zoom link.! If you can’t make it tonight, but want to discuss this book anyway, leave any thoughts you might have had while reading in the comments — I’ll respond (and so can you!). Looking forward to …

Maybe it’s not really fair for me to use this space — where I normally tell you what lipstick I think you should buy or what novel you should use to escape — to talk at some length about this buzzy New York Times article. My husband read it the day it came out, and told me to read it, too. For lots of reasons, it made both of us cry.

It really does feel like fall. It’s never snuck up on me and punched me in the face quite like it has this year. I think it was all the rain and the smoke… I don’t feel like I got the summer my bones needed. (Or at least my teeth. The rest of my bones are mostly intuited.) But maybe that isn’t it; maybe it’s aging; maybe it’s the time of…

I need to put a sign up outside the Chicken Window that says, “It’s fall migration, so we are keeping Norman inside for a while.” (Something like that; I’d like it to be cleverer — do you have ideas?) We kept him inside as much as we could during the spring migration, and the neighborhood was bordering-on-panicked. We got many letters in our Chicken Mailbox: Where is Norman? Is he OK? We miss Norman!!! Our neighbors love Norman (the cat) more than they love us.

Dear Erins, A month ago, I had you introduce yourselves, and you did not disappoint. Here’s something interesting: I think the majority of you feel that you are such rule-followers that you would never get arrested for anything! I wonder if rule-followers are people who need to be told they’re doing a good enough job more than other people? What is the c…

Hello Out There! I hope that Labor Day weekend was as joyful for you as it was for me — I love a grilling holiday, and yesterday the weather was, blessedly, perfect. (By the way, as this is a recommendation blog: the Thermacell Bug Repeller is a godsend for a buggy yard. It is not good for the environment or your body, probably [I refuse to look too much into this], but it really, definitely works.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber to You Are Doing A Good Enough Job. Here’s a perk: a Drive with a ton of videos, slide shows, and PDFs that are exclusive to you. In the beginning of the Facebook era, when you could have only sixty photos per photo album, I was fastidious with mine. I loved culling the pictures from my digital came…