Speaking of Which: July 2024
Masochistic artists, angels with dad bods, and the fight to bring back laminators
We were so distracted by what happened in the teacher’s lounge at school that we totally slept on the laminator.
The teacher’s lounge sounded sexy and mysterious but nothing really happened there. It’s just where your English teacher would store her Diet Cokes and reheat her three-day-old pasta before going back to her classroom.
But the laminator — the laminator was where it happened. That’s where teachers told each other about how Dalton colored his tongue with a Sharpie in third hour and how Ava’s mom is on Ozempic. It’s where they talked about how Mr. McAlister is a Trumper and how Ms. Wood is hooking up with Mr. Calvino, the gym teacher, after school in the auditorium dressing rooms.
They shielded their papers from our filth while spreading all our dirt. And we never suspected a thing.
Speaking of: The Sound of People
July 21st, 2024
Human chemistry is one of those things I’m not sure we’ll ever fully understand. No laws of physics can explain why sometimes two strangers grab coffee and instantly become a corner booth comedy troupe while another two strangers grab coffee and get absolutely nowhere. You can try and predict it by looking for people with similar interests and upbringings and Instagram grids and Myers-Briggs scores, but the truth is you’re just funnier with some people than others, and you’ll never know why.
I’m not here to say I’ve cracked that code, and if I had, I would take my talents to Hinge, not Substack. But I do know how I interpret human chemistry, and it’s rooted much more in music than science.
Even if you’re not a musician, you understand the idea of harmony. It’s when two notes are played together that blend very beautifully and naturally into a new combined sound. It’s the reason The Beach Boys sounded like angels with dad bods even when none of them individually were exceptional singers. But it’s not just that some notes sound pretty next to some others; it’s that the relationship between those notes changes how we hear them individually.
Let’s pretend I’m a middle C note, the most unpretentious, unsexy, saltine cracker of piano notes. Play a G note on top of me — a “major fifth” in music terms — and we get a sound that’s very sturdy and complete. Play an E on top of me — a “major third” — and we get something equally as lovely but in a way that compliments the C more than completes it. Play an Eb on top of me — a “minor third” — and suddenly the two notes are staring woefully at each other through a rain-splattered window. I can go through the entire scale like this. The D sounds like it’s fighting with me for attention. The B is teasing me in a really playful way. Me and the F# have absolutely nothing to talk about.
I think a very similar thing can be said about people. I think our souls emit a frequency that leads us to not only resonate better with some people than others but also resonate differently depending on who we’re with. Some people in my life feel like major fifths where they’re quite different from me but form a very natural, stable partnership. Some people feel like a major third where every interaction is refreshing and makes me happier. Some people feel like minor thirds where they always seem to drag my mood downward no matter what we’re doing. And so on through the scale yet again.
Most importantly, all of this is relative. A minor third for me could be a major fifth to somebody else. The major second I’m fighting with for attention could be the sharp fifth with whom you have nothing to talk about. It’s entirely about how the notes fit together, not about the individual notes themselves.
I still can’t predict who I will have chemistry with and who I won’t, and I truly don’t know if we’ll ever solve that riddle. But seeing all of my relationships as music rather than as a binary “friends or not friends” at least gets me half the way there and adds so much dimension to figuring out what role a person plays in my life. There’s no such thing as enemies or soul mates; just people who you harmonize with a little better or worse.
Speaking of: Great Artists Know When to Stop
July 25th, 2024
I’m not the only creative who fetishizes the idea of obsessive, relentless tinkering.
Artists are masochists. We assign value to the work we create by how much we tortured ourselves to make it. If I show you two photographs — one that took three shutter clicks to get, and one that took 3,000 shutter clicks to get — you’ll naturally be a bit more impressed by the latter. Bedroom creatives like myself have wet dreams about the completely irrational lengths our heroes went through in the hunt for artistic perfection, whether it’s Brian Wilson berating a timpani player for being ever so slightly off time or Charlie Chaplin demanding 342 takes of the line, “Flower sir?” in his silent film City Lights.
And yet the only thing every famous artist you can name has in common is that they knew how to stop.
They all knew that for anyone to ever experience their work, they had to at some point finish it. The creative process is almost always seen as an act of adding things, but anyone can splash paints onto a canvas. It’s only the artist who decides that it’s time to put down the brush. Anyone can open GarageBand and start dragging samples into a project. But only the artist knows when the right samples have been added to qualify it as a song. In many ways, knowing when something is done requires more creative muscle than knowing what needs to be added.
Yet no one ever teaches you how or when to stop. There are thought pieces galore on how to find and cultivate inspiration but never how to ask your inspiration to shut up. Every artistic project has a saturation point where all your good ideas are on the page and everything you add afterwards is just dilutive. You start cluttering the good ideas with okay ideas. You start making things different, not better. The best artists can sense this saturation point in their spine and drop the brush. Everyone else soldiers on in the name of endless creative freedom.
It’s quite possible we’ll never meet the most talented painter in the world because he or she never finished a painting.
Speaking of: Joe Biden
July 24th, 2024
President Biden addressed the nation tonight to formally announce that he is stepping down as the Democratic Party’s candidate in this year’s presidential election, and while I get why the majority of the country is saying, “Thank God,” I think far more of us should be saying, “Thank you,” instead.
This is a non-partisan statement. I truly don’t care what side of the aisle you are on or whether you think Biden had a successful presidency or not. Because either way, we should all agree Joe Biden is the type of American our kids should aspire to be.
This is a man who devoted over 50 years of his life to serving our country in public office, from being our seventh youngest senator ever to being our oldest president ever. This is a man who suffered two of the greatest tragedies you could imagine while in office — losing your wife and daughter in a car accident, and losing your son to cancer — and miraculously found a way to overcome that hardship and continue fighting for a better America. This is a man who was so committed to being present as a father that he took the hours-long train trip from Delaware to D.C. every day of his 36-year Senate career so he could be with his family.
This is a man where the only thing stronger than his personal ambition is his love for his country, and that showed true in today’s announcement.
It’s painful to see such an admirable career get reduced to a caricature just because an 81-year-old started looking like an 81-year-old. I was also in that group of people who believed Biden should step aside this election and let a new generation take the wheel. But that doesn’t make the next six months an embarrassing lame duck period; it makes it a victory lap for one of the most respectable politicians in our country’s history.
If you’re not telling your kids to be Joe Biden, I have to ask, who are you telling them to be? Because sure, I don’t want walking down airplane stairs to be a life-threatening event for my kids, so they shouldn’t emulate Biden in every way. But beyond that, what more can you ask of an American citizen than to devote 51 years of your life to helping our country stay the global superpower it is?
Let me be a voice in the country saying thank you, Joe Biden, for a remarkable career fighting for our country and for the immense integrity and humility you always brought to your work. You are a role model for the type of American we should all aspire to be, and cheers to a well-deserved retirement.
Speaking of: Passionate People
July 29th, 2024
I spend a lot of time in this newsletter thinking through my relationships and figuring out who I enjoy being with and who pisses me off and who I want to invest more time in. There’s something really fascinating to me about taking something as nebulous as human connection and trying to mold it with form and structure and reason into something I can understand. But any rule or theory I’ve ever put forward on this is exactly that: a theory. It’s something that feels right based on my experience but isn’t definitive fact.
If there’s anything on this topic I feel most confident in, though, it’s this: I get along best with passionate people.
Not everyone is a passionate person. I know plenty of people that wake up every morning and commute to their tolerable job listening to okay music while driving the speed limit to see the coworkers they don’t mind before going home and watching a fine Netflix show while doing the hobby they picked up pretty arbitrarily because they thought they needed a hobby.
Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with any of that. The people I described above are often perfectly fun, happy people. They’re just not usually people I can relate to much when a central part of who I am is how deeply I care about things. I love Robert Smith’s songwriting and hate coloring Easter eggs and obsess over semicolon usage and feel like I’ve failed if I miss a phone call from a friend. That’s who I am. And I have trouble relating to people whose emotional wells don’t run as deep.
I don’t even care what you’re passionate about. Architecture. Restaurants. Russian literature. Bird watching. I’ll even allow frolfing. If you care deeply about it, I’m there. I want to hear everything you have to say. There are few things I love more than hearing people who love something with their entire being talk about what they love. And even if the posters on their bedroom wall are wildly different than mine, I’ll relate far more to them than to an indifferent person with matching posters.
Speaking of: Having Myself a Day
July 28th, 2024
Once every few months, I wake up on a Saturday morning and realize I have nothing on my calendar, so I look myself in the mirror and go, “I’m gonna have myself a day.” And then I leave my apartment with no real plan and walk around town and go to record shops and lay in the park and squat in bookstores and return home 10 hours later after having a great day.
This is not blog talk. This is a real thing that happens. I’ve been doing it for as long as I’ve been old enough to go places by myself. It’s probably the healthiest habit I have. And I’m about 29/29 in having great days whenever I’ve decided to have myself a day.
I remember listening to a speaker named Steve Beck give a presentation called “How to Have a Great Day Every Day” my senior year of high school, and the conclusion was so blatantly simple that I was pissed for not thinking of it first. He said, “The only way to have a great day every day is to choose to.” It’s one of those lines that I’m sure got usurped by middle school principles everywhere and now sits next to “You can’t say impossible without I’m possible” in the catalog of phrases nobody can take seriously anymore.
But that’s a shame because it’s also the only self-help slogan I’ve had a 100% success rate with. I think the older I get, the more it feels like my day is forced upon me, and my happiness is directly correlated to the hand I’m dealt at work, and my mood is fully at the mercy of my inbox. But if “having myself a day” has taught me anything, it’s that I’m fully capable of turning ten hours into a great day whenever I really want to. And I don’t always want to. And that’s okay. Because all it takes for me is one day every few months to remind myself I still have some agency in that outcome.
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They did this by focusing on the only piece of information you really need to know: whether it’s warmer or colder than yesterday. That’s it. That’s all you’re wondering when you wake up in the morning. That’s all.
Download today and stop worrying about dew point and wind direction and UV index and all the other nonsense. And Lazy Weather: if you’re ever planning to hire brand ambassadors, let me know.
That’s one of the issues with American offices: they don’t have laminators. That’s why we’re stuck with “water cooler conversation,” talking about the recent power outage and how nice it is when the sun sets after 8 pm.
Quite frankly, I think a lot more people would go into offices again if we put laminators in them. You can always get your work done remotely but you can’t always know who your coworkers are sleeping with, and that’s the kind of face-to-face interaction corporate America is desperately lacking these days.
#BringBackLaminators
