Consumption 4

This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories are added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• Park Avenue (Renee Ahdieh)
• Direct Descendant (Tanya Huff)
• Make Me Famous (Maud Ventura)
• Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief (Benjamin Stevenson)
• Mansion Beach (Meg Mitchell Moore)
• A Family Matter (Claire Lynch)
• Thirst Trap (Grainne O’Hare)
• Bookish (Matthew Sweet)
• Misophonia (Dana Vowinckel)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favourites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Pannenkoeken, which are Dutch pancakes. I served them with cherries and cream.
• Food and Wine’s ramen noodle salad.
• Tofu fajitas.

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• Started Grosse Pointe Garden Society. Super fun, light-hearted mystery. I hope it gets a second season.
• Started The Residence. Love, love, love this. It’s like Knives Out in the White House.
• Watched all five episodes of Sirens. Perfect if you liked The Perfect Couple but snickered at it, too. Satire wrapped in Lilly Pulitzer.
• The new Sarah Silverman special, PostMortem. You’ll laugh, but it’s also a moving account of losing her parents and stepmother.
• The new Mike Birbiglia special, The Good Life. It was less cohesive than some of his other specials but had great stories.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• “Every Woman in the World” (Air Supply)
• “Mr Blue Sky” (Electric Light Orchestra)
• “Sit Down” (James)

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• A Wikipedia page for Gotland, Sweden.
• An explanation for why you can’t say “rabbit” on the Isle of Portland.
• A web project collecting scans of my old high school’s literary magazine.

Micro-Joys

• The symphony community outreach staff gave me a birthday button.
• When we travel, we keep an audio journal each night, talking through all of our memories for the day. It often comes in handy when we’re trying to remember something, which in the case of this story was the graffiti that appeared on a building we passed on the train between London and Norwich. To find the passage, we had to listen to a bunch of other memories. I have these audio journals dating back about 12 years, and I always remember something new when we listen to them.
• I had a ladybird on the outside of my car for many days. The first day, I commented that there was a ladybird. The second day, I marveled that it was still there. By the third day, everyone else thought it was dead, but I still held out hope that it was sleeping. A week later, I had to admit that the ladybird probably would have needed food by this point if it was still alive. “It’s just like ladybird ladybird,” I told Josh. He didn’t know that children’s poem and didn’t believe it was real (once I said it aloud) until I showed it to him online.

Mood

• Feeling pretty fearful about the future, and that makes me feel jittery for a large portion of every day.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.