Vol. 39 of Thursday Third Things

Your favorite hobby should not be staying home

This is how I picture you all trying to take in these newsletters each week ✌️ (Check out more from this cartoonist here).

Your Favorite Hobby Should Not Be Staying Home

[I could have sworn I already shared this piece with you all, but I’m not seeing it in past Thursday Third Things, so apologies if this is a repeat! BUT. I love it that much.]

I just got through my first respiratory virus in nearly TWO YEARS (take your vitamin D, kids!) which meant I was down for the count for a couple of days last week. At first, I thought it might be nice not to have any obligations to leave the house and watch my little shows with no pressure to do anything else. 

But by the second day of being couch-bound, I was agitated. I’d stared at screens for two days straight, feeling too sick to read, write, paint, or do any of the other things that might get me away from digital devices. There was nothing left to look at on the internet. It all sucked. I missed my hobbies — none of which include staring at the internet for hours on end.

Which makes it all the more concerning that there’s this cultural shift to brag about staying home, rotting away in bed, and doing nothing other than staring at a screen. Sure, I love getting plenty of sleep and feeling really good in my body — who wouldn’t? But I love it mostly because enough sleep and good health allow me to live as much of my life as I possibly can, not because wasting away in bed is good for me.

“People simply aren’t connecting the way they used to, and I won’t be the bad guy for pointing out that it doesn’t surprise me that people are desperately lonely while also saying their favorite hobby is… staying home.”

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My Favorite Person is Jenny Slate

I wanted to save this for my end-of-year book review (and I will happily expand more there) but I read Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds this summer (and also listened to her read it) and I think I was transported to a new realm where the world was exactly how my brain thought it should be and we all lived in this wonderful place together that was just utterly delightful but also real and also salient and also…and also…and also…

This interview with her in the New York Times is a small taste of what her writing (and just simply everything else about her) offers. But god, I hope you’ll read Little Weirds as well as her new book which I believe just came out.

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Publishing Looks Miserable

The irony of sharing this after exiting my last writers’ group saying, “I think I’m ready to write my book proposal!” is not lost on me. 

But I can’t shake the desire to see my book published ~ tRaDiTiOnAlLy ~ and I also know traditional publishing SUCKS ASS.

“You will feel like the world has 14 contractual days to care about your book because it does. I’ve had to explain to friends that the more you think about a book like a movie — 2 weeks for people to care then it disappears — the more you’ll understand how it feels to work on something for years just to watch it pop for a minute (if you’re lucky to even get that) then vanish. Friends will assume that at least you got paid a ton of money and now you obviously write books for a living and you will laugh. Oh will you laugh!! Then some writers will be mad that you got paid at all and you’ll once again be drawn back to the rough parallels between publishing and motherhood, that you should selflessly be doing this all for love. What did you expect? You should be happy to get anything for yourself at all.”

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Understanding Zero

How does the brain handle…nothing?

Well, at first we thought nothingness was represented in the brain by neurons NOT firing. But that’s not the case. They do fire. But not in the same way they fire when presented with other numbers. Zero is an outlier. A non-number related to absence.

Also, did you know some of our neurons have favorite numbers?

“The fact that [zero] represents nothing is a contradiction in itself. It looks like it is concrete because people put it on the number line—but then it doesn’t exist … That is fascinating, absolutely fascinating.”

“Particularly due to the influence of the Church, philosophers and theologians associated “nothing” with chaos and disorder and were disinclined to accept it. Many even feared it, considering it “the devil’s number.”

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The Last Universal Common Ancestor - Meet LUCA!

I’m still trying to get my head around the difference between our oldest known single-celled ancestor (the basis for all life as we know it today (LUCA)), versus the very different origin of life (a collection of molecules that suddenly started replicating and evolving).

But here’s what I’m gathering:

• If you think of life’s origin like baking a cake, we’re still not sure how all the components of a cake magically came together to make a cake on their own, but we now have a pretty good idea of what the first cake was (and it sure as shit better have been chocolate). 

What’s cool about LUCA is that scientists are speculating that it lived about 4.2 BILLION years ago, and came into being just 300 million years after the moon was formed (an event that turned Earth into a molten wasteland and definitely could not support life as we know it). Which, if you’re not following means that life basically only had a few hundred million years to emerge (which is a crazy short amount of time given the history of the universe). And that has kind of big implications for life in the rest of the universe:

“Our work suggests that those early steps of evolution weren’t hard; they’re pretty easy,” said co-author Phil Donoghue, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bristol. “If you’re concerned with the origin of microbial-grade life, then that’s apparently very easy, and it should be quite common in the universe.”