Vol. 43 Thursday Third Things ☕
Yule Shoot Your Eye Out
For the newbies — welcome to The Third Thing! Every (most) Thursdays I send out a “Thursday Third Things” email full of things I’m reading, thinking about, listening to, watching, and sometimes buying. Enjoy!
If you saw my new year intentions post, you know that while I had a few holiday plans this year (I was particularly excited to honor the solstice), I was unfortunately whomped by a flu-ish virus over the weekend which sucked all the holiday motivation right out of me.
I feel pretty much back to normal today, but the holiday spirit has passed. On a walk around the neighborhood yesterday (Christmas Day!) I watched a man pack up his Christmas decorations from his yard and put them back into his garage. C’est la vie.
There were a few years in my early 20s when I clung to the holidays, hoping to keep alive the kind of magic that I felt as a little kid waiting for Santa. But in 2018 I decided not to go home for Christmas and I discovered how outstanding it was not to spend any of my precious holiday downtime in an airport or endure the pressure to force magic. I’ve never looked back.
Now my holiday time is generally spent skiing or mountain biking (or in the case of the glorious high desert…BOTH) as well as cooking something to mark the occasion, but more likely, as I did this year, just splurging on some really yummy Chinese takeout.
And instead of trying to see my entire family at all of our peak stress, when one or several of us is sick, during the grayest, yuckiest days in Pittsburgh, I instead go home in the summer for a long visit. We make at LEAST one delicious meal (but usually several) and catch up on the prior year and listen to music and my mom takes me sailing and we watch fireflies and wow, wow, wow, that is just so much more magical than OMG IT’S THE DAY OF JESUS’S BIRTH WHICH NONE OF US ACTUALLY BELIEVES IN? AND ALSO IT’S PISSING RAIN. AND ALSO FREEZING. AND WE JUST GOT THROUGH THE TOUGHEST WORK WEEKS OF OUR LIVES. AND ALSO WE BETTER MAKE THIS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!
I am however still riding the high of my long break from work (the day job, that is), which isn’t even half over yet. I think two weeks is the absolute minimum a human being needs to reset and decompress from their job and quite frankly I believe we need that at least once a quarter (that’s 40 days off a year for those of you keeping score).
To any of you who had to go back to work today, capitalism is gross and I’m sorry.
To everyone else, I hope you’re finding ways to spend your time in the ways you want to spend it and not getting sucked into the trap of, “I dunno, it’s just the way we’ve always done it!”
Merry wintering,
Anja
—Few things are more contentious among cohabitating adults than “The Big Light.”
—How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
—Skip The Meeting. Draw Some Birds.
—Make Your Own Best of 2024 List
—Is There Any Escape From The Spotify Syndrome
—It Was a Record Year for Dating Apps. They Still Don’t Have It Figured Out.
—How I'm Changing My Reading Life in 2025
—The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar: A really amazing, brief, sci-fi novella that will make you rethink the construction of society (and who does the constructing).
—David Sedaris Reads from The Santaland Diaries on This American Life (a holiday tradition)
—Sabrina Carpenter: Tiny Desk Concert (the way she named bed chem is amazing)
—Yule Shoot Your Eye Out: Fall Out Boy (I thought I was so cool when I was 13 and learned to play this at Christmas (even the key change) - MERRY CHRISTMAS I COULD CARE LESS 🤘)
—Ranking Japan's Most Expensive Fruit
—Coffee Brewing, Roasting, Cupping Explained with Dean Petty in Canada