Odessa’s Oddities & Curiosities Week of 12/25

Dear friends,

I am home now, thus my brain is in the process of recalibrating and my megahertz processing speed is reduced by around 7000% (yes, I did go down a whole rabbit hole about how they measure computer speed). But good news for all of you, the more I’m home, the more media I consume…so lots of juicy recommendations for all of you.

I am scheduling this ahead of time so as you’re reading I am exploring Mexico City on Christmas Day. Oh! Merry Christmas to the rare Christians on this mailing list!

But one more note from last week, I’m linking videos of my dad’s robot-dance collaboration — very mesmerizing. I got lost on this long thought tangent about how our minds attribute sentience, and how the robot shifted from feeling like a machine to an animal in different movements.

Liana recommended me this well-produced podcast on Xi Jinping (sidenote: how lovely to have friends who recommend me podcasts about foreign leaders <3). The podcast is called The Prince from The Economist. Xi has never been of particular interest to me, but the podcast made Xi feel like the protagonist of an epic fantasy novel with lots of political intrigue…so I will keep listening.

En route to the airport, I listened to this new improv podcast from Amy Poehler that had me giggling out loud in the shuttle (which is always a little embarrassing). The setup for each episode is that Sheila (Amy Poehler) stars as a couple therapist and two actors step in as the couple. The episode diverges in absurd directions… my favorite parts were hearing their muffled laughter as they broke character.

Speaking of travel, ever since The New York Times joined with The Athletic, I’ve been enjoying a little sports journalism, especially if it’s logistical. So, I eagerly and enthusiastically consumed this article doing a deep dive into how NFL teams travel to away games.

OH! OH! I think I’m reading my favorite nonfiction book of all time. Yes! I truly mean it. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey into the Deep State is exquisite! I’m not sure if all of you are familiar with my book categorization system, but here’s the summary. I separate books into candy books and vegetable books (I did indeed come up with this system at the age of seven). Vegetable books are fibrous, take some time to get through, good for my brain, but delicious with some butter and salt. Versus candy books, which I fly through, not so good for my brain, but useful in turning my brain off at the end of the day. Candy books mainly consist of fantasy and romance novels. My vegetable books are more varied…you’ll hear about most of them in here! But this vegetable book, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, is LOADED with butter and salt (maybe I took the metaphor too far.) I keep reading far past my bedtime because I get sucked into this book. I have been marking up the book with all these delectable lines (in truth: highlighting passages on my kindle). I give you just a few below so you can see what I mean (it was very hard to pick out a few):

“To study surveillance is to learn, over and over, that we cannot escape ourselves.”

“You are a web of social relationships. Many, many stories can be spun from that web. “We kill people based on metadata,” a CIA director once said, which is true, and they are often the wrong people.”

“We live in this particular pocket of history in which we believe both in the internet and in the possibility of anonymity on that internet. We behave as if the network has no interest in us, and forget that interest may henceforth develop. This is a confusion about audience, and our temporal burden to bear. This time collapse coincides with new powers of recall; with endless information comes the ability to take information from its context, to tell stories perfectly matched to the intentions of the teller, freed from the complex texture of reality.”

Goddamn, this book is so good.

In the spirit of full-throated critique of government, I pretty much sobbed in public while reading this letter from the 18 incredible Jewish women who chained themselves to the White House in an effort to push the US to support a ceasefire. I so badly want to share the last line with you, but I don’t want to spoil your experience…just read it.

It’s been so lovely to be home. I forget what a privilege it is to live so near to such astounding nature. One of my favorite things is to take Rosie out, and we just run uphill, picking directions as we please. It turns into a walk at some point (running uphill is difficult!). We get lost inevitably then we just pick different routes down the mountain to get home. Anyway, in this time, I have lots of time-being-lost to listen to podcasts. And let me tell you, I did not have Michael Barbaro (host of The Daily and Yale alum) being a massive Swiftie on my 2023 bingo card. And I mean, dedicated, dedicated Swiftie. For all of you still in denial about the majesty and power of Taylor Swift, I command you to listen to this episode of The Daily: The Year of Taylor Swift.

I did aqua zumba the other day. I don’t know if you all know about this but I’m kind of a water exercise connoisseur. I don’t really know where this obsession started (see, I really am 75 at heart!) Two summers ago, I spent many many hours at the local rec center pool doing water aerobics. I was the youngest one there by about 60 years. There was a whole gaggle of us ladies with these little inflatable blue belts. Our instructor, Christopher, has a long grey-haired ponytail (possible rockstar in another life?) and keeps up a delightful rapport with all of us. Anyway, I couldn’t make it to Christopher’s class so I decided to try a new offering: Aqua Zumba. In my zeal to get to this class, I made my workout around two hours so I was already a bit exhausted at this point. Then, 5:30 pm strikes and no one is there. So I walk over to the lobby, and there are the two instructors who speak very limited English. But I do make out that I am in fact the only one signed up for Aqua Zumba. So I end up shaking my hips and throwing my hands around in the water for 60 minutes to the intense gaze of my Aqua Zumba instructors (it is challenging to keep beat in the water!!) The lifeguard and all the parents of kids in swim lessons watch me flail around in the water. To make matters worse, I forgot about my mascara, so I looked like a waterlogged raccoon! OY! But I will be back come Jan 2nd! Any Mill Valley people who want to join me?

I hope you all have a lovely fugue state (i.e. the time between Christmas and New Years Eve)!

With love & curiosity,

Odessa