Antici... ... ... .... .... pation

Feb 13

May I recommend

Anticipating stuff…

Things are a bit grim these days… It is February. The Olympics are unaccountably happening AGAIN. There is a convoy of fascists pooping in the parking lot of my place of work.

It is at times like this that I turn to the people most commonly associated with deep wisdom and insight into the human soul: The Dutch.

Ha, ha, I joke. I lived in The Hague for a year and I flipping LOVE the Dutch. The height! The bracing rudeness! The efficiency! The bicycles! The clogs and tulips and windmills — seriously, they aren’t screwing around with any of that… The place is heaving with windmills and tulips and if you give a Dutch person a chance, they will tell you a LOT about clogs… Also, whenever you buy anything they offer to gift wrap it. Grown men regularly drink large glasses of milk with their meals. The whole country is the size of a postage stamp and sometimes you’ll see cows grazing in the grassy verge on a highway because these Dutchers are so GD efficient they don’t waste a centimetre of land.

Right, so the Dutch are lovely, but you don’t associate them with deep spiritual wisdom. They are too busy being aggressively open minded about everything except Zwarte Piet (don’t Google if you don’t know… it’s upsetting).

Except here’s an article discussing the Dutch concept of Voorpet that contains some real wisdom.

It’s the “joy or pleasure ahead and in anticipation of the actual fun event,” and it essentially sums up all the feels that creep up before an actual experience.

Voorpet acknowledges the truth we all know - anticipating the thing can be almost better than the thing itself.

Science backs this up:

“Our research suggests that the enjoyment people glean from anticipation might also be an important component of life satisfaction: one’s satisfaction with life is influenced both by looking backward and by looking forward,” they wrote in their report.

I am on board with this approach. Sometimes it’s easy to get busy with life and the daily slog, but I have found it a sanity saver to think with hope about the things that are coming: a freshly planned trip, a night of good TV, an in-person yoga class, takeout Fridays, virtual drinks with friends, the end of a big work deadline, the arrival of Spring, the eventual arrest and imprisonment of lawless white supremacists.

Tell me what you’re anticipating in the comments below!

Optical illusion!

This is a fun one

https://kottke.org/22/02/the-best-optical-illusions-of-the-year

Ancient Egypt is so flipping cool

Why King Tut is still fascinating

I have a novel draft I started and didn’t finish which was essentially “The Golden Girls” meets “Death on the Nile”…. Anyway, I couldn’t get it to gel, but I did a lot of research about Ancient Egypt as a result (Plus I have extensive notes from my 80’s TV research - a sample list I made: Popped collars, Burt Reynolds, Perms, Imelda Marcos, Geraldo, Wimps, Suzanne Somers, VCR).

Anyway, Ancient Egypt is fascinating and the more you learn about it, the more interesting it becomes.

in 2018, devotes whole episodes to new research on just a few of the artifacts: an iron dagger, rare for the Bronze Age, revealed by X-ray fluorescence to likely have been fashioned from a meteorite; two tiny mummies, proved by genetic analysis to be Tut’s children, both stillborn; and the famous solid-gold funeral mask, heavier than a bowling ball but as delicate as snakeskin, thought by some experts to have been made for the Pharaoh’s stepmother, Nefertiti—it has pierced ears, which were more common for women—and then refashioned when he died unexpectedly.

I loved this, except for that dang last line

Emma Thompson on living in a woman’s body

This is a great essay, and Thompson writes with real grace and wisdom. The last line of the essay kind of killed me, though… Imagine being Emma-flipping-Thompson, writing this gorgeous essay about bodies and aging and life and then either feeling she had to end with that joke to soften her message, or even worse, genuinely expressing how she feels about her beautiful, lovely, aging, living body. It really shows you how messed up societal standards of beauty are that her whole message gets reduced to a Cathy-esque “My thighs — Ack!” joke.

Here’s an excerpt, but I didn’t include the last line… This is from the good part:

Living between these bodies is an odd mixture of joy and grief. My daughter thrums. Her life force changes the atmosphere in the room as soon as she enters. We all receive the electrical charge and, once again, we dance.
I must have done that once.
Or my daughter comes in upset, chaotic, spinning out and sits by my mother and receives a calming nod – no questions, I note – and the chaos subsides.

The Honeybee Emeralds is coming soon - plan your book club!

I am delighted to come and talk to your bookclub, so if you’re interested - send me a note. I can do virtual, or, thanks to science and vaccines and public health mandates, I am also happy to do an in-person!

Twitter

*Tweets might be thin on the ground next week… Spending less time on that app to manage my Convoy-related stress. If you see a good Tweet, send it my way and I’ll include it in next week’s newsletter!