Try being easily pleased

Here’s a truncated version of the weekend newsletter because I’m under the weather in a couple of ways.

First off, the actual weather: Remnants of Hurricane Betty came through Thursday morning, and a waterlogged limb from the giant oak in our front yard took out out Little Free Library.

Apologies for the photo quality, it was 7 am and I was half-asleep

We’ll rebuild the LFL, and we didn’t have any other damage, although we did lose power for about 6 hours later on. Many others (including some of you reading this) dealt with serious flooding and storm damage. Here’s hoping all of you are safe and starting to dry out.

I’m also under the weather physically … I mentioned here about a year ago that I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. I had a procedure and started taking medication and everything’s been fine until about it flared up again about two weeks ago. I’m not in any pain … the main symptom is fatigue. So I’m resting up. My doctors are working on it from several directions and I’m sure I’ll be fine shortly.

I have a short list of shareables at the bottom of this post, but first I wanted to mention one thing I ran across the other day in Nick Hornby’s excellent newsletter.

The other day Nick wrote a short post asking where people go when they need their spirits lifted. He mentioned a YouTube clip from David Letterman in 2015 of a band called Foxygen—I’d never heard of them and it’s not clear if they’re even still together. But Nick gets great joy out of their brief moment in the sun, especially the lead singer’s goofy-ass dancing:

I say all this to set up something that a reader wrote in the comments, and how Nick responded:

This feels to me like an extremely useful working philosophy for life.

Try being easily pleased.

In your life you will meet (or possibly, you will be) one of two types of people who are hard to please.

The first is the type for whom nothing external is good enough—every hit movie or pop song is terrible, every TV show jumps the shark, every potential partner has some small but fatal flaw. It reminds me of that Aziz Ansari series MASTER OF NONE, where his character scours online reviews to find the best taco place in New York City, only to get there and find out it’s closed: “What am I supposed to do now? Go eat the second-best taco like some kinda asshole?”

The second is the type for whom nothing internal is good enough. These are the perfectionists, the ones who constantly beat up on themselves, the ones who never think they look good in a dress, or can’t let go a piece of writing because it needs just one more edit.

Neither type is much fun to be around.

Life is so much better when you allow yourself to enjoy it. That doesn’t mean you should gloss over every crack. It just means you should have some perspective about which cracks matter, and not let the essential cracked-ness of our universe get to you.

There is so much flawed beauty out there, so much crooked glory, so much incredible pleasure in the seconds bin. Don’t cast any of it aside.

To be honest, that Foxygen song is not for me. But I did extract some joy out of it—I fell in love with all three backup singers simultaneously, I laughed at how much Letterman enjoyed the performance, and I loved the idea of Nick Hornby, one of my favorite authors, cranking up YouTube on some gray London day to give himself a little jolt of happiness.

I’d love to hear about whatever you do to give yourself a boost when you really need it. Drop your tips in the comments. In the meantime, a few things I loved this week:

1. I thoroughly enjoyed doing the Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O’Meara. We talked a ton about DOGLAND, and also my general writing process … you’ll hear a lot about The Blurt, my organizational “method,” which I’m not sure I really recommend for anyone else.

2. We’ve written so much about dogs around here that it’s only fair to share this beautiful and funny piece from Sloane Crosley about the death of her cat. (New Yorker)

3. Those who worked with Robin Williams remember him on the 10th anniversary of his death. (Vanity Fair)

4. The brilliant Hanif Abdurraqib on the women’s 100-meter Olympic races, and condensing a lifetime into 10 seconds. (New Yorker)

5. The band American Aquarium, joined by Katie Pruitt, cuts straight to my soul with this new song “Southern Roots.”

   If there's one thing I've found
   You can't change the way you sound
   You can only change the words that you choose
   So I'm putting in the work
   And I'm digging in the dirt
   And I'm replanting my southern roots
   

   
   Have a great week, everybody.

—TT