october archive: power, love, and other jollities

monthly postcard (vol.1) — mini-essays, reflections, journal entries, films, books, important conversations with friends that shaped my thinking (whenever i did choose to think)

an unserious preamble: welcome to the slow philosophy, where serious philosophy takes place. i’m not spending the month taking notes like a court stenographer and photographs like a instagram diarist. i’m spending it fully present, and operating as a slow living philosopher. i am then spending 3 weeks, as would any self-respecting, serious philosopher, reflecting and ruminating on the occurrences of the month. doing slow living right means being able to recall important moments from memory, and the only notes to be referred should be handwritten nightly journals. only then do i bring you what follows. all future postcards and monthly roundups will follow the same process by deliberation — as aristotle, and i’d like to think god — intended. come read.

a semi-serious preface

despite being pulled in a hundred directions last month, i still found small, steady pockets of sanity and joy. i cooked. i read. i journaled. i rested. i walked for no reason except to feel the air shift and to chase squirrels. i revived two lost arts: slow reading and ceremonial matcha. i meditated. i pilates-ed. i ate clementines. you know, all the essential jollities of life that we normally shunt to the bottom of the modern to-do list.

it was, surprisingly, a very good month, and i credit that entirely to you. through this publication, i’ve been fulfilling my lifelong (hyperbole) dream of being a serious philosopher who seriously philosophizes the notions of modern life, and writes incessantly about it. i don’t want to be someone who talks about it like some holier-than-thou who, underneath it all, isn’t serious at all. and so i wanted to preserve it and mark the month properly — to make a kind of lookback book as archival evidence of the seriousness of my work here. this is the first in a new series of monthly postcards that will allow me to do that. i will share all the ways i consumed — books, films, journals — so you can, too. i will not be including, however, any embarrassingly dizzyingly, terrifying moments from the month in which i may have greatly failed at my own philosophy by living the fast, shattered-glass, spilled-my-morning-tonic-all-over-the-kitchen-rug-and-my-cat’s-food-bowl-whilst-trying-to-shake-it-like-a-cool-bartender life. you will not be reading about those.

this month, i include a mix of mini-essays, lists of books, movies, music, recipes, rituals, journal prompts, and actual deep conversations i’ve had with friends — who, despite the fact that I’ve become the person who sees one fallen leaf and immediately rethinks the meaning of life (and wants to discuss it over the phone), continue to join me for sunday brunches. I dedicate this postcard on these kind-hearted enablers.

below, please find a tiny table of contents. i’ll include these whenever applicable, as i believe it’s an integral part of my academic work to convince you that i am, in fact, a serious slow philosopher.

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prologue

art corner

a respectable dutch family, freshly fed and spiritually primed for round two at church. the mother handing a prayer book to the younger child and the girl beside her clutcheing her starched cap and fan like a tiny puritan bureaucrat. it’s a tableau of domestic virtue that would make any calvinist beam. the longer you sit with the painting, the more it hums with quiet existential menace. look at the mise en abyme — paintings within paintings, art within more art. i count six in total. and on the mantel: five little decorative vessels. but then: right above the mantle, the large landscape of a ship at sea, a dark sky, a suspiciously theatrical shaft of light slicing through the gloom. disaster a mere storm away?

Family Group in an Interior, about 1658–1660. Attributed to Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam (Dutch, after 1622 - about 1669)

mini late night philosophy essays (the unfiltered edition)

below, you will find not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six mini philosophy essays on various topics. one of my slow living rituals last month was to reflect more.

these days, information barrels toward us at a velocity that all but discourages lingering with it, let alone the antiquated indulgence of reflecting or — god forbid — writing about it.

in my ongoing bid to become an analog, slow philosopher (this month), i took to writing small bedtime essays on whatever topic happened to float my boat and tried my best not to think too deeply about it with the purposes of capturing the “hemingway raw” before the “hemingway with coffee” watered it down it the day. come read.

on gratitude
despite the fact that gratitude is one of aristotle’s most lauded ethical pillars, it unnerves me. to name something good feels like tempting fate, as though the universe might immediately spring it back to sport. it requires exposing yourself and standing unarmored, stupid, and gleeful in front of a world ready to hurtle cruelty. i guess i don’t want to look stupid. i don’t want to look naïve. i don’t want to look embarrassed. but i try anyway. for aristotle insists that the highest form of strength and happiness come from practicing the nichomanean ethics, of which, gratitude is a part. to find the courage to be grateful for something good that’s happened to you, unfortunately, falls under that. for instance, one way to do this is by letting something be real — to let it count, however temporarily. i know you’d rather look cool and aloof. same here. but i have come to terms with the fact that the ethical will never become cool unless we collectively petition for it to be. so please sign my petition gleefully. i’d be grateful.

on love
love is tragic — even the successful kind. if you’re lucky enough to find the resilience and commitment it takes to build a lasting, decent, honorable relationship — if no one lies, cheats, two-times, three-times, ghosts, or leaves — it still ends, because, and i only say this because i’m a serious philosopher (this month): everything does. (sorry, i know, morbid much, like.) love always breaks your heart, one way or another. yet, extraordinarily, humans keep doing it. we love despite the inevitability of endings, the small and large devastations, the endless parade of deeply educational films and books telling timeless stories about people getting screwed by love since the dawn of time. but we do it anyway. we love love. we love fate. the stoics called it amor fati — the love of one’s fate, and most of us practice it without realizing it. so do i. my theory is, if all of life is going to deliver its tragedies one way or another, i don’t have to make it more tragic by depriving myself of the chance to love someone wholeheartedly, and be loved (or cleanly shattered) in return. life is too short.

on power
i was watching ken burns’s documentary on the roosevelts and found myself flamed by fdr’s presidency. i can’t think of a leader more precisely matched to his moment — his voice, certainty, unflinching, testosterone-induced, preternatural belief in his own ability to lead the country and screw the enemies. there’s a strange seduction in that kind of steadiness, the public performance of a man who never doubts himself. you want to be lead by that man. and yet, as it so happens, beneath it all, is a story of a simpleton. beneath the statesman is a man who was, in many ways, startlingly human — ordinary, flawed, disappointing, occasionally small. the infidelity. the secrecy. the retrospective lies. it is without doubt that eleanor’s political instinct and moral courage were among the secret sauces propping up fdr’s success, but history, forever preferring a singular genius and ever fond of a lone hero, rarely applauds the woman who held the scaffolding in place while the country went to war. why is power always hiding something underneath it? is there something inherently wrong with it? it makes me wonder why it so often comes with a subtext: something concealed and uneasy. is it the nature of power itself, or simply the nature of the people who reach for it?

on wanting power

let’s play a game called guess how serious i am. do i want power? it kind of feels vaguely indecent and weird to say yes. especially as a woman. i’m pretty sure i’m supposed to say no — if i don’t want the vitriol. i think it is my moral duty to be kind and not averted to power. i am not saying it, society is, and i’ve still got to live in said society. i don’t want power. you can keep it. or give it to the next president.

on weakness
speaking of bill clinton, i’ve read the biographies, and by god, his betrayals long predated the scandals we remember. i met him once, at a leadership program his foundation ran when i was in college, and he was every bit as charming as they say. whatever he said to me, i am almost certain that i remember word for word. he was present, kind, attuned — disarmingly human. say what you will about the controversies that shadowed his life (and continues to, as the man cannot escape them, and probably knows that by now), his presidency — one of the best in history — did indeed show how deeply he cared for people he promised to serve (this would be in spite of that welfare reform bill, but let’s not dwell on all bad things today). but maybe he is proof that charisma, without an internal anchor, can only carry a person so far. at its core, this is a story of weakness. we’re living in an age where men like david harbour happily recast their cheating and general moral entropy with words like “obsession,” “addiction,” “compulsion,” while the labour of understanding and emotional digestion falls neatly into her lap. his ex-wife lily allen’s latest album is spinning women’s heads the world over, and if you haven’t had a chance to listen to madeline, consider this a public service announcement. so let’s call a spade a spade, weakness weakness, and depravity depravity. potatoes will potate, tomatoes will tomate, cheating men will cheat, and with any luck, their moms will tell them to stop before their poor wives have to.

on marty
president obama is actually the only one I’ve seen plainly admit it in his memoir, a promised land — that there might be a kind of megalomania involved in wanting to be president, or at the top, or famous at all. it leaves me thinking if there is a pattern of powerful men drawn to magnetic women, and then, somewhere in the ascent, the air shifts. what happens there? is it better, in some pervasive way, for men to choose someone with low self-worth if that’s their preferred emotional terrain, rather than partner with a woman with self-worth and watch it turn into shambles? it’s too late into the night for me to take a definitive stance on the psychology of this. but either way, i know i refuse to play the politics of “this is normal” and “every man is the same” in this digital moment we’re all meant to be navigating, because history proves that’s untrue. take ruth bader ginsberg, and the man who never once flinched at her light. marty is the dude who would accidentally win “woman of the year” in a feminist magazine. aristotle wrote that love is two souls choosing the same good. rbg’s husband, the angelic marty ginsburg, seemed to understand that better than most philosophers ever did. maybe that’s why their story moves me more than any political victory or stupid, tedious scandal.

on empowerment
this october, i watched films about women who don’t vanish into someone else’s life or who, at the very least, did the hard job of fighting against that ingloriously unpleasant prospect. i’m grateful for that, and for every woman who carved a path wide enough for me to walk unafraid. dignity is not something bestowed by someone else, but ours to hold. devotion doesn’t mean erasing yourself or slipping into the background to be trampled. let’s please stop defining women in such egregiously stupid ways. when it comes to women, i always like to quote my girl eleanor roosevelt, whose own daughter, impressively, helped her dad cheat on mom (that ****): “there’s a special place in hell for a woman who does not support other women.” true. true. and true. we didn’t deserve eleanor any more than eleanor deserved fdr. but per aristotle, i’m not going to bed ungrateful that we got her anyway.

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interlude

what i watched…

theme — “power & empowerment”
mona lisa smile, on the basis of sex, hidden figures, the help, erin brockovich, legally blonde, veep, matlock, genius: einstein (national geographic, 2017), the perks of being a wallflower (idk, i just threw it in there — isn’t every movie about power?), inside the roosevelts (PBS), bill clinton’s presidency (PBS)

what i read…

books

jane eyre, by charlotte brontë
braiding sweetgrass, by robin wall kimmerer
the code breaker, walter isaacson
a short history of medicine, steve parker

find these books listed at dear jane books. (supporting local bookstores)

essays

“the art of fiction” — henry james
“george eliot” — virginia woolf
“a humble remonstrance” — r. l. stevenson
“the decay of lying” — oscar wilde

articles (news/research)

“college and the “culture war:” assessing higher education’s influence on moral attitudes” — miloš broćić, andrew miles (university of toronto)

“why do we agree to take off our shoes at the airport?” — the conversation

“how giorgio armani mastered the art of outfitting Hollywood stars to sell clothes to the masses” — the conversation

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deliberations & discourses

annotations & marginalia from my journals…

• i spent a lot of time last month just plain reflecting. and reflecting on that.

• i started journaling every night. my favorite new prompt being: “what belief about myself, others, or the world did today subtly support or subtly challenge?”

• i created a sacred little reading nook for myself — comfortable floor seating, a throw, a lamp, tv playing light jazz — to read, reflect, and write. it. is. heavenly.

• i’ve been thinking a lot about critical thinking — and how i used to be really good at it back in school when writing essays and participating in the debate teams and such. over time, of course, my skills have dwindled significantly.

• i started keeping track of the great conversations i’ve had with friends and loved ones. read below for the topics we covered.

• i decided to call a spade a spade, weakness weakness, and depravity depravity. this might be my new religion.

memorable conversations i had with friends…

conversations come and go. i hardly sit with them long enough anymore. but last month, i did.

• oscar wilde vs. henry james — an awesome friend of mine went ahead and read both the essays with me and we were left with no choice but to sit down for half a day to compare and contrast these two wildly successful people who possessed wildly different approaches to their art. when two people are both successful, what metric do we use to determine who was more right and who was more wrong? we came up with several ideas and one of these days, if i feel up to it, i might write it up in an essay. i think i’ll call it “an essay that came out of two better essays.”

• taylor swift and the sociology of parasocial fame — what are the repercussions of a wildly successful public figure holding a significant sway over a large swath of the population? i discussed with two friends of mine and we came to the conclusion: quite a bit. i even wrote an essay about it. i don’t like that our children will read the wrong shakespeare through someone’s pop lyrics and as a future mom, it is emphatically going to be the hill i die on.

• gratitude and how it changes memory — we are a mosaic of what we were brought up to believe was normal. when you can’t rely on your own mind to reflect on your past accurately due to its ability to edit events (a form of coping from trauma) — what do you rely on? a deeply moving conversation with a friend suffering from PTSD and my own unreliable memory made me delve into my contours of my own mind in a way i hadn’t before. that said, i’m never doing it again.

• long-distance friendships and emotional rituals — can long-distance friendships be tagged under the same category as proximity-based friendships? if not, what exactly sustains either kind of friendship? over a 4-way phone call with childhoods friends in three different parts of the world — we ventured into a heated debate and i got the bashing of my life once i was made to rightfully realize that i had allowed the simple act of making an effort get in the way of lifelong friendships that deserved to be nurtured more closely. a bashing i deserved. grateful i have friends who bothered to bash me. (i’m getting pretty good at this).

• naming your different selves — a brilliant friend of mine had me do an exercise to think about the various stages of my life as a different person altogether. i ended up naming each person — and even went so far as communicated with each of them distinctly. an inception of brilliance, that felt like a warm hug. when you feel alone, remember that you’re not — there are versions of you out there in the past and the future, your forever companions. rely on them more, and ask them how they feel about what you’re doing in your life right now. time is nonlinear. let einstein guide you home.

• evolution: theory vs. law — after watching a video where beauty queens were asked if evolution should be taught in schools and most responding with “no” and saying the age old fallacy of “it’s a theory, not a law” — I was especially impassioned to have a full conversation about this with a friend who had a different school biology curriculum than me. when i studied AP biology, evolution, chapter 23 of the textbook, was not only the topic of our summer-before-term reading, but also the accelerated first chapter we studied. our teacher knew that without it, no layer of biology can be truly understood. grateful to the state of massachusetts and new england in general for their riveting standards of education — one of the best in the country. please sign my petition to have more beauty queens from there.

• the education system and who it serves — basically part and parcel of the conversation continued from above. i understand now that saying it “should serve everyone” makes me deeply politically controversial, radical, and incorrect. sorry.

• why education doesn’t always make people smart — i had this conversation with my amazing nail artist while she painted by nails. she is as talented with her art as she is with her chatter.

• beowulf and masculinity — i had this theory (not a scientific theory, just a rhetoric one), that we have been reading beowulf all wrong. this is something that has made even some of my most critical and hard-to-maneuver friends tilt their heads. so i think instead of telling you about it here, i’m writing a post about it — will publish soon.

• art criticism — i wrote about this recently, it trudged from several conversations i’ve had with various friends and of course, culminated into an essay about keeping nuance alive in modern society. here’s a post i wrote about it. LOVE having friends who inspire essays in me. GRATEFUL!

• honorable mention of topics that we didn’t talk about whatsoever: organic substances detected within water vapor plumes from enceladas, saturn’s sixth largest moon. a possible biosignature of extraterrestrial life under the moon’s icy surface.

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epilogue

what i made…

here were the familiar rotation of favorites

- white fish baked with tomatoes, kalamata olives, garlic, capers, and potatoes
- chicken breast with castelvetrano olives, medjool dates, and potatoes
- flank steak with grilled zucchini, squash, and homemade chimichurri
- cinnamon chicken with acorn squash and onions
- coconut chia seed pudding with blueberries
- oatmeal with banana, honey, flaxseed, and peanut butter
- homemade matcha latte with oat milk and vanilla
- popcorn with dates tossed in
- air-fried potato chips of every flavor i can toss it in: oregano, paprika, cracked pepper (should out to michael, the unrelenting potato chef who promises to deliver and refuses to quit)
- buckwheat tea
- cocojune yogurt
- peruvian chicken with homemade avocado sauce
- salmon rice bowl with edamame, avocado, red onion, lemon
- spicy chicken piccata with capers and lemons and wine
- dates with almond butter
- pear with manchego cheese
- chickpeas tossed in good olive oil, flaky salt, cracked pepper, and a squeeze of lemon

halloween menu

- salted kaya toast (gem of a dish)
- potato chips with spicy vinegar anchovies
- turmeric sesame labne dip
- buttered multigrain toast with trout roe, lemon zest, and herbs
- smoked trout dip

favorite day of the month…

i went to three markets in one day to get specialty groceries for cooking our chosen halloween menu. the french market for coconut jam for the kaya toast, the mediterranean market for labne, and the fish market for fresh trout roe. can every day be like that?

self-care & rituals…

sweet almond oil, infrared heat therapy (magical pain relief)

let me know if anything above resonated. i’d love to hear from you.

thanks for sticking around. g’bye for now!

love,
tulipe