Pic I snapped last weekend in South Beach, Miami
Happy August!
Our Will & Way accountability group started yesterday! It’s very low commitment—each day at 5 PM CST, you’ll receive an in-Slack reminder asking if you’ve done your daily practice, whatever that means to you. You can respond with an emoji to let us know you did it. That’s it!
If that sounds good to you but you missed the sign-up window, you can still join here. Be sure to introduce yourself in the #intros channel so I can say hi!
Check out my latest published work:
Chisom Peter Job on why some stories don’t need to be told
Is it okay to turn your Zoom camera off during meetings?
Oh, and if you’re a writer looking to avoid submission fees, click here! I thought there were lots of helpful tips in that article.
And here's what else is on my radar this month…
Watching:
I went to the theater to watch Mission Impossible (didn’t love); Barbie (yes!); and Joy Ride (also yes!)
I started Jury Duty and wish it hadn’t taken me so long. I love it so much.
Two shows that I think are doing better in their second season than the first: And Just Like That (ps-this Reddit thread on Trey MacDougal’s search history is LOL), The Summer I Turned Pretty
Need help delegating as an entrepreneur? Check out this helpful video by Lindsay LaShell!
Reading:
I finished Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America by Maria Hinojosa and learned so much about immigration.
I also read a “chick lit” book called When the Grass is Green and the Girls are Pretty by Lauren Weisberger, and I don’t know why I did. I know that nothing ever happens in these books!
As someone who’s completed an outpatient OCD therapy program, I really loved this essay: As I continue to work on disengaging from OCD’s endless “what if” questions, I’ve rediscovered some questions of my own: What if I did something just for fun? What if I just went for it, even if I don’t know how it’ll turn out? What do I really want?
The perfect vacation doesn’t exist: In catering to Western tastes, developers and the dollars they seek aren’t only killing the existing culture, they’re also, ironically, killing what makes people want to visit a place.
How Orange is the New Black signaled the problems with the streaming economy: Granted, prison is many times worse than a stingy Netflix show, but the parallels, Glenn said, were “uncanny.”
Life before cell phones: I miss it! It was just that I came home at a regular time, and that show just seemed to be on, and I watched it because that’s what you do. You watch the shows that are on.
On how the patriarchy has jumbled our priorities: You are not saying no to an event where you might make an important connection, you are saying yes to your work. You are saying yes to the sleep you need to make good work. You are saying yes to the real relationships you already have and need to nourish and enjoy so that you can be strong enough to withstand the very hard parts of writing and living.
As a semi-newish stepparent, helicopter parenting is fascinating to me—and so prevalent. I was not prepared for the reality that we can’t really host playdates at our home without having all of the parents tag along to supervise and hang out, too!
Sorority sisters lobby for change after a non-binary member was kicked out
HGTV is making our homes boring
Current lawsuits in the real estate industry could change the way homes are bought and sold
Listening:
The Barbie soundtrack! Piiiink goes with everything….
The “Maintenance Phase” pod has been covering RFK Jr. and just…wow.
I’m caught up on “The Retrievals” podcast, which is a series about a Yale fertility clinic where patients experienced crippling pain during egg retrievals; it was later discovered a nurse on site was stealing all of the Fentanyl.
This episode about when a friendship ends was interesting; I’ve talked about this topic before in the newsletter and had a lot of people reach out, so I thought I would share. I’m happy to know there are more resources out there on this topic!
And I’m listening to the Texas Monthly podcast, “Stephenville,” a true-crime story that happened here in Texas.
Speaking of Texas, fingers crossed this heat wave lets up soon!
Nikki
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