The Newsletter Thingy
The Sybarite Newsletter: It’s Been a Minute
Slowly sliding off the couch to tell you about Beijing, shoes and ambition.
Welp. It’s been four months since I’ve written one of these newsletters. Time flies when your therapist finally throws up his hands and half-yells at you that you have PTSD and to give yourself a break. I hate that I wrote that sentence; I hate the overuse of trauma as an excuse for pretty much everything these days.
But I’ll say this: I’ve spent the last four months doing sort of the bare minimum, and also obsessing about whether my house is clean enough to write, because I’ve developed some sort of of home dysmorphia. I think I live in hoarder-like world, with paper piling up everywhere, because taking care of an aging parent means tons of paper no matter how many times you click the paperless settings on the Medicare website, the banking websites, and all the other websites. The world just keeps sending paper.
I’ve somehow decided that I can’t write in earnest until the paper piles are gone. This, I realize, is not exactly sane. A friend came over recently and confirmed that it isn’t in fact sane. But it feels true. As the kids say this day, this is “my truth.”
So I’ve been doing other stuff. We had the unveiling of my dad’s headstone. Then I took everyone to lunch, including the rabbi, who looked at me when I said I wanted to order the shrimp, and said “who am I to stop you from eating an insect from the bottom of the ocean?” I’ve started wearing caftans and clogs, because I am in my “giving-up-yet-still-sorta-glam” era. I made this tomato rice recipe from Food52, which was great but they definitely lied about the cooking time — it’s much longer than they claim. Somehow I can’t stop thinking about this.
Luckily, while I move paper around and ruminate about whether people are testing recipes before they publish them, people still remember Sybarite and are submitting some great stuff. Sonia K. wrote about the wonder of John Fluevog shoes, a story that brought me back to my time clomping around the East Village as a recent college graduate, swooning at the idea that I could be a person who could rock shoes like this one day. That person would have been an artist, but somehow not a starving one. That person would have held court at dinner parties with big chunky jewelry. She would have worn purple tights and still looked elegant.
I did not turn into that person, which is yet another thing to toss into the regret pile. This pile grows along with the paper piles, but unlike those, there’s nothing to do about this one other than just sorta stare at it at and mutter, “huh, what the f*ck?”
And speaking of questions like that, Sybarite is thrilled to welcome back Kyrie Gray — who is always a total surprising delight, because her work is truly original. Kyrie wrote a surprisingly heartbreaking (at least to me) piece about her time in Beijing, although it’s also about so many more things. This, I think, is what travel writing should be: snapshots of emotion and confusion. Someday I’ll write about the restaurant in Rome where they served tangerine juice at the end of every meal, which made me think the world would break wide open with sunlight.
If you too have a travel story like that, you know the deal: send it in. You might have to submit to an unpleasant editing process, but hey, as the philosophers and BDSM community says: pleasure is the absence of pain.
Finally, Sybarite landed a big fish. Because even though it’s been hard for me to slide off the sofa, it turns out that while lying on the sofa you can still get a surprising amount of work done. This is why I was able to reel in Chelsea Grayson, former CEO of American Apparel, True Religion and Spark Networks, who writes about the best way to advocate for ourselves in the the corporate world, although these lessons aren’t limited to folks who work for traditional companies; anyone who has a boss will want to read this story.
Are you wondering why Sybarite has a piece about how to succeed at work? Are you wondering what this has to do with luxury and small pleasures? To this I say: did you know that Sybarite has a whole section dedicated to advice for Sybarites, which covers everything from skin care to how to start a new hobby? Well, it does. After all, you can’t buy Fluevog shoes without getting the raise you deserve every year.
Until next time, Sybarites. I’m going to start writing these newsletters every weekly again, because I miss you all. The paper piles can wait.
Sybarite-in-Chief,
AD
