Hello! Let’s go!
Reading
“I often shudder to think of what my life would look like now if I had not taken a sharp turn away from forming my own nuclear family. How long could I have kept up the ruse? How much misery could I have swallowed? I remember it the way one remembers a potentially fatal near miss, a stumble at the edge of a cliff.”
“Finally, the nostalgia narrative seems to leave out the fact that plenty of trends being reanimated for the 2020s are actually common sense given the moment we’re in. We’re wearing 2000s get-up because we want to be sustainable by op-shopping (and apparently a lot of low-rise jeans were up for resell). We’re using flip phones because we’re trying to be more mindful of our technology use. We’re buying records because more money goes to the artists rather than, say, Spotify. And mullets are back and in the mainstream, not because we all wish we lived in the 80s, but because we’re generally shifting as a society towards more genderless style.”
— Bridget McArthur, “Gen Z isn’t mourning the past - we’re trying to redeem it”
“In the vein of discouraging women from ever sweating or showing effort, how cliché it is to steer the people who would most benefit from lifting from making noise and getting dirty?”
— Casey Johnson, “A gym should be like a toy store, not a museum”
More:
Listening
My July and August playlists on Spotify.
The new Norma Jean album is huge. Someone please bring them out to Australia.
This is technically also a watch, but my sister recently visited and got me onto the YouTube channel My Analogue Journal, where a rotating roster of guests do DJ mixes of old/classic vinyl. Think Colombian salsa, Turkish music from the 1960s, dub… so many options. It’s good for background music, but I also like snooping on everyone’s setups and seeing how much joy they get from the expensive hobby I also share. 🤓
I’m a huge Tove Lo fan — I’m very excited for her new album (and upcoming Aussie shows). Her interpretation of Olivia Rodrigo’s Good 4 U makes it sound like a Robyn song, and I’m here for it.
The NYT Popcast podcast covering the resurgence in hardcore (the aggressive guitar music) was a great listen.
Doing
I barely scraped through my undergrad and swore I wouldn’t do any more formal study2. I’m a curious control freak which means I love learning new skills, but for some reason formal education didn’t really do it for me. Education has changed a lot in the 12 years since I last studied, and I'm enjoying two online short courses in Service Design and UI Design through bootcamp provider Academy Xi. They have regular zoom lectures with your cohort, which is just enough to keep me accountable. When I moved to Melbourne a decade ago I was so stoked to do short courses through RMIT, and I love that I can continue to do this stuff despite no longer living in a major city.
I’m nearly at the end of the second season of WAV Island, an 8-week long music writing challenge run as part of the Spirit Level Discord. Every week, you have to submit a new musical idea in an audio file that is a minimum of 30 seconds long. Some people are submitting fully finished tracks, others are putting in voice memos recorded on their phones — all of it counts. This is the first music I’ve written since mid-2019, and I’m a little surprised at what is coming out. Much like my short course, the accountability of the group has kept me going.
My take: the reality of this differs between the inner city, suburbs and rural/remote areas. People in the country are generally more community-minded because you have no other option. Also, it generally takes 2 incomes (or one huge one) to keep a family afloat with the cost of housing and living. Add in commute time (for those who can’t do remote work) and kids activities, the pressure to “side hustle” and then you get our current state. There are literally not enough hours in the day for many people.
My undergrad was journalism with a minor in music/audio production. I believe both those things are better taught either vocationally or in a TAFE setting, but as if employers would bother investing in training their juniors!