02.14 | what a time to deplete your social battery

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.
– John Green

✉️ letter #54

My best laid plans never really take into account how exhausted I'm going to be after executing them. So many "celebratory-worthy" events happened throughout the last week at the same time - Lunar New Year, the Super Bowl (lol), Valentine's Day - and ADHD FOMO me was convinced I ought to do a little something for all of them.

Then ADHD time planning me did not realize I needed recovery from all of those little somethings built into my schedule as well.

Last Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday all had long meticulously packed lists of stuff to do and people to see. Which means that by the time I got to Saturday, the day I was supposed to be writing this letter, I was in a major fugue state. An entire day passed with me on my couch, groaning about how tired I was.

I exited it just in time to cook a lovely little Chinese New Year dinner... but really, there was nothing in me for anything else.

Sunday and Monday flew by with their own list of over-packed activities and when I finally found a space for quiet on Tuesday I... was completely and totally out of the fuel to do anything productive. I played about a hundred levels of candy crush. I binge watched an entire season of a show. I could not, for the life of me, get myself to do non-easy-dopamine-y things like open up a laptop or take the clothes off my floor and put them in a hamper.

So this is coming out a lot later than I expected (and just after I was all braggy about being consistent with it too). And this beginning missive is once more just me facepalming over my brain. Oops!

🎼 the soundtrack | Ghost in the Machine - SZA, Phoebe Bridgers

I did find a moment to parse through the list of Grammy nominees this year and was pleased to come across a lot of stuff I'd somehow missed out on but really very much enjoy.

How did I miss out on all the Phoebe Bridges love this year?

🌱 green lights | an eco-focused newsreel

Since just about everything this week has been about community gatherings be it for family (CNY), lovers (Valentine's Day) or the bizarre combo of Swifties and sports fans... let's focus on community re: climate today. Inside Climate News has a really interesting profile on Climate Defiance, a youth-led direct action organization that seems to actually be having an effect.

...even among peer organizations, Climate Defiance stands out for its tactic of birddogging the prominent people it targets and its rapid rise to notoriety. Since its inception last spring, the group has made frequent headlines and racked up millions of social media views, pursuing heavy hitters like Vice President Kamala Harris, White House national climate advisor Ali Zaidi, Senator Joe Manchin, Federal Reserve Bank Chair Jerome Powell, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and President Joe Biden.

The result of savvy social media postings of them making a scene at exclusive majority-white spaces has now turned them into one of the most well-funded and effective disruption groups out there. Probably helping is the people disrupting are majority white as well... but hey, if you have that privilege and were trying to figure out where might be a good place to use it...

• Related to all that, I came across this interesting op-ed about how churches could help build resilience into the climate movement in the way they helped bolster the Civil Rights movement. [National Catholic Reporter]
• Grist has assembled four "stories of relationships forged through climate action." It's nice to see potential partners meet through their hobbies. I kind of just did that... except the person I met was a bartender. So. [Grist]

🪢assorted | food for thought from around the internet

Introducing meat-rice: where scientists have used rice as a "scaffold" for growing beef muscle and fat cells, resulting in an edible, “nutty” rice–beef combo that can be prepared in the same way as normal rice.

I... think they're going to need a marketing team to make this not look and sound disgusting. [Nature]

• I somehow made it out of having almost all my friends be smokers without becoming a smoker myself. It worries me that scientists are now finding out they can be more vulnerable to disease and infection for YEARS after they quit. [CNN]
• NASA's Voyager 1 probe hasn't 'spoken' in 3 months and needs a 'miracle' to save it. Oh hi it's me when my social battery has run out. [LiveScience]

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I know this will shock everyone who knows me 🙄, but I don't really follow American football or the Superbowl. I somehow missed out on the fanaticism surrounding it last year (not sure how, perhaps I was traveling?) but the lead up to it has felt incessant this year.

I couldn't seem to go anywhere over the last couple of weeks without anyone asking what my Superbowl Sunday plans were. For the record, I had none - I was at a Chinese New Year party where a stranger who happens to be a friend of a friend caught me looking very serious playing mahjong.

But but but. Perhaps because everyone kept on talking about it, I actually did follow up the next day to see what went up with the two Superbowl parts I would watch: the halftime show and the ads.

Halftime show: Usher is king and I'm in love with him as hard as when I was 14-years-old and discovering how great dancers make my knees go weak. Not much more to say about that (except "YE-AHH.")

As for the ads: the only times I have watched the Superbowl the whole way through was when I was working in the advertising industry in Shanghai. Several years at 8am on a Monday (time difference shenanigans), all us marketing folk gather at some sports bar special for breakfast and beers and critique what trends we were seeing at America's most expensive 30-second-spot showcase.

It was fun and educational and whenever a brand dropped something really groundbreaking, I loved being able to ooh and ahh over it with other professionals. There's a lot less ad wo/men in my life at this moment, but that road might be opening to me in 2024 so...

I watched all 59 ads that came out this year. Yikes.

I get that if there's anytime to blow your budget on a celebrity, it's probably going to be when you're already spending $7 million for a placement but... aren't the celebrity placements supposed to make some kind of sense?

Why is Ken Jeong being unfrozen from a cryogenic state for fried chicken? Was that in a movie I never saw? Why is Glenn Close the nemesis of Tina Fey? Was that in a 30 Rock episode I missed? Chris Pratt literally needs that fake mustache to look even remotely like the Pringles man so why would anyone mistake him for the Pringles man regularly?

Beyonce trying to "break the internet" for Verizon. Christopher Walken barely tolerating Walken impressions for BMW. Jennifer Aniston and the Beckhams playing dementia patients for Uber Eats. Aubrey Plaza deadpanning "having a blast" for Mountain Dew. Arnie & Danny DeVito reuniting for State Farm (but like, I don't think there was an actual Twins callback in there?).

I won't even go into the ridiculously star-studded Ben Affleck ad for Dunkin' because I will hate on Ben Affleck in just about anything. But really, what the hell is all this bullshit.

There was only one clear winner for an ad idea that I saw this time - something that was clever, quirky and still looked like it made even the most remote amount of sense: Michael Cera repping CeraVe.

It somehow managed to satirize the celebrity product pander at the VERY MOMENT that literally everyone else was turning in lazy celebrity product pandering. Bravo to them.

(I looked it up - it was Ogilvy North America and the commercial was directed by Tim & Eric. No wonder.)

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