https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/

Another powerful kindness strategy revolves around shared joy. One of the telltale signs of the disaster couples Gottman studied was their inability to connect over each other’s good news. When one person in the relationship shared the good news of, say, a promotion at work with excitement, the other would respond with wooden disinterest by checking his watch or shutting the conversation down with a comment like “That’s nice.” We’ve all heard that partners should be there for each other when the going gets rough. But research shows that being there for each other when things go right is actually more important for relationship quality. How someone responds to a partner’s good news can have dramatic consequences for the relationship. In one study from 2006, the psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive. Let’s say that one partner had recently received the excellent news that she got into medical school. She would say something like “I got into my top-choice med school!” If her partner responded in a passive destructive manner, he would ignore the event. For example, he might say something like: “You wouldn’t believe the great news I got yesterday! I won a free T-shirt!” If her partner responded in a passive constructive way, he would acknowledge the good news, but in a half-hearted, understated way. A typical passive-constructive response is saying “That’s great, babe” as he texts his buddy on his phone. In the third kind of response, active destructive, the partner would diminish the good news his partner just got: “Are you sure you can handle all the studying? And what about the cost? Med school is so expensive!” Finally, there’s active constructive responding. If her partner responded in this way, he stopped what he was doing and engaged wholeheartedly with her: “That’s great! Congratulations! When did you find out? Did they call you? What classes will you take first semester?” Among the four response styles, active-constructive responding is the kindest. While the other response styles are joy killers, active-constructive responding allows the partner to savor her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good news. In the parlance of the Gottmans, active-constructive responding is a way of “turning toward” your partner’s bid (sharing the good news) rather than “turning away” from it. Active-constructive responding is crucial for healthy relationships. In the 2006 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the couples two months later to see if they were still together. The psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who were together and those who broke up was active-constructive responding. Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more likely to be together. In an earlier study, Gable found that active-constructive responding was also associated with higher relationship quality and more intimacy between partners.

https://tht.fangraphs.com/the-kangaroo-court-and-frank-robinson/

https://imogeneandwillie.com/collections/mens-shirts/products/earl-yellowstone

https://griefbacon.substack.com/p/thanksgiving

In the midst of life, death. Abundance is a giddy and fearful acknowledgement of the losses that have come before and are coming once again. We gather more to us than we need as a way to say that we have felt lack before and we will feel lack again. We gorge ourselves like bears ready to sleep through a fallow season, and at the end of the night as the table is cleared there is a silence as the rushing darkness gapes ahead of us. We love each other more fiercely in the winter when the dark crowds close. My mom makes everyone go around the table and say what they’re thankful for; counting your blessings is a way of remembering that they’re scarce, is a way to say “here is what I am glad has not been taken from me.” Any abundance that is not finite is an acknowledgement of scarcity, of what you would be afraid to lose. It gets cold and we go inside where it’s warm and celebrate gratitude. It gets dark so we hang up lights all over the city, the constellations dotting down the avenues, the trees up on College Walk and on Montague street wrapped with strings of cheap stars. We brace for what is coming. We feast when we should be saving, we let the water run and leave the lights in the house burning, thinking that if we can prove we have enough to waste, we can evade the specter of loss. We pack up the food and we blunder out into the dark, into the lipstick-stained holiday parties, into the small days tumbling down to the bottom of the calendar just ahead.

happy birthday amazing grace!

https://www.wga.org/employers/signatories/strike-unfair-list

https://havenskitchen.com/collections/frontpage/products/herby-chimichurri https://www.burlapandbarrel.com/products/wild-mountain-cumin

flipped this year (thanksgiving) but that's okay

https://griefbacon.substack.com/p/independence

Independence is a shitty thing to celebrate, even if America weren’t a giant sinking plague ship. I’ve spent a lot of time, like a lot of people, trying to figure how to do love, how to get it right, whatever it is, living up close with other people, being wanted, being loved, the negotiation of a human condition that asks to somehow square desire and comfort together into the same small boxed equation. Almost uniformly, these conversations come back to independence. To be loved, one must be self-sufficient, whole in oneself, needless. Neediness is something anyone can smell coming off of you like the stink of unwashed clothes; love is guaranteed only by not needing love, maybe by not even wanting it, by turning and walking fast in the other direction. These same ideas are the ones that say that the last thing anyone wants is to be obligated. Obligation is the great looming monster, the death of both desire and love, a way to make people hate you by needing them. Obligation, this line of thinking says, bricks up the windows of love’s house, turning it into a trap, suffocating anything that lives inside. People should be with you because they want to be with you, show up because they want to show up, be kind because they want to be kind; everything should be done because it’s spontaneous and joyful, because no one asked for it, because no one needs it, as though the whole long line-strung story of a relationship from one impulse to another could be the feeling of cutting class and going to the beach on a beautiful day. If we could require nothing from one another, then we could all exist as pure desire. The idea that you should need nothing from anyone, that it’s actually doing people a favor to be as absent as possible from them, that even when in a relationship people should have separate lives, separate needs, separate means of fulfilling those needs, at face value makes sense. No one wants to be one more thing on a list of errands; no one feels romantic about a reminder that you have to take the trash down to the curb. Grabbing onto this line of thinking like the stretched-out rope from a life preserver, I used to believe that if I was cruel to and distant from people, they were most likely to love me. I assumed that the greatest form of self-actualization and self-love was being accountable to no one and asking no one to be accountable to me. There was a time when I truly believed that keeping myself walled off from needing anything was lovable or even possible. It maybe isn’t even necessary to say that this time was probably the neediest and least lovable I have ever been in my life. But I believed it was independence, as shining and grand as a flag in the smoke-flavored air on a holiday.

https://theoutline.com/post/5970/unconventional-wisdom-emotional-readiness-is-bullshit?zd=1&zi=inxhj5xg

Looking at this construction at a remove, it’s easy to see the trap. Setting out to love yourself because that’s the only way to gain love from others is a knot that undoes itself when pulled; needlessness as the tactic to get something one needs is impossible. But it’s an attractive emotional tautology in part because it keeps those who subscribe to it trapped in its hamster wheel, forever able to blame ourselves for wanting, when the fact of wanting is both the reason for never finding a relationship and the proof that we are not ready for it. The advice that you cannot love or be loved until you can love yourself perfectly fits with our time and our contemporary culture’s sickness. We are everywhere told we have agency by the very corporate or political actors who deny it to us. We want to control what can’t be controlled, we want to believe we can win or lose at things that fundamentally resist achievement. When we do not find love, we are able to blame ourselves for simultaneously not wanting it enough and not having sufficiently purged ourselves of wanting. To think of self-love as a goal-oriented progression leading to a tangible result, comparable to accumulating money in a savings account in order to purchase a house, is perhaps more harmful, in its cheery self-deception, than simply accepting that these things occur primarily through random chance. Equally useless is the idea that the love of others is some earned reward doled out at the zenith of one’s journey to self-love. Saying one is deserving of love is always only a few shades of nuance over from the idea that one is entitled to it. Nobody deserves love, or doesn’t deserve it; the only way people end up in relationships with one another is through random chance, and none of us are ready for it when we do. I’m currently in a great relationship, and how I got into that relationship can be summed up in one sentence: I got lucky. I was kind of a mess when I got into it; I’m kind of a mess now. My parents, who have been married for 35 years, met when they were both going through divorces. My dad’s relationship advice has always been that the best time to meet someone is, counter to conventional wisdom, when you’re in the worst possible emotional place. At least, goes his thinking, then you find out early if you’re willing or able to do the hard work of a relationship with this person. I don’t know that this advice is necessarily perfect, but it at least has more logic to it than the idea of some perfect emotional readiness. Most of us are kind of a mess, and even those who aren’t can’t guarantee love will find them because they have more wholly accepted themselves. Extremely self-loathing people find love all the time; extremely emotionally stable people often live without a romantic relationship. Love itself is not necessarily good or healthy. Romantic relationships provide benefits and also stressors and both of those things are usually not the benefits or the stressors that accepted wisdom tells us they will provide. Love neither fixes us nor arrives as a reward for our fixing ourselves.

aa healthcare

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VtYDId4lW2PFb5i2B381QB3H6K5gxhVgjWMj7-mTh2Y/edit?fbclid=IwAR31QP6Kco2XLafVZaz5tifLnymivYyOBFuCOAbKKX__TiLTUJpXCiyzxfY#gid=604601349

http://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/dressed_to_the_nines/detail_page.asp?fileName=nl_1916_newyork.gif&Entryid=257

https://hatheaven.com/products/florida-marlins-teal-black-cooperstown-new-era-59fifty-fitted

https://www.kitchensofafrica.com/product/kaani-west-african-hot-sauce/

https://shop-bside-label.com/?mode=f8

https://www.rootsoffight.com/collections/shop/products/negro-league-baseball-duffle-bag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhcbizUSOx4

https://www.royalsreview.com/2019/12/10/20982723/here-is-what-a-mlb-expansion-draft-might-look-like https://medium.com/@johnnemann/where-the-water-tastes-like-wine-postmortem-211a1f9d791a