Reading, Writing, Ranting, Recommending: Volume XIII, featuring Jenn Bollenbacher from 1Thing/Week!

Thursday, March 27, 2024

Hello, friends! I am SO VERY EXCITED to have a special guest post on RWRR today from one of my best friends, Jenn! Jenn and I met through blogging in the good old days (like 2008-2009)! While I normally remember everything, I truly don’t remember much about how Jenn and I moved our friendship beyond commenting on one another’s blogs — I think that it was John Mayer related, because we’ve seen him in concert together a lot! Even though she’s in Chicago, we visit one another and text or voice memo most days. She is friends with my wife, her husband Bradley is one of my favorite humans, and if you know me at all, you know what a big deal this is: she and Brad are two of the very few people whose homes I will stay in when I visit somewhere and who I love having stay with me. It’s THAT kind of friendship.

There are many things I love about Jenn: she is so smart it’s unbelievable, she is inspiring and loves self-improvement stuff without being bonkers about it, she is the kind of friend you can go to Target with or go do fun things with, she shows up and helps me with all kinds of branding stuff and taught me how to use Light Room. Every time I am around her, I leave feeling like I learned something because she is the most capable person I know. She gives great advice and is absolutely hilarious and also enjoys talking shit (one of our favorite pastimes). Other Amy and I joke that she is our Financial and Spiritual Advisor, but it’s not really a joke, because I always ask Jenn before making a big purchase or choice because she is the kind of person (a Virgo) who has read everything and made a spreadsheet and has IDEAS.

Last year, I told Jenn that one of my favorite things about her is that she is beautiful and seems truly normal and put together (and she is) but when you get to know her, she is AN ABSOLUTE WEIRDO and I love it. It’s unexpected and delightful and the icing on the cake of a wonderful human. I’m so excited to share her recommendations with you this week now that I’ve written an entire essay about my friend.

Reading

I consider myself an avid reader, but it's probably been a year since I read a book with my eyes. Instead, I've been devouring audiobooks; my AirPods may as well be surgically attached to my ears at this point.

Every time I mention my affinity for audiobooks, I get some variation of "I could never focus long enough to do that!" and to that I say: same! It was an acquired skill for me, beginning with nonfiction & memoirs that didn't require me to follow a narrative plot. Then I moved onto listening to the audio version of books I'd already read, before finally listening to new fiction. 

A few audiobooks I've enjoyed recently:

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley

This was published in 2008, and I read it for the first time in 2009. It's one of a dozen physical books that I still own after several cross-country moves & a 15-year relationship with my Kindle. The psychology of how we respond in emergency situations fascinates me; I loved revisiting this, though I wish the author would release an updated version with some more recent events. I'd love to hear her take on our reactions to the pandemic.

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean Twenge

I found this one a tiny bit tedious to listen to (a lot of references to charts & graphs in the supplementary PDF) but it was worth pushing through. I have a better understanding of Gen Z, as well as a greater appreciation for the older generations that I tend to write off with an eye roll and an "ok, boomer".

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

I listened to this in 2023 but it has one of the most beautiful audiobook narrations I've encountered. Whether or not you've already read it, I highly recommend it on audio!

Writing

I do not have a daily writing habit, and my mid-aughts blogging days are long gone. I did, however, just finish writing thank you notes after my post-elopement party in March 2023. 

While "etiquette" says you have a year to send a thank you (and they were put in the mail a year to the day!) I am still embarrassed because I ordered them, wrote them, and put them in envelopes last summer. All I needed to do was buy stamps.

Instead, I bought a house! I packed the cards in a box, then lost them in the shuffle of moving, the holidays, etc. until I recently rediscovered them next to some paint supplies and old mail.

So I wrote a quick "P.S. So sorry this is a year late!" to all of them and finally sent them out.

Ranting

Please do not take this personally if you have "gotten your colors" done -- I am not mad! -- but I am extremely over this trend.

Every time I see someone post about it, it's always in the context of having to get rid of half their wardrobe in the "wrong" colors / acquire an all new wardrobe in the "correct" colors. I see these comments and wonder: has a man ever been told to get his colors done? Has he ever been asked to shell out $300+ for a stranger trained by a company that's just barely not an MLM to tell him that he's a soft winter or cool spring or neon banana? 

I am a girl's girl and I support women pursuing every opportunity to feel good about themselves, but this seems like a solution to a problem that did not exist until the inventors of the solution convinced us we had a problem.  

The timing of this resurgence (because it's been around since the 1940s...) coincides with the rise of the tradwife trend and a backslide in body positivity efforts, so I'm side-eyeing all of it. Women do not need one more rule about our bodies.

Recommending

Get your knives sharpened! I used to be pretty good about this, but then my local Sur La Table closed during the pandemic, I moved across the country, and hadn't found a new place yet.

It was long overdue, but I had too many things rattling around in my brain so I asked my husband, Brad, to handle it. Within 24 hours, he had found a local place with great reviews, within walking distance, so we packed up our knives and headed over.

At the street address, we found a door wrapped in the shop's branding and instructions to ring the doorbell. We waited, and a man opened the door that led to... a dark stairwell.

"Did you call ahead?" he asked. We had not. He took our knives from us anyway, and we followed him into the dog grooming salon next door. He wrote down Brad's phone number and said he'd call when they were done. 

Two hours later, Brad walked back into the dog grooming salon, paid the man $20 (for 3 knives & some kitchen shears!!! A steal!!!) and walked out with freshly sharpened knives.

We have a lot of questions that we don't need answers to, but most importantly we now have a Knife Guy. 

—

Thanks to Jenn and her Knife Guy (suspicious at best). I’m about to go get my colors done and am praying that I too am a neon banana.