It's the Wednesday Word with Becky Bird!
...the start of what I'm hoping will be a weekly newsletter.
Hello there! This is the first week of what I’m hoping will be a weekly newsletter to supplement my blog. It’ll draw heavily from my Twitter habit, but if you follow me there, don’t worry! I’ll try to throw in some stuff here that I haven’t already posted there. To get started, here are a few things that caught my attention in the first Q of 2022.
First, my mantra for 2022:
Local artist and arts writer Sarah Hotchkiss keeps an updated Google doc of Bay Area art happenings, updated each month. Why do I love so much that’s it’s a shared Google doc?
If you’re looking for something to watch, I recommend Maid, This Way Up, Sex Education, Severance, Life & Beth, and Better Things.
2 in 1: If you’re looking for something to listen to (and read!), I recommend the podcast On Eyre, by Hot & Bothered, a podcast series about romance novels. I’m finally over the halfway mark and I’m really enjoying rereading Jane Eyre while listening to the podcast. It’s like a book club where everyone has actually read the book!
Doing dry Veganuary in January had me thinking about diet culture and intuitive eating (love NPR’s Life Kit podcast, by the way - here’s another ep that really resonated with me).
The social power of pancakes:
Started running again. Ran the half-marathon I signed up for before the pandemic started. Wrote about it here. It’s kinda like when Mark says to Alexa over dinner in a recent episode of Severance:
This is the life you've been given and that's another life. You don't get that one. So, do something with this.
Meryl Streep should play Edith Heath in her biopic. Would watch.
Me, creatively, all the time:
I recently replied to a Twitter thread from someone with way more followers than me asking for recommendations about “the art of interviewing.” I found and shared the recorded version of the Debbie Millman webinar I attended in the fall. The author of that tweet later shared that link without throwing me the ol’ HT.
Speaking of Why Design Matters, I finally got my signed copy of the book!
Yes to all of this: Make plans, COVID laughs. On a related note, my “pandemic diaries” started two years ago this month.
A book (not by me) very similar (same title even!) to a project I did in grad school. It’s fine, I’m fine, I’m happy for them, really.
I will leave you with this, the poem The Orange by Wendy Cope. I hope you’ve checked off all your to-dos for the day and have a little time leftover.