I love all three Lorde albums, but Solar Power is my favorite. It got a lot of hate when it came out, and I'm worried she might disown it when she drops her next album, so I want to take a stand now that this album is good. It traces such interesting critical lines between 60s/70s hippie culture and 2010s/2020s Instagram wellness culture while still holding its own optimistic and fresh natural wellness. And Lorde's affection for her home island New Zealand is inspiring.

Peoria is my hometown. It’s the jewel city of the Illinois River, situated at its widest point, with big bluffs on either side of the river. This segment of the Illinois River is the site of the oldest European settlements in Illinois, but before that, Native Americans inhabited it too. They called this land by the river “pimiteoui”, which roughly translates from Miami-Illinois to English as “it burns past”. The wet land near the river but below the river bluffs was protected from prairie wildfires, leaving forests that have always been safe and green. I spent a lot of time hiking in them. Peoria’s country club is on a long street at the top of the bluffs, with views down to the river and the forests. In 1910 when Teddy Roosevelt was in the backseat of a car on the way to that country club he described the road as the “world’s most beautiful drive”, and I think that’s true. A river valley is where mankind started, and it’s still all we need. This is a recommendation for my hometown but also for yours.

I'm vegan, so I don't experience the full range of peating, but I love the famous Ray Peat carrot salad because it tastes good. The recipe is carrots, apple cider vinegar, coconut oil, and salt. I shred the carrots with a potato peeler and then put the other ingredients on top.

Sometimes I carry a digital camera with a big lens but you don't have to do that. A phone camera works fine. Some people nowadays feel ashamed when taking photos, and I think that's sad. Yes, photos can be curated highlight reels of your life that take you out of an individual moment to capture it, but that's okay. People curate their perceived lives all the time, by what they talk about in conversation, what they wear in front of certain people, what they write about for interviews. And capturing a moment for future memory can be worth a slight step out. It’s powerful to create your identity and remember your past.

A Summer’s Tale is available to stream on HBO Max. It's the story of a math major boy who's shy and wears black. He's pulled between three girls while on his beach vacation in northern France. Like many of Eric Rohmer's best films a lot of its runtime is spent on hot people doing fun activities. This is a recommendation for other Rohmer films, if you like this one. My other favorites are The Green Ray, Claire's Knee, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, and the Romance of Astrea and Celadon.

Another way to generate identity in the present and help you remember your life in the future. It helps that I fixate on individual songs and listen to them multiple times a day, so I enjoy listening to short playlists with the songs I like at the present moment in time. I’ve been doing this since April 2018, and in some ways it feels like my life started then. I can pull up to any month since then and listen to songs that bring it back. In May 2019 I was living in my parents’ sunroom right after I graduated college and listening to Mitski’s cover of Let’s Get Married a lot because it felt so clean and soft.

This is a sonnet, so it’s short. Just fourteen lines. It’s about a falcon. I think about it every time I see a bird of prey hovering in the sky.