Friday Favorites

Honestly, yesterday, Thursday, I was having a sad day. Work was really getting me down. Working in public health is getting really hard, I can’t stop caring about encouraging people to get vaccinated, I can’t stop patiently having conversations with people about masks and vaccines and physical distancing and mental health and coping methods and mold and safe water and housing conditions and climate change and it’s so much more emotionally exhausting than I ever imagined that it would be. So I started to make a little gratitude list in my head. I got home from pet sitting today and get to spend some time in my own space, my little cat is very happy to see me, I washed my sheets and so I get to crawl into clean sheets tonight, I had leftovers from a really good meal I cooked last night to eat for dinner tonight, I get paid from my day job tomorrow and I got paid from pet sitting today, I’m going curling with new friends tomorrow night, I’m going Christmas shopping this weekend and putting up my Christmas decorations, I sat in my thrifted couch and needlepointed this evening. I have never done a gratitude list before but it was a really good way from pulling me out of my funk. I’m still very overwhelmed and reaching a point with work where I can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel anymore, but I feel better.

I also played the 10 minute version of All Too Well and scream-sang and cried, which helped nearly as much.

Instagram Favorite: @katespiers

It’s actually kind of funny how I ended up following Kate, I found her through Rachel Martino, who I stopped following, just because I found her content to get a bit repetitive. But Rachel was influenced by Kate on her gorgeous bookshelves and then I started watching Scotland Home of the Year, where she’s one of the judges, and she’s got such a cute personality and accent. She also makes me want to go to Glasgow, which is somewhere that Northern Ireland people always make fun of so I had never wanted to go there before lol.

Movie/TV Favorite: MacGyver

So I had watched a few episodes of this before when they did crossovers with the various NCISs, but I just randomly put it on while I was pet sitting and it’s really good. It’s the reboot of the original show MacGyver, which I had never heard of until a vet I worked with complimented me on the IV set up I “MacGyvered” for a sick calf in a garage. It’s really good, and it’s cop-show adjacent, which I’ve been reconsidering as I’ve been educating myself on police violence, but the protagonist is an engineer who hates guns. So that’s pretty cool.

Podcast Favorite: Dark History: Why 20,000 people wanted Italian Immigrants Dead

This was a really interesting story that I had never heard of before, and I think that as we continue down the path in North America of whiteness as a monolith, it is important to remember where some people are coming from. Many Italian-Americans and Irish-American grandparents and great-grandparents (at this point probably) don’t think of themselves as white, because they were denied the privileges growing up of being white. Which is one of the things this story delves into, and the Mafia, which apparently hasn’t always been a bad thing? Fascinating, and terrible.