This is Life Is So Beautiful, a weekly email from Hugh Hollowell, devoted to the idea that our hope for survival in this brutal world is rooted in finding the beauty that is everywhere, but sometimes hard to find.

​Click here to read this on the web​

​

Hey y'all!

It is grey and wet here, which s normal for January in the Deep South. It's also in the 60's, which is also not unusual. And while my logical brain knows that there is as much daylight on January 30th as there was on November 12th, it has not informed the part of my brain that really dislikes this time of year. February always seems like a slog to me compared to the rest of the winter - no holiday feasts, no New Years optimism, it's too early to plant summer things, it's too late to plant spring bulbs, and the ones you did plant are mostly not even up yet. Everything is soggy and stupid.

Which is probably one reason why every time around this year I find myself working on house projects (like my office I'm building) or picking up new skills in my workshop or just hunkering down with new books while curled up on the couch with a cat.

A reader used my books wanted wish list and got me Kenji Lopez-Alt's book The Wok [Amazon] [Bookshop] on Wok cookery (highly recommended), and so the last few days have had me crawling around the depths of the Asian grocery store, seasoning my new carbon steel wok, and making lists of pantry items I need for this new (to me) kind of cooking.

I fall into these rabbit holes sometimes. I will find something I'm interested in, and then spend time and money (usually not a lot, but some) obsessing over it, and I will learn new skills and try new things. Then I will slowly divest from it until it is no longer an obsession and is just part of me - a skill I now have, a part of my makeup now, for sure, but not my whole identity.

The best advice I can give you for learning something entirely new is counter-intuitive: Pretend it's 1986. Don't do a deep-dive on YouTube or Pinterest, but instead find a trusted guide and do it their way - at least at first. Learn one person's way of doing something before you seek alternative ways. This is exactly the way we learned things before the Internet: We had one cookbook or article that described how to smoke ribs, so you smoked ribs that way. You just didn't have a lot of options.

But now, there are 37-jillion people on YouTube teaching you how to smoke ribs. This person says to use foil and briquettes, This other person rubs Coca-Cola on their ribs, and this other person would never use briquettes or aluminum foil, but probably recommends essential oils. It's all too much.

Instead, when I'm learning something new, I find one person who has written a lot about the subject, and then only follow their instructions until I feel like I have a firm grasp on the basics, and THEN I branch out, after I have context and enough knowledge to know when something is helpful or time-saving or whatever.

For Wokery, that person for me is Kenji. For now. Until the sun begins to shine again, and my yard is no longer soggy, and I can go back outside.

Five Beautiful Things

• I just finished reading The Diary of a Misfit [Amazon] [Bookshop], the memoir of Casey Parks - a Queer journalist from the Deep South - but who now lives in Oregon. Casey went on a search for a person her grandmother told her about when she came out: Roy, who had lived across the street from her in a small-town in Louisiana, and "was a woman who lived as a man". Interwoven with the interviews with truck driving lesbians, Pentecostal preachers, flag-waving politicians and chain-smoking grandmothers is Casey's own story of growing up Queer in the Christ-haunted south, including her running away, and her learning she can't leave no matter how far she goes. Highly recommended.
• I love the old Kodachrome photos. From a time when much of the world captured on film was in sepia-toned black and white, the vibrant Kodachrome process reminds us that the people who saw these things and lived in this world were vibrant and richly textured, too. So, of course, these Kodachrome photos showing street-scenes from 1940's Manhattan are right up my jam.
• When I was seven, my chain-smoking, whisky-drinking, pulp-fiction-loving great aunt would get tired of my endless questions that interrupted her watching Barnaby Jones on the TV, and would entertain me by trying to teach me how to make paper dolls. These paper creations are... not that.
• Once upon a time, we made things on the internet for fun. No profit motive - just the joy of creation. That is the vibe I get from the amazing site neal.fun, which has many applications, ostensibly made by Neal. But my favorite is Wonders of Street View, which just consists of a random screen capture from Google Street View. It's cooler than it sounds - keep hitting the random button for more pictures.
• From the "In my head, I'm a 12 year old boy" department, I present Horrible Therapist, a random image generator from the Oatmeal. The deal is it randomly generates three comic panels, which are in the context of a therapist and patient. Sometimes the results make no sense, sometimes they are hilarious, and sometimes when either of those things are true, the results are slightly NSFW - depending, of course, on where you work.

On The Blog

Things I published on my blog last week.

• ​Imagine: Imagine how life would be if you treated yourself like you treat someone you love.

Off-Brand links

The purpose of this newsletter is to point out things I think are beautiful. But sometimes, I come across links to things that are really cool or interesting, but not "on brand". Think of these as "off-brand" links.

• One of my favorite books last year was Four Thousand Weeks [Amazon] [Bookshop] (4000 weeks is roughly the lifespan of a human). This website is an homage to the book, and includes a handy lifespan calculator, to show you how many of your 4,000 weeks you have left. Sounds morbid, but not.
• The story of the forger who saved thousands of Jews. He died earlier this month at 97 - May his memory be a blessing.
• Most food expiration dates have zero basis in fact or science.
• And, ironically in this section, Debbie Millman on why personal brands are just icky.

Meta

Trying to make a small independent newsletter (like this one) pay for itself is a balance of creative accounting, magic, and prayer. If you are temperamentally opposed to advertisements (like I am), it is much, much harder.

Over the years, I have been an Amazon affiliate. This means that when you buy something from Amazon after following a link I give you, I get a tiny commission on that purchase. Over the course of a year, I make somewhere between $250 and $300 dollars from this program, or a bit less than what a person working full-time at minimum wage makes for a full week of work.

Amazon has felt increasingly icky recently, and yet it is the easiest way by far to share links to not only books and music but to almost any tangible item these days. But so many of us are trying to limit the reach of Amazon in our lives. I know I am.

So I've started including links to Bookshop.org as an alternative. Bookshop is a frontend service that sells you books from a local independent bookseller. The prices are not as cheap, and the shipping times are slower, but you get the satisfaction of helping keep indie stores going, and in these perilous times, they need all the help they can get. I have applied to be an affiliate with Bookshop, but as it stands right now, all I get if you buy from Bookshop is the satisfaction that we made the indie book world a tiny bit stronger. I'm cool with that.

Affiliate links are a tiny portion of the financial patchwork quilt that pays the bills around here, but every bit helps. The heavy lifting is done by my members, who kick in a little each month to keep my work free for the rest of you. (As an aside - five new members who each pay $5 a month would replace literally every bit of affiliate income I make from Amazon over the course of a year.)

But whether you click on a link or forward this with your friends, share it on social media, or kick in $5 a month, I'm grateful for you and all the ways my readers support my work.

Y'all take care of each other.

Hugh Hollowell

Disclosure: Some links may be affiliate links that provide a small commission to me and help run the site and newsletter. I never link to anything I do not recommend and use, however. - HH