Catherine Price talked to Ross Gay about delight, which was (obviously) a delight for me to encounter because I started my delight practice after reading about it from Catherine Price, who got it from Ross Gay. Delight!
An appreciation
I am sure some of you are foodies who would not be caught dead in a chain restaurant, and I would love to live someplace with many independent restaurant options, but sometimes a chain restaurant just hits right. I went to the Olive Garden for a birthday lunch - is it the best fettucine alfredo in the world? No. (That would be at Talayna’s circa 1994-1998.) But it scratched an itch! What can I say, I am a woman of the people. (And since my sodium tends to be low, a meal at the OG is practically medicinal.)
Some quotes
“We may be the only animals who can think about our thinking, but that doesn’t mean we can be relied on to do it particularly well.”
Sarah Krasnostein, The Believers: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle
“How strange it was to be inside a body, a floating and complex person with many different ways of feeling and then to look into a mirror and see yourself reduced to only one thing, the same physical face over and over again.”
Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates
“Bernie pulled herself back into the room. Her body felt old, ancient and crumbling. Cracks seemed to be forming in her neck and lower back a la a Disney cartoon of dissolution. If she could only stop sleeping on her stomach. But then she’d have to stop cramming cheddar cheese before bedtime and drinking beer and who would she be then? It is a slippery slope, eliminating pleasure: once you eliminated one pleasure from your life, the rest would have to follow. Pretty soon you’d be sleeping on your back like a corpse. Not dead yet. Alive.”
Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates
“Vikings believed that when a baby died they ascended to the heavens in the form of a strawberry — the seeds of the strawberries represented the souls of babies. For the Vikings, eating a strawberry was akin to eating a baby. Very frowned upon, to say the least.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees
“I swept my hand over the damp curls in disbelief. All I did was comb out the messy tangle and let it air-dry. I thought of all the commercials for hair products that were so common in the mid-eighties: the fluorescent colors of Dep hair gel; L’Oréal, in their jaunty red, yellow, and blue Mondrianesque color-block-designed bottles; and of course, the purple mystique of the Aussie Hair Care line — from Australia (so exotic) — where every gel and spritz spray smelled like grape Kool-Aid.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees