Growing up, my family often had a jigsaw puzzle out on the table behind the sofa in the TV room. I really enjoyed sitting and working on that while people watched TV, in the action but also outside of it. I remember getting lost in the details of an image while you fit the pieces together.

I grew up and moved out and didn’t think about puzzles again until Mom was going through chemo–the cancer hospital here has puzzles everywhere in the waiting rooms (because it’s a metaphor, get it?) and they got tainted with that experience. I didn’t touch them in the hospital and assumed I’d never want to see another puzzle in my life.

But fast forward to the last six weeks, when work has been so busy. I get home so fried I’m not able to sew (because I don’t have the brain power) or knit (because I’m too wound up) and instead just default back to looking at a screen.

So I went and bought a puzzle.

Thankfully, I don’t think too much about the cancer hospital when I’m doing it. I don’t think too much at all, actually, and that’s wonderful. I can still feel productive but I can also zone out and I’m not straining my eyes or looking at things I don’t need but want to buy. Highly recommend.

Because here are some pictures of magnified sand grains and they’re amazing:

Images from sandgrains.com (which includes origins of the sand, so click through), found via the Dense Discovery newsletter. And here’s that William Blake:

Sometimes you can learn from Twitter (assuming you trust your Twitter source, which seems decently legit).

The words ROOK, CROW, JAY and RAVEN are all supposed to have originally been onomatopoeic, and derive in some way from words imitating the birds’ calls. pic.twitter.com/nWtPtbf5sP

— Haggard Hawks 📚🦅 (@HaggardHawks) September 15, 2019

I’m a little late but there’s still time to enjoy Palindrome Week

Happy palindrome week!

9-10-19
9-11-19
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9-19-19

(won’t happen again for 92 years)

— oliver binkhorst (@obinkhorst) September 10, 2019

I posted about The Dry Down–a newsletter about perfume–a couple of years ago and I’m still enjoying it (I’m enjoying it so much I’m a paying subscriber). Yes, it’s about perfume and I’ve found a couple that I really love through the authors’ guidance, but what I enjoy most is how Rachel Syme and Helena Fitzgerald use writing about perfume as a way to sum up big feelings.

Like this, for example, and fall, which is breathing down our necks:

This time of year is a huge dose of feeling with little recourse to action. Golden leaves are connected to an activity, leaf-peeping, a hideous out-loud term that I learned about in my twenties on the East Coast and couldn’t believe anyone actually said with a straight face. But even this archaic-preppy-bourgeois term is about a kind of longing and nothingness, reaching for something that offers no landing point, no destination toward which the reach can extend. “Let’s go and look at the leaves” is very silly but also kind of sad and poignant. I feel so much and all I can do about it is… drive by some trees?

This empty destination is the crack where capitalism gets in, of course, which is why those of us who love–or just feel something big about–fall often associate it with things we can buy, sweaters and lattes and boots and pencils and soups and produce and decorative gourds. Buying stuff is always there, lurking in the places where we feel too much and don’t know what to do with those feelings.

Happy 125th Labor Day from the labor movement, which fought for years to give you the eight-hour workday and the five-day work week. Union approval is at a high point again; I think people are realizing that we still need them. (Now to organize advertising employees…)

Here’s my favorite cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid” by the New Harmony Sisterhood Band. I love that they added their own verse to the end:

We modern union maids are also not afraid
To walk the line, leave jobs behind–
And we’re not just the Ladies Aid!
We’ll fight for equal pay and we will have our say
We’re workers too the same as you and fight the union way.

Hello yes it’s a busy week but please enjoy these goats:

(Image 1 is from the Words of Women Instagram; image 2 is from Lisa Congdon–who is coming to SLC to speak next week!)

This is well worth 10 minutes of your time: A charming little video finding out where all Bob Ross’ original paintings are. Bonus: You’ll learn his business partner Annette Kowalski sewed all of the shirts Bob wore on TV (!).

The research and video are by the NY Times and there’s a little more info on their site.

Maybe it’s nine months of weekly therapy, maybe it’s projects I’m excited about*–but I feel like I’ve been doing some really good work at work in the last little while. I’m more willing to take risks and more open about what I need and it turns out that’s a combo for creative ideas.

I saw this article Monday and it falls in line with what I’ve been doing differently in my career: embracing who I am, being open, and managing my anxiety. From A Misfit’s Guide to Navigating the Office, by Jennifer Romolini:

Your best work will come when you can be open, accountable, curious and fully who you are—not by performing some outsize version of who you think you should be. Not sure where to begin? Try the following:

• • • Stop with the whens and thens: (“When I am X, then I can X … ”) Instead, focus on the value and strengths you bring in this moment, even with all of your perceived flaws.
    • Identify what it is about work that makes you feel anxious. Learn to push through this anxiety instead of running away from it. A daily meditation practice may help with this; so could a simple 10-minute walk.
    • Pinpoint the triggers that make you feel ashamed or insecure and begin the process of overcoming them. Journaling, therapy, confiding in friends are all potential ways to cope.

*It’s the therapy