EEDA Newsletter Vol 5, Res 5: Intentionalist & 'Laws' of Productivity
This is a public issue of Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice. Feel free to share it!
Hi friends! First, I want to remind you that I wrote a massive post last week on How to Find a Therapist. I will continue to update it with resources as I hear about them. Please feel free to share it far and wide, you never know who it might help. This week on the EEDA Pod we have a ton of fun chatting about the virtues of snail mail and I unearth some of my snail-mail-related elementary school memories.
Last week for my day job my team had a cook-a-long via Zoom and it was incredibly cute and many of us set up our laptops in our kitchens and a person from the wellness group hosted. We had been given shopping lists ahead of time (and gift cards for the groceries) and one of the salads we made was a curried chickpea salad. The nutritionist? Dietician? who was hosting the cook-a-long was lamenting how not enough people eat beans, especially in the U.S. and more people need to eat beans and so on and…
I just stared directly into the camera. Pretty sure some of my teammates stared directly back at me. I’m also just like, beans are a staple of many if not most Black and brown cultures and we exist here in the U.S. but okay! I’m doing my best to eat all the beans. Don’t you worry.
Unrelated: There is a tweet by The Hungover Pundit going around as a screenshot. I cannot find a link to the tweet and the screenshots are grainy so here is the text:
"A friend once shared what she called the Parable of the Choir: A choir can sing a beautiful note impossibly long because singers can individually drop out to breathe as necessary and the note goes on.
Social justice activism should be like that, she said.
That’s stuck with me."
It’s something that has been very present in my thoughts lately. Anyway, it’s resource week! Let’s get to it.
Resource 1: Intentionalist
I recently learned about Intentionalist.com via Ijeoma Oluo’s new book, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--And How You Can, Too. My buying habits are far from perfect but I do try to buy from BIPOC-owned, queer-owned, woman-owned, etc. businesses. I’ve gotten better at seeing a thing I want and then taking the time to see if I could buy it more intentionally. This does involve a lot of Googling and sometimes it takes a lot of effort. Intentionalist helps folks find local small businesses that are Asian-owned, Black-owned, Disability-owned, Latino-owned, LGBTQ-owned, Minority-owned, Native-owned, Veteran-owned, or Woman-owned. (All language was pulled from the website). I believe the person who started this site is from the Seattle area so it is heavy on the businesses from the Pacific Northwest. That being said, there are 184 listings here in the San Francisco Bay Area and there is the option to add a business if there is one you know of (or perhaps your own) that you don’t see listed. You can search by location and demographic. I do think it focuses on businesses you can visit in person.
Resource 2: The Most Helpful ‘Laws’ of Productivity to Get More Done via Lifehacker
I look at Lifehacker so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. This article gives overviews of four ‘laws’ of productivity that are good enough that you don’t really need to read into them further. You can just get the basic gist and implement them if you think they’ll help or ignore them completely. While I try not to be productive every moment of every day, there are some days when I just have a lot I want to get done. Take last Sunday, for example. I needed to do our taxes, we needed to fill out our ballots, we had a lot of podcast work to do to get our show ready to drop this week, and then on top of that were usual chores and grocery shopping. Sometimes it’s helpful to know about the things mentioned in this article that might help me get some stuff off my to-do list so I can do more fun things.
Recent & Current Reads
Inclusion of a book in this section is not necessarily a recommendation and these books won’t necessarily be added to my Bookshop.
Recently Read:
Infinity Alchemist by Kacen Callender
Us by Sara Soler, lettering by Joamette Gil, and translated by Silvia Perea Labayen
Ghost Roast by Shawneé Gibbs & Shawnelle Gibbs, illustrated by Emily Cannon
Crave by Maria Llovet (out 9/17)
Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--And How You Can, Too by Ijeoma Oluo
Currently Reading:
Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words by Anne Curzan (out 3/26)
Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura (out 3/26)
Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams (Yes, I am still working on this)
That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.
If you want to send me some snail mail, you can find me at P.O. Box 21481, Oakland, CA 94620-1481.
You can find our podcast, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts.