Hi friends 👋
It’s been another trademark Austin week of serendipitous connections. I like to say when you look for good things you find them, but maybe the best things are the ones you aren’t looking for. I love this city.
This week was coffee shop hangouts, chatty bike rides, crying in the car, wine nights in my new apartment and writing my heart out in the final weeks of class. Here are five things I’ve been thinking about this week—including a couple ideas for stories that I’d like to write!
How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart by David Foster Wallace
If you care about tennis or not, you’ll likely appreciate this essay on the pitfalls of a young tennis star’s idealistic autobiography. Maybe you won’t, but I loved how Wallace brings you into his desire to see the real Tracy Austin. He critiques her story as “breathtakingly insipid” and then teases you into a mind game of wondering if the young athlete’s relentless naïveté was really the secret to her success.
Growth! Scale! Profit!
In our western capitalist culture, the question isn’t should you grow but how will you grow. Bigger is better. More is more.
A pivotal point in my early career was a 10-week User Experience Design bootcamp at General Assembly. A student in one of the first classes launched in New York, I went on to be a success story for GA— quickly finding a full-time job with a well-known agency after the class. As time went on, I started to lose respect for the program as I saw them try and scale the business—filling the market with junior designers with an easy-to-spot, cookie-cutter portfolio of work.
10 years later, I find myself in another bootcamp-style learning experience.
This time around I’m not an early test case in an experimental program. This is the final cohort of Write of Passage, as David Perell has decided to close the business. The quality of the experience has exceed my expectations, and though it feels bittersweet to see it end, I wonder if WOP would have headed down the same path as General Assembly.
Some experiences shouldn’t scale. Learning, community… The bigger they get, the more impersonal they become. I’ve seen this in church, too.
Really, I will.
Here is New York by E.B. White
I’ve had this iconic piece bookmarked for too long. Today’s the day to make a coffee and settle in to 17 pages of prose on The City that still has my heart.
I moved to the city at 19 years old, sight-unseen, for a job as a personal assistant. Think Devil Wears Prada, but it’s a pair of 1992 patent leather pumps with mousey grey stitching, haunting the dusty shelf of an expired vintage designer thrift store.
This vignette is from one of my very first first days in New York:
One hand grasped the surprisingly cool metal pole in the 6 train, the other intertwined firmly with a small, sweaty palm.
I didn’t want to lose him.
New York City felt big, but what felt even bigger was the City Under the City, a maze of subway tile and sticky hot underpasses that made up the metro system. Above ground, the mathematic grid of streets and sun peeking over 2nd Avenue showed me exactly where I was at all times. Unless I found myself in the triangles that broke the grid around the West Village, off 6th Avenue, I think. Years later, I would still find myself stopping abruptly to curse and turn on my heel, realizing I’d been walking opposite my direction.
I wanted to take a cab that morning, but Jeanne handed me a floppy metro card and pushed us out the door. The Upper East Side was a lengthy pilgrimage from Tribeca.
Have you done this before? I asked him.
No, it’s my first day of school.
Me too, I thought.
I am deep into Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton. Instead of starting my other library books, I proceeded to borrow two more books from a friend. Oops. My evening read is Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr and I’ve also started Eugene Peterson’s Answering God as a morning devotional. I loved this quote:
“Left to ourselves, we will pray to some god who speaks what we like hearing, or to the part of God that we manage to understand.”
That’s what’s been on my mind! What have you been curious about this week?
Much love,
Alivia
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