Attention Inventory: Haphazard Systems, Finger Foods, Friendship

This month’s list; lists, links, ideas, collections to steal.

1. SYSTEMS TO SAVE YOURSELF

I endorse collecting some quick hits of delightful oddity, unswerving beauty, and reliable recalibration… and keeping them in close proximity.

Maybe you have a secret little folder of images, or a page in a notebook, or things pinned to a board on your wall. Your system is yours.

When you’re down in a ditch, you’ll be glad your past self had the decency to throw you a bone.

2. SPECIAL MUG

I have been staying in an AirBnb this month. The AirBnb is fine, but inexplicably the only mug I can find in the entire apartment has the Facebook logo on it, which I can’t bring myself to use (bad karma).

Over the weekend I marched myself across town to see a beautiful ceramics pop-up from Simone Bodmer-Turner, where I treated myself to a beautiful new mug to use for the duration of my stay.

It is very heavy, with a thick glaze like fondant icing. It arrived wrapped in a solid yard of honeycomb paper wrapping, and I carried it proudly, swaddled in my arms, for 30 blocks.

While on the topic of containers:

• Footed glasses begging to hold chilled martinis on a tray.

• A beautiful book on the vessel as metaphor.

3. SOLITARY & SHARED

This season has felt steeped in friendship and its endless layers; it contains everything.

Two things:

“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster to not be found.” — psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, 1965.

“Our self-conception depends on the durability of our private mythologies, reinforced by those friends who might help us believe, all evidence to the contrary, in our own confidence.” — Megan O’Grady, in How It Feels to Be Alive