Information Inquiry - Your News Today!

April 3, 2023

Dear peers,

It seems it has been nearly a year since I last wrote. With some friends asking about my absence and with the revival of Daily Dispatch by Seth Winton, I was encouraged to bring to you the news I find important. I am attempting a new platform for delivering these and will try to be more consistent. This edition is very much not news and very much just my thoughts, but I hope you enjoy.

A Very Quick Complaint:

If you are going to bring a child on an airplane (approx 4 years old), try giving them a Benadryl or something. On a recent flight, one of these creatures was kicking my seat and using the tray as a drum. After at least an hour (I have some patients) I turned and looked at the mother. She acted miffed and annoyed at me as if it was out of her control. Then to cap it all off, they brushed past me when it was my turn to get out and get my luggage. Not cool.

An Encouragement in Honor of Spring and New Beginnings:

When I first got glasses my senior year of high school, I had this weird feeling of sorrow that I would now be seeing everything through a lens of glass. So, in my silly mind, I started this thing where if I am really enjoying a moment or am generally struck by something, I take off my glasses for just a second. It seems ridiculous, but I want to feel like I saw this awe-inspiring thing with my actual eyes and not through a barrier of glass as if peering through a window. 

However, in contrast to my above story about glasses, I often have a hard time actually acknowledging or celebrating the good things that happen to me or the things that would be considered wins. For example, when I got my job in New York, I remember my soon to be wife, Rylie, saying, “We should celebrate!” For some reason though, I was scared of all my potential future failures attached to this win. What if the job was a scam when I got here? What if I got fired after six months? What if I couldn’t find an apartment in time and had to reject the offer? The list goes on, but I think you get the point. 

In his book Goodbye, again, Jonny Sun says this about celebrating: “If I do, that means it's happening, and if it's happening that means I can severely screw it up, and if I severely screw it up that means it will not be happening anymore, and if it is not happening anymore that means that everyone will know that I severely screwed it up, and this all causes me to get so anxious that I feel more likely and more able to screw the thing up than I did before, and so I've found that in general it's just easier to just ignore it and just try to get through it without imagining and then willing into existence all the ways I can go about messing it up.” 

I do not think that this feeling is unique to me or shared across a minority. I am sure that it is quite common, and because of that, will have many approaches and outcomes to trying to adjust this mindset. I encourage those who do feel this way to at least begin celebrating by yourself. Don’t downplay your achievements. 

Thank you to my friend Andrew for recommending this book to me as I would recommend it to anyone and everyone. 

In Honor of the Super Bowl (I wrote this a while ago when the Super Bowl was still relevant):

Have you noticed that everything comes in the form of a “bowl” recently? Okay, not literally everything, but an overwhelming amount of food options that don’t warrant a bowl have found their way to now requiring utensils. Burritos, smoothies, bread, and even pizzas are now changing shape and people are eating it up.

A 2020 article from The Eater has a quote that really sums up how I feel about this new trend. “Smoothie bowls are, in essence, a marketing lie that’s heaved on the masses to prolong the life of the smoothie and juice bar genre. But here’s the thing: People genuinely like smoothies and don’t exactly need it to be reimagined.”

I am no fan of any of these fad inspired bowls, but the one that I will actively turn my nose up at is the açaí bowl. Açaí has been harvested in the Brazilian Amazon for centuries. The process for gathering this super food is also super demanding and dangerous, but the pay does not reflect it. According to Business Insider, a family who harvested full time in 2021 was able to gather 53 baskets, earning an income of about 950 USD. That’s as little as $0.20 per pound. Meanwhile a pound of processed açaí sorbet can sell for $7.00 or more in the United States.

Is this a big deal? No. However, we live in a world so focused on the environmental effect of everything that we now have paper straws. Just something to think about the next time you eat something that realistically doesn’t need plastic utensils and a plastic bowl to be consumed.

I’ll leave you with this in hopes of warmer weather. “Girl you’re hot and cold. That makes you warm.” - Tyga “Temperature”