Drawing Links: Rings, ASMR, Ottomans, the Printing Press
Stories and illustrations
Hello, I’m Edith, and this is a newsletter featuring links, illustrations, comics, and short stories. Please drop me a line anytime, or reply to this email. I’d love to hear what you think.
Yesterday I met up with a friend after work and came home late. I turned on the lights and went into the kitchen, where I was greeted by a distressing scene. There were two small and three — no, four — large bugs on my kitchen countertop. I want to call them all “cockroaches,” but I know that the little black ones were something else, and the larger ones probably were, too.
The larger ones had a kind of elegance. They seemed to have “longer legs” than the typical cockroach. They were beige and thin, and two or three were hiding under my knife block. I killed two with the cloth that was sitting out, plus both little ones, and then I threw the cloth away.
Normally there are no bugs in my apartment (that I see), and so when this happens, I’m tempted to take it as a sign that I’m doing something wrong in my life. I say this partially as a joke, but it’s sort of like how I got into astrology “as a joke,” and now I pretty much entirely believe in it. Usually there’s only a single bug, though — a lone messenger. I rarely go directly into the kitchen after I turn the lights on, which makes me wonder if every day my kitchen is filled with bugs, only they typically get the courtesy of a few minutes to disappear.
The Links
For a few years one of the first Google searches for me that would pop up was "A.J. Daulerio Is an Asshole." My sister, one of the few in my family who was proud of my accomplishments as a writer during that auspicious period, would struggle with that result the most.
The Small Bow (I’m biased because I do the illustrations for this, but this week’s installment is especially good.)
I would have liked to tell you that First Emily and I stayed best friends forever. But then she chose to go to a college that might as well have called itself Karen College.
NYT (Everyone’s probably already seen this, but I loved it and wanted to join in.)
We love to see characters not just being wrong but also discovering that they are wrong. Yet for ourselves, we want to be right. We want to understand—understand ourselves, our world, our relationships. We may generally believe that as we go through life, our understanding, our basic rightness about things, grows.
I started watching asmr as a joke but now I can’t go to bed without watching your channel
YouTube/ItsBlitzzz (Speaking of doing things as a joke!)
Bird does an everyday dance.
All Animals (My friend Lucy’s new store!)
People lost their minds. It was just like … feral hogs? What was this person talking about? Everything got derailed; it felt like the internet got to have a snow day.
Most people have since moved on, I have not.
Reply All (A podcast episode. Oldish but great.)
When it comes to those who make predictions about the internet, the judgment of history is unlikely to be: They got it right.
The Atlantic (Also, please enjoy my old joke about the printing press.)
“Do you love my cornet that shoots out wet cereal when I play it?” “Yes. How about my car that only goes backward?” “Yes!”
TNY (A sweet comic.)
He doesn’t answer me but says I should have said something
I agree — and tell him it was my fault for not double checking and trusting the sales rep
He says he’s sorry but would be happy to ship me the ottoman as soon as I pay the $300
I tell him that’s not going to happen and ask if he has any suggestions before I escalate it further
Is online advertising working? We simply don’t know
Did you hear the one about the wedding dress and engagement ring designer who shut her business down after her dad died and her marriage fell apart the same year? ... then she slammed her ring finger in the door and embedded her deco diamond so deeply inside her skin that the paramedics had to whisk her away to the ER, where three nurses had to cut a 6K Doyle and Doyle blood-soaked platinum pave band off her hand, along with an engraved three-stone 18k gypsy ring set with six diamonds then sew the skin back together with three stitches in the exact spot where the one carat doyle and doyle 1920's diamond had been…
Thanks for reading! I apologize that the comic is a little hard to read; I will try to make sure they are more readable going forward.