hi friends, and welcome back to Free Pizza.
Free pizza is a nice, unexpected thing in a strange world. I hope this newsletter is the same.
content warning for this intro: health anxiety, Covid
I have not been writing much because for the last six weeks because I’ve developed extremely high levels of anxiety. I have struggled with anxiety on and off for years, but never to this extent.
On November 20, I had my first panic attack. So fun! I went on a run. When I got home, I read an article talking about how, if you’ve had Covid, you should clear exercise with your doctor before starting to exercise and that if you feel any chest pains to seek immediate care. I had felt chest pains on my run, which were probably just…from running. Still, I panicked. I went to the ER. They did all the tests on my heart and found that everything was (thankfully!) normal.
Something flipped in me that day, like the levels of anxiety from that attack turned on a dimmer switch in my brain: Some days, the anxiety is dim. Other days it’s at its brightest setting, but it’s always on.
I’m extremely lucky that I had a moderate case of Covid, extremely lucky that I wasn’t hospitalized, and extremely lucky that I haven’t experienced secondary symptoms after having had Covid in March. This isn’t just luck but also privilege: I’m young, white, able-bodied, economically stable and work from home.
But I did have it when we didn’t know anything. I lost my sense of taste and smell before we even knew it was a symptom. I had it when, after visiting an urgent care, I was told there’s nothing they can do for me, but to go to the hospital — a hospital that may not have capacity for me — if it gets worse. I can’t go into the details of all the symptoms I felt yet. But I was told I couldn’t be helped, and I think I’m just starting to process the trauma of that. That’s coming through in the way that I no longer feel safe inside my body.
What happened on November 20, combined with seeing higher case numbers has initiated a trauma response. Or at least that’s what my therapist says and I believe her! I am constantly worried that every little pain in my arm, sore throat or headache is actually indicative of some serious health issue. It makes sense, I think, that in a pandemic, when I got the virus that is causing the pandemic, that I would start to have health-related anxiety. It is still hard, and it’s hard for everyone right now.
I feel like being honest is important right now because we’re all having a hard time! I don’t want to tell you to listen to the new Maggie Rogers album (although — you definitely should, because listening to it is like going back in time to a warm October day in 2014 when you and three friends drove to Dexter Lake on a Wednesday afternoon and jumped in naked) or talk about how much I have been loving Trader Joe’s blood orange tea without also acknowledge that liking anything right now is a feat.
I am starting to feel better: I’m taking CBD; I have a good therapist; I have been watching hours of Sex and the City daily (if it helps, it helps), reading poetry when my brain can’t hold more than 60-100 words and taking showers at 11 am. I take Vitamin D and magnesium. I stopped drinking caffeine and I sleep 8-10 hours a day and I meditate twice a day. This shit takes effort! I have a Lexapro prescription I can start if I feel like it and Xanax if I don’t want to feel anything. I have a sweet new-ish kitty named Ozzie who purrs nonstop who I can pet. All of these things are working, slowly. But if you have any advice for anxiety, please hmu!
Thank you for reading. Thank you for letting me take up space in your inbox, especially in 2020, the year of the Substack (!). I hope this pizza is, if not fresh and delicious, at least unexpected and nice.
1. putting all your friends’ addresses in a spreadsheet 📬
💡 if you wait until you’re already at the post office to ask your friend what their address is
yes there are a LOT of fire signs in my life, not including myself
I give all credit to Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman for talking about this on the Call Your Girlfriend podcast. Every time I use my ADDRESSES - 2020 spreadsheet, it feels like I’ve just given myself a tiny, perfect gift.
This is very simple! Text your friends and ask them for their addresses. Open a new Google Sheet. Copy the addresses into the Google Sheet. Add birthdays if you’re feeling crazy! You’ll look like a together, thoughtful friend without a ton of effort. If we can’t visit our friends, we may as well send them nice things.
2. light beers in small glasses 🍺
💡 if you like Anthony Bourdain, feeling like you have a large hand or want to feel German
that’s a great light beer and a great small glass
While watching hours of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Parts Unknown (which I write about extensively + emotionally in my last newsletter), I started noticing all the frothy light beers in tiny glasses he was drinking, usually poured from a 12 or 22 oz. green or brown bottle with a nondescript label. Tony would sip this frothy, carbonated light beer in between chopstick-fulls of big bowls of spicy noodles and I would drool. It looked perfect.
Bourdain inspired me to set aside Five Boroughs Session IPAs for Miller High Lifes, Sierra Nevadas for Peronis, and I’ve come to realize there is nothing better than a light beer in a small glass.
excellent lite beer, small glass
Coming of age in Oregon means that my beer palette was nursed on the hyper-hoppy NW IPA style, popularized in the 1980s and ’90s by breweries like Widmer Brothers in Portland, Grant's Brewery Pub in Seattle and Russian River’s Pliny the Elder in Santa Rosa, which has a cult-like following. These are IPAs that make your tongue curl and leave you wondering how you got so drunk after only a couple beers. (I love them now, but the first time I tried Ninkasi in Brian Chaddock’s dorm room my freshman year, I spit it out!)
When I interned at Willamette Week in 2016, we did a beer tasting to determine which IPA was the best in the Portland. We tried 73 IPAs in a day. (I’m still recovering.) For seven hours, I brought growlers of IPAs from the garage to the conference room to fill the tiny cups of our panel of beer-tasters (like 12 dudes) and filled big bowls of pretzels for them to snack on.
We determined that the best IPA brewed in Portland was SemperFiPA from Fat Head’s (RIP), a juicy and drinkable IPA born from a shortage of typical Simcoe and Citra hops. After Fat Head’s beers, Juice Jr. from Great Notion Brewing was the favorite. Juice Jr. was citrusy, tangy, and sessionable, meaning you could drink more than one without debating whether or not to call an Uber home. It was entirely unlike any NW IPA I had tried: It was more like a Northeast IPA, or what we usually characterize as a “hazy” IPA. The NE IPA continued to be popular in hop-heavy Portland, with beers like Great Notion’s Ripe and Breakside’s What Rough Beast.
Soon after this tasting, I got over IPAs. I had tried all of them. My tastebuds needed to recover from the relentless hop attack. I wanted to embrace things I thought were good, even if other people didn’t think they were good. (This is a lifelong pursuit; see my favorite music of the year below!)
So I embraced Rainier, Portland’s regional cheap beer. (Ok it’s based in Washington and now brewed in California, but it’s still Portland’s regional beer.) It’s bubbly, nectary, and the perfect level of bad. It’s the best cheap beer. (If you’re an editor, plz let me write about Rainer for you!) And you can get a pint ON DRAFT for $1.50-$4. For my birthday, my friend Erik sent me a 6-pack of tall boys and I saved them for months. I even saved an empty can like I live in a frat house!
A few months ago, I made @litebeersmallglass, an Instagram account where I post photos of lite beers in small glasses. (Is this entire section a plug for this? Kind of! Jk) For Christmas, Charlie gave me a set of small glasses for light beers and I already feel 25% more European than before I had them. 2021 is, for me at least, the year of the light beer, tiny glass.
3. Buying Goodwill stuff off Instagram 🍶
💡 if you want Goodwill stuff but ~curated~ and not problematic
I miss roaming the aisles of a Goodwill, putting my hands on weird cookie jars, bad art and other things hundreds of people have touched. I remember when I learned I had to break up with Goodwill, which purports to give good jobs to people with disabilities but then exploits them.
There are many other ways to buy secondhand and to buy less (which I talk about in free pizza #2), and the ways to do this seem to only be getting more chic. One way to buy secondhand is through @thehavenmarketplace on Instagram, an LA-based seller who offers a thrift experience that’s curated and thoughtful.
LaToya is based in LA and includes the cost of shipping in the price, or offers a lower price for in-person pickups. The account has high-quality objects you would usually buy new, but this way you don’t have to spend $30 at Target.
4. InsightTimer 🕯
💡
if you want to try meditation but found Headspace to be kind of annoying
zen Lisa courtesy of Baggu wallpapers, which i wrote about in free pizza #2
I get it, Headspace is amazing. (No really though if it worked for you I’m glad.) I just feel like that dude’s voice, much like Michael Barbaro’s, is imprinted in my brain and will never not be there. I think the Headspace narrator guy loves being the Headspace narrator guy. Am I being rude? In a time when everything from your dentist to your olive oil is b r a n d e d Millennial pink, I just don’t need my meditation to be too.
I use InsightTimer, which feels decidedly more ~analog~ despite the fact that it is, in fact, an app. Chloe introduced this to me a couple of years ago, and while I’ve gone through spurts of meditating and spurts of not meditating, it’s the app I always come back to.
So there are two ways I think are best to use this:
1) Timed meditation
This is if you just need to breath for a couple of minutes. I started with 30 seconds and worked my way up.
Press Timer. Set your duration. Set an Ambient Sound. (I do Raindrops because you can take the girl out of Oregon, but you can’t take Oregon out of the girl! 🤪) Press Start. Take deep breaths. There’s no voice guiding you. There will be a nice bell when you’re done.
2) Guided meditation
This is what I’ve been doing for the last 17 days (yes, I’m very proud of my streak!). When I’m really anxious, it’s helpful for me to have someone to tell me what to do.
Press Guided. Press Filter by Time. (I usually do 0-5 or 5-10 minutes). Go to Filters. Go to Advanced - Filter by Benefit. Choose what you’re dealing with. (I almost always choose Anxiety or Sleep.) Filter by Practice. Choose whatever looks good to you. (I always do Guided Imagery, so the meditation will tell me to think of my anxiety as a color, or think of myself being rooted like a tree to the ground, etc.) Then select a meditation.
I hope I’m not making this more complicated than it needs to be, but I wish I knew both of these things when first downloading this app, so I hope it’s helpful.
5. my favorite albums & books of 2020🎸📚
💡
if you’re sick of your own Spotify Year in Review
Here is the art that helped get me through this year:
FREE PIZZA’s top 16 favorite albums of 2020 (in no order)
Notes from the Archives (2011-2016) - Maggie Rogers (2020) (I didn’t really like her last album, but this was great. It’s really unpolished and stripped down and shows just how good of a musician and singer she is.)
folklore - Taylor Swift
American Water - Silver Jews (1998) (I remember the first time I heard “Random Rules” I had just interviewed a bunch of cheerleaders for a story and I was in the West Village and walking to the train and this came on and I listened to it on repeat the entire ride home. My uncle had just died and the lyric, “He said Steve some people leave/ and no highway will bring them back,” WRECKED ME.)
Songs - Adrianne Lenker (2020)
Nobody Lives Here Anymore - Cut Worms (2020)
Free Love - Sylvan Esso (2020)
Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains (2019)
Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers (2020)
UR FUN - Of Montreal (2020) (p sure I got covid at this concert in March but wow that’s a good album)
Future Past Life - STRFKR (2020) (very underrated, chill music for walking + thinking)
Hair - Original Broadway Cast (1968)
Technicolor Health - Harlem Shakes (2009) (2020 made me revert back to high school)
Creaturesque - Throw Me The Statue (2009) (in the best way)
When Your Heartstrings Break - Beulah (1999)
Wrestling - Reptaliens (2020)
Shangri-La - Yacht (2011) (In January I went to a YACHT show and lied to the lead singer whose from Portland about where I went to high school because everyone understandably hates my high school
FREE PIZZA’s top 10 favorite books of 2020 (these are in order)
Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner
A really sharp memoir about a woman in her 20s who moves to SF to work in tech. Great social commentary.Lakewood by Megan Giddings
A thrilling, brilliant novel about a woman who signs up for a medical experimentation trial to help her mom pay for a long-term health condition…and then shit gets weird. It evokes all the ways the U.S. has exploited and abused Black and brown bodies for medical research. (I read this in 4 hours.)On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
A novel about a son and a mother who immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. A coming of age story, an immigration story, a coming out story. Quite possibly the most beautiful prose I have ever read, and soon to be adapted by A24!Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante (you know when Elena Ferrante is no. 5 that I read some REALLY good books this year)
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
What If This Were Enough? Essays by Heather Havrilesky
Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Thank you so much for reading. Please subscribe and share with friends 🍕 HAPPY 2021 HOPE IT’S FILLED WITH LOTS OF FREE PIZZA