Aloha, farmed bees!
How are you this Friday? Does it feel like Sunday to you, also? I am writing at the eleventh hour. Like Kendall Jenner at a spelling bee, I am living dangerously. This week has slapped me silly and called me an exponential waste of space.
UH OH! Here I go, starting off Salve with a depressing waffle. Back on my bullshit because I have a brand that simply must be maintained.
This week I melted down. Perhaps it was an existential crisis. Why get out of bed? Why complete any tasks? Do I have to eat real food? Surely spoonfuls of peanut butter and packets of dried mango will sustain me (?)
Due to the malfunctioning of my human body, I felt personally attacked by every condescending piece of clickbait that urged me to #BePositive.
I tried all of the wellness hacks: make a schedule, exercise daily, find a new hobby, journal your feelings, eat intuitively, don’t be hard on yourself. But self-care rhetoric seems to be punishing me with dissatisfaction for NOT massaging my face with luxurious plant oils and being serene 24/7.
Isn’t self-care supposed to be easy? Or at the very least... ENJOYABLE?!?! I cobbled together some of the absurd wellness ‘recommendations’ I have seen in the last 7 days, in the form of a daily routine, for your amusement:
5:00 AM: Rise, meditate, sing to the birds to wake them up, make matcha latte art.
9:00 AM: Prepare green smoothie in an expensive food processor designed to pulverize bones. Also pulverize bones for broth to slurp throughout the day.
12:00 PM: Intuitively consume one quarter of an avocado. Post a picture captioned #plantmedicine. Practice laughing yoga.
3:00 PM: Sun perineum, take a fat hit of palo santo.
7:00 PM: Eat several hundred almonds, drink 24L of room-temp alkaline lemon water.
9:00 PM: Perform 18 step skincare routine, gua sha entire body, scribble in gratitude journal, sing self to sleep.
Please implement this schedule and advise me on its efficacy. I’m mildly interested in gua sha-ing my entire body, but other than that, I AM TIRED OF BEING TOLD WHAT TO DO. In every corner of the internet, there is a commandment on how to live through a pandemic.
Gwneyth, now is not the time for your vaginal eggs
What bothers me about The Wellness Trap is the rat race towards self actualization that culminates in panic buying lotions, potions, and tonics to bring you closer to Gwyneth Paltrow’s effortless existence. The industry is insidious because it peddles the unattainable euphoric feeling of living your best life.
Admittedly, I have pursued this high. I love a hot yoga class. I put oat milk in my coffee. I’m partial to an acai bowl. These are habits I have developed because they offer a fleeting and performative confirmation that I am inching closer to (but never attaining) enlightenment.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner went to the goop wellness summit and experienced some wacky treatments (syringes of CBD oil, B12 shots, akashic-records healing) curated by Gwyneth Paltrow. She noticed that the ‘healers’ administering ‘treatments’ eschewed traditional medicine and rabidly encouraged patrons to buy more stuff to cure a variety of invented ailments.
For instance–– one medium asserted that Brodesser-Akner’s dead grandmother was whispering in her ear and telling her: you have thyroid disease.
Though she was bowled over by the decadence of the summit and at times enchanted by Gwyneth’s enigmatic glow, at the end of her trip the author came to this conclusion:
“We are doomed to aspire for the rest of our lives. Aspiration is suffering. Wellness is suffering. As soon as you level up, you greet how infinite the possibilities are, and it all becomes too awful to live without.”
I think of the goop’s in this world as gold plated and Le Labo scented multi-level-marketing schemes. Too often, the ‘science’ offered by experts promotes dangerous and erroneous fake news, and that fake news falls into the hands of people who may not be able to deduce whether something is true or false.
WHEW! Rant over.
Rage aside, I found many things that felt like self-care this week.
Salves for your sorrows
To read…
This novel with a peculiar use of dialogue by an Irish author that is now a miniseries.
Normal People
Sally Rooney, Faber & Faber
This reportage on a woman with dissociative fugue who disappears for weeks at a time and forgets her identity.
How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity
Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker
The greatest profile ever written.
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
Gay Talese, GQ
An apt poem.
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh
To watch…
Megan Stalter’s deeply uncomfortable and wildly hilarious web series.
YOURS TRULY reading at The New School on Zoom at 6:30 PM EST, April 24.
Leslie Jordan’s side splitting stories.
Pep talks that are a warm hug on Instagram and TikTok from Tabitha Brown.
To listen…
Dear Joan and Jericha for a hilariously improved ‘agony aunt’ podcast by Vicki Pepperdine and Julia Davis.
The Gemma Collins Podcast to hear a living legend interrogate the state of the world with prompts like “Where do the pigeons think we’ve gone?”
Lily Allen’s grossly overlooked and most recent record, No Shame.
Internet Free-dive For Your Pleasure
In which I find garbage on the web.
You can probably tell that I am feeling venomous about corporations profiting off of a global emergency. I saw a post from Glossier recently that really got me going.
Glossier has positioned itself as a brand of the people, a community rather than a company (insidious Silicon Valley speak, right?), that has emerged and evolved from the voice of its consumers.
They have launched…..wait for it…..a hand cream. Yes, you read that right. A multi-million dollar company that touts ethical business practice, has decided to bring their hand cream to market in the middle of a pandemic that has a universal side effect of really chapped hands.
There are a few ways I have tried to look at this. I like Glossier as a brand, I enjoy and repurchase many of their products. Announcing the hand cream, Glossier revealed they would be donating ten thousand units to front-line healthcare workers.
It sounds okay, right? Obviously, products don’t just come to market, the hand cream has been in the pipeline for some time, and they’re ‘giving back’ through the launch.
“We’ve been working on Glossier Hand Cream for nearly two years, and have been so excited to bring it into the world this spring.”
But….Glossier isn’t a super transparent company. They don’t reveal specific numbers on profit margins, unit sales, or even the % of the company that founder Emily Weiss actually owns. The company’s most recent annual revenue was $100 million with just 36 products.
The lack of transparency on specific financial commitments that Glossier has or has not made to aiding the world through this crisis, makes their intentions unclear. Weiss has written about compensating retail staff––but information about the safety measures being taken for factory workers processing thousands of online orders, has not been shared.
I can’t imagine that donating 10,000 units of one product is going to make a dent in the profits Glossier will reap from the additional sales of the hand cream, and other products that continue to ship through the current crisis from glossier.com.
Wouldn’t healthcare workers prefer...hot meals, PPE, or straight up cash? Hand cream is a cute and semi pragmatic offering, but it seems like this specific ‘donation’ is a thinly veiled excuse to bring a morbidly relevant product to market, capitalise on the positive PR from a good deed, and catch no heat for greediness and poor taste.
That’s me sufficiently WIPED OUT for this week. If you’re enjoying salve….perhaps you could tell your friends?
And if you haven’t…..