on making it through the third year of 2020

Hello, friends. It’s December.

Rebecca spent a good deal of time in our last newsletter detailing all the ways in which we can and should despair, and as the end of the year sees skyrocketing illness, mass worker strikes, and a terrifying shortage of antibiotics closing us out, it feels all the more necessary to search for the little, tiny beacons of joy where we can. With that in mind, I suggested that we pull together a slightly gentler newsletter than usual, wherein we compile some of our favorite things of 2022.

So here we go:

• The barista at the coffee shop who called me gorgeous this morning. This is a very specific pleasure, but not a fleeting one: It's the little interactions with others that sometimes keep you going, and when she said it it was with a look of almost wide-eyed astonishment. She really meant it, and so I really felt it. Also, she said it in front of the barista I usually flirt with, so it was an especially well-timed win. — SF

• Jam calendars. I have written about the Bonne Maman jam calendar before on here, but it truly is more than the sum of its parts. A tiny jar of jam every morning, spread on fresh toast. The ability to close your eyes and pretend you’re at a fancy hotel being treated to room service. A small note of calm in the morning before the rest of the day goes to shit. — SF

• Romance novels. Having COVID in April broke my brain for an extended period of time, and the state of the world did not do said brain any favors. I found myself - not for the first time in my life, certainly not for the last - unable to read in the way I ordinarily do. My attention span and my heart couldn’t take the usual breadth of semi-depressing literary fiction and interesting nonfiction that I typically read, and comfort TV stopped doing it for me around the same time. As a result, I have read approximately 100 romance novels this year. Am I embarrassed by this? Absolutely not, because they are full of mostly-happy endings and also it’s a free pass to basically read porn on the subway. — SF

• King Princess. This year, when my Apple Music year-end stats came in (“You don’t use Spotify?” you ask, not realizing that I will serve you an incredibly long missive about how fucked up Spotify is), I was in the top 100 listeners for this artist. That is because she is incredible, and her new album Hold On Baby hits all the right notes for me. It’s sexy and it’s lonely and she writes as many love songs about her friends as she does about romantic love, and I find her work equal parts interesting and massively listenable in a pure pop kind of way. — SF

• Group chats. I have written on here many times about the absolute joy of being in a group chat, but this year I found that I transformed a lot of “Twitter friendships” into real-life ones, and with that transformation has come a larger number of group chats. I am on group chats with several couples, who try to get me to take sides in arguments and text me hilarious stories about their weirdo kids. I am on group chats with several friends, all of whom own huskies, and we trade pictures of our dogs back and forth while also talking about life and love and the usual shit. I am on a separate group chat with two people from the husky chat called W-Flynn-B-A, where we mostly talk about basketball. Who needs Twitter when you have group chats with everyone you love?! — SF

• Rebecca. Folks, Rebecca wrote a book this year, and I am both desperate to read it and so proud of her that I could cry. And that’s not all: This year marked her ninth season as a small business owner, and she bossed the hell out of it while bringing joy to an entire town like the hot baker in a Hallmark Christmas movie. She started doing burlesque, a goal that she has had for herself as long as I have known her. She only gets smarter and hotter and more interesting every year, and I hope that everyone has the chance to be able to go through life with a little bit of a forever crush on their best friend because it’s very fun. — SF

• Harry Styles. I do not ever want to know anything about Olivia Wilde’s personal life ever again, but that aside, Harry’s House was a real delight of a listen this year. According to the aforementioned Apple stats, I listened to “As It Was” 280 times this year, and I’ll probably do it 280 more before we close out the year. People are occasionally surprised that someone like me (I read this as “kind of an asshole”) loves pop music as much as I do, but I think you’d have to try very hard and be willfully obtuse not to recognize the talent in a record like this. It’s a real joy. — SF

• The final season of “Dead to Me.” I really did watch less TV this year than I ever have, but I binge-watched this whole season in one day on my couch because I’d been looking so forward to it. Sure, it’s funny and it’s far-fetched, but at its heart it is the most true depiction of pure female friendship that I think I’ve ever seen on TV. Knowing that Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate love each other that much in real life is a balm to my soul, as is the existence of James Marsden, whose comedic skills have been finally put to their strongest use on this show. — SF

• Kylian Mbappe. Most of you will be alarmed to hear that, as Flynn so correctly puts it, I have been “doing a sports” a lot this month. The truth is that I dated an Arsenal fan in college, and apparently international soccer is where my entire sports heart lies. Because of the myriad complications with corruption, human rights abuses, and general onset of climate disaster (sorry, this newsletter is still this newsletter), the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was moved to November, rather than its usual June/July schedule. This means that I’m off work for the World Cup since 2014, and I have become an absolute goblin about it — gathering friends for viewing parties, drinking Guinness in the local pub at 10am, and talking about it so much that one friend suggested my next career should be sports writing (cue laugh track). For those of you who do not know, Mbappe is a 23 year old French footballer, who is basically the best soccer player alive on earth. He seems to break a goal-scoring record in every match. He is faster, more precise, and more artful than anyone else on the pitch, and — lest you think this is all going to be about stats — he is also extremely hot, and it’s very nice to watch someone you have a raging crush on do the thing that they are best at in the world. Bravo, Kyky, merci. — RO

• A League of Their Own. (Oh god, ARE all mine about sports??) I was really skeptical of this reboot, mostly because I don’t want anyone to ever try to do anything better than Geena Davis already did it. But, I have to say that Abbi Jacobson’s extremely queer series based on Penny Marshall’s extremely wholesome film made me giggle, and cry, and fall in love even harder with D’Arcy Carden. There’s not a lot of heartwarming bisexual historical fiction around, so we gotta celebrate the ones we’re given. This series also offers us more Roberta Colindrez (my number one crush from I Love Dick), whose furious turn as the deeply sensitive Lupe was one of my favorite parts of the show. — RO

• Flynn. Obviously, I’m biased. But let me give you a short list of the things that Flynn did this year that delighted me: 1) she started writing a romance novel, 2) she rented a house for her visit in Provincetown that had a hot tub the size of a swimming pool, 3) she convinced Jim to move into her building, so now they have a compound for us to come visit in Brooklyn, 4) she Executive Produced a basketball documentary (did you know she’s also on the board of the fucking WNBA?!), 5) she continued to push herself, and by extension me, to continue writing this newsletter even though we are both often so tired from our lives that we fall asleep with books in our hands, 6) she, as usual, sent us a metric fuck-ton of cheese curds and summer sausages from Wisconsin Cheese Mart, one of our most beloved dairy vendors. — RO

• Melissa Clark’s red lentil soup recipe. There are some recipes that just get into your brain and never leave. This one has found a way to replicate the deeply savory flavor and texture of the one from Yasmin’s Cafe — my favorite Arabic restaurant in my hometown. It’s heavier on cumin than I would normally go, and otherwise deceptively simple. It’s become Sean’s favorite soup I make, and my favorite thing to have leftovers of in the fridge. I made it the other night with homemade naan and felt like an extremely wise and capable person. — RO

• “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You” by Big Thief. Sometimes the first time you listen though an album, you know it’s going to live in your heart forever. That’s what happened for me with this sometimes goofy, sometimes emotional, always sincere record. Adrianne Lenker said in an interview about it that everyone in the band is a huge dork, and they just wanted to make music that reflected that. They certainly did, and I listened to it hundreds of times this year. — RO

• Mack’nifique. As Flynn made reference to, someone let me start doing burlesque this year, and while it’s something I’ve practiced roughly 7,000 times in my head, I’d never actually done it in front of people before. I haven’t quite found the words to tell Mackenzie Miller how grateful I am for him giving me this opportunity to come back into my body after a few years of feeling really weird in it, while also offering me an excuse to buy, like, a lot of pasties. This brilliant weirdo and their Dolls have offered me the opportunity to join the cast for all of next summer, so I suspect I will find a lot more words of gratitude and praise while worshipping at the church of tiddy-shaking. — RO

• In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. It’s really something to read a memoir that absolutely demolishes all your preconceptions of how memoirs should be written while you’re writing your own. Machado is absolutely one of my favorite writers, and I can’t believe how generous and brutal the stories are that she lets us see. — RO

• Haitus Kaiyote’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Have you ever been on, or wanted to be on mushrooms? Watch this. You’re welcome. — RO

• Foam Brewers Distopian Dream Girl. Okay. I know we’re all sick of $16 4-packs of limited-release beers from small-batch breweries launched by white hipsters in remote locations that make you drive into the middle of nowhere and buy a wristband, or whatever (lookin’ at you, Treehouse!), but I had to include this nevertheless. This beer tastes like a pineapple traveled through a different dimension and learned a language no one’s ever heard spoken before. If you ever see it, you buy one. I mean it. — RO

We love you, and we hope that next year isn’t 2020 again. We know it might be, but we also still manage to find all this joy in the in between times. A lot of that is because of each other, and a lot of that is because of you all. Let us know what brought you joy in the comments, if you want — you know we’re always hunting for the next nugget.

With love, in despair, but also in soup,Rebecca+Flynn

And Yeah, Rebecca Made You A Playlist: “Saison de Footeux” on Apple Music

You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a (sometimes) weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!