Episode 325: Consumer Culture Download with Amanda Mull
Doree and Elise mentally prepare for the election and invite Amanda Mull, senior reporter at Bloomberg covering the intersection of culture and commerce, to the pod to discuss writing about how people want to spend their money, what happens when the consumer system becomes visible in ways that we are not supposed to see, and the way that “cool” has been flattened by the internet.
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Transcript
*Transcripts are AI generated.
Doree: Hello and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.
Elise: And I'm Elise Hugh. And we are two friends who like to talk a lot about serums,
Doree: And
Elise: We're still in anxious October.
Doree: We are still in anxious October. I just realized we're going to have to record some episodes that will come out, but we will have to record them.
Elise: Yeah, yeah. The world could really change.
Doree: The world could fully change in many ways
Elise: And our moods and our general dispositions.
Doree: I know. I wonder what we should do about that. Well, we can figure that out later.
Elise: We can figure it out and listeners, we would love to know. You should absolutely reach out to let us know what you're doing to take it easy and stay calm and ease anxieties during these final couple of weeks before election day in the us. We know we have a lot of global listeners too, but obviously our election does affect other parts of the world. So yeah, just love to know how people are taking care of themselves because I feel like my sleep is more restless. I am more testy. I'm like, my fuse is getting shorter. I just think maybe I shouldn't be riding the polar coaster so much and sensing all the vibe shifts, because I know the aggregate poles really haven't even changed that much since Brat Summer and the Kamala Noon of the summer. But suddenly there's all this panicking and what democratic consultants called bedwetting
Doree: And
Elise: It's affecting me sort of like, oh my gosh, this could be 2016 all over again.
Doree: Yeah. I mean, as we've discussed, I kind of ignore the polls. I am just trying to control what can control and they haven't that. Yeah. And it's like why? What does it change for me personally to be following the polls constantly? Not much.
Elise: I'm paying less attention, I think, just as a matter of self-preservation, but doing as much as I can civically. I went to a postcard party this weekend. How was it? We wrote 2000 postcards.
Doree: Oh my God. To voters
Elise: In swing states combined. Yeah,
Doree: It was fantastic. That is So many postcards.
Elise: Yeah, handwritten cards. My friend Caroline got everyone together. She and her friend Jenny hosted at their house up in Laurel Canyon, and just a bunch of folks came through over the course of two, three hours and Jenny baked all sorts of pumpkin flavored breads and coffee cakes and scones, and
Doree: I love this.
Elise: It felt good. Yeah, it was a cool party. It was much different than my Friday night Bushwick style warehouse
Doree: Album drop. If you are a Patreon member, you heard Elise's story on the casual chat of what her weekend was like. And it's a
Elise: Doozy. It was a doozy because I'm too old for this stuff. I'm too old for it. But you know what I wasn't too old for was the post carding. And so I am very grateful to folks who are organizing all over the country right now during this crucial period.
Doree: Yes. What else is happening with you, Elise?
Elise: Well, after our conversations recently and our intentions, I've been trying to get out there more in terms of just exercising. So that's why my hair is wet for this recording because I actually went on an extra run. I've only been running about one time a week, but now I have upped that. I've doubled it. I'm doubling my runs and going to more mega former classes, and I'm just trying to keep it even. And I think it's really helpful. It's always a cure for depression and anxiety, a free one to do more exercise. And so if exercise isn't your demon,
Doree: If you're
Elise: Not, so just I'm caveating that, but it tends to help for me to get out there and go for a long walk. So I'm trying to do that. What else are you doing for care besides just avoiding the vagaries,
Doree: Avoiding holes
Elise: Of the headlines? Yes.
Doree: I mean, just still playing tennis.
Elise: A
Doree: Lot of tennis. I told Matt on our Excellent Adventure podcast, I told him that I want to start a newsletter chronicling my tennis journey. He was like, will it make any money? And I was like, probably not. Oh,
Elise: He's looking for revenue drivers only door.
Doree: He is looking for revenue drivers, which he's not wrong. He's not wrong.
Elise: Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Doree: That makes sense. We do
Elise: Live in capitalism and have to survive.
Doree: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, what do I want to be? What do I need to be spending my time on?
Elise: Well, that's actually a really good segue to today's guest because it kind of asks the flip side of that question, which is what do we need to be spending our money on? What
Doree: Do we
Elise: Need to spend our disposable income on?
Doree: Yes, great segue, Elise. I have been a fan of her and her writing for probably at least a decade, probably longer, and I've just been so thrilled to watch her career blossom. And it seems like she's been able to work at publications that really just give her free reign to go down the rabbit holes that she's interested in. And the result is just a lot of amazing articles about things that you're like, oh, I didn't know I was interested in that. But now,
Elise: Yeah. Yeah. So we are talking about Amanda Mole, and if you are not familiar with her byline, you will get familiar very quickly after this episode because she is probably one of the leading voices on consumer culture in America. And the way she analyzes it, like Doree describes, is so insightful. She also writes about trends and things that are happening that we didn't know to think about.
Doree: Yes,
Elise: We'll get into a lot of the things that she's written about, but just in terms of her bio, she's currently a senior reporter at Bloomberg covering the intersection of culture and commerce. She's written previously for the Atlantic New York magazine, rolling Stone, Vox and L, and at the Atlantic. Amanda covered health in the broadest possible sense of the word and wrote Material world, a regular column on American consumerism.
Doree: I just really enjoyed our conversation with her. And before we get to that conversation, just a reminder that we have new episodes of this podcast every Monday and Wednesday. Mondays are our interview episodes and Wednesdays are our mini episodes. Those are on our main feed. And then we have our casual chats on Fridays on our Patreon and on our Patreon. We also have monthly pop culture discussions. We have our Forever35 questionnaire where we get to ask our guests a few extra questions. We have discussions in the Patreon app and on our Discord, and it's just a good time. It's just a good time over there. You can also visit our website Forever35 podcast.com for links to everything we mentioned on the show, follow us on Instagram at Forever35 podcast. I forgot to mention. The link to the Patreon is patreon.com/forever three five.
We have a newsletter at Forever35 podcast do com slash newsletter. And we love, love, love to hear from you. So you can call or text us at (781) 591-0390. Some people put us in their contacts, and our email is Forever35 podcast@gmail.com. And as we mentioned at the top of the show, the election is just a couple weeks away. We have our Giving Circle as part of the state's project. We are supporting state legislative races in Arizona. Please give if you are able, it really helps. We've had Melissa Walker from the States project on the show now three or four times, and she has told us very clearly how literally every dollar you donate to the States project and our giving circle goes directly to help elect progressive candidates. It's not too late. It's not too late. It's not too late. So yeah. So with all that being said here is Amanda. Amanda, welcome to Forever35. You've been on our list of guests we wanted to have on the show for a very long time, so we're really happy that you're here. And as you may know, we like to start off by asking our guests if they have a self-care practice currently that they would like to share, and we're kind of very broadly defining.
Elise: It doesn't have to be a consumerist pursuit.
Amanda: No. That is your beat. We realize that is my beat. That is my beat, and I really enjoy this app on my phone called Happy Color.
Elise: Happy Color. Say
Amanda: More. Yes. It is essentially a Color by Numbers app that has a whole new set of pictures to fill in every day. You don't have to drag your finger across it to color things in, you just tap the areas that are numbered according to the number you have. They have a bunch of fine art photos or fine art pictures that are very, very, that have tons and tons of these tiny little areas you have to find and fill in with the correct color. And it is, I find it totally engrossing. I've gotten my best friend into it. I got my mother into it. It's one of those things that has sort of slowly traveled through my family in Social Circle, and it's super fun. I really love the fine art ones,
Elise: And now you're getting us into it. It's made so calming. This interview is already valuable.
Amanda: Yes. Yeah, this is one of those things. I was never a coloring books person. I had no patience or interest in that, but for some reason, this app really does it for me. There's a nice haptic feedback element to it. It is really, really engrossing and it is great. I love it.
Elise: And it sounds so much more doable than the actual paint by number canvases that you can buy on Amazon or wherever, because I had a girlfriend have one of those parties where it's like, oh, come on over and we'll sip and paint. And we had to meet four times because
Amanda: Oh my God. Yeah, that kind of stuff. God bless anybody who has the patience for it, but I don't anywhere you have two minutes, I have filled in a little bit of a Van Gogh.
Elise: Love it.
Doree: Love it. That's amazing. That's amazing.
Elise: Well, this actually goes into one of the questions that we had for you, which is you always have an eye on what's happening in culture. So we want to know just first off, what you're obsessed with lately. What are some things that you can't stop thinking about or just are getting curious about?
Amanda: Well, I go in sort of fits and starts with certain things. For a while I was super into figuring out what was happening with Amazon and Temo and Xian and what sort of habits we had saddled ourselves with and how these sort of foreign upstarts were changing them and threatening this sort of power center of American life, which is what Amazon is.
And for the past few months, I've been more on a in-person stores way. I think that there's a lot of little signals happening that people want to go to stores and especially find good stores, interesting stores. I think that that is probably a little bit of reaction to how algorithmically curated and mediated everything is online, whereas if you're in a store physically, you sort of control a little bit of your own experience a little bit more, I think. And I think that the things that end up in stores, like physical stores tend to have more mediation by a person on the seller side as well. There is a little bit more of a level of taste required, even if it's a big corporate store. I think that in-person interactions with commerce are often more interesting as a result. And yeah, retail space is at all time, not necessarily all time vacancy lows, but it's like vacancies are very, very low. So much that I read something about Spirit Halloween was having a little bit of trouble finding appropriate popup spaces, and there's a lot of little signals out there to look at that. So I have been thinking a lot about in-person stores recently.
Doree: So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back.
Elise: One of your paths to this beat was actually your own retail experience. Tell us a little bit about how this all got started.
Amanda: Yeah, I think a lot of people when they have their first jobs as teenagers and 20 somethings are either retail or food service people and you sort of get on one track or the other and it sort of determines what jobs you can get from there. So I was a retail person. I worked at the Gap for a little while. I worked at Best Buy for three years, and there's a lot of retail workers in my family. I just found jobs very interesting in ways that I think that they're not often given credit for, and that sort of stuck with me.
Elise: Yeah, I'm a Gap girly. And then Doree was at Urban Outfitters, so we also come by this, honestly,
Doree: I think I've been reading you since you wrote for Purse Blog.
Amanda: Yeah, I've been writing about shopping for a really long time in various ways. I started writing for Purse Blog in I guess 2008, probably graduated college. Kept working for them, worked for them for 10 years, wrote 5,000 blog posts, I think literally. Wow. But this sort of generation of independent online media was coming up and I was very, very interested in fashion, but I didn't have any traditional fashion credentials. I had never had an internship. I had been to New York twice, but it was a way to get in there and write about something I was interested in and really willing to learn about in depth, but had no way to crack the traditional type of media. So yeah, I worked there for a very long time.
Doree: Your experience working at Purse Blog, do you feel like it gave you, I don't know, more appreciation or more of an insight into the way that trends start? Because I feel like Purse Blog felt like it was so interesting in that way. You had people always talking about what the hot bags were for the season. It all felt very from the ground up almost
Amanda: In a weird way. I've always thought of purse blog as a trade, but it was a consumer focused trade instead of a industry focused trade.
And in the blog era, you had to have lots of stuff to say every day about sometimes a rather narrow topic. And the luxury accessories business is I think sort of infinitely interesting. But if you need to write three posts a day, you are going to start scraping the bottom of the barrel in between seasons and releases and stuff like that. You really sort of have to dig for things to write about. But that was sort of a blessing for me, I think in that if you run out of all of the obvious stuff to write about, you have to get really, really good at looking at something that most people might not think is interesting and figuring out what is interesting about it
Doree: Or
Amanda: Figuring out how to talk to people about it in a way that sort of surprises them. You were talking to a field of people who are in some aspect of what you're writing about subject matter experts, because you're writing about something that they're obsessed with, that they spend a lot of their free time thinking about and investing money into and planning what they're going to do next. So if you're not on the ball, you're going to hear about it. It was stressful in that you better be right, you better be right. You better be perceptive. You better have the details correct. You better not be telling people something that doesn't scan for them, and that will make you a very good trend reporter over time.
Elise: I was going to say, I mean, you are so great at your job because you are so perceptive and you write things that really do track because once you observe something, I'm like, oh yeah, you're right. All the Airbnbs have gray floors and barn doors.
Amanda: That's always the goal is to name something that everybody has noticed but has not figured out how to talk about yet.
Elise: But that's what I'm so curious about. How do you observe and see around corners?
Amanda: I think one of the great gifts that the fashion industry gave me is an understanding of people's relationship to their money and people's relationship to spending money. Because the fashion industry is in some ways the most naked marketing exercise that you can imagine. It is a marketing business. It is a products business, but it is so overwhelmingly about how people tell themselves stories about themselves, how brands tell you stories about the person you could be, how brands tell you stories about the things they make and how people try to mediate their sense of self, their identities, their insecurities through the spending of money. And once you understand how that works, I think that you can then take that and sweep any corner of culture that you are interested in. And as long as the fundamentals of the players within it and what motivates the people who are interested in it, then you can find stories. Now, it's kind of second nature for me because if you know the underlying concepts, if you know the underlying dynamics, then it is easy to apply those principles everywhere.
A friend of mine jokes that I am a professional pattern, and that really is it. You start to look for repetitive behaviors, you start to look for things that used to be one way and that then are starting to change. It can be anything. You have to be genuinely really interested in the world around you and in humans as these endlessly fascinating, sensitive perceptive beings. And once you are there, and once you're in that mindset once, that's how you interact with the world. I mean, I have 8,000 different Google Docs full of story ideas and things that I've noticed and things I want to look into further. I could write every day for the rest of my life and not run out.
Doree: I was going back through all your old stories in preparation for our interview, and I was just like, oh, just banger after banger. So many iconic stories. I mean, your sweaters are garbage, the Bama rush story about, but using it as a lens to how people shop all your stories about Amazon, all your stories about returns, your story about, I love it just went on and I, the topic. Yes. It's endlessly fascinating, I feel. I was like, oh my God, I've learned so much from her over the years. It's just crazy. So I realize that asking you this question is sort of like, who's your favorite child, but what's your favorite story you've ever written?
Amanda: I have an immediate answer for this. Amazing. I have a more serious set of answers that I could give you, but my immediate answer is you remember when that boat got stuck in the Sues? Yes,
Doree: Yes, yes.
Amanda: I wrote a 1200 word thing at The Atlantic about why I was so enamored with that, why I loved the boat so much, and it was, I think a good illustration of something I always trying to do with my work, which is get a couple jokes in there and have fun with a topic that ultimately what I want to say something about is a larger thing. That article makes some jokes about my therapist and hangovers and all kinds of weird stuff, but it is fundamentally about when the consumer system becomes visible in ways that we're not supposed to see. The
Doree: Pandemic did that a lot, right?
Amanda: Yeah. Yes. A lot of work goes into making the infrastructure of global consumer trade not be visible to the people who see it because it is a lot easier to sell things to people if they don't have to think about them too hard. And I thought that that was just a really dazzling example of that system going sideways a little bit in a way that stopped everybody and made billions of people sort of look at how things move around the world and how fragile of a system that is and how far flung the systems that supply our consumer whims actually are. So I am still just overjoyed without how that one came out.
Elise: We will link it to all y'all in our show notes for sure. Another larger idea we've been kind of batting around in our conversations is the internet kind of flattening culture. And so as a trend watcher, as somebody who's paying attention to niche, niche, an individual preference, an individual style, do you feel as though over time regional differences, individual differences in tastes have gone away?
Amanda: Yeah, I definitely think that the internet has flattened a lot of stuff like that, and you can see it in ways that are sort of measurable too, that run sort of parallel to these types of regional differences and variations across population. We know that regional accents are dying out. There is a sort of flattening and an accessibility of things across the normal divides that you would get, and I think some of that is good. I think that the ability to be exposed to all kinds of different art and culture and aesthetic ideas and creative ideas without having to physically transport yourself, I think that's fantastic. But it also does have this sort of flattening effect of if you're not just looking at the people who seem cool in your town or your state or your region, you were looking at a sort of globalized notion of what is cool and that has an effect of herding everybody toward a sort of median version of cool or of edgy or whatever. I think it makes it a little bit harder for subcultures to flourish because that's a shame
Because dominant culture has always mined subcultures for things that it found valuable or exploitable or whatever. But the amount of time from something being sort of subcultural to something being widespread is just really, really short. Something going from something a single person thought of to being something that marketers are using while trying to sell smoothies or whatever can be a couple of days now. It is very, very quick, and I think that you sort of lose the opportunity for other creative people to get to it first and riff or improve it or remix it or do something interesting with it in a way that creates a lot of genuine, interesting, creative thought. It just goes directly to the marketers now, I think in a lot of ways, which is why you get this sort of flattening.
Elise: Got it. Okay. Let's take a break and we will be right back.
Doree: You've written a lot about returns. The problem with returns and kind of the related problems of overconsumption has been a big theme in your work, and I'm wondering if you've noticed if anything is changing it getting better? Is getting, have we
Amanda: Reached peak stuff? I know you have asked that question. Yeah. I don't know that anything is getting better. I think there are sort of rumblings of dissatisfaction in some areas of consumption from some groups of people, but then you run into this really basic problem of the beat that I cover, which is that there is a difference in what people say they want and then what their actions indicate that they want. And anybody who works in the consumer space works in retail, works in marketing, covers it from a friendly or critical lens, knows that the gulf between consumer sentiment and consumer behavior is often enormous, often unoriginal, which is why you get a lot of headlines about Gen Z hates waste, gen Z hates over consumption, gen Z, this, that, the other. And then you get a lot of other headlines that are like, gen Z loves Amazon, gen Z can't get off of sheen. And those things are contradictory. They sure
Doree: Are.
Amanda: So publishing just one or the other, you should step back and ask yourself as a writer, what else do I know about the people and actors and companies in this headline or in this story that should give me pause about this? And so often it ends up being really difficult to reconcile what people say they want and what people suggest that they want through their behavior. And you should believe behavior, honestly, especially when you have that much a population-wide data set, which we have in a lot of ways for consumer behavior because everybody buys stuff, everybody has to, so it's good that people are upset about waste, but I don't know that we know that anything is changing.
Elise: I mean, it was shocking to me. I watched that Brandy Ville documentary on a plane, and I was so outraged that the company has yet to respond. The company just got all this awful press. The waste is crazy, like most fast fashion, but also their values are awful. They have this horribly misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic group chat among all the executives, and I was just morally outraged. And yet to this day, the company's like me. And so I guess because consumer behavior hasn't changed.
Amanda: Yeah, consumer behavior hasn't changed, and I think that a lot of companies and a lot of brands and public figures and people et cetera, have learned over the past 10 years that post through it, to borrow a phrase from Twitter, basically is just keep going. People will forget about it. People will get distracted by something else people might not have cared to begin with. You can outlast a lot of outrage if you are a brand or company or whatever that is selling something that otherwise a lot of people, and I think a friend of mine, Lauren Sherman, who is also on the fashion beat, said something in an interview recently about, this was about Victoria's Secret. She has a new book out, and she said that she thinks that people overestimate how much consumers want to associate themselves with brands with good values. It
Elise: Is people overestimate.
Amanda: Yeah, people overestimate. It is one of those gulfs between consumer sentiments, consumer behavior that I think is unbridgeable. Yes, it would be great if every company and brand and whatever that we interacted with reflected how we see the world and supported the values that we have. But I don't think it's actually that salient to a lot of people when it comes down to if they're going to make a decision, if there is a product that they want that is an awesome pair of jeans or a great handbag or something else, whatever else. And the only thing wrong with it is that the company that makes it has a bunch of racist executives or a bunch of misogynist executives or a bad corporate culture or doesn't treat his workers very well. I think 99 times out of a hundred, even if the person involved, really, really believes in fighting back against those things, if everything else is good about the product, I think they usually, the values are not enough to stop them in most cases.
Elise: So if there is a way to act out our values, what is the better way to challenge the system?
Amanda: I don't know. That is sort of the fundamental question that I think I am always sort of working towards in whatever I'm writing about writing, because I fundamentally don't know. I don't think that within consumer culture, within the consumer system, there is a way to align these things. I don't think that there is the possibility of that. I think that the system is fundamentally set up to create those contradictions and to then profit off of them. But I think that there are little ways. The thing that I always recommend to people basically who are trying to get a handle on their own consumer behavior, whether that's for values-based reasons or budget-based reasons or whatever, is just to try to stop shopping period. And not necessarily forever, but just for give yourself a little bit of time to try to reset your habits. People buy a lot of things that they don't want or need because we are in a system where there's very little friction in purchases.
So if you can make just buying things in general, besides the stuff you actually need less convenient for yourself, take the Amazon app off your phone, take the target app off your phone, delete all those apps. Take the credit card out of your browser settings out of delete it from the places that you find yourself going to mindlessly buy things, reintroducing some friction back into the process of buying things. I think it isn't one of those things that is going to lead you to a more virtuous purchasing pattern, but you might just purchase less stuff. And I think that that is often the best way to reset a habit or better understand why you're doing the things you're doing. Because if you can't understand your patterns and your habits, then it's very difficult to change them. And so if you have this sort of misalignment between your values and your behavior and that is causing you stress and it causes a lot of people stress, people I think genuinely don't want to act in ways that are fundamentally contradictory to the things they believed about themselves. I think that is something that stresses people out whether they realize it or not, but there are not good alternatives. So trying to make just sort of mindless purchasing a little bit less convenient convenience is a real double-edged sword. It is great in a lot of parts of life. It is fundamentally counter to your best interest in other parts of life. I think trying to reset your behavior around buying new versus buying secondhand
Can be useful. I find myself buying fewer things on a whim when I buy secondhand stuff. It's the type of purchasing that requires a little bit more thought. So introducing that friction into your habits, it can't make you a perfectly virtuous consumer, but I think it can work to slow you down a little bit. And by virtue of slowing you down, I think that sort of shakes out some of our worst decision-making tendencies.
Elise: Before we let you go, Amanda, we always end our show with intentions. And so I'd love to know your sort of wishes for either pitches that you have yet to write about. So the pitch that you keep pitching but editors won't. Okay. Or a subculture or trends that you wish would come back. So what are your kind of wishes for the consumer culture sphere, whether it's something you want to write about curiosities or a period you wish would come back and the trends from that? Once you say it on the mic, you're putting it out there.
Amanda: And I'm afraid to reveal any desired pitches because I have a list of stuff that I have to do before I can do anything that isn't already approved, and I don't want somebody to get to something good before I do. Yeah, that makes sense. If they get to it of their own ideas, I am happy for them, but I'm not No free ideas. No free ideas. Yeah. Let's see.
Elise: But you're a millennial girly, right?
Amanda: Yeah,
Elise: I'm 38. Are there certain millennial, a turn of the century trends you wish would come back? I've been thinking about how I have this giant, speaking of purses, this giant slouchy bag that I bought from Burberry because I had some journalism award money one time and it went out of fashion very quickly. But I'd love for that to come back so I can carry it again.
Amanda: Yeah. Was it a hobo by any chance?
Elise: Yes. It was like a big,
Amanda: I have great news for you now. It's back this season. Oh yes. Oh, thank
Elise: God. Yes. I got to go find it somewhere in one of my plastic bins.
Amanda: Yeah. Yeah. I have been looking for the big suede hobo of my dreams in the past few weeks. You're exactly there. Yeah. It's sort of hard to come up with anything because I feel like the past has been so thoroughly mined. It brings me, I was in college in the mid to late two thousands at a big state school in the south. So it has just been endlessly funny to me in a sort of warm way. I don't think that the kids are idiots or anything. I think that we looked great and all that stuff too. And now all the college kids are dressing like I did in college, which is hilarious to me. The little Flo skirts, the tube tops, stuff like that. The mid two thousands trends are very big with the kids now. So even my own style history has been just so thoroughly mined already that it's sort of difficult to think of a trend that I genuinely miss that hasn't come back. And I think that it's the sort of weird pastiche that is, the trend landscape right now is kind of nice because you can sort of wear whatever it is that you want without feeling particularly weird about it. And if anybody questions you just tell them it's coming back and they probably believe you. It's coming back. Yeah. I'm really, really trying to think of something.
Elise: No, that's great. We'll just go around wearing whatever we want because you told us we could, and you are the ultimate cultural and trend observer, and we're just going to be like it's coming back.
Amanda: Yeah. I think that something I learned over my time in the fashion industry is that fashion people are, some are in aggregate, probably the least judgmental people about what other people wear because at a certain point you understand that everybody's trying something and fashion is not for everybody. Following trends is not for everybody. Not everybody has to wear the same thing or discard the same garments at the same time. It's people who are really insecure about their own sense of style and their own sense of what they like to wear that are extremely upset by other people in what they wear. So take this as permission, wear whatever makes you feel comfortable. Wear whatever you feel hot in and if you're not interested in feeling hot, wear whatever you feel comfortable in. The best thing you can do for yourself is just develop some taste and stick with it.
Elise: Alright, Amanda Moll, I love that. Thank
Doree: You so much. Thanks so much. Of course. Thanks. It was so great to get to talk to Amanda. She is just one of those people who I wish we were friends. IRL, she lives in New York
Elise: Also. We could have kept going. I feel like
Doree: I interview.
Elise: We could have been twice as
Doree: Long. I completely agree because there were so many. I thought I wanted to ask her about individual articles of hers and go deep and I was like, this is getting real. This could get real in the weeds. But no, she was amazing. So I'm really glad, really glad we got a chance to talk to her. So let's get into the intention zone, Elise. Last week you talked about stillness and a movie. How did that go for you?
Elise: I did stillness pretty well on Sunday. I had a very still Sunday. I didn't have any kid obligations. I had deep cleaners come to my home and it just felt so satisfying. I left for a while, I read a book. It was great.
Doree: Yes.
Elise: So I did still miss pretty well, but I wanted to go see a movie in the theaters because I used to spend every weekend doing that. I was thinking in middle school and high school for example, that's what we did socially. We'd go see a movie and it just doesn't happen anymore. And I really wanted to do that and I wanted to see my old ass and I still haven't seen it. I had like to change my intention this week, but bearing in mind that I still need to get to that particular movie. But my intention this week after being inspired by all the handwriting I did while postcard was to actually write, do some journaling in longhand. I haven't actually written with a pen or pencil in a while. I used to really enjoy that. And so maybe I'll do morning pages or something just in longhand or write some notes or just journal in general.
Doree: Who knows? I mean, I love a longhand journal. I love a morning page. I never do it, but I love a morning page.
Yeah,
I do still do my one line of day journal and I'm actually getting to the end of it.
Wow, great.
I've been doing it for five years, which means I need to buy another volume, which is crazy.
Elise: That's awesome. That's awesome. Good for you. Thank you. What about you? You had
Doree: Yum before last week I talked about Yom Kippur and I think I mentioned how the Jewish holiday season is sometimes a little triggering for me because every year I'm like, Ugh, I feel like I don't really have a Jewish community here. I don't have family here. Didn't, no one invited me to break fast. And yes, I could have hosted a break fast, but my house is just so chaotic and it's not host ready, so then that gets me depressed and blah, blah, blah, blah blah. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to try to do Yom Kippur and reflect and whatever. So I did join a synagogue recently, which is big, so I feel like that's going to hopefully get me more aligned. And they had childcare and a family service for kids.
Elise: So good. Yes.
Doree: So after Rosh Hashanah, they had handed out popsicles as we were leaving, it was so hot and Matt and Henry picked me up and I got in the car with a Popsicle and Henry was like, they give out popsicles. I was like, yeah. And he was
Elise: Like, he's like, I'm religious now.
Doree: Yeah, exactly. He was like, okay. So then on Yom Kippur, and he hadn't come on, Rosh Hashanah couldn't get him to come on Yom Kippur. He was like, well, are they going to give out popsicles? I was like, probably not. But because adults don't eat on Yom Kippur. But I know for the kids, they'd put on the schedule that there was going to be snack and lunch. And he was like, okay, well I want to go to Temple. And I was like, oh, okay. So Matt got him dressed up, unquote, which just he put on a little collared shirt.
Elise: I love little boys who are in, yes.
Doree: He just looked so cute and he was so proud. It was cute. He was proud of himself for being dressed up. So first we went to the family service, which was half an hour, and he was sort of restless and whiny and was like, how long is this? And not super into it. And then I found his group for childcare and I was like, okay, bye. Just left him and went downstairs to the adult service and I was like, okay, how is this going to go? And I had shown him where I was going to be sitting in the sanctuary. So I was like, if he absolutely needs to, he can come find me. And he didn't come find me. And so then three hours later I go to get him and I'm just like, three
Elise: Hours.
Doree: Yes. I'm like, what is this scene going to be?
And I go to the classroom where the kindergarten kids are and he's just sitting there holding court, basically running a Go Fish tournament with big on campus. Yeah. Three other five year olds. And I'm just like, oh. And I walk in the door and I had been expecting he was going to run up to me and be like, I'm ready to go. And instead he just glanced up almost. My mom's here. So good. And I had to wait for him to finish. Oh my gosh. And then he goes, I love temple. When are we going back? This
Elise: Is
Doree: Great. I was like, okay. They nailed it. Gosh, whatever they did, they nailed it. He's
Elise: Going to be the most popular kid at Hebrew school.
Doree: It'll be awesome. Well, I had made the choice, I mean, this is getting a little in the weeds, but I made the choice not to do Hebrew school this year. I was like, it's kindergarten. It's so much transition. Putting him at a whole other school for three hours every weekend felt like a lot. But I feel like now for next year, he's ready to go.
Yeah.
Love it. So that's my story.
Elise: So that sounds like an awesome. Yeah. You lived out your intention. Great. I
Doree: Did week. Okay. So this week I need to just schedule my days a little bit better. Yeah. So I'm just going to try to come up with a schedule. I've had to do this in the past and it's been fine, but I kind of fell off the wagon, so I'm going to do that.
Elise: Alright. Maybe you can do it longhand.
Doree: Maybe we can combine our intention. Oh my gosh, that would be amazing. Combo. Alright, well Elise, this was great. Thanks everyone for listening. February 35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Frier and Elise Hugh, and produced and edited by Sam eo. Sammy Reed is our project manager and our network partners. Thanks everyone.
Elise: Thank y'all.
Doree: Bye.