things i think about while powerwashing 168

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It's been a couple of weeks but I went to my second Christian church service this year (as part of one of my goals for the new year)! This time I went with esteemed subscriber Matt Jewison to his usual non-denominational church and the whole vibe was basically a 180 from the Catholic Mass I attended the week before.

As Matt and I walked in, the band started to play. So we stood for a full 40 minutes of an honestly quite good church band performance. If there's anything I'm noticing about the NYC Church scene it's that the music will go hard.

The building itself was quite interesting in that it was fairly plain: if they weren't projecting bible passages and lyrics to the worship song, I could have been convinced it was just a small concert (with an interestingly polite audience). The main area was dark enough where you kind of felt like you had some privacy to kind of be in your thoughts, and take it easy especially during the sermon.

As opposed to the Catholic one which was pretty structured with a passage reading as well as a homily, this sermon felt more like a guided meditation. The pastor basically had us visualize our life as a house, and tried to guide us to identify which parts of the house were wearing down or maybe even broken. It felt a lot more personal — no one was sharing anything out loud, but for a second there I really did search through my life to find the problems that felt worn, torn and broken.

I think if anything this experience left me feeling pretty hopeful. I really liked how everyone was gathered to really take a moment for themselves to be still, to be present and also find the things that were hurting. Maybe if we could all find time to do that in our lives, we would feel a little more free. So this week! I hope you all find maybe 15 to 30 minutes of time to be still and think about your life as a house, to find the carpets that are starting to fray and the floorboards that are starting to creak. And just take some time to think about yourself this week!

museum of the week

Back at the Poster House again! With esteemed subscriber Rachel Inman and her partner this time!! I really like the Poster House — they really know how to lay their galleries out in a way that feels fairly intuitive and let the posters peak, but still provide enough context in descriptions (that are fairly large text so everyone can read!). And this time, we were learning about the history of posters and African-American film.

Though films featuring mainly Black casts started popping up around the 1890s, the 1910s saw a huge uptick in Black-dominated movie casts as a response to what was truly one of the most insane movies ever produced, The Birth of a Nation.

But the actor that stood out to me the most was the man dubbed as the "The One Legged Marvel," Steve "Peg" Reynolds. There must have been like four or five movie posters that just kept referring to this guy — and I had to look him up afterwards. Turns out he was a stuntman (without most of one of his legs!!!) and was promoted as one "who does stunts that no two legged man can do". What a guy!!!

As I walked through the decades of posters, I started to notice that Harlem in particular was getting a lot of mentions. It was later clarified in a description that Harlem was basically a euphemism for Black people. So kind of like ... Taipei takes the town? For Taiwanese people?

Once again, the Poster House really showing its chops here. Definitely visit if you're in the Chelsea area!!!

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animal of the week

From our northwestern correspondent esteemed subscriber Alisa Reynya shows us some reindeer!!! I do wonder how animals manage to communicate — I've only seen Simba on his own and I heard that a lot of inter-cat communication is pretty non-verbal as well.

An impatiently hungry reindeer at the reindeer farm in Leavenworth, WA! Did you know that reindeer click the tendons in their feet to communicate with each other and that baby reindeer can differentiate their mother’s clicks from other reindeer??

Send me your animal photos at ryan@torrtle.co OR at this form https://forms.gle/NT3nSkKVbpkjCr1u8!