Sasha's 'Newsletter'

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2025-01-03 21:00:02

I believe that one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything. My wife, glimpsing me reacting to a Fiona Apple song, once said: “I wish everyone could enjoy something as much as you’re enjoying this right now.” She’s also noticed that when I eat a good meal, I appear so emotionally affected that she confuses my verklemptitude for sorrow or anger. The variety of my enjoyment is notable, also: I like a tremendous number of cuisines, locales, styles of architecture and visual languages, et cetera. It’s not that I don’t have critical judgement, or favorites—the ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high, too.

Part of this is personality makeup, but I believe enjoyment is a skill that anyone can improve at. I learned out of necessity: my childhood was unpleasant, and as a coping mechanism, I tried to love, hard, the passably pleasant moments. Later, my enjoyment ability was rewarded and reinforced in college, when I learned that I could channel my adoration for a work of literature into an essay about its positive qualities—you can’t be an academic this way anymore because of the abominable state of the humanities, where everyone is committed to ineffective activism, but you can make it through school.

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