I've been thinking about it a lot * week 32

A string of opinionated random thoughts

What’s authentic? It’s genuine, something whose origin you don’t doubt. In existentialism it means, relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life. When something feels appropriate and significant, it means familiar, related to your life, your upbringing. Authentic is an adjective used in social media, algorithm, and influencers’ realm that has become as redundant as “green”, “sustainable” or “amazing”, empty and hollow. Where are the parameters and the tools to decide if and why we should trust the viral creators? Nobody tells you that or they’ll reveal their business which is selling you what they are being paid a commission to sell you, even if they couldn’t afford it in the first place. But I will:

1. know your style

2. slow down

3. “But, first, shop in your closet”

4. common sense

And this is what happens with me, I can go all sociology of the cultural processes or Real Housewives of New Jersey on you, in the same conversation.

Love

• August 10th is la notte di San Lorenzo, the night of the shooting stars. It is also, ideal for my newly adopted summer fragrance, the pair of Last Light + Jake’s House by Henry Rose.

  

  “It felt like floating among the stars”, a verse by Cesare Pavese

• The good basket shopper to take to work, shopping, and the movies, all day.

• Love that there’s a community of us who never pick the front item on the shelf. I thought I was the only one super discreetly reaching out at the very end of the shelf in the hope of picking the least manhandled item. It turns out we are many super discreet peeps.

• To ignore the heat of the dog days of summer I think of fall, cozy socks, rain boots and porcini, onion layering makes me happy. This year’s only buying 5 things commitment helped me go down to those famed staples I have always needed, reduce the clutter, repair and reparations, stimulate creativity, and keep it authentic.

  I have been expunging, a lot, with spurs of determination mitigated by bouts of grace.

• Big pants and big bags, especially a good basket shopper to take to work, on a flight, to the groceries, or the movies, all day.

the bigger the bag

• This idea of winter

Hate

• Ferragosto, aka August 15th. I hated it when I lived in Italy because it was the Sunday of summers: after the 15th everybody would get ready to go back to the city. I hate it now that I live in the US because everybody’s on vacation, checked out, relaxed and I only receive pictures of sunsets, aperitivo, dinners under the stars and I go to work. So, yeah, let me hate you.

• Noise, external and internal, that pollution of cars sounding horns and people talking on a speaker while at the drugstore, the overflow of pictures of stuff to buy and humans recommending whatever crap you don’t need. I stumbled upon a monologue from “8 1/2” the Fellini movie from 1963, premonitory and current, that said: Siamo soffocati dalle parole, dalle immagini, dai suoni, che non hanno ragione di vita, che vengono dal vuoto e vanno verso il vuoto. [We are suffocated by words, images, sounds that don’t have reason for existing, that come from hollowness and go towards hollowness]. I leave it at that because it’s existential, but so vividly modern. Nothing that a nice sandwich and a glass of wine couldn’t mitigate.

  

How do you say it in Italian?

We don’t say “no cappuccino after 12 pm”. There I said it, no Italian will understand you when you say it to them. The truth is cappuccino is for breakfast and goes with a croissant, as S I M P L E as that, we don’t go all Starbucks tall or grande on the barista. What’s sinful and will get you what-a-tourist-rolling-eyes, is ordering un cappuccino in any other setting other than breakfast, like with aperitivo or after a meal, hence the after 12 pm comes from.

Why? It is like that, that is how we do it, another unspoken rule.