Attention is love

One of my favorite quotes conveying a principle to live by is from The Power of Fun by Catherine Price: "Our lives are what we pay attention to." She has explained elsewhere that what she means by this is that "when we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our time alive."

 

After I responded to this idea, I started seeing variations on the theme all over. In How To Know a Person, David Brooks wrote that "[t]he quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world." In The Good Life, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz quote the French philosopher Simone Weil as saying, "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

 

When Paul Met Karen

I recently started listening to the Love Factually podcast, which is one of the most "Paul" podcasts ever. The idea is that two relationship scientists — Paul Eastwick, who is a professor at the University of California, Davis, and Eli Finkel, who is at Northwestern — talk about famous rom-coms and tell you what they get right and wrong about how relationships actually work. I love that their substack [1] cites and links to all of the academic papers Eastwick and Finkel discuss in each episode, so I can read the science for myself if I so choose.

 

They discussed "When Harry Met Sally" in Episode 1, because where else would you start if you're doing a podcast about rom-coms? One of the things that movie gets right is that the lead characters start out as friends first (well, frenemies first really). Relationship scientists have mostly overlooked "The Friends-to-Lovers Pathway to Romance," say the authors of a paper with that name,[2] because friends-first initiation is much harder to study than dating initiation of a romantic relationship. [3]

Pizza Day!

It's a big day today! No, not the Super Bowl, who cares about that? It's National Pizza Day! (And apparently World Pizza Day too.) I tried to make a big deal last year, but everyone pooped on my pizza parade. This year I insisted though, and Dylan was on board because pizza is his favorite food, which got the ball rolling. So I made Shortcut Sicilian-Style Italian Pizza:

Fast food, episode XV

It's been too long since my last installment in the "fast food" franchise, even though I have posted other under-30-minute recipes since then. As quick and easy go, they don't get much quicker and easier than this, an Indian-style variation on a rice-and-beans dish using only pantry staples (if you go with canned over fresh tomatoes). This one is definitely worth keeping in mind for when you're home late from work and don't know what to make but don't want to order in or go out. We all thought it was really tasty, especially given the small amount of time and work involved. Stock up on black-eyed peas next time you're at the grocery — they're delicious and have a great texture compared to some other beans. (They're great in the Four "Pea" Usal, too.)

 

Your parents' meet cute

In a recent episode, I mentioned in passing having "had the perfect meet cute with my dream woman 40+ years ago in the Hopkins cafeteria." I was surprised when Moriah texted me to get the scoop on the meet cute because I thought Dylan would have known the story, but he didn't, and apparently neither did the rest of you. So here it is.

Outsourcing my blog, episode VI: Above and beyond the call

[Moriah spent months perfecting this recipe so that Mom could have a reliable recipe for making gluten-free sourdough. Talk about going above and beyond the call!]

 

 

Karen makes a huge sourdough loaf every week for the family but can't eat it herself! I wanted to perfect a gluten free sourdough recipe so Karen can enjoy the fruits of her own sourdough-labors. After a lot of research and four attempts with tweaks, it turned out better than I could have imagined. 

My 2024 reading

A favorite year-end activity is looking through the books I read in the preceding year. According to StoryGraph, I read 73 books in 2024, totaling 21,622 pages. The genre I spent the most time with in 2024 was, not surprisingly, psychology (20 titles), followed by memoir (15), self-help (11), and "literary" (9), whatever that means. Looking through the picture of all the books I read last year, I see that there were a fair number I slogged through, even though they weren't all that enjoyable.