Sarah Wilson

“I write longhand” and other ways going retro helps you focus

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Sunday Life: This week I work a little “retro”…and it worked!

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via Gala Darling

A week or so ago “#RIPTypewriters” was trending. Which, for those not of The Twitterverse, means a stack of people were commenting on the death of the typewriter following news the last manufacturer in the world had closed shop. I entered the nostalgic Twitter fray to reminisce about work life pre-Ctrl Alt Delete:

Remember Liquid Paper? Remember doing actual research in a library? The metho smell of the stat machine?

The commentary, as with all things particular to Boomers and Gen Xers, was tinged saturated with a certain “see how hard we had it back then?” message to young folk. But there was also a distinct longing to it. Not for the usual “simpler times” (because they weren’t; navigating the Dewey system to check what year Tupperware was invented was not an elegant process). But for…well, this week I tried to capture what it was. And replicate it.

Turns out there’s a community of hipster typewriter fetishists out there. In March the New York Times ran a feature on Brooklyn 20-somethings who hunt down vintage Remingtons at flea markets. “Type-ins” are being held around the world (cool typers hang out in pubs and…hit the keys) and there’s an emerging “typosphere” (a blog scene for typewriter nuts). One Gen Y fan summed the appeal thus: “It’s about permanence, not being able to hit delete”.

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a sweet trick:: breath for yourself

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This is just a small trick the lady next door shared with me last night. She said she focuses on following her breath when she’s anxious. Stops for two minutes. And follows it in and out.

By Anna Hatzakis
By Anna Hatzakis

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. It’s what everyone says. But she added this:

Follow your own breath. Draw it in for you, air that’s not muddied by other people’s energy.

In that little bit of simple advice, I discerned something fresh. It’s one thing to follow your breath. It’s a super focusing technique that brings you into the present. But it’s something extra to follow a breath that’s especially for you, the you on the inside. The quiet you that sits somewhere around the lung/heart cavity where the air is drawn in. It gives the “task” an extra sense of purpose. And don’t we all respond to that!

When I focus on breathing in I feed that quiet part of myself. My inside people. Just for a few minutes.

Nice.

In other news…

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I’m learning to listen to my gut

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This keeps coming up as a theme: listening to your gut. I remember a  few years ago being told to do this, to trust your instinct, which somehow resides in your stomach. And I tell you I had no visceral sense AT ALL what it meant. My gut? Nothing was coming from there. I got nervous feelings, butterflies etc, but had no idea how to translate these feelings to my cerebral side.

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I saw this on Big Think this morning – James Marsh, who made Man on Wire, talking about it.

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where women go wrong: they give away their feminine power

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Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psych and author of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters came out with some statement this week that men typically lie upwards and women typically lie downwards.

He uses this argument to then highlight a point I think he’s rather proud of: the one thing that women don’t realise about their feminine power…

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They actually have more of it than they realise.

He says:

It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige.  They do, because they have to, in order to impress women.  Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to.  What do women control?  Men.

But he argues:

Men pretend that they make more money, are taller and have had more sexual partners.  In contrast, women pretend that they are younger, lighter and less sexual. In a word, less. He points out (apart from height) these dimensions only increase with time, so women lie and pretend to be what they used to be before in the past, whereas men lie and pretend to be what they will be in the future.

The females of all mammalian species, including humans, always have more power than the males,

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17 of my best cooking tricks for real wellness

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Here’s a few cooking and eating tips I live by for a Tuesday. Enjoy! Oh, by the way, the new nutrition makeover show I finished filming in January – Eat Yourself Sexy – will appear on Lifestyle YOU in August…in time for Spring. That should give you enough time to subscribe to Foxtel/Austar!

heather ford 1270607 unsplash 17 of my best cooking tricks for real wellness

Image by Heather Ford on Unsplash

1. I blend my tomatoes. Cooking tomatoes increases the available lycopene antioxidant content by five times. Blending tomatoes does the same but avoids the heat and oxidation, as well as water and enzyme damaging properties of cooking.

2. Marinate meat in rosemary. Cooking meat at high temperatures can create toxins called heterocyclic amines, linked to cancer. But, marinating lowers the risk by preventing the formation of the toxins –  rosemary is the most effective marinade herb to use. Makes sense. They taste good together.

3. Here’s how to do speedy pumpkin: To stirfry cubes of pumpkin (for a quick lunch salad etc) without pre-steaming it, fry it up with a liberal shake of salt. I’m not sure why, but the salt breaks down the pumpkin’s starch faster, so it softens as you fry.

4. I cook with coconut oil. It tastes amazing – a little bit sweet and a bit toasted. And it’s sooo good for you. It’s made up of ninety percent saturated fats (good fats). And 50 percent of the fat content iis a fat rarely found in nature called lauric acid. Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, which has anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-protozoa properties, as well as being antifungal, antioxidant, and soothing. PLUS it supports thyroid gland and enzyme function.Pumpkin in particular tastes great with this oil. It’s also less fattening than other oils…if that matters to you.

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in defense of hipsters

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In the Fairfax papers on the weekend there was yet another rant about why hipsters are so not cool.

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I find these rants intriguing …but they seem to read the cultural cues a little wrong. Through an old prism, somehow. So here I’m going to go into bat for these earnest, oddly cardiganed folk.

To confirm what a hipster is:

Hipsters covet lo-fi goods such as fixed-gear bikes and old-school Lomographic cameras. Their tastes run to 1950s furniture. They crave things that are obscure and typography-related. And they are disdainful of anything mainstream.

London’s Guardian describes a hipster, which historians say popped up in New York’s lower east side in 1999 as “squatting somewhere between MGMT, The Inbetweeners and Derek Zoolander [ouch!] … this modern incarnation is all mouth and skinny trousers”. And ipads, and second-hand shopping and cardigans and hanging in obscure coffee shops and having slashie careers (T-shirt designer/cafe owner/web design business etc).

You get the picture. (And I should confess that I certainly don a few hipsterisms: the black Buddy Holly glasses. The single-speed bike. Which is not why I feel compelled to defend hipsters.)

The thing is, critics bag out the affectations as being all about irony. And therefore flaccid.

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is it time to stop the twitter sycophantic-a and get real?

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In Sunday Life this week I get more authentic online

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A theme that crops up consistently in this weekly flirt with life betterment is something I call “too much-itis”. Or “battered (by) life syndrome”, a condition charcterised by a sense that too many commitments and distractions are dragging us down. The American Academy of Pediatrics have just diagnosed the latest symptom: Facebook Depression, caused by reading friends’ updates and feeling your life sucks in comparison to the fabulous “wine weekend away with the boyf” and “ZOMG! Most blissful afternoon on the harbour with besties” everyone else is breezily engaged in.

I used to call this malaise Friday Night Alone Watching The Bill-ophobia. Previously, a mere suspicion everyone was out having more fun than you fuelled the panic. But since everyone now has Facebook and Twitter on their phones, there’s no doubt. We all know exactly – in real time – how much fun everyone else is having. Which has upped the heart-sink.

I now call it Friday Night Alone Reading Status Updates-ophobia.

Me, I’ve become totally overwhelmed by other people’s status updates. An article in this magazine on the subject a few months ago, prompting a wave of  “me too!” feedback. My journalist friend C has since taken a Twitter hiatus. “I can’t deal with the spin. It feels so grubby.” My single friend G has turned off Facebook; “Too many ex-boyfriends with baby photos!”.

Quitting social media altogether is one solution. I’ve previously tested e-toxing (living offline) and creating e-boundaries (like using the Freedom app which blocks social media for eight hours at a time) in this column. They’re great. But extreme. I personally get a lot from Twitter in particular – it’s the most efficient way for me to read the news each day.

So this week I experimented with some more balanced – and balancing – approaches.

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an oodlie…and why you shouldn’t sleep with your microwave

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Remember my chat with Joi about oodlies from earlier in the week?

She made this one for me. With this note: “I was going to give you harry potter glasses but felt it would be too busy what with the dog hugging you and the other oodlie sniffing your hair.” She also asked if I have an obsession with cleaning my ears. Which I do. But unrelated.

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Also unrelated. But useful. Remember I wrote about how to detox your apartment? (And I discovered my bedroom was a dungeon of EMF evil?)

Well, I found out you can HIRE a guass meter FOR FREE from the Government.

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your bike-buying questions answered

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I’m constantly asked for tips for buying bikes. If you’re buying your first since you sported spokey dokes on your Repco, it can be daunting. For this sponsored review I asked Jenny Fay from Australia’s first women’s bike shop at Clarence St Cyclery in Sydney to share her advice.

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And can I just say, it is actually a very cool thing that there’s a chick-specific store out there…I get freaked dealing with blokes in Lycra in bike shops who don’t really understand I have longer legs than men and boobs that get in the way, that I need to carry loads of stuff wherever I go and, quite frankly, want to put style before a fancy derailer sometimes. I don’t want to explain all this (and cop attitude); I want it assumed! Over to you Jenny…

Q: I want a… how can I put it…purely pretty bike! I’m a bit of a princessy type, but I want to start riding to work. I don’t know how to put this, but I don’t want one of those lean-forward, fast styles; I want to sit upright and ride in my frocks’n’heels. Oh, and to be able to touch the ground at traffic lights! And I want to be able to carry my bits and pieces in a pretty basket. Does this make sense? – Rachel

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this is how I write…

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I read this wonderful interview with author James Salter in The Paris Review. If you’re not a writer, or you’re not working on a long, big, scary project (an essay, a thesis, a report, a house) I still think you’ll find some good life lessons in it. And will enjoy his considered, dignified answers. It continues the theme I’ve been exploring of late: taking the time it takes to do something. Doing things steadily. Finding your own kooky rhythm and finding solace in the kooky, twisted rhythms of successful people.

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He writes in longhand first! As do I.

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type. And then I retype, correct, retype, and keep going until it’s finished. It’s been demonstrated to me many times that there is some inefficiency in this, but I find that the ease of moving a paragraph is not really what I need. I need the opportunity to write this sentence again, to say it to myself again, to look at the paragraph once more, and actually to go through the whole text, line by line, very carefully, writing it out. There may be even some kind of mimetic impulse here where I am trying to write like myself, so to speak.

He tweaks and frets!

I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another…I write big sections and then let them sit.

It’s dangerous not to let things age…

and if something is really good, you should put it away for a month.

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