The Weekly Edit: Unsubscribe Summer

Is anyone else’s inbox flooded with unwanted e-mail?  Retailers that you’ve never shopped with.  Brands you’ve never heard of.  Even names you know have turned their weekly e-mails into daily ones, sometimes multiple times per day.

I used to open my e-mail in the morning to 10-15 new e-mails.  Now, it’s 30+.

Spending 15-minutes every morning hunting down the ‘unsubscribe’ and ‘e-mail preferences’ buttons has become my equivalent of morning coffee.  Purging the unwanted internet chaffe is my catharsis.

I’ve also unfollowed dozens of people on Instagram.  Cut down on my weekly e-mail newsletters.  Deleted podcasts I’m not listening to from my list.  Donated books that I haven’t picked up.  And started snoozing all of the people in my social media feed who have decided to break out their Facebook J.D.s to argue the constitutional law of pandemic re-opening plans.

So it looks like this is going to be an unsubscribe summer.  Because my plate is already full enough with anxiety, stress, and extra headaches.  I don’t need to spend my morning deleting e-mails from mountain bike companies and nail polish brands or explaining to my former co-worker on social media that he can’t sue the local hardware store for requiring customers to wear masks.

I need less, not more.  I just wish they would make the unsubscribe buttons bigger.

Every day, I like to take a long walk.  It’s the only peace and quiet I get when my husband never leaves, my dogs are clingier than ever, and the Montana primary election is 14-days away.  Sometimes I listen to a podcast or music, but mostly, I just enjoy the quiet.

My uniform for these walks is my Lululemon leggings + a Daily Ritual sweatshirt + my Adidas + and a ball cap.  But I needed a baseball cap that didn’t say anything, so I picked up this $9 hat from Amazon.  It’s simple, it doesn’t rub my forehead raw, and it comes in a bunch of colors and prints.

‘My Boss Assumes I’m Slacking Off When I Work From Home’

I had this boss.  When he would leave town, he would call to check-in.  He wouldn’t call me, he would call my assistant.  He would ask him questions about who was in the office, how long we’d been gone to lunch, what we were doing.  He turned a 24-year-old into his personal eye-in-the-sky.  It was madness.

I can only imagine how he’s coping now with everyone working remotely.  As my friend K once said, “There are managers and there are supervisors.”  Managers trust people to do their jobs with reasonable direction.  Supervisors are task masters, you are just cogs in their machine, and without their input, you are nothing.

My body hurts.  The sitting.  The stress building up in my muscles.  My entire body just feels like lead.

The Jane bath cubes in muscle ache and less stress are helping.  I turn on my portable white noise machine and try not to think about anything for a few minutes.

Also helping is my acupressure mat and my foam roller.  The mat takes a while to get used to.  But once you feel how it relieves tightness in your back after a long work day, you won’t care that it pinches a bit.

I love Naan.  I would rather eat Naan than any other type of bread.  The soft interior, the pockets of crispy, charred exterior, the buttery goodness.  It’s just the best.  But since our favorite Indian restaurant has closed, we’ve been relegated to the dry, flavorless grocery store naan.  Or have we?

Gimme Some Oven has an easy Naan recipe.  I ‘m going to use our shallow griddle pan to make the naan.  The shorter sides should make it easier to handle the bread as it cooks.

I work in politics, so I rarely want to listen to it in my free time.  But Pantsuit Politics has interesting content that you won’t see everywhere.  For example, I joined their Patreon channel so that I could hear their take on a SCOTUS decision that impacts my hometown.

Growing up on a lake of mine waste and playing in slag piles, you don’t think about the longterm implications of all that toxic refuse.  But with the mine cleanup entering it’s fourth decade, some of my former neighbors sued for the right to demand more of the mining cleanup than the EPA felt was necessary.  It’s an interesting case about federal regulations, the environment, and just how far private property rights go.

{this post contains affiliate links that may generate commission for the author}