067: Maple Suggests Dateline recaps, etc.
Appreciating our humanity and more
~I'm Maple, I’m currently in Park Slope, Brooklyn 🫶 and this is a monthly deal where my friends and I suggest all kinds of things you should try~
Guys! I’m BACK. Missed you.
For those who missed the memo, I’m changing up the way things operate here. I’m sending out this newsletter once a month and, more importantly, making everything free.
To do that, I had to turn off paid subscriptions in the “danger zone” of Substack (which was… empowering?), and manually update every post to make them all public (big flaw in the Substack system), but I DID IT FOR YOU. Everything is free now (except 3 posts which seem to be buggy… I’m working on it), including all essays and longer-form writing, all of which you can easily find in my About section on Substack.
I won’t lie that the painstaking process of opening every single one of my 60+ newsletters to make them free… wasn’t painstaking. It was nostalgic. I cried a little, I laughed a little, I got a little embarrassed at some of the things I’d written. I thought the process was going to take me hours. I was sad it didn’t.
Here’s a little taste of some of my favorites from the archive:
My vintage lamp source in #056,
the opossum flyer prank from #048,
the entirety of #046 because I was exploring new things (short story writing) and generally very happy,
“Bored Couples” and Kurt Cobain’s journals from #042,
these text messages from my friend about her mom in #040,
Jennifer Mills News from #038 (SO FUNNY — to this day, I read every week),
making homemade valentines in #033,
the essay “Human_Fallback” from #027 (I still think about this essay all the time),
my mini-essay about Tennessee #012,
my friend Yalda’s mafia-style text message in Turkey in #010,
the 2D vases from #008, and
everything about my first newsletter. Reading it and remembering where I was then, comparing it to now… just special.
Okay! Here goes the rec list for this month, now a big 10 (!):
1. Connections. A NY Times game I somehow didn’t know existed?? and now absolutely love!
2. My friend Gabe’s trick for breaking in new shoes.
Just kidding…
My new loafers thank you <3
3. Land Ho! An in-depth analysis of the tradwife phenomenon. I slurped it up. I promise it’s worth a read even if you’re done hearing about the tradwife thing (to be fair, it was published in September when this kind of talk was more zeitgeisty… but this essay is still so good).
4. Dateline Recaps. My favorite podcast in the world that I will talk about until I’m blue in the face (Attitudes!) has a Patreon, of course. One of the perks of being a subscriber is getting a bonus podcast, which is a hilarious gay man (Bryan Safi) recapping Dateline episodes. If that doesn’t sound enticing to you… I simply don’t know where our friendship goes from here. (Here’s a free one! The ep really starts at like 2:30, he does a little announcement before that.)
5. This thing I heard recently which is wonderful: “If you love someone and they ask you when you are free... don’t tell them when you aren’t free.” Once you notice people do this, you can’t un-notice it. “I can’t do Thursday from 2-6…” etc. No one likes calendar math!
6. Secret Glass Agency. My dear friend Lindsey is one of the most remarkable people alive, and one of her jobs/ hobbies is making stained glass. Her work is incredible. Here's a piece she made for me for my birthday this past year (now one of my most cherished possessions). And somehow she’s this good and just getting started!!
7. Appreciating your humanity, even when it hurts. Bear with me here. I’m now a single woman in New York City. I’ve only been on five app dates as of writing this, and all of them have been fascinating (the dates, that is — not necessarily the men). I guess it’s not surprising that as a writer I’ve jotted down a little something about each of these instances.
Already, the dates have been a lot of things. They’ve been enlightening: one guy had a habit of slightly poking out his tongue like a lizard whenever I said something funny, and just like that, a new ick burst forth. They’ve been validating: another guy tried to convince me of the innate parenting instincts of all women, and while I don't know that I needed to be reminded that I can hold my own about reproductive rights, yeah, I definitely can. They’ve also been devastating: a third man revealed to me he’d been on over a hundred app dates. At one point, he asked if it was okay to touch me and I said sure, and he brushed my shoulder and said, you have the most beautiful smile, do you get that all the time? And my heart broke for him because I knew as concretely as I knew that the lights were too bright in that bad Mexican restaurant that he would never see my smile again, not to the tune of bass-heavy Top 100 beats, not so close to me, not with any hope, not like that. But what these dates with strangers have been most of all, I think, is humanizing.
There was one guy I liked — really liked. We had a first date that was the stuff of a Nancy Meyers rom-com. But our second date was nothing short of a low-budget cringe comedy. Lying in my bed days after, face hot as my thoughts rolled over that night like fog machine wisps at a sad prom, I remembered a first date from years ago, when I first moved to New York.
It was 2012 and we were walking in Bushwick. He said he’d seen me on the subway platform a few days earlier. He thought I saw him too, so he jerked his hand up to wave — but it got stuck in the cord of his headphones, ripping them off his head as it tangled in his arms. While sorting himself, he hopped on the subway car one down from mine, but soon realized he was on the wrong train and, in jumping back to the platform, trapped himself in the closing doors. Everyone stared as he performed that hopelessly inelegant shimmy to freedom. And of course, meanwhile, his headphones had fallen off again.
He told me the story because he thought I’d seen the whole debacle; he just wanted the chance to acknowledge how awkward it was. I can still see him now: his hands shoved in his pockets, his curls, his little blush lit by the soft streetlights, defending his dignity. In fact, I hadn’t noticed any part of the train incident, but it wasn’t until this recent Horrid Second Date™ that I profoundly understood the need to explain a version of myself away, to be validated as imperfect, but still good, to be seen as human and not just the sum of an unfortunate series of moments. I understand it’s “cool” to be aloof and less cool to be vulnerable. But in spite of that, I also realized it’s grounding to go through something embarrassing that leaves us feeling raw, because that shade of ourselves only exists when we’ve managed to fuck up something that we deeply wanted to work out. And to admit to ourselves that we are excited about something, even if we don’t yet know why, to take that risk in caring about it solely because our gut tells us we should… isn’t that the first step towards all kinds of nirvana?
Anyway, the date wasn’t really that bad in retrospect. I was tired, I smoked too many cigarettes, and the sex had its problems, mainly thanks to said tiredness and a poorly placed lamp (which has since been moved). Of course, that second date is not the fundamental reason we will probably never see each other again — people are complex and sometimes timing doesn’t work out because of where we are in our lives and what’s taking up headspace. And I probably won’t think about this guy much in a week or so, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t still wish I had a chance to laugh it off with him. That’s the human in me — wanting, risking, and if it must be done eventually, honoring the longing, and moving on.
8. This clip from British game show Mock the Week. Thank you to my friend Sam who alerted me to this and has a stellar track record of contributing ideas for this newsletter.
9. This vintage clothes shaver. I’m addicted to shaving pills off my shirts because those little buggers drive me crazy, so thank you to my grandmother for this amazing tool that I also love to look at.
10. Thingtesting. With holidays coming up, here’s an easy spot to find gifty stuff.
Love you guys. See you next month.
xo Mapes