Issue #53: What Age Do You Feel?

And a conversation about (late) blooming. 🌸

Morning Person is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

🎥 Wedding Season on Netflix: Fight me on this, but the best romcom plot is: two people who are obviously perfect for each other decide they cannot be together, but need to pretend to be together for XYZ reasons, then (WHAT!?) end up falling in love. In this iteration of the age-old tale, Asha and Ravi are set up by their parents and, at Asha’s insistence, agree to pretend to be together to remove the pressure they’re each facing from their respective families to find a match during wedding season. Tropes abound: We know Ravi is a cool girl because she eats double cheese-burgers and a professional lady because she brings file folders and her Macbook to weddings. Is it a brilliant movie? No. Did my friend and I eat up every second of the low-stakes drama and cute outfits Asha wears when we watched it this weekend? Absolutely.

📚 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: In the weeks leading up to Christmas in a small town in Ireland in 1985, Bill Furlong begins to question the meaning of his life. He grew up poor and his single mother died young, so he has always felt fulfilled by the act of providing a better life for his five daughters and talking to his wife about myriad, small concerns as they fall asleep. At some point, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?[…] The work and the constant worry. […] Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” A chance encounter on one of his coal deliveries leads him to a new conclusion that allows him to break out of the “ordinary” thinking of his small town. It’s short and sweet—I listened to the audiobook in under two hours.