Wonderful! - Wonderful! 293: Towels Drink the Wet from the Skin of the Back

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Rachel's favorite oddly familiar poet! Griffin's favorite underrated meal!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Hawai’i Community Foundation: https://www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. This is a podcast where we talk about things we like that is good and are good and remains good. And we are into now and will forever be into. Whoa. Well, I don't know. I think it's important we plan our flight in this specific point that if we ever talk about anything on this show, we love it forever.

I can give you a 100% guarantee that we have talked about something that became quite problematic. Maybe. Yeah. I think the whole foundation of Rose buddies was kind of crumbled beneath us on shifting sands there. But for the, okay. Then for the most part is for the most part where we talk about things that

is and am good and will remain forever. Good forever and ever. Amen. This is a good time. And also with you. With you and also with you. Mm-hmm. Man.

Let's keep going. This is hot. This is hot fire. This isn't hot fire so far i it turned into a sort of um liturgy for a minute can i tell you what my small wonder is i would love to hear about your small wonder okay i thought about i've actually thought about this before and thought like oh this is a goodilty and then you add water and it just pops up it's crazy i love that it it it doesn't make any sense to me i've seen plants before in

our house where i'm like put that one in the ground yeah well for a plant, actually. Put that one below the ground. Take that one out of the ground. It's done. Take it out of the ground. But then you just dampen it a little bit, and then it's good to go. I have specifically been investing in plants that do not require a lot of maintenance or care. Yeah. Because my whole approach to plants is water them once a week when I feel like it's been a week.

So sometimes it's been more than a week and they start to look pretty bad. And then I'll water them and pop right back up. I'm going to say there is a new content expansion for the most recent Pokemon games that Henry has been shuddering with excitement. Yeah, tell me about it this morning. You guys hit it. We only played it for like 45 minutes or so this morning before he had to go to school. Boo.

Boo, school sucks. But it's fun to see him get this like fired up about like a new video game thing and get to share in that with him it's been it's been nice it's funny like the most recent pokemon games i was so cool on when i played them for besties yeah talk about them uh but through a child's eyes through the magic of a child's eyes though i've been really i've enjoyed it a lot it's been like a game we've played together now and have shared and it is my experience with it has been much

improved you go first this week I do what do you have for me I want to give a thank you you know friend of the show Anna Roach I love friend of the show Anna Roach that we invited on our special third love episode she also has a podcast

stab in the back uh that she does with her friend benton and they talk about murderers and murders and all the things that people love but in a fun way anyway she sent me a poem oh uh which is a perk of my role as poet enthusiast that people will occasionally send me poems um and most of the time i'm like that's a good one uh this one I was like, I think I'm gonna make a whole thing about it. Hell yeah. So we're going to the poetry corner.

She's doing a little rag time for you. It's beautiful, honey. Thank you. Gave me time to get out my laptop and open it. And now it. Yeah. And now it's open and I can tell you that the poet in the corner is, well, I don't know if I can say it. That's weird. Get in the corner.

Robert Frost, you're in trouble. Now that you're in the corner, I can introduce you to the poet who is not necessarily in the corner, but we're going to talk about while in the corner. This poet is on the naughty step and it is pat schneider pat pat schneider pat schneider i thought you said patch i believe short for patricia okay uh and this is a poet i was not familiar with although the poem feels very familiar i'm sure listeners of the show that are big poetry enthusiasts will recognize. It feels to me like a poem that I have read on the show before. It is not, but it is similar in content.

And I would love it if you all could get on the Facebook group and tell me what poem you think I'm thinking of. Because I opened up our Rolodex of poets and I was like, which one does this sound like? And then I was just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of poems that I have read on this show. Anyway, Pat Schneider, born in rural Missouri in 1934 near the Ozark Mountains. Beautiful. I had never heard of Ava. And so I looked at it.

There's only like 2,000 people that live in that town. Ava? So that's the name of the rural missouri area that pat hails from yes okay yes and i was like 2 000 people that's crazy let me see what the population was when she was born maybe it's just gotten smaller no it was 1 000 people when she was born it is doubled in size keep it up uh sitting on the grove she's written nine books of poetry uh and she's got kind of like a complicated past that really motivated her work as a poet uh when she was four her parents divorced and her mother moved her and her younger brother to st louis where she was looking for work uh they

lived in a tenement building, and later her mother put both children in an orphanage. I'm assuming for financial reasons, but I don't really know the story there. And then when they were released, her and her brother kind of diverged. He became what she called a drifter, and she was lucky enough to get a scholarship to Central College in Missouri. She, she did continue to travel out. Her brother ended up in California and, or the West Coast rather. Uh, and she continued to kind of stay in touch with him and he was very important to her. And I think she really became aware of the challenges of, uh, which she called traditionally silenced populations so she

founded amherst writers and artists which was a non-profit uh that focused on low-income women and children uh sponsoring writers workshops and retreats because i think and i read an interview with her where she talked about the fact that just even putting content on a page is a barrier in itself. And she realized through her own experience, because she did pursue an MFA. She did become a professor. She taught at University of Massachusetts, University of Connecticut, Smith College, and she lived in Amherst until her death. Smith College, and she lived in Amherst until her death. But she became really committed to connecting people to a community of artists and trying to remove those barriers. People were invited to share writing that was handwritten. People were invited to just

share information and they would support them in getting it on the page. It's pretty exceptional considering how kind of exclusive the MFA community has become that she was kind of making it available to everybody. So the poem that our friend Anna sent me is called The Patience of Ordinary Things. Even the title sounds familiar. I know. I think, I mean, this is just the kind of poem I like to bring, right? Like it is accessible and joyous and helps us focus, I think, on the splendor of the everyday is what I will say.

So this is from a book, Another River, New and Selected Poems. It came out in 2005, or at least this version of the poem I'm reading. Again, it's called The Patience of Ordinary Things. It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, how the chair stands sturdy and four square, how the floor receives the bottoms of shoes or toes, how souls of feet know where they're supposed to be. I've been thinking about the patience of ordinary things, how clothes wait respectfully in closets and soap dries quietly in the dish and towels drink the wet from the skin of the back and the lovely repetition of stairs

and what is more generous than a window i almost want to hear it again it's a short one yeah it's a short one it's kind of hard to read because there's so many questions in it i know um i was thinking about one of them and then the poem was over was it uh the towels drink the wet from the skin of the back? Yeah. That's a real showstopper. It really is. Particularly because she's using such plain language up until then.

It really is, yeah. And then it's like, whoa, wait, I'm in a poem now. When there was a review done of this book, the reviewer, Don Junkins, said, Pat Schneider's poems cut through to the real world. She not only knows how to write seemingly without effort, articulate and precise lies, she leans in language and abundant in content. Even that review was kind of poetic.

Hers is a genuine voice expressed in informed craft, which to be really effective includes the management of tone, which itself depends entirely on the management of restraint this i want a review of the review of this poem i think a lot of poets review other poets and so you get a little little poems in the review because everybody wants to be blurbed i guess uh yeah it's her, her poems. I mean, unsurprisingly giving her, her focus are very kind of unassuming. But then every once in a while she'll, she'll, you know,

flaunt it. Yeah. You know, I guess is the word I'm looking for, where she's like, yeah, Hey, by the way,

I am a poet. Yeah. And I, I like that one. I, again, reminds me of something I've read on the show. Can't identify what that is.

But it does, there is something about it that feels like an AI generated poem for Wonderful. Well, that is productive, I think, of both our show and the poem. I know, I know. I read it and I felt like this is so precisely like the spirit of the show for me. So I was very grateful that Anna sent it to me. And I thought, hey, you know what? I'm going to talk about it. So here I am.

Pat Schneider. Everyone did a great job in getting this poem into specifically my ears. You, Anna, Pat, the reviewer, everyone just did a great job today. Can I steal you away, please? Yes. Throughout history, sirens have captured men's attention, enticed men with their feminine wiles, and fulfilled men's primal needs. The siren's allure persists. They have not.

Unless the primal need is I need to be smashed on the rocks. Yeah, smash me. Smash me, mommy. Smash me, mama. Smash me, mommy. The siren's allure persists. Why do we do this to ourselves? Strand me, baby.

Strand me, Mark. Strand me, baby. So yeah, this is my brother, my brother and me from Maximum Fun on Mondays. It's just like that. It's just like that, but more of it. There's more of that. The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom Diablo 4

Final Fantasy 16 Street Fighter 6 Baldur's Gate 3 Starfield Spider-Man 2 Master Detective Archives Rain Code for Nintendo Switch No? Is that just me? It's a huge time for video games

You need somebody to tell you what's good, what's not so good, and what's amazing. I'm Jason Schreier. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Kirk Hamilton. We're the hosts of TripleClick, a video game podcast for anyone who likes games. Find us at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye. fun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye.

I'll be honest with you. Okay. I struggled a lot to come up with a topic for this episode. Yeah. Partially because I've been feeling kind of sick this week. Yeah. It's hard to get the energy up when you're just kind of bummed out. I did start preparing a segment that was called the evolution of American Ninja Warrior, which would be different from when we talked about American Ninja Warrior on episode 100. I got like four bullet points into that prep work before i lost the courage of my convictions um we have just so anyone who listens to this and also watches american ninja warrior which i assume there's like seven of you we have talked about doing some kind of bonus content associated with the show because we feel very passionately about it this is a great fucking season there's a lot of people who didn't like this season they didn't like the the race oh the race yeah yeah that they did um i thought that they added a real dynamic energy

yeah um instead i'm gonna talk about lunch um because i think that lunch is by most people's estimations the least important meal of the day. Yeah, no, that's fair. And, but the older I get, like the more I appreciate the space that it occupies in my every working day. Cause it's not flashy like dinner or like necessary like breakfast is, but the structure that it provides,

specifically for me, a person who has worked from home for their entire adult life. Yeah, no kidding. Is much appreciated. And I will also say upfront that I don't go very hard on lunch. Like I don't spend a lot of time preparing my lunch.

Yeah, you're not like putting sprouts and sliced avocado on a sandwich of uh particular i do like sprouts on a sandwich though me too should i buy sprouts you should get sprouts man i'll get sprouts um i don't really ever go out for lunch i don't work in an office which i feel like is like the main reason why you go out for lunch how cute would it be though if we put our lunch in little brown paper bags in our fridge? It'd be waste. It'd be incredibly wasteful. That's fair.

Lunch for me is typically a like a sandwich of some sort plus a crunchum of some sort. Some sort of crunchum. I like usually it's whatever crunchums we have lying around for Henry for his lunch, whether it be something in the Ito family, one of Judge Lance Ito's incredible chips, or a rice, a rice cracker, a flavored rice cracker. I enjoy that as well. And a sparkling beverage. That's usually my my that's usually lunch

for me of course very utilitarian hand food you know for the hands yeah um however that consistency is what makes the variations like all the more exciting like when we have leftovers i genuinely do look forward to them uh all morning long in, if I am making dinner and start to realize like, wait a minute, there's more here than Rachel and I are going to be able to eat tonight. I start getting excited for lunch tomorrow. Oh, I know. Depending on what it is. I know. There should be a word for the experience of you're getting close to lunch.

You're not sure what you're going to eat. And then you remember like, oh, wait, I have leftovers. And like a little endorphin rush you get like yeah i get this a lot for um we get food from a place called city lights of china here in dc and it's you know pretty um it's your usual takeout chinese fare um but the portions are so outrageously large yeah it's like three meals almost like three meals but like i will forget every time that i have it in the Yeah, it's like three meals almost. It's like three meals, but I will forget every time that I have it in the fridge until it's like 11.50,

and I'll be like, what am I gonna have for lunch? Oh, I guess I could just have a sandwich. Oh, wait a minute. I got something special calling my name. So lunch, it doesn't just mean eating, though. It also means like rest or time off from whatever it is that you'd rather

kind of not be doing whether it is school or work lunch just means like you're not learning or working for a little bit and i like that you're nourishing not just your body but you're easing your mind and that rules i also like the structure of it. I like how lunch divides the day for me into two pretty clean blocks of pre-lunch, which is where I get a majority of my work done. Most of our recordings that we do happen in the morning. And so by the time lunch rolls around, I have finished a bulk of my necessary work for the day. And then that just leaves post-lunch for like cleanup of like the other little odd jobs and tasks that remain on my schedule. Today, because I struggled for so long to come up with a topic, Wonderful got bumped into the post-lunch block um which is maybe why i'm dragging ass

a little bit i was gonna say there's kind of an agreement when you do work in an office and let's say you go out to lunch with a co-worker there's this kind of agreement of like well now we're useless the rest of the day yeah there have been so many times when i have gone out to lunch with a group of co-workers come back my desk, and everybody's like, well, ate too much, got nothing left to give. being can take, I think, because you just get so heavy in your midsection and it just compels you to just be supine and unconscious for a little bit. Yeah, I need to reevaluate my approach to naps. Me too. I'm on a real unhealthy sort of everyday nap schedule again.

See, I almost never nap anymore because I found it to be so unsatisfying. Oh, wow. But I think part of that is because different quadrants of our house are like 10 degrees different in temperature. Yeah. So I keep going into the hot room to nap. I should go downstairs to the cold room.

And I think I would be much more satisfying. I think you would too. I took a post-lunch nap today and I did a mistake in that i set my alarm for the exact time that my fairy therapy appointment started griffin um and so i rolled up and was pretty like out of it for the first i would say like 10 minutes because i was also like i had it on do not disturb mode on my phone and i turned that off like as i sat down to therapy oh so everything blew up i had like 14 texts and a bunch of emails i was like oh fuck oh hi hello yeah i'm doing bad um uh you know what you should have done you

should have put your laptop right next to your bed yeah and then you just roll over onto your side and you're ready to go for therapy yeah that would be that would cross very intimate pretty major boundaries i think um so it's a hard thing to kind of track the origins of a common eating time around all the cultures throughout global history um but modern lunch is more or less sort of it was established as industrialization. Yeah, of course. And that meant that workers were working longer shifts further from home because in like a, you know, more sort of rural society where that is not the thing you would just dip back home, grab a quick meal and then get back to work. That was not possible in the in the land of factories.

And so folks started to eat more portable meals, and they started to have employer-dictated breaks so that you get your energy back for the afternoon shift of putting fish inside of cans or boxes or whatever it is they do in factories, making cars. It makes me wonder a lot about the whole agriculture community because they wake up super early, like 4 a.m. or whatever, to go out and start the farm work. And then they're going to bed probably not long after sundown. So where is lunch for them? It's probably like 10 a.m. I would love getting up at four,

working, crushing a gigantic breakfast at eight, working, lunching, a huge lunch at noon, napping for like two and a half hours uh-huh going out gym tan laundry dinner bed until the next morning that's the life for me man all right should we move again i guess so uh the etymology of the word lunch is also hard to track, but the first recorded use of the word comes from 1591, where the word lunch was used to mean a thick slice of something like a lunch of bacon, which sounds amazing, honestly. Oh, that's great. I would destroy a bacon lunch right now. I do also enjoy a lunch excursion when it happens, going out to lunch.

Yeah, we need to get back in that habit we used to try and do that every so often it was a way to get to a restaurant that we were not getting to otherwise yeah it's harder when once we had kids to like go out for dinner and so lunch is my time of day um i also do love when i go out to a restaurant and they serve me lunch sized portions, which is almost invariably the better sized portion for me. Griffin McElroy, what I like to eat at a restaurant. You mean smaller? Smaller. Okay.

More petite. Myself. I love finishing a plate of food and saying, ah, yes. That was the right amount of food. that was the right amount of that was the correct amount of food for me a petite man i also do enjoy how undefined lunches like breakfast foods is a pretty set category well in western in western culture in western culture okay fine yeah it is a broad category but it is pretty well defined like i could show you a food and you say whether or not it is a breakfast food or not i've noticed that you feel strongly about

this because our our sons will often ask for something like chicken nuggets at 9 a.m and i'm like all right cool i don't really care but you're like that's a lunch food what are you doing um i don't think i say what are you doing. What are you doing? But I just think you're always like, you know, you grab your throat a little bit and your collar pops. I clutch my pearls. Yeah. I pop my collar. No.

What are you doing? Get out of here. I just like that lunch is just, it's a freestyle. Literally anything goes for lunch. Anything can be lunch. just, it's a freestyle. Literally anything goes for lunch. Anything can be lunch. Yeah, no, it's true. I haven't, I didn't talk about lunches, lazy twin brunch. Because we're not brunch people anymore, Griffin.

No, we're. This is a great sadness for both of us, I think. Yeah. Brunch was for people who got to wake up later. The only thing that beats a post-lunch nap is the post-brunch nap. The post-brunch nap

that starts at noon and ends at four is, that's the life for me. I take it back. I don't want to be a farmer guy. I want to be a mimosa-guzzling brunch fiend. A brunch master. i would like to think you can do both but i don't think you can have it all i want to i want to live every life possible all at the same

time i want to be rural farmer beautiful honey and then i want to be you know gossiping over brunch and then sleeping for four hours um because i'm worth it i have some submissions from our friends at home you know what they're talking about yes helen says as a kid i hated spicy things and refused to add anything extra to my food but as an adult i have really come to appreciate how the right hot sauce can make boring foods taste different and better shout out arizona gunslinger Green Sauce. Sounds good. It's been a while since I've had a green hot sauce in my home.

I do like a tomatillo salsa. It's actually probably my favorite kind of salsa now. But like a smooth green sauce. I need like a sommelier for hot sauce because I know what kinds I like and I'm literally scared to try anything else. The only stuff I put hot sauce on now is eggs and pizza. And it's Cholula basically all the time.

Rice, don't you do it on a rice dish occasionally? I like Sriracha on a rice or noodle dish. I like, we've started doing like chili crunch with some of the dishes that I that i make and i i like that i've fallen off sriracha pretty hard i feel like sriracha um like overwhelms the taste of whatever food i put it on in a way that is uh distracting um uh ann says my small wonder is when foods come in little glass jars that you can keep and reuse you enjoy your yogurt or tiramisu and you get a little glass souvenir that's yours forever

yes i got about jellies also yes i've been meaning to talk to you about this actually uh-oh we we get a jelly that comes in a little jar we do and occasionally griffin will discard the jar and i will fish it out of the receptacle and clean it because I really like I like a jelly jar as a cup I like a jelly jar as a cup too I don't know why I do that I mean it you know most things when you finish the contents you get rid of them just in that very specific example I'm like no no no the jar I recycle it though right I don't just throw it in the garbage can I would hope oh no, no. Do I really? I mean, here's the thing.

There's still a little bit of jelly in it. Oh, I see. Right? Sometimes it's like, oh, gosh, I don't want to put this jelly in the recycling and have it sit there for three days. But I don't rinse it out. Man, I really need to get it the fuck together. I don't want it to be like this. I don't want it to be like this either, but apparently. I just wanted to talk about jars i do love jars though especially jars of clay my favorite um christian rock i can't follow you please i don't know anything about this i can't

follow you i'm gonna sit you down one of these days i'm gonna going to sit you down. One of these days, I'm going to force you to guest on Good Christian Fun, and you'll get a very quick education on contemporary Christian music. I know so little. I know. It's so exciting. You didn't know what Reliant K was. No. It was like a couple months ago, we were talking about Christian bands, and I was talking about

Switchfoot, and you had heard of Switchfoot, but you didn't know their music, which is appalling. I never heard of Reliant K. And then I was like, well, or Reliant K. And you were like, Reliant who? And the thought that you didn't know that is. Is DC Talk one? Yes. Okay.

I've heard of that one. Yeah. DC Talk was great. They did Jesus Freak, I think. See, again. What would people say if they found out. I did Jesus Freak, I think. See, again, just... What would people say if they found out I'm a Jesus Freak? I will say there are a lot of times when I am looking for a station on the radio,

which is something I still do, and I'll hit what sounds like an alternative rock station, and then I'll start listening. I'll be like, wait, you caught me. You fooled me. Yeah, Jesus Freak was DC talk. Man, what a bop. me um yeah she's as freaky as dc's hot man what about thank you so much to

bowen and augustus for these for a theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description and thank you to maximum fun for having us on the network go to maximum

fun.org check out all the great shows that they got there you're gonna find something there that you're that you're gonna like and you're gonna vibe with um we have a bunch of merch uh over at mackroyMerch.com that you can go check out.

We have a new line of Besties stickers that I'm delighted by. It's like all four of us, but done up in the styles of the video games we love. So I look like an Animal Crossing guy. That's adorable. Justin has a little sewer shark guy. It's very good. We have some shows coming up in New York and Philly that you can get tickets to. They're going to be like second week of October, I believe.

Go to McElroy.family and find links to those where to get tickets now. And I think that's it. Thank you so much for listening. Sorry for the low-key vibe on this one. We're coming in hot but i'm i next week next week's one is going to be is maybe we will give ourselves permission to talk about american ninja warrior for whoa i don't know dude i don't know i will say that as much as i do enjoy the show and i do think it has evolved in a spectacular fashion as soon as the season is done i forget

fucking everything about it. I know, I was gonna say. It feels a little bit like dumping out my underwear drawer in front of our listeners. Like, here is my hidden things. What do you got in there? What do you got in your underwear drawer? It's just a kind of vulnerability

to talk in depth about American Ninja Warrior, which is a show that I think almost no one watches. What if you dumped out your underwear drawer and you had a secret like like pocket knife collection that you something like really out of character i like that rachel okay i'll be farm griffin you be knife rachel by next week and we'll meet back up and see how it sounds good and see how it goes. Sounds good. Okay. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.