Hi everyone, my name is Abigail and I'm here with Amanda, Amanda, and we are friends. We are friends. And we have been thinking for a long long long time that we should apply cast. Just like everyone else in America.
Just like everyone else in America. And I started listening to podcasts really aggressively in the last six months. Like I probably listened to three to four hours a day. And so I finally got in the...what's the word?
Um, um, ocean. Is that our? Gumption. There we go.
I got the gumption to bully Amanda into doing it. So we are sitting down having lunch and doing our podcast. And I thought a fun way for us to introduce ourselves would be to introduce each other. Oh gosh.
Okay. I'll go first. Okay. Which means you have to introduce me first.
Okay. I was like, I was like, oh well, you introduce me, I'll take advantage of it. So this is Abigail. She is very accomplished in many different ways.
It's kind of hard to think of them all. She has a lot of experience with running huge departments of people and making everyone do everything they need to do in order to get their jobs done correctly. And she's really good at coming up with creative solutions to problems. And if you feel like your life is a mess, she will ask outfully if you should make a list to help you with your problems.
Or business model. Yes. She enjoys camping and reading a lot and her cats, Grayson and Ever are most important friends. And she is always up for adventure.
Thank you. Did I miss anything? How old am I? She's 31 and a half.
Yes. So this is Amanda. And she is the most creative person I know and also the funniest person I know. And the reason why I thought we should do a podcast is mostly because I think podcasting is her best format for her humor.
And she has degrees in film and art and library. And she's worked in many different jobs from fashion to writing to yelling at people. And most recently in tech. And she also has written several short films written and produced etc.
You can see them on Hulu or something. It's about as much as I know about the whole film. This is part where I say I'll put the link in the show notes. Grow.
I know you're a real podcaster when you mention the show notes. And what else? She lives in Los Angeles. She lives in Los Angeles.
She lived Iceland before. It was cool. I guess it's always been cool because it's so close to the North Pole. Today is like the girls test out her fun.
And every day is my test out on my Monday. None of my puns are ever better than just the testing phase. As our listeners will soon discover. And she was homeschooled.
I feel like yours is so long and very demanding. I don't know. Well, that's a good segue into our next segment. Which is Amanda's creative project of the week.
Oh dear. But where we talk about what Amanda's creative endeavors. Amanda is so creative. She's always giving herself more work because she thinks of ideas and she executes them.
So, plenty of like three-fourths of them. She begins executing them. And then she's got so many balls in the air. And that's where I come along and say, can I help you make a list?
And I say, no, no, she's just making a list. She said, no, it's already written down on my heart. So, Amanda, I've decided the future project of the week is your new tiny letter. Can you tell us about it?
Sure. So, my new newsletter that I decided to start is called Hashtag Engaged. And you can find it at hashtagengaged.tinyletter.com. And it is a compendium of all of the best and worst of Instagram where people hashtag their engagement.
We're recording stuff. Yeah, we're recording stuff. Hey, who knows? It's doing its thing.
Okay. I was trying to see how long we were going, but I don't know. That's not telling me. We're very expert podcasters as you can tell.
It's telling me our levels, I think. Anyway, so, yeah, I look through one day I noticed a long time ago that if you clicked on the hashtag for Engaged, it was filled with hilarious bizarre strange things. And I decided it would be funny to make a newsletter out of all of the every week. And the funny thing is there's so much stuff that you really can't even make.
Like, you can make a newsletter every day for it. Yeah, it's recording. So, oh, you can make a newsletter every day for things you find on Hashtag Engaged. But I try to look every couple days and pick out some stuff that I think is really funny or strange.
And the point is to make fun of people for being ugly or stupid or tactless or whatever. The point is that sometimes, I don't know, I feel like people who post about their engagement kind of get away from the point of what it is to be engaged or what the reason is or stuff like that and they post really ridiculous stuff. Amy Cannon found this amazing one that she sent me where... Who's Amy Cannon?
Amy Cannon is a poet and an author and a friend of ours from college. She lives in Los Angeles and is the poetry editor of Femillate Mag and has been published in lots of places and is generally a creative inspiration to us all. The universally beloved. I can't think of anyone that doesn't like Amy.
It's kind of sickening actually. Anyway, so... Did Babies hit her? I was like...
No, she's always posting pictures on her Instagram. I've heard her cuddling some small child who's laughing in delight and thoroughly enjoying her. Of course. No, that is the point of posting to be on the conchon.
I guess so. I feel like I like the ones where people would say. Which is why I started my newsletter. Oh, she sent me one of a guy holding up a sign that said she said yes.
He is kneeling next to the trunk of a car which is open and there's a woman in there smiling with her hands and her wrists and her mouth covered with duct tape and she's showing her engagement ring. Why don't we get it? So it's like a kidnapper. She said yes and she's in the car trunk showing her engagement ring and her hands are like all together.
She looks excited. Yeah, she looks happy but she doesn't look like she's a kidnapped. But it was like a joke but it was a terrible, unfunny joke. Yeah, I feel like if I find her joke if she looked like been drag-old and unhappy because it would actually be like she was kidnapped.
But otherwise it's just like she's like I'm wearing a costume. No, all of them are like that. All of them are like this doesn't quite make sense. I can go see what you're going for here.
Like the one where okay so they're. Yeah, tell us. Tell us to give us an example of something we might read in the newsletter. Okay, so in the newsletter last week I started at a section who knows all continue it called Who's Marrying Whom?
And that's where all the posts that are very ambiguous as to who in the picture is getting married to whom. So, since there's one of a woman looking very souffle-ly, she's in her bride, she's wearing her bride-offs and she's carrying a bouquet and she's looking very souffle at a horse and it said something, the caption was something like beautiful wedding this weekend and I said oh is she burying the horse? It really looks like she's involved with this horse. So anyway, and they're stuff like that with people with their dogs and all kinds of things.
So, I don't know. There's a lot of nonsense to be found. Okay, and how do people sign up? Tenureletter.com slash hashtag engage and that's hashtag spelled out so H-A-S-H-T-H-G engage.
Well, we'll put that link in the show notes. Okay, so thank you Amanda for sharing your project a week and giving us an action item there on what we can do next about that. The next segment is it like so awkward that I introduce every segment by saying the next segment. And you'll find it on the show notes which is now a joke officially.
We have a podcast joke. Alright, hashtag arrived. Hashtag blessed. Make a newsletter.
Tiny letter dot. Joke. Okay, our next segment is history or mystery. Yay!
What's history or mystery? So history or mystery was the original podcast idea that Loa and like 10 years ago that everyone came up with was thought the funniest thing in the world. I actually don't know the specifics of coming up with it. I wasn't quite there for that.
But we were at the old ship probably. We were probably the old ship and Kate. The old ship is a pub in English pub in Faller, in California that everybody loves. We used to go there a lot and we got all these points and then they did away with their point system and we had a captain card and we had a captain's card and we were gathering all these points.
And it was kind of a dump point system because you basically eat a bunch of food for free if you spent like $1,000. Yeah, it was a reward system where basically if you every time you bought anything you got points on your card and it was a pretty good return. And it was a pretty good return. And they would round up because they liked us.
It was kind of archaic because it was just a small business. If we'd spent 120 we should get like 12 points or something but they would give us 20 points and they would round up like that all the time and it counted on drinks and everything. And so we would go there with a bunch of friends and spend like 250 bucks every couple weeks and pretty soon we had tons and tons of cabinets points but we didn't spend them all before they faced it out. It was so sad.
Okay, don't tell the sad part of the story. Tell the cool part of the story. So every about once a year once we had hoarded up enough points I'm a classic order. Like I say if cards are red or like I mean I gave me a card to the circle oh hello friend for my birthday two birthdays ago so a year and a half ago and I just used it for the first time last week.
And the girl at the store had to look at like she had to go up to their old system because they changed systems twice since that card was bought and she had basically assumed a new gift card and I wish I could say that was the first time that's happened but that happens to me all the time. Thankfully the state of California has all these laws that basically mean a gift card has monetary value for the rest of your life. So I think what we've learned so far is this thing but it's actually gift cards. How we've abused them and the ways in which we've been abused by gift cards.
When it raises me, look forward to my next week. So we would hoard our captain's points. Where we supposed to be talking about history or mystery? Oh so it was truly this sort of mystery.
Oh yeah. We would hoard our captain points and we would go and we would have a short list. You had to get on the list to be invited to point tonight because we'd call it point tonight and we would play in advance and be like hey it's getting time for point tonight. What should we be celebrating with point tonight?
Who will we invite? Who's on the short list? Who's really contributed? Most us getting these points and we wanted to keep it a low crowd because I'm ordering to want to spend with points.
Right. The goal was not to completely deplete the points. Right. I would enjoy the free points.
I would let us go unless we had like two points nights for the points. Anyway, we would have these insane nights. They leave my alcohol with the points. Which is a terrible idea and probably why they get away with the point system.
And yeah, we would drink. We would binge drink like orgies of old for revenue. Double whiskey. We would try and think.
We would eat everything on the menu. We'd be like okay we'll get everything. We always wanted to get. They do this terrible thing where they charge extra for sauces and we'd be like all the sauces.
And yeah, so one night probably had a point today at the old ship. We came up with the city of history and history where you basically talk about something important in history but you're just recollecting from the past what you think actually happened. And it could have been true based on how good your memory is. We still chime in with what they also remember about it.
Yes. So what's otherwise known as a conversation. We turned into a fun little game called history of history to encourage and I went to ever speak again. So today's history of history topic is Pompeii.
Oh. Okay. I'm starting. I'll jump in.
I read a lot of books about Pompeii because I was home sold to those part of our group topics. You guys, she didn't learn math. I didn't have time for math or science or geography or geometry or any other science. Well she knew of some day.
She would have to discuss Pompeii on history of history. And I've never used math once. I probably could tell it was my taxes. See the show notes.
My taxes. I remember that their first thing that comes to mind is obviously a National Geographic article with pictures of all the bird bodies that are like you know. Well they're like spooning. That's what I remember.
Like they're like they're not really bird. They're more like they're from lava. Yeah. Yeah.
The mountain exploded or whatever. No idea what that happened. It could have right before the French Revolution. It could have been sometime in the past hundred years.
It was over a hundred years ago. I think. I think it's like old Roman times. No.
I don't know what that was. What was it? What did they know? What did they know?
They have sandals. They have sandals all the murals in the wall. Yeah and they have like the bowls in the tools. Okay.
Yeah. All right. So at least 200 years ago. Again, we don't.
History of history folks. We don't know. I'm going to bet at least 200 years ago. I'm going to say 1400 BC.
Oh no. No. Well, Matt, isn't that what Romans were? No, that's what Christopher Columbus was.
Many Romans were like 200. What do you mean by Romans? Like the old Romans with like a... They were for a long time.
They were before and after Jesus. Remember? Not very well. I know a lot of Richard history that I know Roman history, but yeah, because the Romans were the one...
They were under a Roman rule. These were relates. Panchot's Tyler was Roman and Paul was Roman. I listened to a lot of podcasts.
We veered away from you. We have. Well, you were the brother of Romans. I was trying to elucidate the mysteries of Pompeii.
Okay, so Pompeii was a volcano. Right? I lived in Pompeii, right? And volcano was Pompeii?
It was an island. I want to look up so bad right now. You know, I'm confusing Pompeii with that other gas leaves or something. Yes.
I was a genius. That was a dream about me. She's not in it, who is it? Tom Hanks.
One of them is in it. It's here, Rosin. I'm in Renee-Rus, so maybe? No.
No, they're in the other movie where they steal art. So you get so many histories about what I said. They steal everything. They steal everything.
But you know, the painting with the guy in the student has the alcohol for space. Yeah. There's extra history, mystery. So the volcano goes and it destroys a civilization.
That's the story. But it's preserved. So unlike other past civilizations, which decay like normal organic things, because the lava came out, it preserved everything. And you can even see people going about their daily life because it was a surprise attack.
No. Anything else to add? No. No.
No, ideally we would have someone hop in like an expert and tell us what's really going on. But we're not famous enough for that yet. So we'll maybe revisit it on the next podcast. When we are...
When we are... When I'm the expert. I think that sounds like a lot more fun to have the topic. We decided to advance and then one person is the actual expert.
The other person says what they think they know about it. I agree, but I feel like when you meet three people, because you meet at least two people, chime in with their, you know, McGrear paintings. Like a rare. The famous painter Renee Ramer.
Wait, what is it? Renee McGreate. McGreate. Yeah.
Anyway, here's the painter. I don't actually know the name of that painting. Right. Man with apple, maybe.
It's not like what all paintings are called. It's not like the role of herliering. I thought they're all called like the persistence of memory. It's probably not.
Well, it's a dolly, but yeah. What about the bread of life? I'm trying to think of other painting names. Mona Lisa.
The segment that never ends. Okay, it's over. The segment's over. And the next segment is Whole 30.
Oh, all right. Not so much. I mean, it's a segment. I'm not saying it's going to be recurring.
But so I mean, then I started the whole 39. Because we love a good fad. Six years after it's arts. So much.
But yeah, Abigail's wearing some mom jeans I found from over eight years ago. And Peter put on. Yeah, they are. They are jeans that were like really cute in like 2007.
Okay, so which was when I was really cute. Like that is when we were closer to trends. Now we're old ladies. Oh, I forgot to say Amanda's 29.
She's almost the big 3-0. By the way, why do you mostly dirty 30? I think I'm supposed to like just need dirty for it. But why?
Just because it rhymes? Yeah, like I don't get it. That's why. Okay, well I vote now.
So I say the big 3-0. Over the hell. Anyway, what item lost? I trained a thought.
And you're looking at your phone. Who's going to carry the podcast? Who's going to carry the podcast? Oh, she's not listening to me.
Don't air. Don't air. Sorry. I didn't have to work.
I know. No, I know. She's very busy. I had to bully her into this.
What? What? I lost my train of thought. Oh, Whole 30.
We'll just skip right back to our segment here. Whole 30 is the fad we're doing. Oh, we were talking about my mom jeans. They're cute flare pants.
They're not like mom jeans from the whole 30 other than you were about the mom jeans. True Whole 30 talk. Yeah, let's just do Whole 30. So this is like my day eight, I would say.
I think I sort of lost track around six or seven. I think it's eight. I don't know. It could be seven.
Who knows? You should just go to my day 30 because I keep track. Oh, that's fair. Well, I was trying my day too.
I'll try to do it on Instagram, but it's hard. Yeah. Okay, so Whole 30 is a diet. It's a reset diet.
So the idea is you do it for 30 days. And it kind of has two major purposes. One is to basically break your bad food habits. So it has all these restrictions.
No grains, no dairy, no legumes, no water, no added sugar, water's okay. No added sugar, no alcohol, no food that are round. No use that are square shaped either. Yeah, so it does have a lot of restrictions.
It's only foods that are wavy shapes, like but with potato chips? No, those are also round. Oh, twist. What about Pringles?
No, again, round. Okay, well, you want to argue with Melissa Hartwood, author of Whole 30, author and movement maker. She posted something about this Instagram drama that I really liked. Did you see it?
Dallas did. They both did because they're still secretly. They still have the same. We ship them.
We do. I do a little bit. This is the person my friend tested who I borrowed my whole 30 book from. She was talking about them.
Again, these are the founders of Whole 30. Yes. So it's on top. They don't actually know them or anything like she was talking about them, and how much they eat and that sort of thing.
And I said, did you know they're divorced? She, or like her heart broke with her face spell. She was like, what? And I was like, I know.
But yeah, we're worshippers. We're team H. And they both posted separately about this new Instagram feed algorithm. What are people calling it?
The algorithm drama algorithm gate? I don't know. People are freaking out about feed. And everyone is begging for people to turn on notifications, which apparently isn't even real.
I don't turn on notifications. I try to turn off as many notifications as possible, so I just kind of ignored all that. But I was really glad Melissa was basically like, this is stupid. Why should we have more notifications in our life?
Like just unfollow people if you don't want to follow them instead of adding notifications when you do unfollow. And I really appreciated that. And I was like, preach, preach. So whatever anybody complains about their Facebook feed, I'm like, yeah, just hide the people that are bothering you and then they won't bother you anymore.
We have a friend whose name I won't mention, but she hid so many people on her Facebook feed. I was supposed to say who it was. Like it was an accident. Oh, so it's so cool.
So she had so many people on her Facebook feed that there's basically like less than 20 people that actually show up on her feed. And if she has a new Facebook friend, which makes a new Facebook friend, she hasn't hid them yet because they haven't fallen into her feed. And she said when they, as soon as she has a new Facebook friend, her whole feed is all of their posts because there's no other content to be on her feed. I thought that was really funny.
That is funny. So, man, I'm like, can I have that word? Podcast. I'm following over here.
She's taking us up the water. Thank you. Keeping the con. Keep it in the corner.
She's there. So, no dead air. Is that our motto? I think it is.
It's a good one. It's kind of how we live late. I've got to eat all the delicious things off her plate of delicious food I made for her and then didn't eat the vegetables. No, I ate the soft things.
The crunchy things take me a while and I knew I'd be crunching loud on our podcast. So, I'm saving the crunchy things for after. I'm animating a whole 30 lunch. So, we had some grilled chicken breast, carrots, cukes, and sweet potato.
And avocado. And avocado, which was one of the delicious and say, and also a soft potato. I would say a whole 30 is not hard to do. It's just time consuming.
So, it works best if you have a lot of time to make yourself food. Not a lot of time because it doesn't take that much longer. But it definitely takes time to think about what you're eating and plan ahead and not eat out with it very easily. So, it's best to kind of do it during a time slot when you have maybe a extra time on the weekends to make yourself meals for the week.
Or you don't mind eating things that are very similar because you end up eating a lot of food that's... Yeah, there's a ton of really good recipes, but I'm kind of lazy. I am too, so I usually end up making something very similar to that. Because it's fine.
Yeah, well, and that's kind of why something like Whole 30 is good for me is when there's a lot of rules so I don't have to make for any choices. I don't mind eating the same thing every day. So, I'm like, oh great, I'll just eat this healthy thing. And there's no measurements allowed.
So, you can't measure your food and you can't measure yourself. Yeah, you're not supposed to log your calories. You're not supposed to weigh yourself. You're not supposed to do anything like that.
So, it is pretty, it's pretty actually mentally freeing because you don't have anything to think about it. You're not like, oh, my under my calories. What's my weight today or anything like that? You just need to make sure you have enough food on hand that you're not starving.
Yeah, which I'm very excited about. It's just my second day. So, I can't be calling myself next for you. But I'm excited about it.
And that is the end of the whole 30-second. To wrap up. We have a wrap up theme. Oh, doing.
Yes, it's a hashtag. It's called hashtag joke life moment. And it's where we share something that happens to us this week that points out how much our lives are a joke. I feel like a lot of podcasts are all about empowerment and using your voice and this is not bad.
No, this is about self-deprecation. You want to example? I feel like I'm having trouble thinking about it. So, an example is like when, so one time I got a working ticket and I went outside and I saw that I had a working ticket.
Like really, like I was like, bummer. But you know, this is what happens to me, whatever. So, I took off the parking ticket, but my car was still parked wrongly. And when I came back outside to the later, I had a second parking ticket because it's my life as a joke.
So, that's an example. And that's how long ago, but I'll use that as my account. No, that doesn't count. I'll try to think about it while you share yours.
I can't even think of one. Really? I don't know. Dettair, sorry.
I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of a joke life moment. Can you think of something I told you? You keep signing out for too many exercise classes. And so you're like limping from one class to the next.
Yeah, I've been doing class power. It's kind of like a bullpry. I guess so. I don't know.
I mean, I'm trying to think. I guess a joke life moment. I don't know when I can think of it. What about your taxes?
Yeah. So, joke life is your. So, I am trying to get my 2014 taxes done this week. So, I need to get all my stuff together.
Yes, that's right. Two, three years ago. And I need to do my 2015 ones, but I need to do those in like a month after all of the, it's complicated. Anyway, it's my joke life.
The only other thing I can think of is every time I go to the post office to mail an Etsy order, literally as soon as I do, I see to get another Etsy order, like while I'm at the post office. That's another bullpry. I know. Like, that's why I didn't want to.
They're not very much money, but still. It's just annoying because I have to go home and pack it up. So popular. People just want to buy all my things.
No, it's only happened in the past week. No, that's good. That's good. That's good.
That's just weird. That's great. I feel like Etsy's rewarding me for whatever time I do what it wants me to do. It's like, all right.
You got another sale. Even though I know it's a problem. Okay. Now I need to think of one.
This will be in coming episodes. We'll be thinking about this all week long. So we'll be like, well, I assume. I mean, not to say that we have a lot of joke like moments, but we have a lot of joke like moments.
Yeah, we have a lot of joke like moments. Oh, man. I can't think of any. Oh, I did do something stupid.
On Friday, I was driving to my friend's house because I spent the weekend at my friend's house for Easter weekend. And I left home without eating enough food. And I was the new there to be so much food there that weekend. And so I was like, I just need to get there.
But because it was a holiday, there was a ton of traffic. And so I was driving forever. And oh, I left without getting gas. I had to stop and get gas, which I also did again this morning.
So I mean, I don't know. That's not a joke. But that's just like the theme of my life. And I'm always like, oh, now I have to get gas.
I get a surprise every time. So I was really angry. And I had to get gas so much that I only put in like half a tank because I can't stand being there. Because you don't want to wait any longer.
I hate doesn't like take it out. I have to go more often because you only have a tank. I've been trying to like, if I feel the urge to like leave quickly, then I'm trying to make yourself stay. It's okay.
I'm like, I'm mindfulness. It just saves me so much. I can get the knowledge that feeling and just rest in that and then move on. Alright, I think guru gas guru.
I listen to a lot of hot gas. I can't even get gas for a second. I do understand. But when I get gas, I can get so much.
But I'm like, can I get two tanks of gas? Like should I get like an extra side thing? Like, how can I do this? And I never want to downsize cars because I have smaller gas tanks.
I really should have an electric car. Maybe next time. So I stopped to get a snack because I was starving and I had sugar craving and I stopped at a Walgreens because that was the easiest thing. And unfortunately it was the Easter weekend.
So there was all the scanning on sale. And I spent $20 on candy. Oh wow. And then I made myself get almonds to be like, you can't just have candy.
And so I had this snack castle on the front seat of my car. Like a true road tripper. Except it was all candy. All candy.
I'm so jealous because I was all 30. I didn't have a single piece of candy during Easter. And Easter is one of my very favorite candy quality. Well, you know what we can do is we can go out.
I can go today and get some on sale Easter candy and we can enjoy it in the future when we're better behaved. Let's build an extra. We'll bring. Yes.
We'll bring. That is a segment for later. A segment for later. Yeah, because we got to wrap up.
This is going on. But I'm making a note here about weasel brain. And that's a teaser. So at the end of the episode, we're like, listen to episodes.
Listen to Closer Next week's podcast. We'll be a little bit more. No, weasel brain. That's our teaser.
That's our teaser. So thank you guys for listening. Thank you so much. We want your feedback.
So that we don't laugh at me. Prove. So that we can read it on air. Oh, yeah.
We blame you. I'm coughing too much. We definitely need to wrap this up. We will see you all in the future.
Bye. Bye.