Bad Behavior at High Altitude
I’m writing this in Aspen, where the skiing is great and the shopping is too good and the restaurants are mostly the same as New York and Miami and LA and everything is beautiful and way too expensive and I have never heard more people yelling at their children, like truly yelling (and some of the kids are yelling back), or loudly fuming at waitstaff. Thoughts and Prayers for managers of any kind this holiday season! You all are getting a lot of requests for face time.
It’s funny that it’s here, especially, that there’s such a locus of bad attitudes. I always associated American ski holidays with a sort of happy hippie crunchy granola goggle tans and GORP feeling from my childhood, but I guess tensions (and expectations) run high when you’re paying through the nose, as you do here and with most ski vacations now that it’s all priced so exorbitantly. (As one fellow working at the spa at the hotel told me, “a lot of people seem to find vacation…stressful.”) I've been a lot of places in recent memory and Aspen is currently the only one where I’ve heard a pair of late-middle aged men use “the c-word” (I’ll spare you, it’s the holidays) at the next table at breakfast. In a five star hotel. Mike White make the next White Lotus at a ski resort challenge!
Clearly this is not a problem specific to this particular mountain, as Hidden Brain’s latest podcast episode is about complaining, an act that provides short term relief (sympathy! attention! the righteous vindictiveness of the unfairly wronged!) and long term complications (repeating an offense ad nauseam just reinforces it in your mind and makes it feel fresh, rather than allowing yourself to, you know, get over it). Apparently the best move when you want to complain is to talk to someone who can reframe your complaint for you, rather than someone who does the easy-in-the-moment thing of agreeing and echoing it back. Have you considered the wider picture? Is the woman who is late delivering your frittata actually an incompetent jerk hell-bent on making your 5 kids late to ski school, or is she an underpaid and overworked staffer at a massive resort on the busiest and arguably most awful week of the year to have that job? You tell me!
If you’re not in the mood to listen to the episode, possibly because, I don’t know, hideous weather (a “bomb cyclone?!”) has derailed your entire holiday/ travel plans, the gist is basically: The more you complain, the less happy you are. I would argue also that this is also true of the people around you forced to listen. My mother used to say that some people aren’t happy unless they have something to complain about. You don’t want to be that person. It’s a way of being that feels— forgive me, I do live in LA—very low vibrational. I’m interested in higher frequencies, okay? Perhaps it’s time to surround ourselves with people who make us feel filled up, rather than completely drained. Also, and perhaps not less importantly, it’s really boring to listen to.
This doesn’t mean that I’m immune to a grievance or two. And as a person who historically bottles things up, there’s something to be said for expression, useful anger, etc. But the happiest people, it turns out, mindfully express what’s annoying them and then get the hell over it. Worth trying this season! Let me know how it goes, if you do.
A few things I like and recommend:
I bought some of this delicious Masa Memory Sonoran Sunset Cacao and have been enjoying it very much with plant based milks, some good raw local honey, and this cheap handheld frother thing that’s probably on its last legs but until it is, by god I’m going to use it. FWIW everything at CAP is a beautiful idea for a gift for someone else, but since we’re probably past the delivery window, maybe think about January ‘23 reset treats for yourself. It’s an especially good resource for that.
A very good dinner idea via Marian Bull’s very good home cooking-focused newsletter, Mess Hall, that feels wintry but not the usual saucy meat and poultry parade you get around the holidays: Salt Baked Herbed Salmon.
I carried this Vanessa Bruno bag around Colorado and it is snuggly and charming and if you live in a cold-weather place, great for the next few months.
The new Avatar is here, I guess, and I always think about this story from when the first one came out, though nobody else seems to remember it. (It’s no Truman Show delusion.) Maybe now you will! I always knew I liked you.
Another thing Aspen reminded me I need (besides patience), which is also a great last minute stocking stuffer idea: Baby Foot. Watch your dead skin flake away like a lizard shedding its skin. Cheap, repulsive, effective, fun! 10/10.
Okay, that’s all for now. I have made the questionable life choice of continuing my travels east (weather and airlines permitting), so I have one suitcase to empty and another to fill and some inclement weather gods to make sacrifices to. If you’re celebrating Christmas this weekend, I hope it’s wonderful. If you’re not, I hope you treat yourself wonderfully regardless. Either way, I hope there’s very little to complain about.
Thanks for being here. I’ll see you next week. I love you.