What I Love: A Listener Summer Special

Welcome to You Wrong About. This week, we are bringing you a listener special, which means that you are the guests. A little while ago, I asked you all to send in voice memos telling us about something you love. It was a very open-ended prompt I was looking for, hobbies, things, times of day. I specifically asked also for statues of fictional characters, characters from children's literature, if any of those were available, and they were. You all sent in your answers, and we have put them together with some music by Magpie Cinema Club, and I did want to tell you there's a little section in the middle about 27 minutes in, where we talk about babies and pregnancy, trying to get pregnant and pregnancy loss. And if you want to skip over that, you can skip about seven minutes ahead, and we will return to our pets. These are my very favorite episodes to make. I love hearing from all of you, and I hope that in this time when we are constantly hearing about people being angry and scary and refusing to learn, this can also remind you that there are great people in our midst, who are not on the news, and yet are still out there, and here are just a few of them. Hello, Sarah, and you're wrong about team. Hello, Sarah. Well, hey there, Sarah Marshall. Hello, Sarah Marshall. Hello, you're wrong about listeners. Hey, you're wrong about. Hi, Sarah, and you're wrong about family. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Sarah. Hi, and hi, Sarah. Hello, Sarah, and Sarah's cadre. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for opening up this prompt. Hi, my name is Miriam. I live in Northern Central, Pennsylvania, in a little town called Benton, and I really love that time in the morning, the moment when you just wake up, and you're still laying in bed, just slowly opening your eyes, and the day could still be anything. I really love that moment. This is Paige from Chicago. Something that I love the very, very most is springtime in Chicago. As probably many folks know, winter in the Midwest can be pretty brutal. It's generally much longer than you expected to be. It's often very gray. It is very cold, and my favorite time of year, the thing that I love the most, is when you look outside one day and you see tiny, teeny little buds on trees start, you start to see color again, and the smell of a lilac means that warmth is close, warmth is here, and that there is light and hope, and blue sky coming towards us, which sometimes it feels like the winter will never end. My name's Cassidy. I was the fifth generation raised in a family farmhouse. I'm about to only turn 30 years old, so this farmhouse was built in 1909. Every year we get to get some spring paper action going on, and it's just a sound I love. Every time I hear them, it takes me right back to being at home. I don't live there anymore, but it's probably one of my favorite sounds, and it's part of who I am, and growing up, and just a sound I really love and appreciate. It tells you what time of year it is. You know, the world's spun around again, and there's always rebirth, so spring papers is my answer. Hi Sarah Marshall. This is Amy Davis, calling from where I'm at. I love when you go in to smell a flower, and the petals just brush across your lips. Yes. Hey Sarah and Co, this is Marina. I live on the west coast, and I wanted to talk about a thing that I love, which is summer. I love going to the beach. I love enjoying the smell of the sand and surf the clear water, the gentle waves, the warm sand between your toes, the seagulls, the pigeons on the beach. There are always beach pigeons, which is very cute. I love the smell of the smoky barbecues and the greasy night markets, and I love music festivals. It's all in the summer. It's all just joyous people coming together and having a good time, and they're all strangers, but they're all here for the same thing, and it's to enjoy being outside in a live and warm. It's rapturous. I love summer, and I can't wait for it to come this year. I've had a good breakfast in a cup of coffee. The sun is just coming up here in central Kansas, and me and my 15 year old dog are out here on the small acreage where I live, and we are standing in the perennial flower beds. And no matter how hard I try, I always have some weeds coming up in the spring. So we're out here listening to podcasts, and I'm pulling weeds and making way for the flowers to come up. So now I'm going to be quiet so you can hear what I hear. I'm speaking to you from Melbourne, Australia to tell you about the thing I love, and that's when I get to go back home while I'm from Tasmania. Tazzy is a really remote, beautiful, wild, dramatic, isolating place, and I go home maybe once a year, and I stay in my childhood home with my family, that's where they still are. And after a busy day of catching up with people I haven't seen for a year, and seeing family members, and just all that busyness that you have to do when you go home, I look forward so much to my twilight walk around my childhood neighborhood. I walk for maybe an hour, and the air is crisp. I always try and go in September around spring time, because it's beautiful, the flowers are in full bloom, but it still gets dark early, and that's an important part of it. I don't find it spook, it's so remote. There's no one to be, there's no one to be afraid of, except for maybe a potteroo, which is kind of like a kangaroo, but a lot smaller, and yeah, I've got to be rugged up in a pool of fleece, and it's important, it's one of my mums that I've borrowed that's integral to the enjoyment of this walk, and I just have the best daydreams, and I feel so removed from everything, but also specifically back in place, and held in a place that I know so well, and also it's not my life anymore, and that is such an intangible and wonderful feeling that I get to experience for an hour every day for the week that I'm there. My name's Jolene, and I'm from Wales in the UK, and something that I love other than my baby that you can hear playing right now is the Welsh word 'herife', so there's no direct translation in English, it describes a uniquely Welsh longing and yearning, like a really intense homesickness, but often the place you feel it for is like beyond the physical. It's more like a spiritual morning for a Wales that once was, or never really was, because it's like an idealised idea of a past Wales that once existed, and we've lost now. I heard there were growing up a lot, and when I moved away from Wales I actually felt 'herife'. There was nothing else that could describe it other than 'herife'. I wanted my Wales, as I knew here, the people, the land, my hometown, and this distinct feeling of belonging that I didn't even know I felt at home until I moved away and missed it very, very much, but then I found when I came back all these years later that I still felt 'herife', because the thing that I wanted didn't really exist anymore, it was like an intense nostalgia for something that was really, really precious to me, but also like a grief that it was never coming back, and perhaps I slightly romanticised this place in my head, and the places have changed, the people have changed, and people have moved on with their lives, and I have such an acclution for herife now, because it's just for me, and it's just for us in Wales, and I think there's something really beautiful that there's this little country of people that can all feel something, but also have such a intense feeling that is both a collective and such an individual case each time. I live in Washington, and I love road trips. I was on I-84 during that episode, which is between Ogden Utah and Twin Falls Island. I think it's one of the most beautiful stretchable highway. I think it's a beautiful place. I'm calling from Chattanooga, Tennessee. One of the things that I've grown to love being back in my hometown is a park and it's called Enterprise South Nature Park. One thing I love is my college campus. I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Washington, Seattle and it is beautiful here. This is Lynn up in the Michigan U.P. The thing I've always loved is looking out at vistas of wild country. My name is Isabel. I am from outside of Washington DC in Maryland and you may or may not know that Jim Henson, creator of Kermit and the Muppets, was from Maryland. He spent a lot of his formative years here, including his teenage hood and the beginning of his career. And he attended the University of Maryland and College Park and on that campus now is a statue of him and Kermit. And the way it's arranged is you can sit down with them and hang out on the bench with Kermit and Jim Henson. And I think that's just really, really sweet. My name is Casey. I live in Bloomington, Indiana and outside of the Wonder Lab Children's Museum here, we have a statue of Captain Catherine Janeway who was born in Bloomington, Indiana on May 20th, 2336. So it is the future birthplace of Captain Catherine Janeway and she is a character from Star Trek. I love driving past the shipping cranes in Seattle where I live. I drive past them just about every day and I love driving past them because I think they're very beautiful and I also think they look like dinosaurs, right? You know, like a brachiosaurus or something like that. And so I sort of enjoy imagining that I live in like a dyno-topia world with dinosaurs, sort of living and working amongst us though, I suppose. I don't believe dinosaurs should be used for industry labor from an animal rights perspective. Politically, I am against it. But it's a fun thought and it brings me a little bit of happiness when I'm going to marry me for a more. I love gas station coffee. Now, hear me out. A lot of gas stations give you a lot of coffee options. They all have dispensers where you can get your black coffee or your decaf coffee or even iced coffee and then a lot of them will have a dispenser for specialty coffee like vanilla lattes. And then they'll have a station where you can get your creamer and your sugar and they even have special syrups with like vanilla and hazelnut flavoring a lot of options. It's essentially, you get to go behind the counter of a specialty coffee shop at a gas station. And so if you're like me and you get anxiety in a coffee shop where the menus really vague and you're not sure what your options are, gas station coffee perfect because you just get to make it yourself and you have all your options in front of you. And I will pay less than two dollars for a small cup of coffee that I created myself at a gas station. Gas station coffee gets distanced on a lot. People are wrong about gas station coffee. It is great. Hello from the state of Victoria in Australia. When I was thinking about the prompt for this episode of something that you love or hobby, the only thing that came to mind that I thought really suited the you're wrong about vibe is actually my dog Mac. And you know, you would think dogs are great. You know, we all love dogs, right? Or most people do. But look, Mac is a hard dog to love at times as we all are, I think, you know. And I thought that was really emblematic of some of the lessons that I've taken from you wrong about where we are all, you know, more than one thing, right? You know, we can be crazy annoying, but also super sweet. And that is my dog, Mac. So Mac is a blue healer at Australian cattle dog. Mac is five years old. Like all cattle dogs, he's short, he's stocky. He has the softest ears and the softest little head to scratch. And he does love cuddles, but because he's a cattle dog, well, he loves being close to you. He also can't help but put his mouth on you like almost at all times. So he's like gnawing on you. He's like licking you, you know, that can be annoying, right? But he also loves a cuddle, right? Who doesn't like that? He's also reactive, which means that he's an anxious boy, right? He's on flocks a teen again, as a lot of us are. And he manages his anxiety by lashing out and barking and really looking aggressive towards other dogs, right? So that makes it hard to walk him. We can't just walk him around the neighborhood because he gets so anxious and overwhelmed and stressed. And also it's embarrassing and drives us crazy. However, this means we can also walk him in the Australian bush, which means we get to walk him, you know, amongst our unique landscape, our beautiful wild flowers that come up every spring, our beautiful eucalyptus trees, and our iron bark and box gum trees that grow in the central Victorian region. So Mac kind of pushes us out of our comfort zone. We've learned a lot about dog ownership being with him. And he also is the best friend probably that you could ever ask for. He's funny, he's sweet, and he loves a lot. My name is Sophie. I'm calling from Portland, Oregon, specifically on my couch next to a very old 20 year old failed tabby cat. I am calling to tell you about something I love. It is springtime here in Portland, which means that soon I get to start going on trails in the Columbia Gorge to look for my favorite little creature, which is a pica. If you're not familiar with the Portland or Gorge area, the Columbia Gorge is a natural area that runs along the Columbia River between the states of Washington and Oregon, and it's beautiful. It's one of my favorite places in the world, but inside of the Gorge are little colonies of these little rabbit guinea pigs squirrel type things called pica, which are the size of a russet potato, and they have these big round ears, and they live in boulder fields, usually in high altitude areas, but there are some colonies that live in lower altitudes, specifically in the Columbia Gorge. So I love to, in the morning or the evening, when I don't have work or during the weekends, take a hike out to one of those boulder fields, and I sit for 10 or 15 minutes very, very quietly, and I wait for there to be a little sound. It's like a little meat kind of sound, and I didn't do it right, but if I'm really lucky, there will be a pica, or honestly, sometimes multiple pica that will come out from between the boulders, and I bring my binoculars, and I get to sit, and I get to watch these really, really cool little creatures come out and tell each other that there is a big scary human that is sitting there silently, and it's just one of my favorite peaceful activities. I live in Augusta, Maine, and something I really love is going to the dump. That's because, you know, I throw all my recycling in the back of my car, and I drive up there all the femur of our human life boxes of the things we probably shouldn't have ordered. You press this hill, and suddenly straight up before you, it's like at least 30 eagles. I don't know why our dump supports this large population of bald eagles, and I think somebody smarter than me should probably study it. I can't imagine it's great for them, but in a lot of ways, it's weirdly beautiful, and I think, you know, there's the obvious joke about our democracy within this story, but at the same time, it's weirdly beautiful, and I don't know. I kind of love to see them super and around, and trashed, being majestic, but also acting like seagulls. And I really love the dump eagles. I think it might also be a good band name. Hi, my name is Louis. I'm a trans dude from Portland, Oregon, and I love my rats. Currently in my home, I have 19 rats. 15 of them are my own personal sanctuary residents, and four of them are fosters for the small animal rescue little critter crew, which I have the joy of working very, very closely with. I get to process adoption applications, and sometimes I even get to do stuff like going into people's homes and doing a behavioral consult to help them work out behavioral issues that are happening. happening with their rats. They are just such social fascinating and empathetic creatures. I've seen young rats bring old or sick rats food to make sure that they are eating. I have seen them be so resilient. I have worked with many rats who have been abused and the way that they can bounce back and form deep relationships with their human caretakers and with other rats. It's just so lovely. I don't know if you just heard them in the background there a little bit squeaking at each other. I've seen them experience love stories. Some of the first rats that I adopted, potato and gravel, separately they had lived alone in small cramped cages. Very similar stories but they came from different care takers. I adopted them both and when they met they fell in love. They would not leave one another's side. They slept together and ate together and played together and when gravel unfortunately died before potato, potato took these strips of newspaper that I give them to nest with and he went in one of his hides and he built a great big nest blocking up the door and he barely left for days. He just deeply grieved and I saw that happen and he was a bit depressed after that and just not quite himself until we brought home some babies and he met these babies and he just perked right up. He played with them and helped correct and discipline them and he was always so gentle and loving towards them and he ended up living another year after that. He lived to be three years and three months old which is a very respectable rat age. I think everyone should love rats. If you are thinking about getting rats please research proper care because there's a lot of misinformation out there. Yeah go rats. When I first heard this prompt I immediately thought of my beautiful friend who's having her 50th birthday party on Saturday. I've been looking forward to this party for weeks. I bought a new dress, I helped big dialed a gift. I just feel so crazy happy to be celebrating her. She's so strong and smart and so giving herself. She's just terrific. And thinking of Mary made me think about all of the wonderful women in my life and just how much joy I get from being around them, being impressed by them and rooting for them. And they're also perhaps the people in my life who most reflect back to me someone I can easily love. They widen my universe so I could speed a space I have to grow and to be. They are unconditional love and I could not be more grateful to have found them. This is Tofer. I live in New York City and I love a good fun fact and so I love all of the fun little odd facts that I learned from your podcast all the time. So I thought I would share some fun facts about my particular area of expertise which happens to be musical theater. So Steven Sandheim and Angelina Weber, they are objectively to of the most influential musical theater writers since Rajas and Hammerstein. They share a birthday which is kind of common knowledge at least within the theater community. But one other thing about them that they share which is pretty implausible is the fact that they both won an Oscar for Best Original Song and that song was sung by Madonna in the movie. So for Steven Sandheim it was sooner or later for Dick Tracy and then for Angelina Weber it was you must love me from the Aveda movie. I just think it's so interesting because first of all obviously winning an Oscar for Best Original Song is something that so few people have accomplished and the fact that these two people who happen to share a birthday and are very influential musical theater writers wrote that song for somebody who you don't necessarily associate with musical theater is just very surprising. But it's a true fact. My name is Annie and I love teaching middle school. When you tell people that you are a middle school teacher immediately people say oh god bless you or you know some other comment about oh how do you handle it? And I genuinely believe that Eardilly adolescents are some of the most wonderful people to work with. They still have that playfulness and curiosity of children but they are starting to think about and wonder about far more serious things and even though it doesn't look like it I promise you kids today are paying attention. They're really paying attention. Their attention spans might be very short and the way they communicate might look and sound a little bit different but they are some of the fiercest friendships you will ever see. They absolutely love each other. They're creative and curious and they are just silly as hell. There's a lot of ups and downs in being there for them on any given day and a middle school can be a really busy, noisy place. The sheer quantity of social interactions that they have to have all day long and every hour somebody different is saying sit down pay attention. This is important. It's no wonder that by the end of the day they have so little left to say to their parents when they ask you know how was your day and then they give a one word answer. I know that for many people this age group can feel like a bit of a mystery. You know not really understanding who they are or what's happening for them and it's not that they don't have anything to share. It's that they're just sharing it all day long in other places. They can solve algebraic equations. They're learning new languages. They can name the three branches of government and while it's always complicated I have to say that from where I sit Monday through Friday 180 days a year the future is actually looking pretty bright. So, in defense of middle schoolers everywhere. I send you a voice memo to tell you that I love my daughter. She is the best thing that's ever happened to me and as I'm recording this right now she has officially been living outside of me longer than she ever was living inside of me and I think that's pretty wonderful and I love being a mum. It's not for everyone I have to say. I think being a mum is like climbing a mountain or eating a comically large pizza. You've got to want it but I want it and I love her. Kia ora from a very rainy Altierdoan New Zealand. I'm calling in to say that I love my daughter. My one-year-old daughter more than I thought it would ever be possible to love anything and to add context to that statement because I feel like that's a very normal thing to say and that's kind of what I feel I should say as a parent, as a new parent and what we encourage parents to say and how we encourage people to have kids and all of that kind of thing. But to illustrate why that's so significant to me, I'm transgender, I'm a trans woman and I'm autistic and I have ADHD and I'm a musician and playing music feels like flying for me. It's the most wonderful feeling in my life and somehow this tiny bundle of screaming and cuddles has become even more wonderful. That's absolutely wild to me. We put a lot of work in to have a child being transgender and having children is something that our institutions here in New Zealand kind of encourage. We are funded to preserve our fertility but they're not funded to use it. And yeah it's so nice being a mother and calling myself a mother it's so joyous and at the same time just I have another autistic friend who's thinking of having a child and I told them to be prepared for the highs and lows of every day to triple. Like everything that's wonderful about every day gets three times as wonderful and everything that's terrible about every day gets three times as bad and that's kind of the math that I think you have to do before deciding to become a parent. Hello, so just finished up listening to the last episode and I am feeling inspired by the prompt. It feels really personal which I suppose something that you love is always personal for somebody, but two, almost three years ago, my baby was still born. And he was essentially full-term, so I got to hold my son, and he was born at seven o'clock in the morning on the dot. And one of the days after I was home, and I had to go back to work, I was just feeling really upset, and I looked out the window at the sunrise, and the sunrise was just at seven a.m., and it was the most beautiful, orange, and pink colors that I had just experienced in so long. And I see those colors every now and again in the sunrise. One of my favorite things that I love is watching the sunrise in the morning now because it's one of those weird things where I feel connected to that moment. Hi, my name is Zach, and I live in New Jersey. My wife and I got married last year, and we came into 2026. Very optimistic. We were hoping this would be the year that we would have a baby, but suddenly my job got very less secure, so we decided that reproducing would be very irresponsible for the foreseeable future. But this created a hole in our hearts that we needed to fill. I have never had a pet before. I have always been a dog person, but neither of us are home enough for a dog. So before I knew it, there are now two cats in our apartment, Diamond and Trevor. Diamond is about two, she's a lovely little black cat, and Trevor is four, and he is orange. And they have just taken over our lives. I never thought I could love to cats this much. Trevor is not beating the orange allegations. He is just mostly confused all the time. He waxes his tail like a dog, and he is highly food motivated. Diamond, we like to call her shadow because she just wants to follow us around and see whatever we're doing, but we can't pet her every time we get close, she runs away. And it's just so amazing to see every little milestone of them getting close to us, every little barrier that gets broken. Our lives have just become so much fuller. So we like to say that we thought we were going to have a baby, and so we ended up with two wonderful adorable sweet babies. I love when my friend Sean sends me updates about a cat called Cleo, who he does not own. She is infamous in her neighborhood for beating up every single dog, and every day she mules and yells outside his door until he opens up and feeds her treats and gives her attention. I think she's amazing. She is an icon, and I love hearing about her adventures. Hi, Sarah. This is Will from San Francisco. I wanted to share something I love, and that is the sound of my partner and I's 11-year-old French bulldog Calvin sleeping away on the couch next to us. I hope you enjoy it. Something I love is when he wake up on a day where you have nothing to do. I live in Michigan, and so we're very close to the beach. I really love when I have nothing to do, and the weather is nice, and I can go out to the beach and look for rocks. This is Izzy Collins from North Carolina, and I love sitting outside. I am pretty unemployed at the moment, and just going out with something nice to eat or something nice to drink, something nice to read is just absolutely incredible. It's feeling really good, and every time I'm like, "The everything sucks. This is terrible." I'm like, "No, I'm going to take a minute who's still on the grass." I love it. It sounds terrible, but I've been loving this period of unemployment in my life. I look this up. There are 5.8 million young people out of work in the UK, and I imagine in the US it's not much better. I've been unemployed for about a month, but the weather's turning, and the sun is out. I've just been having the best time, really. Just waking up naturally in the morning, walking through the park, and doing nice things for other people because I have the bandwidth to see and notice what they need. When I am in work, I tend to go for those kind of high stress. It's all junk and filled corporate offices, and so this time has been really important for me to consider how much longer I'm sort of willing to forsake my arts, my soul, what my personal limit is, and I will obviously get another job, and quite possibly another corporate job, and that's okay. That's absolutely okay. But I'm just loving this period of my life, and as ridiculous as it sounds, I genuinely hope that everyone has an experience of a period of not working because this human beings weren't for so much more than that. I'm Sushi, and the thing that I love is an old anime. I find fan comics in Japan from the 80s and the 90s where artists would write little notes in them about how they're neglecting their studies, or putting off dental work to finish their comics in time. It just makes me really feel warm and fuzzy when I read these notes. From these ladies who are probably 60 years old now, who are doing the same stuff that's like fans do all over the world, and it makes me feel connected, and I love the joy and silliness of all of it, and I'm working on that same sort of stuff myself right now. All to make stuff that's just really goofy and gay and frivolous stuff. It's not that important, but it's fun and special, and I don't know, it's really wonderful to feel connected to something, and maybe add a little bit to the legacy of making stories about characters that are older than I am, and getting to meet people who love it too all over the world. It just reminds me that love keeps ideas alive, it keeps people alive, and that you can really make special stuff when you love something, and I like doing it, even if it's not for money, it's not profitable in any way, but that's what makes it really fun, and a lot of people have been doing it for so long, despite it being completely unprofitable, and that's what I love, it makes me really happy when people do things just because it's fun, and everybody out there, I hope you spend some time on things that you love that aren't worth any money, because that's really the only way to make the world better, in my opinion. This is Joy, I am calling from Stone Mountain, Georgia, and something that I love is rocks. I think I have always loved rocks, like I have some core memories from childhood, where I was sitting on big rocks, like boulders in the woods, on various adventures, and those are just magical, peaceful memories, and it's like about the rocks. I always dreamed of going to a rocky beach, since I grew up in the southeast, our beaches were always, you know, the nice sandy beaches, but I wanted to see a beach like the beaches in Maine with the rocks, and that's where I took my honeymoon to Maine, mostly so I could see those rocky beaches, and I am lucky enough that I happen to live in a house where there are tons of rocks, it's just a kind of a strange thing, just as coincidence that this house that made sense for us to live in. The yard is, some people might say littered with rocky debris and lots of little rocks and all kinds of rocks, And so I have gotten really into the rocks in my yard and I'm making a rock garden and I like to go out and dig in the dirt and find cool and unusual rocks like I found a little one that's actually shaped like a heart and it has some black and some brown and some white. It's the best and I've also learned how to tumble rocks. So I got a little rotary tumbler and it's like this long slow process and you've got to put in different levels of grid and check the rocks every week or so. It takes like two months but with patience those crusty yard rocks come out smooth and shiny and to me they are precious jewels and I'm in love with them. Hi Sarah this is Chelsea in Seattle and what I love is when farms turn themselves into little Halloween wonderlands every year. I love haunted houses so much. I love the detail and I think of the tenderness of people decorating these horrifying scenes together and I love corn mazes. I love haunted corn mazes when there's people in there to scare you but I also love just walking through a corn maze during the day looking at each and every individual ear of corn because each one if you really look at it the silks they form kind of different hairdos you know they can be really long you know they could look at an up ponytail or a bob they look like they're wearing these beautiful green gowns and I just think it's so amazing that you can walk through this field and everything can look exactly the same and every ear of corn you think oh that's just an ear of corn but then when you look you know that every corn in that field is a glamorous woman. The thing that I love is movies I love every kind of movie I love good ones I especially love bad movies and the thing I love about them is that they're essentially a way of experiencing a collective dream and they're a form of art that is an inherently collaborative process. I think that making art in a world where we are having machines make art for us is a precious thing and since the proliferation of AI art it's made me appreciate movies even more than I already did there's something about watching something that's bad but that was made because a person made a choice to do it that way I think that that feels special now in a way that it didn't before. Hi Sarah this is Tegan I'm coming to you from NAMM Melbourne Australia and I wanted to tell you about something I've fallen back in love with recently which is tap dancing so I'm what I half jokingly I guess referred to as a recovering dance child. I did jazz ballet and tap dancing from the ages of about six to seventeen before I stopped to focus on my final year of school. I'm doing that quotes in case you can't tell. In reality I just didn't want to do it anymore I guess to paraphrase Maureen from one of my favorite dance movies and to stage I just didn't have the heart so I stopped and kind of just accepted that part of my life was over until about four years ago when I was looking for a non-screen based hobby and I thought I might try to start dancing again. Shout out to Miss Caroline's School of Tap in Preston. Miss Caroline she runs at all by herself and she's such a great teacher she manages this really good balance of you know encouraging you to learn new things and become a better dancer but making sure you're still having fun it really feels like I'm reconnecting to a part of myself that I thought I thought I'd lost or maybe didn't even know that I'd lost. I was very moved to speak to you today about something that I love but also that I think fittingly a lot of people are wrong about which is compost. I do love compost you know for the last six years I've run a community compost all volunteer on the east side of Los Angeles. Together we've composted maybe 20 to 25 tons of organic waste a year and we've also had a kick-ass time in our community playing around in the dirt and using the fertilizer to grow food that we give away free back to the community for free and I think in that time I've really grown this deep and profound sense that compost is this connective tissue between how we conceptualize life and death as connected or not how we act as consumers in society how we conceptualize throwing things away and what that means and how that's connected to the responsibility we take in the world as consumers versus giveers in addition to the fact that it's super fun it's super fun to just get in the dirt with your friends and mess around and be filthy and silly and just have all this permission to to mess up. Compose kind of has this reputation I think is this rigorous scientific and complex process when in fact it's just the absolute fate of all biological material is that it will decompose and recreate the conditions for life and the process and as the composter it's your job to steward those conditions but there's very little you can do to to mess them up there's so many forms and types of compost that exist as a result and it's kind of just our job to be around and witness it and perhaps put our hands in it from time to time you can kind of just get in there and fuck it up and mess around and you're still going to end up with this like beautiful great end product that's going to literally create life for you and I just think it's so magical and people don't realize I wanted to tell you about something that I love which is watching live sports especially hockey and basketball I love being in a room full of people who feel the same way as me like a huge amount of people who feel the same way as me just like with live theater even if you really think you're not into it because you don't like watching sports go to a live game it will change your mind something that I have been loving lately is organizing exchanges with groups of women that are friends of friends or close friends or maybe they're groups of people that haven't met each other before everybody brings something that they're trying to get rid of whether it's close or books or even a tricycle that somebody else turned into a little library we all get together we drink tea or wine or whatever anybody's feeling like and the goal is for everybody to leave with a new friend I hope that this inspires other people it's one of the ways that I've met my really good friends here on the tiny island that I live on something I love is grabbing a late night bite with friends after a concert a game or another outing there's something about being at a diner with good company they're determined to make the night last a little bit longer even if it's past our usual bed times maybe it's because I like twin peaks or because there's a waffle house nearby no matter where you are in the city but I feel a calm tired joy when I'm with the people I care about and we're all enjoying each other's company too much to say goodnight what I love is making dinner with my friends in between sharing stories and thoughts and feelings of asking like okay like what other what other spaces should I throw in here do you think should we put in the tomatoes now and getting to alter your recipes and learn things from each other and nourish each other I want to talk about how much I love onions particularly the smell of them when they're cooked my dad used to come home smelling like cooked onions and cooked garlic he was a chef growing up I find myself noticing that smell more and more nowadays there's an apartment building next to mine and sometimes when I walk out to my car they have their patio door open and that onion smell is wafting out of the door and just filling the entire complex it's lovely I'm sure other people may not feel the same way. but onions feed into so many different types of cuisines and that smell and that flavor can transform into so many other smells and flavors. I think that's why I have a particular love for this root vegetable that finds itself being transformed into so many things too. I mean, who doesn't love an onion ring? - What I love is the French toast at my favorite local breakfast place. So I wrote this song to celebrate it. ♪ Geraldine's you really know how to French toast ♪ ♪ Pemperdue but your bread is not lost on me ♪ ♪ When the waitress with the pretty earrings ♪ ♪ Rattles off the specials I'm only hearing ♪ ♪ The topping of the day always we beach ♪ - I greatly enjoy growing vegetables and herbs and being able to take them straight into the kitchen. And it also means I get to give people homegrown flowers, fruit, vegetables, and herbs as gifts, which I love. My favorite type of flowers are bainxies, which are native to Australia. And their flowers smell like freshly baked bread. Some of them are only perfume did night. What more could you want than a flower that smells like a freshly baked loaf of bread? - I love horses. - Nidding. - I'm calling it to say that I love bush jerkeys. - Pruning fruit trees, I love the water. - I love my wife, I love my wife very much. - I love plant gals and the insects that induce them. And the thing I love is the show Mystery Science Theatre 3000. - I realized that I love my life. - I love the show. I love the feeling of connection and community I get with so many like-minded listeners from the comments sections through to Sarah's wonderful sharing of other people's experiences and stories. It just makes for a real sense of togetherness and belonging, given how disconnected and fractured the world can feel. Thank you so much for creating something that feels so meaningful and has spawned, of course, the you're wrong about extended universe. ♪ She grew up with the children of the core ♪ ♪ At a pumpkin patch in the autumn more ♪ ♪ The farmers grew to feel big and created a maze ♪ ♪ They invited all the kids and the parents and the teenagers ♪ ♪ And the Halloween bass ♪ ♪ Her silk looks good in a ponytail or a bob ♪ ♪ But from the maze I can tell that she's feeling down ♪ ♪ That she's just a cob ♪ ♪ But right before she hangs her ear to leap ♪ ♪ I sing to her melody I sing ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Find her by the haunted house off the 15 ♪ ♪ Down that lane about a mile's walk ♪ ♪ And all the people tell her that no corn is unique ♪ ♪ That she'll never be a big star ♪ ♪ That she's better off being jiffy pop ♪ ♪ But she just flips her hair, her silky gold mane ♪ ♪ She's seen her share of monsters in this Halloween maze ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ I told her you're the best thing about this maze ♪ ♪ I see you in your gorgeous green gown ♪ ♪ With that gold, pernaled face ♪ ♪ I know it feels like everybody's got a sickle ♪ ♪ But their hearts are dead girl like a cornfield ♪ ♪ In the winter ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Ever recall is a glamorous woman ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ ♪ Sack of life ♪ And that is our episode. Thank you so much for helping us make it. Thank you to everybody who sent in a submission. We listen to all of them. We love doing the opportunity to just learn more about you and the things that you care about. Thank you for sharing your lives and your joy and your sorrow and all of your love with us and with each other. This episode was edited and produced by Miranda Zickler with original music by A.J. McKinley. And you can hear more of Miranda and A.J.'s music, including this full version of "Stock of I," featuring Chelsea Weber Smith at the link in our show notes. And I have to say, I can't think of a better song than this one. Thank you to our administrative assistant Nicole Ortiz and thank you to you for listening, for being part of this community and for getting lost in the corn with us. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)