All aboard Kaley’s health trip
Going full GOOP + Bookchella + serving Gatsby
Kaley enters her health influencer era
Exciting personal news, I’m taking a sabbatical! Seven weeks starting in mid-May to disconnect, reset, and recover from a chronically stressful work culture. Approximately a week for every year I’ve been at Google. 😮💨
I’ve been toying with the idea of taking extended time off for the last two years but a round of layoffs or the perpetual grind of the promotion cycle would stop me. This year, I had the privilege to pilot test an executive coaching program and came to the conclusion that it’s now or never. So I submitted my request, cleared my calendar, and I’m pot committed!
My executive coach warned me to avoid a common mistake people make: not being intentional with their time away from work. He stressed that I didn’t need to be *productive,* but intentional. To be mindful about what I want to get out of the time before, during, and after. Whatever that is.
One of the main things I want to do with my time is reset my mental and physical health. Work out, meditate, and do some tending to my overactive nervous system. I have a tendency to squash my feelings deep down inside until they manifest in bodily pain, rather than just feel my feelings (thanks Irish Catholic repression!). So I’ve committed to using the Curable app which has previously been a godsend for managing chronic back pain at least 3x a week.
I also wanted to get some actual in-person health check ups done before heading off on my reset, so I booked appointments with my doctor, dentist and most intriguingly, Prenuvo. If you haven’t heard of it, Prenuvo is a startup health tech company that offers full body MRI scans to detect various conditions like cancer, aneurysms, and other diseases.
Yes, I did it. I did the influencer scan. Like Kim Kardashian, Rita Ora, and Kate Hudson before me, I posed in the branded scrubs and sat still for an hour while my internal organs and skeleton were magnetically imaged.
Grateful to report I am healthy, beyond some minor disk degeneration that I already knew about and some sinusitis my Kleenex usage could’ve also indicated.
Here’s everything you need to know if you’re curious about doing it!
I paid $2,500 for the standard full body MRI. The whole thing took about an hour from walking in to walking out. I got my report super fast - in just 3 business days (scan on Wednesday, report the following Monday). The report is really intuitive and easy to understand thanks to the great UI. I would bet they did loads of UXR and it shows!
Here’s how the report looks:
You can expand each finding to learn more:
Here’s a picture of my big beautiful brain! 🧠
And finally, here’s the finding that made me lol:
Happy to answer any other questions or provide more detail. If you want to do it yourself, feel free to my referral code at the end of this email to get $300 off!
More to come on how I plan to spend my sabbatical time (I’m toying with going phone-free for a week 😬). And please comment with your suggestions! I’m curious how you would spend your time away from the Capital grind.
This Week In Cool Shiny Culture:
📚Megan’s Cool: Usually I’m out of town (at Coachella) during the annual Festival of Books at my alma mater, USC. But not this year! I’m happy to report that I’ll be getting to go to what locals jokingly call Bookchella and hopefully get to see my faves Paige & Hannah who are on tour promoting their book: How To Giggle. The festival is the largest literary festival in the nation expecting over 150k attendees (for context Coachella has about 125k). I’m excited to see all the vendors, readings, panels, discussions and celebrities. Wish me luck on sticking to my book buying ban.
🫦 Kaley’s Cool: I just finished All Fours by Miranda July. It was an absolutely propulsive novel unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s about a woman in the middle of her life who leaves for a cross country road trip and ends up less than an hour away from her house holed up at a motel. There, she entertains an affair with a younger married man, redecorates the room into a feminine oasis, and ultimately goes on an exploratory journey of her sexual desires and identity all while grappling with perimenopause and society’s diminishing interest in her aging body.
Reading this book gave me a similar feeling to watching Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal. They have almost nothing in common, except the uncomfortable, wired, almost possessed sensation they evoked within me. It was a similar feeling to watching Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Like Fleabag, the unnamed narrator of All Fours is relatable even when doing “unlikable” things. She blows up her life with a wry charm that reassures you she’ll be (at least sorta) all right in the end and even if she’s not, at least she got some personal growth along the way.
The book won the Booker Prize and has been snatched up for adaptation by Starz. Kristen Wiig, come get your Emmy.
Note: this would be a great book club book! Lots of juicy things to discuss!
🪞Megan’s Shiny: I haven’t been keeping up with the sci-fi anthology series, but I was sucked into Black Mirror season 7 by the promise of seeing one of my faves–Issa Rae–join the universe. Unlike most Netflix series, I’ve been savoring it slowly, watching just one episode every few days because each is so dense with ideas and metaphors that I need time to digest them. As such I’ve only made it through 3 episodes but they’ve been worth watching
Episode 1 “Common People”: The premier episode stars Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd and tackles flawed healthcare and subscription price creep–ironic when Netflix are some of the biggest perps of that practice.
Episode 2 “Bête Noire": This episode is mostly about exploring the nuances of misogynoir in the workplace but it also has a plot line that touches on the Mandela Effect– the phenomenon when a group of people collectively misremember something. In a meta storytelling decision, this episode actually has two different variations to create a Mandela Effect among viewers.
Episode 3 "Hotel Reverie": The episode that got me to hit play stars Issa Rae, Emma Corrin, and Awkwafina could have been a standalone movie. I personally disagree with the online criticism of Issa’s performance and found the Evelyn Hugo-esque love story to be a welcome reprieve from the previous two eerie vignettes.
🥂 Kaley’s Shiny: My best girlies and I got to attend a Roaring ‘20’s party in a beautiful old Hyde Park mansion last weekend. I love a costume and any chance to wear my muppet coat. Here’s me serving my best Daisy Buchanan:
And the clique dressed to impress (literally only each other. We didn’t talk to anyone else and mostly sat in the home theater watching Wicked on the big screen. It was perfect):
Marketing We Want to Talk About: Lorde, What Was That?
Lorde is entering a new era and giving us a master class in drumming up attention and building hype through fan service. Since starting the promotion of her latest release, What Was That? earlier this month, Lorde has been very active “feeding the fans” in the last few weeks. A new album launch is certainly on the horizon.
For the (lead?) single What Was That, the social media teasers, snippets, and cryptic Instagram posts culminated in an IRL listening party (a trend started by her collaborator Charli & hopped on by Tate McRae) in NYC.
What’s more, footage of that event made it into the official music video released the very next day.
Wednesday 4/9 – Lorde drops snippet of “What Was That” on TikTok with cryptic video of her walking
Saturday 4/12 – Lorde makes surprise cameo at Charli’s Coachella Weekend 1 set to perform “Girl So Confusing”
Tuesday 4/22 - Lorde Plays “What Was That” for Fans in NYC After Cops Shut Down Earlier Gathering
Wednesday 4/23 – “What Was That” video drops
There’s something cool–and uniquely of-the-moment–in the way Lorde is managing to so strategically deploy a grungy, lo-fi, unpolished aesthetic. She’s doubling down on what makes her iconic, whether it’s her unique dance style or “bitchy” walk.
Opposite of Cynical: A supportive photo bomb
We always love a little proof that the kids are going to be alright and this adorable exchange gives us renewed hope. Watch as a creator named Jianni interrupts his fit check to let some kids pass only for them to give him a compliment that leaves him beaming.
Everyday Activism: BART celebrates Autism Acceptance Month
Despite what RFK would like to gaslight us all into believing, the month of April is Autism Acceptance Month. We have to give BART their props for their Autism Awareness Month celebrations. Leaning into the collective understanding that trains are a common special interest among people on the spectrum (we see and love you PurplePrincessPari 💜), they brought back their annual tradition of recording and playing announcements recorded by local youth on the spectrum.
Chugging along 🚂,
Kaley & Megan
My vote for your sabbatical: finish your novel