July 2025: Droplets of Summer

How I'm procrastinating productively

Jul 10, 2025

I’m dragging my feet on the Aanab News Q2 Bulletin. The summer slump has set in. The daily temperature is over 30 until late September at the earliest and it takes a lot of internal cheerleading to get out the (bedroom) door into the invisible cloud of thick heat. But I told myself I wouldn’t do this! I promised myself that I would not bring up my sweaty discomfort as much as last year.

This year, I would be both the shimmery puddle and the kid that was ready to jump into it!

That is an easy mission to commit to when you’re under a fluffy throw and a fluffy cat in February. I haven’t published an essay here since then and it’s not for a lack of ideas. I can feel things percolating but my kettle hasn’t started whistling yet. That, and my focus is elsewhere.

You have other projects you need to be doing (a freelance article, store graphics for dad, illustrations for a friend’s wedding, and my short film —AND THE BULLETIN!).

Instead, I jot down ideas for the pack of neon A4 paper I bought two months ago. I want to make a zine (in August?) but I’m torn on the topic.

I clean out the Promotions folder of my Gmail inbox in an effort to reduce the number of unread newsletters I still want to read. I have admitted defeat: I’ll never get to them when at least 30 more festoon my screen everyday. Another mass delete and unsubscribe, a subscription cull. Then, I switch back to this tab.

You had toast and coffee for breakfast. You should eat something.

I make peanut noodles using angel hair pasta and the last bit of Castania chunky peanut butter shaken with maple syrup, soy sauce, warm water, and a couple taps of Tajin. That’s not the exact recipe that the saved Instagram reel suggested but I’m improvising with whatever I have on hand. It works. I put the empty bowl in the sink and I come back to the blinking cursor here.

I check my phone again hoping that my film scans are waiting for me on WhatsApp but still no notifications from Fadi even though he said they’d be ready by yesterday. I want to send this newsletter out today but maybe I’ll wait another day so I can include some film photos?

I turn off the AC because it’s been on since the last time I gave it a break to make coffee 11 hours ago. I read 30 pages of my book while lying on a towel on the couch. I turn the AC back on and I read an article about bypass tunnels in the West Bank. I finish typing all of this out.

There, at least one thing’s done.

AT LEAST 10 LITTLE LINKS

“An Israeli Restaurateur Steps Down As Spokesperson for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” by Jaya Saxena for Eater - When I first read this article on July 1st, it was sharing his appointment as GHF spokesperson. A week later, it was updated to report his stepping down.
More on who GHF are: “BCG modelled plan to ‘relocate’ Palestinians from Gaza” by Stephen Foley for Financial Times
“The Genocide in Gaza Isn’t Just Attacking Our Bodies, It’s Erasing Our Memories” by Abdallah Aljazzar for Truthout
As expected, I still love The Bear but I want more discourse on the latest season. I’m still waiting for someone to drag the bits & pieces it included about wine at the restaurant. I’ve never worked service or as a somm so I don’t feel entirely qualified to weigh in but its inclusion still felt like an afterthought. The show’s been renewed for another season and I hope that’s not a mistake.
I finished reading Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. It’s short and thin at 100ish pages (great for a commute) but relatable and addictive enough to reignite the reading fever. It’s trending online so I’m sure you’ll hear about it again. I’ve cracked open The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş which is proving to be another short yet good companion read to Latronico.
Speaking of trending, I’m still searching for a print copy of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley but any book that isn’t making the rounds on Tiktok needs a special order to Beirut. In the meantime, this Criterion reflection on four film adaptations of the Ripley series has made me want to watch the older attempts (pre-Minghella) and finally stream La Piscine (the inspiration of Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash).

“It is a unique Western laziness and colonial instinct to assume that a foreigner could somehow document Syria better than a Syrian (a non-Arabic speaker at that!)” - Hannah Arafeh in “For the Syrian Perspective, Look No Farther than Syrians” for Al Rawiya