Sorry to keep you waiting on an issue this week— I could have warned you that I was getting shot #2, but I chose optimism and figured I’d power through. Hilarious. What I lack in physical integrity, though, I make up for in optimism and a growing ability to blow kisses at a short distance to every stranger I meet. If there’s anyone in your life who is hesitant to reach this level of safe revelry, the Ad Council put together this link with real, non-Q-informed answers to regular vaccine questions like,”How were these shots developed so quickly?” “What do I need to know about J&J?”  and “Did they do clinical trials on people like me?” Nothing like outsourcing that emotional work. Here’s that link again. Pass it on.

If you think I’m going back to an office, though, you are sorely mistaken. On team Lorem (that is, me), even a video all is too constraining. Why are we imprisoned indoors when we could be walking around in nature during our important business talks? That’s the question behind Spot, a new app designed for walking meetings. “Isn’t that what we would call a phone,” you’re asking. Well, yes, but Spot also removes the barriers to professionalism that you inevitably encounter when you try to take a call outside. First, it blocks out street noise, and it records and transcribes your calls so you don’t have to take notes (a journalists’s dream). Right now they’re in closed beta and I’m going to do everything in my power to get on the list, which I think might be easier than convincing people that they don’t need to see my face while we talk. One step at a time.

Now that we’ve freed up our call time, where are we going? Someone recently forwarded me a six-minute TED talk from 2015 about Happy Maps, a navigation app that optimizes directions for beauty, not efficiency. How lovely and anti-capitalist to have your map send you by some pretty streets and historical buildings, right? Well, it may have been too lovely and anticapitalist because since that initial wave of press a lifetime ago, Happy Maps seems to have disappeared. On the bright side, in 2021, the skill of aimless walk-taking lies within us.

You didn’t think I’d bypass music, did you? Here’s a sonic pillow by duendita, the Brooklyn-Berlin soul singer whose “Open Eyes” takes a small jazz ensemble through a warm and winding inner monolog. While it’s hard to say that a stream of thought is “about” anything, what the artist doing on this track is leaning into loneliness, a skill she has cultivated over time. She’s good company for anyone doing the same.