Weekly Wrapped - 03/31

how to maintain friendships, severance finale & george harrison

Welcome to another installment of Weekly Wrapped.

If you are new here, this is basically like virtually grabbing a cup of coffee with me and I share with you about everything I am reading, watching and thinking about. Rather than avoiding anything stained by the world, here at Jenna’s Column, we seek to find glimpses of the good in all things.

I post every Monday and alternate between these recommendation posts and longer form pieces about Gen Z and faith. Subscribe to stay tuned!

How I feel typing up my Substack every week, but instead of piles of magazines and papers, I have 50 tabs open on my MacBook.

Hi friends — it is so good to see you (in this virtual disembodied way!) I am looking forward to sharing with you some fun tokens this week.

I have officially reached 300 subscribers, which is so exciting. Thank you, readers, new and old. I am so grateful that you take the time to read my work every week!

This month marks my 3rd month in my office job, and having this substack every week has served as such a fun creative outlet for me. I regularly have a Google Docs tab or a notebook sprawled in front of me, where I will jot down notes to make sure to include on my next post. I also often will use Siri to make voice notes while I am driving, so I am sure not to forget an idea.

For those of you who feel stuck creatively, I encourage you to always write down an idea when it comes to you, even if it is just a sentence or not fully thought through. It teaches your brain that your ideas are important, and suddenly you will keep finding new connections and then boom you have a rough draft. At least, that is what happens to me sometimes.

I am cooking up a few different pieces right now that I am excited to share about in April. If you have anything specific that you want to see me write about, please shoot me a message. I would love to hear your thoughts/ideas!

With that, let’s get into the good stuff I have to share with you.

Writing

I realized that a lot of you read this directly in your inbox, which means that you miss my copious restacks and sharing of different work on the Substack app. So, here are a few pieces of writing that I shared with my community this week that, to use a scientific term, tickled me. Kidding — but really, these pieces helped me think about what it means to be a person of faith in light of grace and friendships.

Grace Might Have Strings Attached (and Why That’s Not a Bad Thing)

When I saw the title for this, I started kicking my feet!

Allow me to drop a little paragraph from his introduction to capture your interest.

In the world behind the Bible, grace always had strings attached. That’s actually part of what grace meant — that it would bind two parties into a relationship of mutual reciprocity. Grace that’s free from expectations didn’t enter the Western imagination until after the Reformation.

Griffin Gooch is a great follow if you have not already read his work.

He helps make complex ideas from Christian academia trickle down to us, common folk. I am grateful for the time and effort he puts into his pieces, they always stir fruitful conversation in my heart with God.

101 ways to make and maintain friendships

Arrive early to parties and events. Organise a friends-of-friends dinner party. Apply for things. Volunteer or get involved in a cause you care about. Create a ritual with someone.

These are just a few suggestions for how to make or maintain friendships by Madeline Dore. I love how uncomplicated most of these are, and it reminded me about the importance of being intentional with maintaining the friendships in my life.

In my experience, we often assume that the other person should be the one to initiate plans or make the next move. However, we often fail to realize that we contribute to 50% of a relationship dynamic. You are likely half the reason the relationship is the way it is right now.

Reading

Currently Reading

Presence by David Benner

I read my first Benner book a few weeks ago, Surrender to Love, and it radically re-oriented me to the source of my spiritual growth, the Holy Spirit. Oftentimes I fall into the trap that many of us in the West do, which is

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games continues to be one of my favorite fiction series of all time. I am amazed at Collins’ ability to craft such an unbelievable world, and draw parallels to modern life. This book is a prequal to the series, which follows Haymitch Abernathy, who plays Katniss Everdeen’s mentor in the books/movies.

I will post a full review once I finish the book, but I am about 100 pages in so far and am loving it. My only complaint is that the book is only 400 pages, much shorter than her other prequal, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (which I HIGHLY recommend).

This bout to be me!

Read

Red Rising Review

After finishing Harry Potter last week, I have felt a slight (very large, gaping) fantasy hole in my heart, so I decided to pick up this science fiction book that had been on my to-be-read list for quite some time.

One of my coworkers with great taste recommended me this series, and he said the first one is the worst out of the bunch, but I genuinely enjoyed a lot of it.

The series takes place on Mars, in the far future, where Earth is now vacant and we have moved and colonized other planets. There is a class system divided up by color, with golds, who are the politicians and rulers being the top, and reds, those who do the most dangerous and grueling jobs, being the lowest.

In this story, you follow a ‘red’, the lowest tier on the color scale, and how he suddenly finds himself in as he somehow infiltrates the ranks of the golds. I was truly gripped to this book right up until the end, and am currently enjoying the second one. I highly recommend if you are looking for your next fiction read.

Appreciating

All Things Must Pass by George Harrison

I realized that I have failed to share music recommendations in this section, which I used to do a lot more often. As per usual, I have been enjoying hymns deeply, mostly those sung by Ella Fitzgerald.

But lately, I have been putting All Things Must Pass on shuffle at work, and it has been lovely.

I am a big fan of The Beatles, but have only just stumbled onto Harrison’s solo work. I have been a fan of "What is Life” for a long time, and am beginning to become a fan of the larger album itself.

I love listening to music that aligns with the seasons, and this feels very much like a spring album to me. If you are looking for some 70s goodness as you enjoy seeing the flowers bloom, I’d put this on shuffle.

Pondering

First, this.

My brain, unfortunately, has a hard time understanding this

Ok, now, Severance.

Severance Finale

Severance season 2 has been a whirlwind. As each episode passed, I felt like I had more questions than answers, but I was hooked.

*Spoilers ahead for those who did not watch the finale, you can skip until you are past the photo of Mr. Milchick and then you will be safe.*

The emotions that I experienced in this episode were CRAZY. Seeing the four different iterations of Mark/Gemma with their innies and outies truly broke my heart and I could not keep it together when both of their outies were finally reunited. Real tears there.

It is hard to even list out my favorite parts of the episode because I enjoyed it so much. But I would say that seeing innie/outie Mark communicate through the camera was definitely one of the highlights. I was so impressed with Adam Scott’s performance that he demonstrated with that. As somebody with zero acting experience I literally can not fathom being able to do that, but as a viewer it was so cool to watch.

We watched the finale with friends, which made it really fun. They even brought blue severance balloons and put them up in the space we watched it, so the ambiance was perfect. Of course, I forgot to take a photo.

picture these but in a living room

Of course the ending was genuinely infuriating and I wanted to throw my shoe at my TV, but from the cam-corder conversation that Mark had with himself, I can totally see how he made the decision he did. Gemma is a stranger to him, but Helly is everything to him, even if their existence is fleeting.

I am so curious where the show will go from here, and what direction it will take next season. We got a lot of our questions answered about what MDR does, what role Cobel has and obviously, we got to see Gemma escape. But, I am still most curious about how the innies will fight for their existence in this next season. When they are not at work, they functionally do not exist, so what happens if Lumon is destroyed, or their outie decides to resign?

This show is a fascinating exploration of consciousness and what it means to be human. Are we merely our physical bodies, or are we what is in our minds? I think the simple, Christian answer is that we are embodied, containing both the spiritual and the physical. The severing of our consciousness, an important part of what makes us human, has so many ethical implications. I think that is why this show continues to fascinate me, and frankly, gives me a lot to ponder.

Me when I realize it will be 365+ days till I see this diva again

I genuinely can not fathom that I will have to wait a year (at least) for the next season of Severance. But I suppose it is in these times of deep suffering that we have the opportunity to grow…

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Your friend,