#there’s probably less of a chance of an ‘I love gluten’ car appearing in a country with subsidized gluten free food for celiacs

[marieaqua]

In the effort to push back against diet culture there seems to be a subset of people who have forgotten that allergies and medical conditions exist and have circled back around to being straight up ableist.

Idk man, there’s just something about people constantly shitting on sugar free, gluten free, egg and dairy free food items and recipes that doesn’t sit right with me. Like, yeah, thinking that gluten is poison and no one should eat it is diet culture madness but there’s also many people who have to eat gluten free due to things like celiacs and wheat allergies. Or how having criticisms of vegan diets and subcultures is understandable but making fun of dairy and egg free restaurants just blows back onto people with dairy and egg allergies.

[talabib]

How to Break Free From The 9 to 5 Grind And Find A More Meaningful Life.

What did you do last week? Was each day about getting up, going to work and coming home exhausted?

Is your house filled with gadgets and toys meant to distract you from the dreadfulness of those 50-, 60- or 70-hour work weeks?

In case you haven’t realized this for yourself, there’s little happiness to be found in devoting your life to a job that only provides you with a paycheck. And to make matters worse, the meaningless things we buy to make the job easier to cope with only serve to clutter up our lives and cause more anxieties and distractions.

As these post points out, it’s time to reprogram our minds and bodies away from the corporate culture of fast-food, disposable goods and instant gratification. With some simple techniques and a bit of effort, you can reclaim your life, declutter it of all that’s hollow and useless, and refill it with meaning and purpose.

Money and stressful jobs are not keys to happiness.

Many people grow up with the expectation that getting “a good job” is everything. From this perspective, true “success” is based on how good the job is – which is largely dependent upon the size of the paycheck. But the truth is: money doesn't buy happiness.

Even rich people will tell you that more money comes with more problems, including being so stressed that you resort to comfort eating, waste money on meaningless gadgets and constantly think about the future while never enjoying the present.

Success often comes at another great cost: very few hours to spend with loved ones. Hired help raises many children from families of success-oriented adults, just so their parents can spend more time earning money.

So, more often than not, the thing that money really buys is unhappiness. Ask yourself this: Is any stressful job worth having?

Ryan Nicodemus asked this question while working at what many would consider to be a great job. He was even on the rise, getting promoted to a managerial position, but the role came with 80-hour work weeks and huge amounts of responsibility and pressure. What it added up to was debilitating anxiety, stress and depression.

Nowadays, Nicodemus believes there is no amount of money to justify the toll a stressful job has on your mental health. However, when you’re wrapped up in the job-is-everything mentality, it feels like you always need to make more and more money.

Both Nicodemus and his friend, Joshua Fields Millburn, thought they would be happy once they hit $50,000 a year. But after reaching that milestone, the goal quickly crept up to $75,000, then $100,000 and so on. At no point did they feel satisfied.

Part of the reason for wanting more was that, as their paycheck grew, so did their financial commitments and responsibilities – in the form of loans, cars and mortgages. Eventually, enough was enough and they both quit their jobs and decided to live on less money.

It was at this point that Millburn and Nicodemus finally experienced happiness. All thanks to their decision to adopt a minimalist lifestyle of working and consuming less.

But as we’ll see, the minimalist ethos is about more than money and work; it’s about letting go of everything that holds you back.

To begin your shift to minimalism, pay off your debts and declutter your surroundings.

If you were to ask yourself “What are the anchors that are dragging me down?” the answer might not be readily apparent. But there’s a good chance that you have some form of debt, be it a mortgage, credit cards or student loans, that weighs heavily on your well-being.

That’s why the first and most crucial step to minimalist living is to pay off all your debts.

At some point, you may have been fooled by credit-card ads or a banker telling you to take advantage of a certain mortgage, but let’s be clear: there’s no such thing as “good debt.” All debt is bad, plain and simple.

As Joshua Milburn was preparing for a minimalist existence, he followed a strict budget and spent two years saving as much as he could to pay off his debts. This meant a hundred weeks of no vacations, no restaurants and no luxuries of any kind. But it was worth every minute for the relief he felt in finally paying off his debts. He was now free to live the life he wanted.

While you’re decluttering your finances, you should also turn your attention to reducing your material clutter.

First of all, it’s important to recognize that your possessions aren’t a meaningful statement about who you are as a person. Instead, you should ask yourself whether your belongings truly help you live in the present or if they prevent you from doing so.

For decades, Joshua Milburn’s mother had four sealed boxes in her home that she never opened. They contained every scrap of work John had brought home from elementary school, from handwriting tests to drawings.

Millburn understood that she was hoarding these things in an effort to hold on to her little boy, but the cherished and meaningful things in life aren’t objects, they’re our memories and relationships. This doesn’t mean you need to throw away everything, but Milburn’s mom could keep one meaningful drawing in a frame rather than four sealed-up boxes.

By decluttering, we not only give ourselves more physical breathing room, but we also provide more mental breathing room. Having objects everywhere vying for our attention can easily weigh us down mentally.

Minimalism is also about reducing the amount of junk you put into your body.

There’s no shortage of diets or fitness programs out there. In fact, the sheer amount can seem overwhelming. But you can avoid trendy diets and temporary fixes by reprogramming the way you think about your body.

From now on, think of it as a machine: when you give it high-quality fuel, you’ll allow it to perform at its maximum potential. With this frame of mind, it should seem obvious that junk food, like processed and prepackaged goods, should be avoided.

This kind of food is full of additives and preservatives that add zero nutritional value to your diet. All they provide are empty calories, especially sugar, which are terrible for your health. Sure, these foods may taste good in the moment, but they can often make you feel awful afterward. So any temporary pleasure is far outweighed by the long-term damage they can cause to both your physical health and your mood.

A good decluttering regimen should also include dairy and bread. We’ve been eating wheat and pasteurized milk for a relatively short period in human history – only since the invention of agriculture. Our bodies were never designed to digest the vast quantities of dairy and bread contained in the average modern diet.

So, whether you have a gluten or lactose intolerance or not, you can benefit from cutting back on these foods and replacing them with natural whole foods like vegetables, fish and beans. Once you’ve made this adjustment to your diet, you’ll soon find yourself with a surplus of energy. And this is a good thing to have for the next step: getting the most out of your body.

Fitness is something that works best when you have a constant growth mind-set, which means you’re always aiming for more than last time – whether it’s a faster running time, more repetitions or heavier weights.

To adopt this mind-set, you need to demand more from yourself. To help make this happen, you can reprogram your thinking away from “I should...” to “I MUST...”

Don’t tell yourself “I should go out jogging three times this week;” instead say “I MUST go for a run tomorrow at 8 a.m.” With some persistence, you can even make yourself accomplish new things.

Maybe you can’t do a single pull-up now, but you can probably hang from the bar for 30 seconds. So, do that and then tomorrow, hang for 40 seconds, and then continue doing more until you build up enough arm strength to do a pull-up.

Change and improvement don’t have to impact your authenticity; they can lead to better relationships.

Friends and loved ones are important. If you’re currently feeling isolated or unhappy with your relationships, it may be time for another round of reprogramming, this time to become more accepting of others as well as appearing more acceptable to others. The first step to making this happen is to have a willingness to change.

It’s hopeless to try and change other people – in fact, it’s cruel to even attempt to do so – but it is possible to improve yourself.

However, you may be resistant to the idea of change if you think that there’s nothing wrong with being your “authentic self.” But it’s important to take an honest look at your behavior and recognize when you’re doing something that upsets people or is a turnoff.

If you’re unhappy about being shy, a poor listener or overweight, don’t think “that’s who I am.” Instead, do something about it and be proactive in your self-improvement.

Changing yourself isn’t betraying your authenticity; it’s simply a way to attract better relationships. Would you rather be lonely or would you rather work on yourself so that you’re a better conversationalist and a more appealing person?

Another avenue toward self-improvement is to be more accepting of those with different opinions than your own.

Don’t think that you’re meant to find someone who thinks and shares the same opinions as you – this is just another fallacy. Relationships aren’t about hobbies and tastes; they’re about love, so you should accept that people are going to think differently than you.

If more people were open-minded about whom they hang out with, there would be far fewer lonely people in the world!

So, don’t just tolerate and accept your loved ones' peculiar habits; respect and appreciate them!

Let’s say your loved one has a hobby you find annoying, like collecting action figures. After all, isn’t a silly collection the opposite of minimalist living? Actually no, especially if they get a lot of meaning and pleasure out of that collection. So don’t deter them; understand that the collection enriches your partner’s life and therefore should be cherished as part of what makes them the person you love.

With this in mind, here are the four steps to help you better tolerate, accept, respect and appreciate the person you’re with:

Tolerate their unique hobby or passion;

Accept that it will always be there;

Respect the effort your partner puts into their pastime;

Appreciate the hobby as a part of your life because it is an important part of your loved one’s life.

Don't let work define you as a person.

Just as we saw the importance of breaking away from the idea that money and work are the most important things in life, so too should we avoid thinking that our jobs define us.

Think of it this way: You’re a complicated person with a variety of interests and talents, some of which make money, some of which cost money. So you’re far more than just your job. Nevertheless, it's easy to fall into the trap of letting your job title define you.

Many people will find a job in a certain industry and feel they should stick with that industry for the rest of their lives as if it's a part of who they are. But remember, a job is just a job. In fact, your job might even be an anchor that weighs you down.

Consider this: your job isn’t even one of the top five most important aspects of life. Those are: your health, your relationships, your passions, your personal growth, and your contribution to society.

These are the aspects of your life that make sense to measure yourself against, not your job title or how much money you make.

This is why you should avoid the annoying small-talk question of “So, what do you do?” This is often asked early on in a conversation as if it were the most important characteristic of someone’s life and not just a different way of asking, “So, how much money do you make?” Instead, why not ask them, “What are you into?” or “What are you passionate about?”

And if someone asks you, “What do you do?” you can redirect the conversation by saying something like “Oh, I do a lot of things, but my current passion is gardening. How about you?”

For more freedom, reduce your dependency on money.

One of the primary purposes behind minimalism is to spend less of your life working at a job. Naturally, this means finding ways to become less dependent on a big paycheck.

There are a number of ways to help with this, including learning how to make things yourself rather than buying them, and selling off the needless clutter in your home. But the next reprogramming you should learn is how to live on a small income.

The first step here is to create a monthly budget and stick to it. So start by making a list of needs, which includes all your fundamental household costs, such as food, pet food, gas, electricity, insurance and transportation. These are basic needs that have to be met, so there’s no getting around them.

Next, start a second list of wants, which might include categories like new clothes and entertainment. Now, at the start of each month, separate your extra money so that both of these categories are given a budget. And to make sure you don’t break the budget, you can separate them into different spending accounts.

Remember, every dollar in the budget should be accounted for. So, if you dip into the entertainment budget to buy new shoes, you’ll have to wait until next month to go out to that restaurant.

To reduce hard feelings and make things fair, get the entire household to agree on the budget. Since everyone has a say, there should be a feeling of mutual responsibility for making it work. For example, by making the kids part of the process, they’ll know not to bother trying to get extra money for video games when that money is being set aside for school supplies. But it’s still wise to set up a safety net.

Once you get yourself set up, you’ll find that it isn’t hard to live comfortably with less money, but that doesn’t mean life won’t surprise you with something unexpected, like an illness or the car breaking down.

This is why it’s smart and sensible to establish a safety net of at least $500 to $1,000 at first. You should not only do this as soon as possible, but you should also put the money in a place where it isn’t easy to spend.

Once you're out of debt, you can add to this safety net. And with your new found powers of budgeting, you’ll find that this fund can grow quite quickly.

Make life more rewarding and purposeful by taking on difficult work that contributes to society.

So you’ve cut all your anchors and are finally free from your dependencies. The only question now is: What are you going to do with your newfound freedom?

Sure, you have your new plans to get healthy, fit and friendly, but you won’t get far without a strong purpose in your life. And true purpose only comes from a meaningful life that allows you to actively contribute to society.

You might think that donating money to a charity means doing enough for society, but you can only have it be meaningful and purposeful if you’re directly involved.

What you’re sure to find is that the most rewarding activities are the ones that are the most challenging.

Some activities are easy, like reading in the park or swimming in the pool, and while easy activities are fun, they aren’t very purposeful.

Challenging activities, on the other hand, might make us feel uncomfortable while we’re in the middle of them, but afterward, they make us feel fantastic. This can include child rearing or running a marathon – there are a lot of difficulties involved, but the rewards make these efforts feel worthwhile, and they become the most significant experiences in our lives.

That’s why these are the kind of events we should seek and build our lives with, especially when we don’t just contribute to our lives but to society as a whole.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of charities looking for volunteers for this kind of meaningful work, whether it’s building affordable homes for the poor or turning vacant lots into community gardens. This is tough work, but it’ll be extremely rewarding when you’re looking back on it.

You can still make these tasks fun, too. If you’re building homes for the needy, there’s a good chance some days will be rainy or cold, and morale might take a dip, but you could rally together to sing songs. Or you could have an emergency supply of hot chocolate with marshmallows.

But unlike a cushy office job, where you may not even understand how your work contributes anything of value, this difficult work comes with a strong sense of purpose that will make your days a lot easier to get through – no matter how bad the conditions might get.

You are not your job, and you don’t need as much money as you think. You can restart your life by dispensing with all the “stuff’ you don’t need and the relationships that are dragging you down. Living simply will help you open up to and relish a more meaningful life.

[dailyskyferreira]

Sky Ferreira Returns With an uncompromising vision and the studio hours to back it up, the enigmatic singer is back with a new single—and a promise that her first album in six years will be worth the wait.

So, what’s Sky Ferreira been doing all this time? Well, for the last 35 minutes or so, she’s been in the bathroom.

“I’m so sorry,” she says when she finally emerges, eyes wet, arms full of winter layers. It’s a late-February afternoon at New York City’s Russian Tea Room, the fabled blini-and-caviar haunt of candy-red banquettes and eternal Christmas ornaments where Madonna once worked the coat check. About a half hour ago, the 26-year-old singer turned up for our afternoon-tea reservation only to disappear in an immediate whorl, as if a czarist vortex sucked her into the basement. What she had thought was an asthmatic flare-up, she now explains, was actually a pretty severe anxiety attack. A panicked twinge remains in her expression, like the distant memory of tasting a lemon. In town from Los Angeles for three days, she tells me, “I’ve been anxious to the point that I haven’t slept at all.”

It’s a nerve-wracking moment for Sky, a pop artist, actor, and model who’s lately been keeping a low profile. This is partly because she seems to find the social contract of the PR exchange stressful, but also because she doesn’t want to suck up all the air before she gets a chance to breathe. “You really can get sick of someone’s face,” she says, as only someone who has loaned their own to Jimmy Choo and Calvin Klein could. “I don’t see the point of doing a bunch of photoshoots or press when I don’t have anything out.”

The fact that she hasn’t had anything out might be the biggest stress of all. Signed to Capitol Records at 15, Sky spent years in teen-pop A&R purgatory—groomed as a naughty-girl-next-door type with mall-Shakira hair and prefabricated singles with names like “Haters Anonymous” and “Sex Rules” (“We are animals/No matter what we deny/Our bodies strong, like magnets” are actual words she sang)—only to have her minders decide she wasn’t worth the trouble and shelve her long-promised full-length debut. Rather than give up, she used money she’d earned modeling and finished the album without their help.

Released in October 2013, Night Time, My Time was a rare major-label triumph of craft over product, a purposeful barrage of seething recriminations coated with ’90s-grunge textures and ’80-pop incandescence. It sounded like “My So-Called Life”’s Angela Chase mainlining John Hughes films and channeling her existential anguish into a record—except Night Time was the vision of a 2010s 21-year-old, and the truths were all hers.

The right people loved it. In the spring of 2015, Sky announced her second record’s name was Masochism and promised its first single that summer. The summer came and went, then the fall, and some winter too. On that New Year’s Eve, she addressed the delay obliquely on Instagram (“I refuse to put out something that isn’t honest”) and promised “in 2016 you will hear it.” In 2016, you did not, and now it’s 2019, and, still, no album. At this point, she can’t post online without some commenters popping up to heckle, “where’s the album sky” or “MASOCHISM!!?” or “still waiting,” like they’re hungry people rage-texting Seamless.

These impatient fans aren’t alone in their enthusiasm. “She’s one of those beautiful, rare people who can probably do anything,” says Debbie Harry, who’s had Sky open for Blondie. “If there’s anybody I would ever be jealous of, it would be her.”

Naturally, all of this—the anticipation, the unfulfilled promises, the time lapsed since her last release—is adding to the pressure she puts on herself. She feels like she has to explain. “It wasn’t by choice.” It wasn’t creative paralysis, nor was it a creative hiatus. “I wasn’t just taking time for myself the last five years.” During that time, she landed a half dozen movie roles, but she says she didn’t decide to focus on acting instead. “I never stepped away from music.” She alludes to vague external hindrances: “I’ve been at the mercy of people the last few years”; “gatekeepers”; “the rug pulled out under me”; a “someone at my label” who undid the generous arrangement she had to work with Kanye West musical director Mike Dean; and the very real issue of a young woman telling men what she wants and not settling for less. Then the labyrinthine nature of her production process is, as you’ll see, akin to playing charades blind-folded while riding a dog, and everyone else guesses with kazoos. Plus, she’s a perfectionist. Obsessive. She’ll do 800 takes. She’ll consider every option—and then she’ll consider it again.

But the primary reason it’s taken so long: Sky doesn’t just want her new songs done, she wants them to be good. By good, she means, executed the way she intended, no matter how long she waited to find the right violinist. Properly mixed so they don’t accidentally sound like pop-punk in the car, because “someone puts some shit on my voice” and she forgot to play them in an Uber. (Sky never learned to drive.) Songs that know their place in the broader pop continuum, not what’s hot on streaming. “I’m not looking for ‘a moment,’” she says. “I’m looking for a career—and real careers, you build them.”

She’s deemed two songs good enough to share with me. The first single, “Downhill Lullaby,” is a five-and-a-half-minute, goth-noir, chamber-pop piece—with strings!—that could have easily closed an episode of the revived “Twin Peaks.” (The association may be deliberate: Sky appeared in the show’s 2017 return, deeply admires its director, David Lynch, and the series’ music supervisor, Dean Hurley, produced the song alongside her.) Another forthcoming track, tentatively titled “Don’t Forget,” is a new wave time warp, a lovely bit of nostalgia therapy for people who were never there—even if it is, according to Sky, “about burning down houses.”

By now we’re settled into a booth, one Sky has selected in the empty part of the restaurant, far away from her manager and publicist, who’ve come along to chaperone. Her natural espresso roots have outrun her hair’s blonde highlights, and her dark T-shirt reads “CHICAGO METAL MANIA.” We’ve managed to order tea by asking the waiter to bring what he likes (a nice, orangey, spicy chai) and then momentarily horrify him when Sky asks if, instead of sending the teeny triangular sandwiches with mayonnaise back to the kitchen (she hasn’t touched them, and mayo makes her gag), we can give them to someone who’s homeless. “I’ll get you the ones without mayonnaise,” the waiter says, taking them away.

“I don’t have a back-up plan,” Sky says. “I never have. I don’t have an education. I don’t know how to, like, play music in the [traditional] sense. I’m socially awkward and stuff—I couldn’t really do a lot of other jobs either,” she says. “Literally, there’s no other option for me. So this has to work.”

There are many Sky Ferreiras. There’s Sky the model, a Hedi Slimane muse who’s walked the runway for Marc Jacobs and perfected a glare so haunted the Bates Motel must be jealous. There’s Sky the actor, who played a key supporting role in director Edgar Wright’s big-studio heist flick Baby Driver, but doesn’t have an agent. There’s Sky the live performer, who battles stage fright, but who also opened a 2014 Miley Cyrus arena tour, fell down an elevator shaft on night three, and still took the stage the next day.

There’s also the Sky here at the Russian Tea Room, whose left dimple comes as a surprise because, come to think of it, you’ve rarely seen photos of her smiling. The Sky who shouldn’t eat gluten because of an autoimmune condition, but doesn’t really tell people about it because it sounds like bullshit. The Sky who’s watched enough “Game of Thrones” to see her pets’ personalities reflected in the show’s characters. (For the record, her cat Egg would be a Lannister, while his brother Squirrel would be from the North.)

This Sky speaks in em dashes. It’s less that she loses her train of thought, and more that her thought train is screeching onto a new track. Sometimes you’re right there with her, but other times you’re watching the conversation from a distance like a detached caboose that just kept going straight. “I know I keep going in circles,” she says, “but my mind kind of always does that—spins.”

You don’t interview this Sky as much as steer her, but first you listen. “I’ve always been really shy,” she says, six minutes in. “I was actually mute for years when I was a kid.”

Little Sky Tonia Ferreira hummed along to the radio before she could talk. Raised around Los Angeles, mostly Venice Beach, her young parents split when she was a baby. Her dad tended bar, sometimes with her in tow, and when his roommates got cable, she devoured MTV. “I always hung out with a lot of adults,” she says. “I was, like, one of those kids.”

Being one of those kids meant she didn’t know how to talk to the kids who knew how to talk with each other. She was bullied constantly. She also had trouble with numbers and spelling—she suspects she’s dyslexic, but never got tested—and for a while, was so unhappy, she stopped talking altogether. “I had really long hair, didn’t speak, and had dark circles around my eyes,” she says, describing herself as a child. “I looked kinda feral.”

As the story goes, Sky’s first-grade classmates didn’t know she could talk until she sang “Over the Rainbow” in school. “As long as I can remember, I’ve felt the most like myself when I was singing,” she says. (Roughly 18 years later, she covered the Wizard of Oz ballad at David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, and the director still raves about her version, telling me, “It was incredible. So beautiful.”)

She lived with her grandmother, who worked as a hairdresser. One time when Sky was around 7, she sang for one of her grandmother’s clients. Impressed, the man suggested she join a gospel choir. The man was Michael Jackson. So she did. Jackson also gave a 9-year-old Sky some grown-up advice that’s shaped her approach to art and music ever since: “He was like, ‘Don’t focus on things that are just around you—you need to look back to the history of music.’ And that’s what I did.”

Yes, Sky went to the Neverland Ranch—“a lot.” She also went to Jackson’s other houses. No, she didn’t witness anything untoward. “It wasn’t just because I was a girl,” she tells me, a few days before the controversial HBO documentary Leaving Neverland aired. “I was around a lot of kids.”

Yes, she’s grown hesitant to talk about her grandmother’s larger-than-life client—for all the reasons you’d expect, along with a few you might not. Like, that it’s difficult for people to wrap their minds around the fact that the King of Pop could be a formative elder acquaintance in the casually anodyne way of, say, a dancing-school teacher or a little-league coach—someone whose small encouragements could be so big. “I was really quiet, but when someone sees something in you...” she says of Jackson, before abandoning the thought. “I had a connection to him, but I’m not, like, his family.”

Sky has also routinely been asked to account for the bad behavior of men in her orbit. A dominant narrative surrounding Night Time, My Time’s 2013 release was her relationship with indie rock band DIIV’s frontman, Zachary Cole Smith—an ex-boyfriend with whom she was arrested that September. He was the driver of the vehicle in which heroin, ecstasy, and a stolen license plate were found (and someone who’s since publicly acknowledged his struggles with addiction). Throughout that album cycle, the arrest became a more delicious red herring than anything Sky had actually done.

“The thing that’s still so fucked up about that: I didn’t have a drug problem, I dated someone who had a drug problem, I was in a car with someone who had a drug problem,” she says. “No one wants to talk about how my charge got dropped.” And the whole Kurt and Courtney star-crossed mythos that dramatized the headlines around the arrest? Spare her. “I was really young; I wasn’t even 21 yet for most of it. That wasn’t my great love story of my life,” she says, adding, “The people that have treated me so much better—they’re the ones who deserve the attention, not that guy.” (Presumably, one of those people is her current partner, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, frontman of the Danish punk band Iceage.)

Those who have followed Sky’s personal life could easily read “Downhill Lullaby” as an extended metaphor about a tumultuous relationship: “I can see that you want me/Going downhill too/Going downhill into a lullaby.” But she’s adamant about distancing her songwriting from the egos of her ex-boyfriends. “That’s the one rule I made,” she says. “The one thing that I’ve always had is my music. If someone treated me badly, they don’t get to have that. I don’t want to drag the weight of what they did around forever.”

For Sky Ferreira, time is not a flat circle, but rather a sticky mass of saltwater taffy. She tends to run late, but once she’s present and engaged, she can summon an Iron Man endurance. At the Russian Tea Room, two hours of conversation easily floats into six-and-a-half, and eventually we’re the last diners to leave. Somewhere in this elasticity, she talks about her refusal to give up on the work. “I’ve literally been using my life savings to do this record.” She is not motivated by money—to her, time isn’t money, but money is a thing to buy more time.

This springy relationship with time can make Sky seem almost anachronistic. In conversation, her offhanded pop-cultural mentions span director Todd Solondz’s 1995 cult indie Welcome to the Dollhouse, Courtney Love, the 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter, the 2018 iteration of A Star Is Born, and the cheerful ’60s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” (which she concedes, “No one my age knows”). Sky’s reference points, like Michael Jackson once advised, exist within a totality, not a blip.

One of her artistic lodestars glows brighter than the others: When Sky was 13, she discovered David Lynch. “He’s the first person who ever saw the world the way I saw it,” she says. “It was the first time anything made sense.” You can see Lynchian dream logic throughout her work. In fact, the staggering, airy title dirge from Night Time, My Time came to her in a dream. “I wrote it in the middle of the night, half-asleep,” she remembers about the album closer, which was built around a line spoken by the doomed girl at the center of the “Twin Peaks” saga. “Then I woke up the next day and I finished it in an hour. I still have the notes; the handwriting’s all fucked up. ” When she finished the song, she knew the album was finally done.

So Sky’s cameo in “Twin Peaks: The Return” had the meta-ness of astral projection. She played Ella, an enigmatic bar patron who talked about a penguin and flaunted a “wicked” armpit rash. “She played that scene so perfectly,” Lynch tells me. “She inhabited that character and made it real from a deep place. When she scratched that rash, you could really feel the itching!”

“Downhill Lullaby” summons the creeping orchestral gloom of “Night Time, My Time.” A sweeping arrangement in five parts, Masochism’s first single begins with a sashay of strings and an interpolation of the unmistakable squee of the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” followed by a murmuring, angered bass. Sky exhales a numb indictment—“You leave me open/When you hit me”—and amid the layers of kettle-drum thunder and keening violins, there’s seduction and revenge, confusion and queasiness, silkiness and elegance. It sounds like the last thing Daniel Day Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock hears before the poison takes hold in Phantom Thread.

This habit of visualizing music—Sky does it too. Except for her, it’s the first step of many in the song creation process: “I see it like it’s projected in a movie theater.” “Downhill Lullaby,” in particular, began with a vision of water in darkness. “Lakes kind of terrify me,” she explains, recalling a childhood memory of feeling lost in a Maryland forest that packs a similar unease. “In a lake, by yourself, you look at the bottom and it’s murky and still and you can’t really see anything or feel anything—and if you do, it’s fucking terrifying. It always feels like something will grab you and pull you under.” The eeriness became the foundation for the song.

She likens the ordeal of making “Downhill Lullaby” to Mickey Mouse’s Fantasia turn as the sorcerer’s apprentice. “You know how all the brooms are making a gigantic mess and the water starts rising and rising and rising and rising?” she says. “It was sort of like that: Magical, but at the same time, ‘What is going on?’ And then cleaning it all up.”

Her technique is more like a collagist—one who both scavenges her raw materials and oversees the fabrication—than a traditional songwriter. Conceptually, she works backwards, starting a song with an imagined outline of the final arrangement, isolating each sound element, and then embarking on the oft-laborious task of identifying studio musicians with the time and patience and willingness to conjure each sound individually, so that once she’s gathered all the pieces, she can begin the meticulous process of putting them all back together.

This unorthodox approach to songwriting has led to recurring logistical difficulties for Masochism. Namely, figuring out how to articulate what she hears so that someone who’s not in her brain can actualize it. “Nobody really understood what I was trying to say or wanted to do on paper,” she says. “It was a really long process.”

Sky never learned how to read music and she’s too self-conscious to use instruments that aren’t her voice in front of others. So if there’s an obvious reference point—like a certain note in a ’90s-radio staple she wants imitated—she’ll play that for her collaborator. But when there’s not, she’s often like a conductor asking to summon a mood.

In the case of Danish violinist Nils Gröndahl, who recorded all the strings on “Downhill Lullaby,” she recalls telling him: “‘Play it as if you’re one of the birds in Snow White, singing underwater, while slowly being suffocated by plastic.’” And you know what? In the end result, it’s easy to hear all that.

Additionally, Sky is even more particular about her final mixes. She will only be satisfied after she’s evaluated her song in seven different listening contexts: a car stereo; a smartphone with “regular” headphones; a smartphone with Apple earbuds; a smartphone’s built-in speaker; on a laptop; through “really bad, bad computer speakers—like the ones that came with Dells back in the early 2000s”; and the lush splendor of the studio, which is a personal luxury because, as she notes, “most people aren’t gonna listen that way.”

And she goes through this convoluted course of action for every song. It’s no wonder Masochism has taken so long. Says Sky, “I’ve accepted this is how I work and stopped feeling bad about it.”

Two Fridays after her insomniac New York trip, Sky is on the line, self-confidence restored, completing a high percentage of her sentences. Earlier in the week, she received the “Downhill Lullaby” master, immediately dropped her phone and shattered its screen, so now she’s on speaker. “I was like, I hope this isn’t a metaphor?” At least she’s laughing.

As for Masochism. She tells me she produced most of it herself, wrote with Los Angeles-based dream-pop artist Tamaryn, and worked with Ariel Pink collaborator Jorge Elbrecht. The proper album is coming, Sky swears, almost positively in 2019. Granted, she said the same thing last year—and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that—but this time, she has finally loosened her grip on some songs.

“Downhill Lullaby” may sound like dying Disney birds and “Don’t Forget” may be electro-pop arson, but Sky promises “more poppy” songs on Masochism too, as well as more “abstract,” orchestral stuff. “It’s very big, but also very violent,” she says, half-chuckling. “But not all the songs are super-dark.” Beyond that—the number of songs, tracklist, other credited collaborators—who can say? Sky can’t yet. She has some songs in mind she’d still like to write.