Wordpress and Tumblr, I've seen 'em all
Since July the kids have been in camp. I dicked around a lot and then got back to work. Nothing that I’ve been working on is finished yet, except one very short interview that was kind of a disaster on all fronts. I did it for free, sort of accidentally, and ended up feeling like I’d sort of taken advantage of myself. The whole experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I keep promising myself that I won’t do anything, anymore, to be a “good literary citizen” or because I think it might be a stepping-stone to some other kind of more prestigious, interesting, better-paying work. Instead, in the extremely limited time I have, I will focus only on doing work that either teaches me something or pays me fairly. Or both!!
I almost wrote a caveat here about how lucky I am but honestly I think we have all been saying that too much. It’s 2020. No one is THAT lucky. Even these vile UWS assholes in this article aren’t lucky, because they have not learned how to deal with their discomfort except by running away from it, and they don’t understand that the discomfort they’re experiencing when they witness other people’s suffering might be grief, because that would explode their brains, so they process it as anger. Or they’re just evil assholes! I might be overthinking it!!
Anyway: my work! I’ve been really enjoying it, on the days I’m not too fried to do it. I’m trying to teach myself how to do reporting, which isn’t my comfort zone but lately I’m not sure what is.
I’ve also been trying to figure out what to do with this newsletter. A couple of times in the past few months I’ve sat down to write complaints and then deleted them. I feel like Keith has taken over recently as chronicler of our domestic life, and while I’m extremely supportive of that — it does honestly feel like I’ve outsourced part of my own brain, though unfortunately not the part that makes grocery lists or knows where the swim goggles are — it discourages me from having my own perspective on the same events. Like, no one needs Raffi Rashomon.
So what does that leave me with? I’m not ruling out the idea that someday I’ll blog again, probably sooner than I think. (Like in a week or two, goddess willing.) In the meantime, though, I thought I would experiment here with a new format, a tidy listicle based on my recent expenditures and endeavors.
I have always been loathe to charge for my newsletter — I’ve been doing this, various variations on “this,” for so long (since 2004!), and never directly for money, except when I’ve had actual blog jobs. But maybe that has always been stupid of me, rooted in an outdated gen-Xey fear of being a “sellout.” Certainly I don’t mind paying for other people’s newsletters. I would always keep some parts free, and I would mitigate my feeling-weirdness via donating half my profits to a rotating group of reproductive justice nonprofits, especially those that address the Black maternal mortality crisis like BMMA.
Just a thought. Anyway, on to the listicle.
Things I Consumed That I Liked!
The last book I read to Raffi that I genuinely enjoyed:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an amazing book on every level — it’s got that shambolic quality where you can tell the author is having fun with their outlandish premise and its potential, and not getting bogged down in making anything add up. The structure is just: Charlie, a boy on a quest to … not starve to death, finds the golden ticket, then is led on a tour of the Chocolate Factory that culminates (spoiler??) in the comeuppances of his fellow ticket-holders, plus he inherits the factory and saves his family. He doesn’t have to actually do anything, he’s basically a passive observer the whole time. Interesting: a POV character doesn’t have to do much of anything if the world is magical enough. I imagine that Roald Dahl had a notebook with lists of weird and outlandish magical candies. He really hates fat people and, well, women, which is a bummer, but I forgive him because he’s such an all-around weird genius and these biases are so transparent that it’s hard to be mad. Like, ok, you hate fat people, weirdo, chill out about it. By the way, I haven’t seen EITHER version of the movie??
The last book I … listened to
I can’t read lately, except 1000 different articles about the virus, epidemiology, and whether schools should open. In order to sleep at night, I often listen either to the Sleep With Me podcast or a familiar audiobook. The Secret History read by Donna Tartt is great, if not especially soporific, though I have managed to drift off to it. Some parts are obviously more murder-y than others. Tartt’s voice is young-sounding and drawly and very very cool. She does voices for some characters — Bunny is high-pitched and irritating, of course. The book is easy to speed through when you’re reading it, so listening has made me pay closer attention to details I’ve missed over dozens of rereads, like the pathetic way Richard says “What are we going to do about me?” after he gets shot and no one notices.
The last thing I ate that felt sort of special:
The Good Batch opened an ice cream shop! I don’t know anything about The Good Batch, if it’s evil please don’t milkshake duck it for me. I got coffee ganache, a delightful mega-latte treat that reminded me of that magical time in the 90s when chocolate covered espresso beans were suddenly a Thing.
The last terrible tv show I got hooked on:
Keith and I are watching Billions, which is sort of like a very earnest SNL sketch based on someone’s overheard drunken description of Succession. I love it. I love it wholeheartedly and completely. It might as well take place on another planet, which is part of its appeal. Here’s a great tweet about it that I screenshotted to show to Keith:
Last actually good show I watched:
I May Destroy You is so good that I can’t handle it — I have been avoided watching it because it makes me feel too much. Recently a friend tweeted that she’d watched several episodes in a row and I almost texted her to ask if she was okay. I watched four episodes in a row once and was definitely not okay afterwards. If you’re a woman I would proceed with caution — like, be in a stable place and have someone on call to talk to afterward.
Thing I’m looking forward to:
Lisa Hanawalt and Emily Heller are doing a Zoom at Powell’s on August 20th to celebrate the release of her collected I Want You minicomics, and this is effectively a live episode of my fave podcast Baby Geniuses so you know I’ll be “there.”