Shall we try again?
Introducing the next iteration—dispatches to follow!
Hello friend!
It's been a while. There are many reasons for that, but the main one is, well, I haven't been doing much writing
If you're getting this, it's because at some point in the last five years, you subscribed to my newsletter, in one of its iterations. First there was the silly but short lived "advice" column (heavy on the quotation marks, the advice was questionable at best), then the weird and delightfully useless data analysis, and most recently, my particular flavor of soccer/football takes during the 2023 Women’s World Cup. If for some reason you want to revisit any of them, they’re all still questionably online, just like me.
I've thought about reviving this newsletter for a number of purposes since my last dispatch circa mid-2023. Either in the vein of one of the above or doing something completely different. What I'm proposing now is a little in between. I wanted to pitch it to you first so you have time to opt out if you aren't interested, because let's be real: there's a lot going on now, and maybe you don't need one more thing in your inbox.
So here's the pitch:
I'm about to take a trip that will be a perfect union of some of my big special interests. I'm going to England for 10 days, with the goal to attend as many football matches and ride as many trains as I reasonably can in that time.
So far, I've booked seven football matches, and even more trains (though it will unfortunately be mostly the same train up and down the middle of England, between Manchester and London).
My thinking is that I will send you dispatches from the trip, an idiosyncratic travelogue that might be less Anthony Bourdain and more Bill Bryson, if Bryson were not a cishet white man from Iowa, but instead a neurodivergent trans person from, well, I never quite know how to say where I'm from. Possibly New Mexico, or Cleveland, or Boston, or another as-of-yet undiscovered M-class planet.
These dispatches will not include insightful football analysis, nor will they include intricate train information. More likely you will encounter a little bit of history, a little bit of context, some political takes, some navel-gazing while I look out of train windows, some compare-and-contrast with my train and football experiences in the US, and, if I go to the Barbary Macaque colony in Stoke-on-Trent, some stuff about monkeys.
I can promise I will try to be funny, because I can't help it. I cannot promise I will actually be funny.
I can promise that there will be no deep tactical insights from the matches, but I cannot promise I won't complain about how we've completely lost the spirit of the offsides rule. That will depend on how long of VAR breaks I experience.
As the trip wears on, I may get...weirder. More tired. More fed up with my past self for creating such an absurd schedule (7 matches, all over England, in 10 days??) Homesick for my dog and a good cup of drip coffee. Maybe that weird will be fun, like in the World Cup group stage when the commentators start to get tired and punchy. Or maybe it will turn into me sending dispatches that just read "I went to a match today. Some stuff happened. I miss my dog. Send post."
Politics caveat:
Honestly, I’m so exhausted and overwhelmed by everything happening in the US right now. Sometimes that looks like “I can’t even think about it, let alone talk about it” and sometimes it looks like “Political discourse is seeming out of my pores.” I intend to keep things closer to my trip activities, but also, who knows? I keep thinking about what my return trip through border patrol will look like and if I need to wipe my phone before I pass through on my way home! Such fun times!
So that's loosely what to expect!
If you're into it, no action needed. If it doesn't sound like your cup of tea, or you just don't like me anymore, feel free to unsubscribe. I will not take it personally, the unsubscribe button is my favorite part of most emails. Plus, if it’s because you don’t like me anymore, I’ll just assume it’s because you’re aiming to reach inbox zero! What an easy escape!
If you’re sticking around, stay tuned. My trip is in 9 days, but I might have a dispatch or two before then, just to get into the swing of things.
More Soon!