RWRR: The Horrors, They Are Persisting

September 25, 2024

Hello! Thank you for the warm response to my first longer essay, especially one with such a serious topic. I am grateful for the kind messages and comments. As a gentle reminder, this weekend, my next longer piece will go live and it will be for paid subscribers! Thanks for supporting my work.

I’ve written this every week for the past 84 years, but this week has been a doozy.

This photo really sums it up. On to this week’s typical content!

Reading

One thing about me is that Gilmore Girls is my all-time favorite and best comfort show, tied with The Office and followed closely by Friday Night Lights (a show my spouse REFUSES TO WATCH!!!!!).

I was excited to read Kelly Bishop’s book because of my deep love for the show and general delight in Emily Gilmore. I don’t typically read celebrity memoirs, and this book reminded me why: they are not great. This book was fine and it took me a cool two hours to read. Her stories were great, but there wasn’t enough Emily Gilmore gossip in them for me — it was more of a retelling of Kelly Bishop’s cool, inspiring career.

This may be too inside baseball for people who aren’t rabid fans of the show, but the book felt like what Miss Patty would have written — like one of her “reminiscences” from the one-woman show she puts on during Season 3, Episode 14, where she talks about meeting Bette Davis.

If you don’t know, I get it. If you do…we should be friends.

Anyway, I love Kelly Bishop forever, but I am also looking forward to diving into Sally Rooney’s book, which I assume will make me feel things and not have my eyes glazing over at Broadway stories.

Writing

I am a huge Alexander Chee fan. He is smart, and his work is incredible. He published this piece this week on his Substack, about being prolific and facing the wall. There is so much wisdom in this piece, but the part that stopped me in my tracks was the last paragraph, where he advises writers on how to face the writer’s block and hard parts of writing:

There is something that thinks it is trying to protect you by shutting you down. You have to give it a specific new job. You have to put it in charge of keeping you going. It believes that keeping on will bring danger. You have to explain that safety is actually in that direction. And then see if you can keep going.

I needed to read that this week. I’m working on my novel, which I’m excited about, but I’m facing different challenges than I did with my memoir. For me, “writer’s block” often shows up as shutting down, and this was such a timely reminder that our brain is simply trying to protect us and keep us safe. It was the push I needed to keep going and push past that desire to close up.

Ranting

Not even sure where to begin with this, but this disgusting article about Bulletproofing America’s Classrooms and the way companies are monetizing items to keep kids safe made me want to light something on fire. As an educator, it is so horrifying to me that not only do we keep bowing to the NRA and their money, but now companies get to profit off of “solving the problem.” I hate it here.

Recommending

I had an absurd amount of GapCash, so I bought a few things that will be returned immediately, if not sooner, but I also bought this delightful Waffle PJ matching set. Hibernation season is nearly upon us, and I love a cozy cute look; however, I am also ALWAYS SWEATING, so a fleecy knit is not the move for me.

I need an outfit that can do the only kind of “day to night” transition I’m interested in: going from being worn on the couch to being worn to bed, and this seems lightweight enough not to cause me to wake up feeling clammy! I got the set in black and because I was feeling wild, I got it in a light tan, too! Look at me branching out from a neutral to something that is…also very neutral but not black or gray! LIVING!