good things 02.29.24

erewhon, existential dread, good convos

Feb 29, 2024

happy leap day! what a strange concept. i don’t remember ever finding it as a fascinating as i do this go around. did you know that if we skipped leap day for many years, summer would start to arrive in november? time is so fake i love it!

1. frank o’hara reading ‘having a coke with you’

a professor of mine played this for us in a creative writing class in college and i go back and listen to it often. i love frank o’hara and the cadence of his writing and voice. (if this tickles your fancy, keep going with this one)

2. wearing jeans on the plane

hear me out… i used to get unbearable stomach aches every time i flew. i only discovered the source of this illness when i started wearing jeans to the airport in an attempt to look less like a troll going back to the bridge it lives under.1 i have stopped wearing leggings to travel, and lo and behold, the stomach aches have also stopped!

i now understand that if i wear any sort of pant that sits above my belly button, my intestines get crushed and collapse in on themselves throughout the course of the flight. the only way to solve this issue is to lay horizontal for several hours and let my intestines stretch back out, which i can’t do very easily while traveling. so, if you also suffer from this illness — i’m glad to report the solution is your comfiest, lowest slung, softest jeans. if you don’t have any jeans that fit the bill, that’s your own problem!

3. joan baez and maggie rogers singing bob dylan

mesmerized by this little snippet from the tibet house benefit concert at carnegie hall this week. wish i had known about it because i absolutely would’ve gone! very badly need the full video.

maggierogers

A post shared by @maggierogers

4. erewhon

i regret to inform you that this bougie, exorbitantly expensive grocery store is my new favorite place. i felt like i was in a dream! everything was so vibrant and fresh — much like california in general. i found myself stunned by how green everything was in LA. like wow, a tree outside your window? that’s something you guys just… have everywhere? new york has warped my brain irreparably!2 i got an asian chicken salad and the coconut cloud smoothie and my total was $39. i’d do it again every day if i lived close to one of these stores.

i'm going to be dreaming about this smoothie for the rest of my life

5. ira glass on where should we begin? with esther perel

i liked listening to this conversation between esther and ira glass about feeling discontented. this thing where you wake up in the morning and you get ready for work and you say, ‘again? is this all there is?’ it’s something a lot of people wrestle with, myself included. lately i feel like i’m bumbling around, crashing into people and being like, ‘hi can you tell me what i am supposed to be doing here please? is this what a life is?’ i don’t know whether i find it comforting or not that one of my idols is grappling with this feeling too. on the one hand, wow! that’s great that people i admire also feel lost sometimes. but on the other hand, jesus christ, if ira glass can’t find contentment in his work, then what hope is there for me? idk! anyways, good ep and +10 points for the producer’s involvement.

6. a great conversation with a friend

you know when you have a really good talk with someone, and it feels like a door inside of your brain has been pushed open? all of a sudden you’re in this room in your mind, and the room has a bunch of meaningful objects in it that you’ve never really taken a close look at before. and you’re describing them to your friend, and they’re helping you understand what their function is and why they’re there and what you should do with them. when i said i was having existential feelings above, i wasn’t kidding! and yes, the byline on this newsletter is indeed Captain Obvious. but i’m just very grateful that i have all of these great, smart friends that i can have conversations that feel like this with.

7. ‘aaron bushnell’s act of political despair’ by masha gessen (the new yorker)

anything gessen writes these days is an instant click from me. they talk about the history of self-immolation in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, and what it means when an american like bushnell chooses this act of political despair. i also want to recommend this podcast that i can’t stop thinking about in light of aaron bushnell’s death, about the radical group the weather underground. it still informs my thinking on activism and solidarity:

♡good thing from a good person♡

my friend maritza rico sent a voice note the other day describing a breakthrough she had while listening to the podcast call her daddy. i was shocked by this because i am a snob about podcasts and have felt contempt for this show since it started. it’s mainly because of my hatred for the barstool sports franchise, where the podcast originated, which burns with the light of a thousand suns. someday soon i’m going to make everyone read my write up of why barstool is the worst thing to happen to american men since the draft, but not today.

i asked maritza to share her perspective about why she likes this show, what she thinks of alex cooper, and the angle she comes at it from. she graciously agreed, and she also wrote her own bio! A+ good things student. i may actually listen to an episode now. here it goes:

Maritza is a life-long New Yorker of 10 years based in Astoria, Queens. She is a Public Policy graduate student at the New School and manages a tiny crochet account on Instagram (@handmadebymaritza). Maritza is also a volunteer organizer with the Undocumented Women’s Fund (UWF), a mutual-aid network facilitating community care for recently arrived migrants, where they collectively defend each other’s rights to shelter, and more. To donate to UWF’s work, learn more or join, visit: https://linktr.ee/undocuwomensfund
I frankly I can’t trace back (tho it was weeks ago) the reason I started devouring episodes of Call Her Daddy, but this new-found fandom has coincided with organizing work I’m doing with migrant women in NYC, which is bringing up a lot of…¡personal feelings!… so my ‘good thing’ is gonna be a little bit of a rollercoaster. strap in girlas:
I got to the US when I was 14 and I was obsessed w/ befriending beautiful blonde women. I was an incoming sophomore in HS and I was literally binging Hannah Montana episodes to prepare for what American HS was going to be like (??!?) My perfect american girlie was blonde, beautiful, popular, rich, and yes, a sex bomb(!) In many ways, she was Alex Cooper from Call Her Daddy. I would need a dissertation to retell how Alex got to where she is today (not to mention Dave Portnoy, $60M USD, a multi billion dollar streaming service with 600M users…) so I’ll hold for now… But Alex makes me feel like I finally befriended that blonde girl I had made up when I was 14. She is so pretty, she asks direct questions, she talks about sex openly, her guests are by most’s conceptions, icons (Jane Fonda? Now Come On Now).
In some episodes I’ve watched, she facilitates grounded conversations on sexual violence (Madison Beer, Bella Poarch, Trisha Paytas, Paris Hilton), or others on body shaming (Renee Rapp, Remi Bader, Christina Aguilera) & also mental health and substance use (The Lautners, Lucy Hale, Nessa Barrett). And SEX omg sex (the best one IMO is Anitta’s episode, but also Lil Dickie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Janelle Monet). This list is by no means exhaustive (there’s 358 episodes lol).
Every time a guest reveals something difficult, Alex listens, empathizes and humanizes them. More times than I can count, the empathy and sympathy are accompanied by a sentiment of gratitude, for having the resources (people, therapy, time) to overcome whatever happened. It helps she’s also interviewed girls I idolized from my favorite shows at 14 (The Hills, The OC, Zoey 101, PLL….etc…etc..etc..)
To end, I want to make a kind of oUt ThErE remark about my reflections on Call Her Daddy (which exist in the same brain that’s working w/ poor migrants being deported from shelters in the richest city in the world.) In the ensuing 14 years since I’ve been here, I’ve become invariably entrenched in american popular culture. Notably (!) I’ve made beautiful, life-long friendships with real blonde women (yay!) I’ve also absorbed all the contradictions of america. Much of which alex represents. Let me cook. I watch her all. the. time. she goes on amazing vacations, she owns homes and a studio, she now has her own production company, and is more and more similar in lifestyle to the stars she interviews. I am 1 of +5M, 90% female, weekly listeners. And I think, what pays her? Well, for one, ads by BetterHelp, an app, essentially, that provides bad privatized healthcare, that doesn’t take insurance, sells data (yup, it isn’t subject to HIPAA) and prob underpays health-workers.
Here’s the take: her ability to amass a following isn’t due to her humanity, but rather, the opposite. An inhumane system of wealth hoarding of which she, the Spotify CEO…. & idk those handful of luckies, out of 5M(!!!) of us, benefits. I guess all I wanna say is, I will keep enjoying Call Her Daddy, but I can’t in good conscience pretend Alex is one of us.
I also can’t let myself think that just because she’s the embodiment of that girl I wanted to know when I was 14, and because I feel like I’m sitting on her couch with her every week—that Call Her Daddy counts as a substitute for community care. In other words, it would make me very sad to find out that some of our girls are learning about how to deal with sexual violence, for example, from an episode of Call Her Daddy.
P.S. If you wanna learn what community care is, or how to work on it… email me :)