DISPATCH 4: CORRECTING THE RECORD
RE: GHOSTBUSTERS VS. CAESAR SALAD, PROMOTIONAL EMAILS, FUCKED UP HYPOTHETICALS, AND JD SALINGER
My boyfriend would like to issue some corrections after last week’s post. He wants to say that it was entirely clear why we were supposed to chant ‘TACO’ at the baseball game last week. Obviously, it was for the Taco Player Of The Game, he said.
“There’s a guy on the other team, and if we strike him out, everyone gets free tacos,” my boyfriend told me. “So we have to chant taco every time he hits. He’s the Taco Player Of The Game.”
Okay. This makes sense, is the thing. I am the fool in this situation for not knowing about the taco player of the game.
My boyfriend also took umbrage with the fact that I said it was five balls to walk, because “I literally explained this to you at the game. You asked me this at the game and I explained it to you.”
This is likely true, but I write this newsletter in multiple sittings, and probably had that on paper before I asked him how many balls make a walk. Beyond that, there are plenty of things that people have explained to me that I don’t understand. It’s truly incredible how good I am at not knowing things.
DISPATCH 3.5: GOD ROLLING AND SMOKING MY SORRY ASS PT. 2
This is part two of a two part post. I usually post a little bit about my life and what I’m consuming each Friday (and by usually I mean all of twice), but last week went entirely cattywampus so I am trying to recount that instead. In doing so, I wrote over 6000 words.
For example, the rules of football, or the songs ‘Free Bird’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Statistically, I must have heard ‘Free Bird’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ dozens of times in my life before, and I know they've been played for me and identified for me, but I have no concept of what either of these songs sound like. I know they played ‘Free Bird’ at the baseball game, too, because my boyfriend said, “Hey, they’re playing ‘Free Bird’”, but that doesn’t mean I now know the song ‘Free Bird’. Plus, this all is rich coming from my boyfriend, the man to whom I recently had to explain the concepts of bossa nova and the color chartreuse.
Anyways, another update from last week’s newsletter (which I really released earlier this week) is that our pest control guy finally came back this morning. To make a long story short, I had a truly unreasonable amount of pigeons in my attic, among other potential creatures. Good news: we were clear as far as birds were concerned. I could kind of tell, as we hadn’t heard any alarming scrabbling this week, and pigeons have been gathering ominously on our neighbor’s roof like gangsters casing a joint for a stick-up.
Bad news: the pest control thinks there’s a problem with our roof, which is funny, because we just had roofers there last week, plopping shingles all over the driveway.
“You’re still seeing daylight up there,” the pest control guy said. “With a hole like that, I’d be concerned with bats or squirrels, but not birds.”
We told him about the roofers came last week.
“I don’t know how roofing works, but they only did one side,” my boyfriend said to the pest control guy.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” the pest control guy said.
So I guess we’re pigeon-free for the time being, but we should be concerned about water damage. Between myself, my boyfriend, and the pest control guy, no one has any professional roofing knowledge, but I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t have holes in there.
Anyways, after work last Friday, I went out to a celebration dinner with my boyfriend for surviving throwing up and then getting employee of the month. I had the express goal of getting a caesar salad. This is because – hold up, I’m about to drop a fun tidbit on you – the 100 year anniversary of caesar salad coincided with July 4th last week.
At the restaurant, I could tell my server was a little quirky. He had a ponytail and said things like, “Heyyyy, here’s that stuff you ordered. You guys like stuff!” when he dropped off the food. I could read his vibe and I just knew he’d want to know about caesar salad’s birthday. When he dropped off the salad, I told him. He considered this for a moment.
“Really? Huh. Well, the 40 year anniversary of the original Ghostbusters was a few weeks ago,” he said.
When he walked away, I leaned over to my boyfriend.
“See, I knew he’d like that kind of stuff! I knew it,” I said.
“Well, caesar salad definitely has more cultural influence than Ghostbusters,” my boyfriend said.
I am not sure that’s necessarily true. At the very least, it’s a point worth discussing. I find I might use caesar salad for different things than Ghostbusters. Like, if you asked what I’d bring with me to a deserted island, I’d say caesar salad. But if I had to pick one to watch for the rest of my life, it would be Ghostbusters. I don’t know what the stats are: perhaps thousands of people are watching Ghostbusters every day, and hundreds of thousands are eating caesar salad. And even if I could quantify such a debate, it might come down to subjective preference more than anything. Sound off in the comments if you prefer caesar salad or Ghostbusters.
Speaking of fucked up hypotheticals, my friend Nell’s birthday was earlier this week. She ALSO just started a Substack, which you can follow below. We’ve been friends since we were 12 years old and watching Viria PJO MVs on Youtube. But just for the record she doesn’t remember any of my embarrassing phases from the past 10 years, so if you ever encounter her, you probably shouldn’t even ask. It’s really interesting to know someone growing up and watch them go out into the world and meet new people. It also means you get to meet new people by proxy, like when I met Nell’s current roommates for the first time.
The context was that she’d just moved in to a new apartment and they were having a housewarming party with a bunch of people all the roommates knew, which by nature means fraternizing with strangers. This was fine except for when, all of us already a few drinks in, Nell’s roommate posed this question: Which is the worst, incest, racism, or homophobia?
I’ll leave you to ponder that. If someone you’ve known for all of two hours asks you this while you’re drunk, it’s most definitely a trap of some kind.
In other news, Someone has stolen my email address and started to sign me up for a variety of promotions and websites. For example, earlier this spring, I was “going through it.” I was in this extremely tumultuous and uncertain period of my life, and then I got this message that someone had used my email to sign up for AsianDating.com. So two relevant pieces of information here are that I’m 1) not Asian and 2) already dating someone.
Someone also used my email to sign up for FilipinoCupid, and that’s not all. The most consistent of these emails have been the ones I get from a company that bills itself as mattresses for fat people. I won’t claim to be some skinny legend, but I wouldn’t necessarily call myself fat, and I’m not overweight to the degree that I might need a specific mattress about it – though I do appreciate that this company exists for you if that’s your thing. At this point, though, I’ve been getting these fat people mattress emails for so many months that I’ve been kind of Stockholm Syndrome’d into listening to their takes. The most recent email from them had the subject line: “Bridgerton Sparks Buzz on 'Mixed-Weight' Relationships: Big Fig Mattress Responds.” I read that and I was like, you know what, speak on it. I DO wanna hear this mattress company’s take on the most recent season of Bridgerton.
The funny part is that I actually was in the market for a mattress earlier this spring. And then I bought a mattress, albeit not one for fat people – just a regular mattress from the mattress store because I moved apartments. But then the regular mattress store started emailing me promos, too. Guys, if all goes according to plan, I’m not coming back anytime soon. Your emails telling me about your wonderful mattresses are not going to entice me to purchase another mattress because that’s not really an object you need a spare of.
A little while back, I went to a local urgent care, and now the healthcare provider for that urgent care has felt the need to send me promo emails as well. Which is like, hey, this wasn’t part of the deal. I gave you my email because I wanted to know if you guys were gonna charge me $85 to tell me nothing’s wrong with me, and you did, and now this relationship is over – leave me alone. But they just sent me a ‘Happy Birthday’ email enticing me to schedule a gynecological check up, or at least an annual physical. First of all, the doctor is probably the last place I want to be on my birthday. Happy pap smear, I guess. Second, it’s not my birthday – that’s next week.
Turning 23 jump scare. My birthday is next Thursday. Recently, people in my life have been contacting me about an increasing volume of “real jobs” which I might want to “just take a look at”, or at least “reach out to someone” where they’re hiring to “pick their brain”. I’d rather have my liver picked out by birds à la Prometheus, but I suppose at some point I’ll have to stop being 22 and start living an actual life befitting a real human being.
22 was the first year I think I didn’t contribute literally anything to society. I look back at this year and I’m like, well damn. I did truly fuck all. I didn’t even really hang out. I think my most lasting memories of being 22 will be coming home from my job as a whipped cream girl at 11 PM on a Sunday night, cracking open a cold one, and watching plane crash simulator videos alone on my phone in the living room while trying not to wake up my roommates.
In a way, I lived out the dream of moving to a commune in the middle of nowhere where no one knows you. Because that fantasy is about responsibility, right? It would be dope if you had nothing really tethering you to a lifetime but a part time job and you could just live. But what you learn is that you still have to feed yourself and do laundry and your parents will still call you. So you can’t leave it all behind.
I guess I didn’t do completely nothing age 22 – I made a banger linguine carbonara last night.
THE BEE STING - PAUL MURRAY
Spoilers ahead.
In my Irish lit class in college, I asked my professor, “Is queerness a major theme of Irish lit, or is that just your specialty?” She told me it was just her and how she reads the books (she was a PhD student). But every time I read an Irish book, I feel like I prove that answer wrong.
In general, my take on this book is that you could read a different contemporary litfic book and be better off. It felt like Jonathan Franzen or Meg Wolitzer, and there were points where I’d rather just be reading those authors instead. I understand what Murray was going for here, and I think taking a family saga and making it thematically about climate change is a unique and clever idea. But this book was just good where I wanted it to be really great.
The writing of young people felt substantially off to me – every teen or child character in this book seems to act several years younger than their stated age. It also had that sugar-rush feeling native of a lot of contemporary litfic (and especially family dramas): a sort of concatenation of events that seem overblown compared to how real life is, a very and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened feel. Like, you get to a point, and you’re wondering why is this character is rubbing her dead boyfriend’s coke on her pussy? Or why does one of the protagonists almost get kidnapped? What was the point of all that?
SHARP - MICHELLE DEAN
This book is like a beach read about a group of American women writers in the mid-twentieth century, specifically those that were part of or had some relation to the New York Intellectual scene. It covers a lot of heavy hitters like Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. The writing was super readable, and I liked how much intellectual history Dean was able to cover here. With a lot of these writers it’s easy to get caught up in their feuds or their personal lives, but I found that Dean stayed pretty focused on the work in this book. Definitely recommend if you’re looking for a general overview on the scene, and the women in particular.
FRANNY AND ZOOEY - JD SALINGER
Let me tell you a story which will reveal something embarrassing about myself (as if that isn’t the conceit of this entire blog): as a middle schooler, I was really obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. I don’t remember if I even ever finished it (I do remember touting it around when I definitely hadn’t finished it yet). You might be thinking, thirteen years old is a devastating time to read that book, personality-wise. And you’d be right! I was extremely annoying about it, but that was really the only outcome for a person of that age reading that book. Recently, I picked up my copy from my parents’ house which I think I stole from my seventh grade language arts classroom, and I found a piece of plastic inside I’d been using for a bookmark at the time – a tag for a push-up bra. A little on the nose, huh?
This is all to say I was not going to be normal about Franny and Zooey under any circumstance given that it’s my first Salinger after Catcher. This book is obnoxious in that if you’re the sort of person who likes ‘Vienna’ by Billy Joel or posting about being a former gifted kid, this is a great book for you. A lot of Salinger is about how having something bad happen can impact you in ways you can’t control, and doesn’t necessarily give you some special insight into the universe, contra all the trauma memes out there. So if you’re easily put off by privileged characters who whine a lot but seem to have the world on their side, don’t read this.
But for me, there was a moment of wondering if Salinger managed to capture just how I think, or if how I think was shaped by reading him at a formative age. I read the first 25 pages, and then the rest all in one sitting. I had seen the passage with Franny’s “I’m afraid I will compete” speech before out of context, and then I read the book, and it made wanna throw up.
MJ LENDERMAN
Okay, I’m late to the party here. I get the sense that MJ Lenderman is just like that guy from Pinegrove but less of a weiner. One time in college, this guy I was friends with played an emo cover of a Morgan Wallen song. That’s kind of the MJ Lenderman vibe, right?
The album I listened to in particular was Boat Songs, which is a solid twangy indie record elevated by funny, self-aware lyrics (I didn’t know until I listened that “I bought fake Jordans/they weren’t even shoes” was an MJ Lenderman line). I told my boyfriend I was listening to MJ Lenderman, and he was like oh, you should listen to ‘Ghost of Your Guitar Solo’. It doesn’t even seem like something my boyfriend in particular would like, but it does seem like ‘boyfriend music’. Just like moms everywhere love the song ‘Kodachrome’ by Paul Simon, all boyfriends like MJ Lenderman.
MJ Lenderman is also in Wednesday, a band that released the banger album Rat Saw God last year. Wednesday: woah, what an absolute local farmer’s market of a band. You can see MJ Lenderman in the Wednesday Tiny Desk Concert, which I loved.
HEAVEN IS A JUNKYARD - YOUTH LAGOON
If you’re a Lorde Melodrama fan, or an Ethel Cain fan, you might like this soft pop album with vivid lyrics. This album came out last year, and I heard about it by way of Samia’s appearance in the Perfectly Imperfect newsletter. If you like Samia, or Jordana, or anything of that ilk, you’ll probably like Heaven Is A Junkyard. It has lyrics that seem perfect for placing in italicized white text over blurry images on Tumblr, like “Fear is my only daughter/And ever since she was born/She's had freezin' skin/But her eyes are warm”, or “I don't remember how it happened/Blood filled up the clawfoot bath and/I will fear no frontier.” He also has a new single which, according to the promo, was produced by Rodaidh McDonald, the producer for, and I quote, “Weyes Blood, The xx, Gil Scott-Heron.” What a group!
ELIS & TOM - ELIS REGINA AND ANTÔNIO CARLOS JOBIM
I feel like every time there’s someone who’s like super into the 70s now their vibe is just rancid. You see someone wearing a flowy skirt with some kind of psychedelic tapestry behind them, and then they’re talking about crystals and how they love Creedence Clearwater Revival, and then they’re suddenly saying the most unhinged shit about their personal life. Maybe this is just personal bias, I don’t know. But basically, I don’t listen to a lot of 70s stuff.
I started listening to this song because I was really obsessed with the Art Garfunkel cover of ‘Águas De Março’ (Garfunkel’s title is ‘Waters of March’). I feel like there’s a kind of 70s sentimentality that’s a little too sugary for either the 60s or the 80s, and that’s the appeal of the Garfunkel cover. Like, Barry Manilow is very 70s, and Steely Dan, and Dolly Parton, and anything you can categorize as yacht rock. All this has a sentimental edge that we’re too cool for in current music but is kind of fun and silly and novel. This is why I like the Garfunkel cover.
Elis & Tom has pretty much the same appeal. While the music is pretty much easy listening, there’s also a level of drama that’s kind of refreshing. This is from an era when we weren’t afraid of throwing a key change onto a track just to turn up the tension. When I first listened to this all the way through, I really liked ‘Retrato Em Branco E Preto’ and ‘Modhina’ for this reason: okay swelling strings! Okay intense piano! I thought this was a soft jazz album, but I like the stakes we’re setting up here. Maybe I get the 70s now.
BONUS ROUND: SPIRIT LINK - COMPILATION ALBUM (This is a benefit album from December from a CT-based label! Very cool project!)
OTHER NOTES OF INTEREST
The New York Times released a list of the top 100 books of the decade so far. Then Defector did a response article about that article, which made the point that the Times’s list was engagement bait. Which is true, but what if I like a little bait sometimes? What if I want to hear people fighting about what deserves to be on this list? What if I like strife and chaos? God, no one’s thinking about us out there who want more hellfire and damnation. I’m always saying: we need this society to be more divided over essentially meaningless matters, like what the snot-nosed dorks at the New York Times think is the best book of the 2000s so far.
For some of the Olympic sports, they pull in all the fan faves, all the pros, and watching the resulting team is kind of like when they did House of Mouse on Disney. Like oh shit, Jafar is balling with Yzma and Kronk. But the basketball equivalent. This is to say Kahwi Leonard is no longer on the US Olympic basketball team, and Derrick White will take his spot, much to the chagrin of Jaylen Brown, apparently.
On the topic of the US Olympic basketball team, perhaps the only time I can say “just like me fr” about Steph Curry is watching him fold after trying to spin a basketball on his finger. I, too, would throw that shit across the room in a rage.
This article about the effects of having a bitcoin mining center in a small town in Texas is very wild. It links to this report from Goldman Sachs about how they anticipate data centers sucking up more and more power over the next few years. Man I love the #future!
Okay sorry this is literally nothing but I was just at the grocery store and saw this description of their new lights, and “Bright as sunlight. Soft as moonlight.” just kind of took my breath away. Okay Wordsworth! Whose MFA was wasted on a copywriting career to get this sign to me?
Spotted at the Wegmans: a very nice description of lighting. Cathedrals everywhere, etc. The Supreme Court said that the president is our country’s most specialest boy and he can do whatever he wants and then he can get ice cream after. That’s cool. Hope that doesn’t have any major impacts on the functioning of democracy or anything.
MORAL OF THE STORY: IT TAKES FOUR BALLS TO WALK. BOSSA NOVA IS KIND OF LIKE IF SAMBA WAS JAZZ. BEING 22 IS USELESS AND IRRELEVANT. BUT IN THE END, IT’S ABOUT THE CARBONARA WE MADE ALONG THE WAY.
New York Times more like new DORK times. what’s the foamite take on the top 100 novels of the decade that’s what i wanna know