Touching the grass

If you’re on social media for more than five minutes a day, then you have seen the videos of parents and politicians and tour guides and doctors and lawyers and who knows who else using Gen Z slang, sometimes with on-screen translations, which are entirely necessary. Skibidi toilet rizz. It’s giving mildly humorous, no cap. 

*****

Last Saturday was a perfect day, especially if you like autumn-y PSL football weather. It was sunny and blue-skied but also a little overcast, enough that the sunlight was filtered and soft and not glaring but not so much that rain would seem likely. It was cool but not cold. It was breezy but not windy. I wanted to be outside, and not just to walk around the neighborhood or hang out in my backyard. I wanted nature but not camping nature, not hiking up a mountain or trekking through the woods nature. Brookside Gardens was just the thing. It’s practically around the corner from my house, and it’s just lovely - peaceful and beautiful, with just the right combination of real and cultivated nature, rife with walking paths and gazebos and ponds spanned by little foot bridges. Brookside is small, so you can walk through pretty much all of it in an hour or so; but there’s enough to look at that you could spend an afternoon. 

Lots of other people had the same idea, which was nice, actually. I like other people. There was a wedding group gathering for a photo (Brookside is a very popular wedding photo spot) and retired people getting their steps in and families with little children, much like we were not very long ago. I hadn’t been to Brookside in over a year but when my children were little, I was there all the time. My little boys loved to run on the paths. There was a climbing structure with little speakers, and you could push the buttons and hear different bird calls. It might still be there. There was a maze, which is still there but the dirt pathways through the maze are now paved over with stones that contrast with the larger, darker stones that outline the paths, but the contrast isn’t great, and so it just looks like a great big circle now. I liked it better with the dirt paths. The Japanese tea house, accessible by a little boardwalk and a little footbridge, is being repaired now so we couldn’t sit in there but I’m glad they’re maintaining it. 

We spent about an hour and a half at Brookside. We strolled around on the paths and walked through the conservatory buildings. We looked at plants and flowers and trees, and sat on benches near the ponds, and absorbed sunshine and breathed fresh air. It was just the thing. 

*****

I have not adopted very much of the new online jargon for my own use, even though much of it is colorful and delightful and hilarious (though nonsensical), because it would be silly for a 59-year-old woman to run around babbling like a 15-year-old on TikTok. It’s just not my language. 

But I do find myself saying “touch grass” all the time. First, it’s a concise and sharp but not mean way to dismiss someone - “go touch grass” is the 2024 version of “get lost” or “go jump in the lake” (which are also both still very serviceable). But “touch grass” is also solid advice to a person who’s losing their grip, as in “go touch grass.” Go put down your phone and step away from the news. Go outside and take a walk, get some fresh air. Touch some grass and some flowers and some trees. Breathe. The influencers are always out here telling people to touch grass, and having taken that advice, I can tell you that they are not wrong. I spent last Saturday afternoon touching all the grass that Brookside Gardens had to offer, and I felt so much better. 

Two words that say so much - “Touch grass” is a pretty much perfect expression. I’m pretty sure that in 25 years, no one will remember “skibidi toilet,” but “touch grass” has officially entered the lexicon. 

Disappearing people

Do you ever think about places or events or people from your past and wonder if you dreamed them? So many of the everyday places of my childhood have a dreamlike quality for me. I remember riding my bike through alleys behind rowhouses, and it seemed that I never actually rode on the street, just one narrow back alley connecting to another, a network of secret passages set aside for 10-year-olds on their bikes. It’s not possible that none of those alleys ever intersected with the street. That’s just how I remember it. 

I remember riding down one of those alleys and ending up on a pine needle-carpeted path through the woods. This is possible, actually. My grandmother’s neighborhood backed up on city parkland. What doesn’t seem possible is that I rode past an opera house and heard the singers rehearsing inside. I’ve never been able to find any evidence that this opera house existed but I remember what I heard. 

Was it real? I don’t know. It was probably just a house in which someone was listening to opera. Although I lived right in the middle of a city, in a very working class neighborhood. Houses were on the street, not in the woods; and we weren’t much given to opera or other high culture. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about it, except that I’m older now and I think about the past sometimes.

*****

One day last week, a name popped into my head. The name was the name of a classmate - a girl - from my class at St. John the Baptist parish school in Philadelphia. SJB is closed now - the church is still there but the school closed a long time ago. 

St. John the Baptist school, may it rest in peace, was an old-fashioned Irish Catholic uniform-wearing Mass-before-school nuns-with-rulers throwback to another time. St. John’s was old-fashioned (and just old) even when I went there, which was a long time ago. Now, I think, people my children’s ages would simply not believe me if I told them about piano lessons in the convent, where you didn’t speak in a voice louder than a whisper; or Chinese jump rope in a cement schoolyard surrounded by that same convent, a rectory, and a graveyard; or the veils that we had to pin to our hair for Mass and confession. If you’ve seen “Doubt,” you’ll have some idea of what it was like to be a working-class child at a Philadelphia archdiocesan Catholic school in the middle of the last century. Many years later, I found out that we even had a creepy molesting priest. Though I think we all knew about him even then - or rather, we knew that there was something terribly wrong about him but we couldn’t put it into words. Some of us (girls) could avoid him. Some of us (altar boys) could not. I believe he’s dead now. God will judge him. I certainly have. 

When my mother went to SJB, it had a lower school (first through eighth grade) and a high school (two separate high schools, actually - the boys’ school on Manayunk Avenue and the girls’ school next door to the lower school). After the high schools were closed (my mother’s class, 1962, was the last to graduate from SJB), the boys’ school was torn down and replaced by an apartment building, and the girls’ school building was used to expand the lower school. When I was at SJB, first through fourth grades were in the old lower school building, and the high school building housed the fifth through eighth grades. Even then, the building was really old, and openly acknowledged to be unsafe. There was an auditorium on the top floor, permanently closed, the stairway blocked off. We were frequently (almost daily) warned not to try to climb those stairs and not to enter that auditorium because the floor was in such bad shape that no one was sure that it could accommodate a person’s weight, even a 7th grader’s weight. 

Normally we’d have taken any such warning as an invitation but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone ever trying to break into the auditorium. I also don’t remember anyone wringing their hands about our safety or demanding that the parish get us out of that manifestly unsafe building. The 70s were different, you know? We were the original free-range children, like a bunch of wild chickens.  

*****

Those buildings are all still standing. I was just there last year, in fact, for my grandmother’s funeral. So there’s no confusion between reality and dreams when I think about SJB in a physical sense. It’s all solidly real, 150-year-old stone and ironwork and cement. But the time that I spent there, eight years of school that felt like 20 at the time, seems remote and dim, steeped in unreality. I remember in a broad general sense what it was like to be an eighth grader, for example, but I can’t clearly recall more than a handful of days or even moments. I know that I spent eight years in that school, in a plaid uniform jumper and navy blue kneesocks and a rosary looped around the button placket on the skirt of my jumper and of course those veils on Mass day. I have photos to prove it. But it’s all a haze. 

*****

I look up classmates from St. John’s and sometimes I find them but often I don’t. An astonishing number of my childhood friends and classmates seem to have managed to avoid the internet altogether, leaving absolutely no trace of themselves - no Facebook, no Twitter, no LinkedIn - nothing. Maybe they don’t exist. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing after all. Or maybe my old classmates are too smart to leave a breadcrumb trail on the internet. Maybe that school taught us something after all. 

I never did find the person I was looking for. She’s not on Facebook; or maybe she just uses her married name without inserting her maiden name in parentheses like most women of my age. She doesn’t seem to be on LInkedIn or Twitter or Instagram. So I stopped looking. Maybe she’s in witness protection. Maybe she just doesn’t want to be found. I just wanted to see if she was anything like the girl I remembered. Sometimes, I want to see if anything is as I remember it, anything at all. 

The prehistoric elephant site

I joined Mastodon last week. I’m on some random server on the “fediverse” and the place is both completely different from Twitter and oddly familiar. More experienced users (it’s been around for a few years but most people never heard of it until the genius billionaire took over Twitter) are likening migration to Mastodon as a move to a new city - it seems overwhelming at first, but just take your time and explore and you’ll be at home in no time. And I do feel quite at home there now, but it’s not like a new city at all. It’s more like a countryside filled with villages, most rather charming but some less so, versus the sprawling monolithic metropolis that is Twitter. 

It took me some time to set up my account. I couldn’t upload photos for my profile avatar and header, which I first thought was user error but then came to understand was a result of latency arising from a huge influx of traffic on the Mastodon servers. There are a lot of people moving although I take issue with new Mastodon arrivals calling themselves “refugees” from the Twitter warzone. Given the number of actual refugees fleeing terrible places and clamoring to enter new places that mostly want nothing to do with them, this metaphor seems rather stupid and solipsistic. So I guess it tracks. 

*****

I joined Twitter in 2008. I was, uncharacteristically, a relatively early adopter. I say “uncharacteristically” because I’m usually the very last to pick up on a trend. I’m the one chasing the bandwagon long after it departs and moves on to pick up the early adopters of the next hot trend. But I was right on time with Twitter. Not the leading edge necessarily, but not late to the party either. 

At first, I really liked Twitter. I had a blog (still have it, as  you can see), and I used to have quite a few readers. They followed me on Twitter, I followed them back, I followed their friends and followers, and they followed mine, and we all shared our writing and posted pithy little jokes and comments. When I started on the hellsite, Twitter still supported only 140-character posts. I don’t remember when I saw my first thread; maybe around 2010 or so? You couldn’t post pictures or videos, and I don’t remember that there were any ads, either. The whole point of it was “what are you doing?” - 140 characters all about what you’re doing at that moment. Watching a movie? Walking around Manhattan during a snowstorm? Boarding a plane? Eating a snack? Getting married? Changing a baby’s diaper? Robbing a bank? Going to work? Going home from work? Any or all of it, from the mundane to the dramatic, was Twitter-worthy. Just write a very short and ideally funny or touching or thoughtful comment about what you’re doing at that moment, post it, and wait for people to react. And of course, read and react to everyone else’s funny, touching, or thoughtful observations about their daily lives. 

I tweeted on and off for a few years, and even made some friends. Then at some point, the combination of work, school (I was an adult student then, God help me), young children, PTA, swim team and baseball and school concerts and compulsive housekeeping made blogging and tweeting completely unsustainable, and so I stopped, pretty much cold turkey. I started blogging again, sporadically, in 2015 or so, but I didn’t go anywhere near Twitter again until years later.

Right in the middle of the pandemic year of our Lord 2020, with too much time on my hands, I installed the app on my phone (I didn’t even have a smartphone when I first joined Twitter in 2008 - practically no one did), logged back in, and found that I barely recognized the place. I avoided Trump, of course, but he still dominated the discourse - it was also an election year and most people on Twitter were reacting to him in one way or another. And a few huge accounts with tens of thousands of followers controlled everything else. Comment threads were either orgies of OMG-you’re-so-amazing fandom or delete-your-account pile-ons, sometimes (often) over the most innocuous things. It was entertaining sometimes but it wasn’t congenial. It wasn’t good for anyone’s mental health. 

*****

Just before I stepped away from Twitter for the first time, in 2013 or so, a mutual invited me to an “Elf” Twitter watch party. The host made up a hashtag for the watch party, asked everyone to start the movie at 8 PM, watch with family and friends, and live tweet their comments and jokes and reactions, using the party hashtag. 

It was HILARIOUS. The group was mostly (but not all) mothers with young and school-age children, so many of the tweets were about our kids' comments and reactions to the movie. During the breakfast scene, my youngest, who was 7 or 8 (so this must have been around 2012), said “He’s going to get dia-beet-ee-us.” My sons tried to recreate the Santa and Buddy fight scene. My older son took a flying leap at the tree to put a star on top. I tweeted about all of this, to the great amusement of the party attendees. During the mailroom scene, I tweeted “That’s the oldest-looking 26-year-old I’ve ever seen. Sunscreen. Antioxidants. SOMETHING.” About 35 people liked and commented on that tweet - probably my best tweet ever in terms of sheer numbers.

The thing about 2013 is that it wasn’t that long ago. Less than a decade. Of course, Donald Trump existed - he was very famous and had been for years. And I’m sure that he was on Twitter then, too - I think that the whole Barack Obama “birther” controversy started on Twitter. But no serious person took him seriously. You could follow him and read his stupid tweets if you liked that sort of thing but most of us on Twitter were there for fun. Most of us were there to try to make each other laugh while we watched “Elf” with our kids. Those were the days, I tell you what. 

*****

Mastodon is a quieter place, at least so far. It kind of reminds me of old Twitter. No one knows anyone, not yet, and you have to make connections organically. You have to find people and listen to them and talk to them. I use it the way I used to use Twitter. A funny thing will occur to me and I’ll post it. I’ll see something interesting or beautiful, and I’ll share it. I follow people who interest or amuse me. 

During my first few days on the site, the few political posts that I saw seemed jarringly out of place. Mehdi Hasan was yelling just as loud on Mastodon as he does on Twitter. But most people seem to get the difference between the two sites. This is not to say that people shouldn’t post about politics. People should post about whatever interests them, and the people who tell other people not to post about politics because it harshes their vibe should just calm the heck down. Filter out the terms you don’t want to see and just look at your cat photos. It’s fine. 

What I mean about the difference between the two places has to do with the tone. The tone is different. There’s not as much flamethrowing. There’s not as much trolling for reaction. There’s not as much anger for its own sake. You can’t see how many boosts (the Mastodon equivalent of an RT) a post has received unless you actually click on the post. You can’t see how many favorites (likes) it’s received at all, unless it’s your own post. There is really zero incentive for bandwagon-jumping or piling on. There’s no reward for sycophants or haters. 

There are definitely many things that I will miss about Twitter. Viral inside jokes can be really fun. It’s fun to get the joke, and then come up with another joke that amplifies and improves on the original joke, and then to see everyone’s reactions, and to be part of the party as every funny person on the internet jumps in and tries to one-up everyone else. Twitter is also really good at creating communities of shared interest around topics both really broad and really idiosyncratically narrow. 

But there are many other things that I will absolutely not miss. I won’t miss the bullies and their hangers-on. I won’t miss stupid people who disingenuously misinterpret every tweet or comment to find offense where none exists. I won’t miss the sad people who shamelessly beg for followers. I won’t miss “follow me, blue crew!”

*****

I went to the Capitals game on the night before Thanksgiving. It had been a busy few days and I was tired like tired has never been. I even thought about giving my ticket to one of my kids and just staying home but I really wanted to go to the game. 

Earlier that day, a Mastodon mutual had posted a hilariously silly thread about how much tea he drinks and how much he loves to drink tea and how he was going to stop posting that very minute and go drink more tea. I guess you had to be there. Anyway, I remembered that thread as I drove home from work in very light pre Thanksgiving traffic and thought that a cup of tea and a few minutes in front of my kitchen window watching a late November sunset would be just the thing to put me right. And it was, and 20 minutes later I was on the Red Line on my way to Capital One Arena. I posted a few pictures and comments on the game, and a few Capitals fans found me, and now I have a few more mutuals based on a shared interest. Yesterday, I watched “Elf” with my now-grown children, and I posted running commentary, cracking myself up the whole time. Last night, I connected with a few more new people, and we shared status updates on the massive power outage in Montgomery County (more about that later). 

No billionaires, no crypto, no Draft Kings, and no venture capital. It’s too soon to know for sure, but I think that Mastodon might be the new place to be. Look me up if you happen to be around there. 

The computer isn't the only thing that needs a help desk...

If the COVID and the monkeypox and the impending collapse of civilization weren’t enough for me to worry about, I’m scared to drive now. This is because I am a terrible, terrible, no-good driver. I used to be a very very good driver. Yes, yes, I know that everyone claims to be a great driver but you should believe me when I tell you that I was once an excellent driver because I am truthfully telling you that I am a terrible driver now. 

I say that I’m scared to drive because I’m a terrible driver but the reverse is equally true. I am a terrible driver because I am scared to drive. I am by turns apprehensive, fearful, and downright terrified when I’m on the road, and this does not make for good Capital Beltway driving, I tell you what. I used to drive the Beltway with carefree aplomb, every morning and night. I drove the Inner Loop from Silver Spring to Capital Heights every morning and the Outer Loop from Capital Heights back to Silver Spring every evening, in every kind of traffic and weather condition, and I never gave it a moment’s thought. Sometimes  I’d get to work and realize that I didn’t remember the drive. I drove the Beltway on autopilot, utterly fearless. Tonight, I had to drive the Outer Loop from the Clara Barton Parkway to Connecticut Avenue–a very short stretch in case you don’t know the Beltway, in pretty light traffic at 7:30 PM–and I nearly had a cardiac event. Who knows, maybe I did have a cardiac event. I should have an EKG. I’ve been home for two hours, and my heart rate is almost normal now. Almost. 

*****

It’s the next day now, and I'm at work. I wouldn't normally be writing when I'm at work, but I'm also on the phone with the help desk, so I can’t do any work because the technician just remotely took over my computer, and I think he and I are going to be here for a while. That's because I have at least four different open tickets, two of which are months old. I have a lot of work to do, so it's a terrible time for me to be in a veritable hostage situation with the help desk but I'm afraid that if I don't let them fix my computer now then I won't hear from them again until November. I learned to live with the problem I reported back in June but this more recent problem is affecting my ability to do my job or at least part of my job, so I need to get it taken care of now while I can. 

We're off the phone now, and I'm waiting with considerable trepidation for a firmware update to finish. My need-to-solve-now problem involved a Drupal dev environment so I don't know why I need a firmware update but I don't really know anything about anything so when the help desk tells me that I need a firmware update, I don’t argue. Still, the computer was just fine before, except for the Drupal thing, and now I'm worried that the firmware update will create a new problem rather than solving the old one. 

*****

It’s later, and I’m home. My computer was fine (except that the Drupal problem remains unsolved) and I finished work and drove home without incident. The routine daily drive to and from work is easy. It’s the detours and unfamiliar routes and the wrong turns that get to me. Eventually, I’ll start having the panic attacks and terror episodes when I walk to my mailbox and then I’ll be unable to leave the house for any reason. That is, if the monkeypox doesn’t get to me first. But for now, everything’s good. Heart rate and pulse are good, computer is working perfectly, and I don’t have to drive anywhere for the next few days. And obviously, I’m a super fun person, too, so I’m firing on all cylinders. Hash tag #winning, as they say on the social media. 

Advice

I’m feeling so overwhelmed right now with new-girl-on-the-job anxiety coupled with annual-spring-onslaught-too-many-things-to-do panic that I thought, once again, about stopping this; this being my daily writing habit. 

Of course, I could let up a little on the compulsive housecleaning schedule. I could stop with the daily Wordle habit. I could stop scrolling Twitter. If I stopped doing all of those things then I’d have an extra hour every day. But then I’d live in squalor and my deductive reasoning skills would miss out on badly needed daily exercise, and I’d have missed the thread about Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to a bunch of high school students. 

Now I don’t have any way to verify the authenticity of the advice ascribed to Kurt Vonnegut in this possibly apocryphal letter to possibly fictional high school students. But it reads like something Kurt Vonnegut would write and so I’m going to suspend disbelief and embrace the lovely idea that Mr. Vonnegut replied to a group of high school students who wrote to famous authors seeking advice, and that he was the only author among the many to whom the students wrote to write back. 

Here was his advice: “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives.”

That’s good advice, isn’t it? I’m in the middle of writing three or four things and at least one of those things will never see the light of day but I’ll keep going on the other things in the five to fifteen minutes per day that I can spend tapping away on my Chromebook. Thanks for the advice, Kurt Vonnegut.

Honestly

Months ago, when the uproar about Spotify and stupid Joe whatever-his-name-is and his stupid podcast still seemed worthy of attention, I started writing something about it. The thing that I was writing started out as a sort of on-the-one-hand and then on-the-other-hand acknowledgement that what’s-his-name’s approach to COVID information is stupid at best and dangerous at worst and then a further acknowledgement that artists have every right to remove their music from the platform because that’s how the First Amendment works. That’s what it’s for. 

But then I was also going to write about how I was not planning to cancel my own personal Spotify subscription just because they give a platform to one stupid chucklehead. After all, there’s no law against stupid, and even chuckleheads have First Amendment rights. But then I found out that The What’s-His-Name Experience showcased the n-word in SEVENTY episodes and that what’s-his-name and one of his stupid dudebro guests yukked it up about sexually harassing and abusing women and then it was no longer a First Amendment issue; it was just an issue of simple human decency and my responsibility not to support a company that gives a huge platform to this kind of message and this kind of messenger. So I had to cancel stupid Spotify (and I really liked stupid Spotify) and also re-write a substantial portion of a thing that I had already written. I don’t have time for this nonsense, you know what I mean? 

But since we are on the subject of problematic podcasts and stupid nonsense, let’s talk about Bari Weiss. Yeah, Bari Weiss, I know. I used to sometimes listen to Bari’s podcast “Honestly,” including part of the episode that preceded her infamous appearance on the Bill Maher show. I didn’t actually see the TV appearance because I don’t have HBO and because I just can’t stand Bill Maher. Well, I didn’t see the entire show, but I did see the now famous “I’m done with COVID” clip that made Bari Weiss the Karen of the Week. That was ages ago, of course. I'm always behind. Don't come here looking for breaking news. 

Anyway, this isn’t really about the “done with COVID” moment, which is now largely overcome by events. It’s about another episode of “Honestly,” in which Bari and her psychologist guest complained about the word “trauma.” Shall I summarize this episode for you? Here’s the gist: These young people on the TikTok and the Twitter! They break a nail and it’s “trauma!” Hothouse flowers! Snowflakes! What do they know from trauma? The Holocaust, there’s some trauma for you! 

For God’s sake. 

Well, let’s back up a second. Part of me is OK with objecting to the clinical use of the word “trauma” in any way other than how it is defined in whatever medical textbook is regarded as the authoritative source. That was the position of Bari’s psychologist guest whose name I cannot remember and do not feel like looking up. His point, a valid one, is that misusing a clinical term that has a specific and agreed-upon definition muddles the term and leads to confusion and lack of clarity in treatment and research. 

And this objection would apply to the conversational everyday use of the word, too. How many times do I tell people that words mean something, and that it’s important to try to choose words carefully? All the time, I tell you, ALL THE TIME. 

So the word “trauma” means something, and if we want to know what it means, we can just  look at a dictionary. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines the word “trauma”: “(in psychiatry) An experience that produces psychological injury or pain, or the injury so caused.” That is pretty broad, is it not? All kinds of experiences, especially experiences of young people, especially the experiences of young people since March 2020, could easily fall under the heading of “trauma.” Who is Bari Weiss or anyone, really, to decide what qualifies as “trauma” to a person who is suffering? Is it not enough to know that someone is suffering, and to just show some damn compassion? 

The whole idea of Bari and her guest questioning the validity of other people’s feelings annoyed me. I was so annoyed, actually, that I almost turned off the show. Then I second-guessed myself. I thought that maybe I was being harsh and unfair. I decided to listen for a few more minutes. And that’s when I heard the mobile therapy app commercial, narrated by Bari herself. It wasn’t the existence of the commercial or the product that it was advertising  that bothered me. I bet that mobile therapy apps are very helpful. But then in her lovely and reassuring speaking voice, Bari listed all of the different issues that the app could help with. Depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, addiction issues, compulsive behavior, stress, and (wait for it), trauma. 

Something tells me that therapists who provide services through a mobile app probably have a pretty broad definition of the word “trauma;” a definition that would contradict the very thesis of the show, namely that young people should stop calling every little problem a “trauma.”  Did Bari Weiss consider this inconsistency as she narrated the commercial? I’m sure that she recorded it earlier and that it was intended for general use on her podcast, so perhaps the contradiction never occurred to her. Perhaps she recorded that commercial months earlier and then never gave it another thought. I do stuff all the time and forget about it moments later. So it’s possible. 

On the other hand, Bari Weiss is a smart person, and her podcast is professionally produced, presumably by lots of other smart people. Did NO ONE on her staff catch this? Did no one notice that this commercial might belie the premise of the whole episode? Did no one consider that there might be a disconnect? Or did they all notice it and think about it and talk about it among themselves and ultimately decide that there wasn’t a disconnect? I don’t know. I’m overthinking this, as I tend to do. The worst interpretation is that Bari Weiss and her producers are completely aware of the inconsistency of selling “Honestly” listeners a service that helps with “trauma,” while hosting a discussion in which Bari scoffs at the very idea that any 21st century middle-class educated American even knows what trauma is. Middle class educated Americans are probably the people most likely to use a mobile therapy app and they are definitely the only people listening to Bari Weiss. 

*****

For pundits and opinion writers and commentators and thought leaders, self-appointed or otherwise, integrity is key. Integrity matters almost more than rightness; or at least it matters as much as rightness. Say (almost) whatever you want, as long as it’s not obviously hateful or ridiculous, even if it’s wrong, and as long as it comes from a place of integrity, I will still respect you. I don’t always agree with Bari Weiss, but I always considered her a person who wrote and spoke from a place of integrity. The “trauma” episode made me question this. I seriously question the integrity of a person who produces a whole podcast episode that mocks and criticizes people who think of themselves as traumatized, sponsored by an advertiser selling a service targeted at those very people. 

My objection to this episode goes beyond the obvious contradiction between its content and the advertising that supports it. The whole discussion smacked of bad faith conservative outrage-baiting about snowflakery and safe spaces and emotional support animals. It came across as though Bari Weiss or some smart young person who works for her searched Twitter and TikTok for trending topics and keywords, and decided “Hey! Here’s an idea! This will drive engagement! This will push some buttons!” I’m just tired of it. I’m tired of phony outrage and concern trolling. I’m tired of performative petty throw-down gotcha one-liners substituting for thoughtful commentary. 

*****

So why was I listening to Bari Weiss anyway? That is a reasonable question. I admire her bravery and honesty on some topics, especially the landmine-strewn field of gender theory. She is a great writer who was hounded off the NYT’s editorial board and while we’re talking about stuff that I am tired of, I am profoundly tired of seeing fanatics left and right allowed to control the discourse. I’m tired of ratio-ing and subtweeting and I’m REALLY tired of book banning and curriculum control and dishonest equivalence between obviously unequal ideas. 

Still, I’m of two minds about Bari Weiss. There's a part of me that wants to defend her, just because I’m even more sick of the Internet He-Man Woman Haters’ Club. Call me a radical feminist if you want, but my spidey senses tell me that the real reason for the strong reaction to Bari’s Bill Maher appearance had little to do with COVID and lots to do with the very existence of women speaking out about anything with our high-pitched feminine voices and our overly emotional demeanor. The word “shrill” made frequent appearances in the furious anti-Bari tweets during this little kerfuffle. Omicron panic made it easy for the haters to hide their misogyny behind a veneer of public health self-righteousness and faux outrage on behalf of service workers and public school teachers and students and beleaguered healthcare workers. But you know what they say on the Internet: We see you. I see you. 

*****

I started writing this weeks ago, obviously. But after watching Senators Cruz and Hawley and Cotton and Blackburn posing and posturing through the two days of hearings for Judge Jackson, the topic of phony political outrage trolling with a side of misogyny seemed relevant again. I’m no admirer of Senator Ben Sasse but the man earned a tiny place in my stone-cold heart for referring to the Senators’ antics as “jackassery,” especially since that remark immediately followed Cruz’s “questioning.” Well done, Senator. You’ll never get my vote for anything, ever, but you might have a little bit of my respect. 

*****

I haven’t listened to “Honestly” since the “trauma” episode. I haven’t found a new podcast home yet; but even when I do, I probably won’t listen to Bari again. It’s not ideological, although I do disagree with much of what she has to say. I just don’t want to consume any more of the tiresome content rolling off the fake outrage industrial complex’s assembly line. It’s an integrity thing. 

Playing to win

Oh it's cold. So cold. It's Saturday morning and I am sitting in my car waiting for my son to finish his pre-season baseball workout. My car's temperature gauge reads 19 degrees. A radio announcer just helpfully noted that the wind chill makes it feel like ten degrees. So cold. 

After a week or so of chatter on the Twitter, I finally succumbed to the Wordle craze, as I knew I would. Yesterday's word took me all six tries. I got today's in four. If you have played the game, then you know that it's as much about deductive reasoning than words. I'm quite good at the latter but I'm not so good at the former. And that's the appeal, really. The difficult part is humbling. It keeps me in my place. And the easy part makes it fun. It's an awesome game. Too bad I only get to play once a day. I mean, I'm sure that there's an app that will allow you to play as often as you like, but the shared experience of that one game a day is also part of the fun. I'm two for two now. I'm going for a ten-game win streak. 

*****

It’s Sunday now and I’m three for three (and in only three tries this time). It’s a nicer day so I’ll actually go outside, because I need the exercise and because I need the sunlight to combat the seasonal affective disorder that’s making my low-level depression much much worse. 

My son had a swim meet yesterday, too. As anyone who hangs around here regularly knows, I often write during the dive meet because what do I know about diving? When you’ve seen one teenager do a backflip off a springboard into a pool, you’ve seen them all. But yesterday, instead of writing, I started making a list of five-letter words. I even installed an add-on to Google Docs so that I could alphabetize the list. It’s been three days and I already have an unhealthy and obsessive relationship with Wordle. I also have a running list of words (152 so far) and a three-game win streak. It might be too early to count my Wordle chickens, but I like my chances at ten for ten. I won’t tell you what today’s word is because maybe you want to play. Tomorrow could be anything: Arrow, Bread, Clock, Drive, Egret, Heron, Queen? There’s only one way to find out. A person has to play to win. 

I don't have the cholesterol

You know what? Climbing the proverbial corporate ladder is not all it’s cracked up to be, and that’s from someone who didn’t have much ambition in that direction to begin with. I mean it’s nice to be promoted but I’m working all the time now. All. The. Time. I work like a dog. 

And you know what else? Forget that, because I know a bunch of dogs, and they’re all lazy and shiftless. They sleep 18 hours a day and spend the rest of their time sniffing things and trying to score free food. A day of my life would kill your average dog. No work ethic at all. 

*****

Earlier today, I asked my 16-year-old son if he’d seen any of the milk crate challenge videos, and he replied in the affirmative. “You’re not going to try that, are you?” I asked. 

He scoffed. “No. Where am I going to get 20 milk crates?”

*****

It’s the next day now. I stopped work a few minutes earlier, only to notice that I have ten million household chores yet to do. That’s another problem. I need to get everyone else in the house to do more of this stuff, but I don’t. I do it all myself, and then I wonder why I’m exhausted. 

*****

I mean, I was glad to hear the “no,” but I do wish it was prompted by concerns more practical and urgent than milk crate supply chain issues, know what I mean? 

*****

I have been writing several different things all at once, but my real job has been sucking up most of my mental energy, so this has to suffice as my writing for today. Milk crates and vacuuming. Maybe I should just write Twitter threads. A Twitter thread is its own literary form, and I read one today that includes a line that I will be repeating for years to come: “You don’t have the cholesterol to be out here.” 

Analyzing why a thing is funny generally makes it no longer funny, so I won’t ruin this line by overthinking it. 

OK, it’s the word “cholesterol.” It’s a fatty acid, right? Or at least it’s close enough to a fatty acid. And fatty acids do more than clog arteries; they also yield ATP through metabolic processes. So that’s a shorthand but obscure but also hilarious way of saying that someone doesn’t have the necessary energy. I won't get into an exegesis of "out here," which is a thing all to itself. Brilliant writing. I can only hope to be so creative. Not today, though. Fatty acids are in short supply.