Obsessions This Week: August 13-19, 2023
"It is no measure of health to be sane in a profoundly sick society" is a great quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti that I've lately seen attributed to Sinéad O'Connor (RIP).
🤌🏽 British sketch comedy 🤌🏽
I had some tough day job news this week, but I’m coming out of my cage and I’ve been doin’ just fine. Completely coincidentally, I revisited my favorite sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look circa 2006:
And going back down my British sketch comedy wormhole made me remember that I spent the earliest days of YouTube watching Catherine Tate, Peter Serafinowicz, and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. What on earth possessed an American teenager haunting iO in the mid-aughts to seek out esoteric British comedy in her free time? The past is a mystery.
🦢 Lest we forget I majored in poetry as an undergrad…
You keep sleeping
and I’ll stop trying
to decide if it’s better
to change other people
or how they see us,
or what’s more
urgent and futile,
to unlock
or to invent the past.
The above is an excerpt from my favorite love poem, Haiku by Matthew Zapruder, which has haunted me since my friend Angelique posted it on Facebook over a decade ago.
As my mother says, there is no balm like poetry when the world is unkind. All week, I listened to Mary Oliver reading her poem “Wild Geese” on YouTube, repeating these words to myself like a mantra:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
This is essentially the thesis of this very newsletter!
🪧 Hot Strike Summer: August Edition
Also this week, the TV writer Sera Gamble shared some of her own poetry on Instagram, and it moved me:
And speaking of dads and labor rights, my own father was a force in the ongoing WGA battle this week, urging teachers pension funds to re-evaluate their investments with AMPTP signatories in light of the strikes.
CTPF trustee and former Chicago Public School teacher Jay Rehak also spoke before the board […] “I believe there is a national movement afoot by other pension funds around the country to reassess their positions with these companies,” said Rehak.
Go, Dad!
💍 Always a wedding guest, never a screaming witness during that “Speak now or forever hold your peace” moment.
The romcom character I most relate to is Sandra Bullock at the start of While You Were Sleeping, when she imagines a fake relationship with a man she has never met while languishing in a CTA station. I too constantly fight the urge to interrupt wedding ceremonies simply because I think it would be cool and funny to object. Thank you for continuing to invite me to your weddings in spite of this character flaw.
Many of my closest friends and family have chosen a married lifestyle, which is hard to fault when you consider that women fare much better economically when hitched to men, and men fare much better emotionally when partnered at all. Given my own life choices, however, I’m obliged to add that women fare best psychologically and physiologically when childfree and unmarried.
This newsletter is about my obsessions, and not my increasing panic about spinsterhood, so I won’t get further into how I feel about all this beyond saying that being a wedding guest is the only time I ever feel like a glamorous supporting character in another person’s movie, and that is why I love weddings like Oprah loves bread. While I not-so-secretly think of weddings as funerals for friendships, I do actually love when my friends and family are happy.
The number of ceremonies I’ve attended recently surpassed the 27 Dresses threshold, and that’s including two I was deeply honored to officiate. (I’d be even prouder of this fun fact if it weren’t for my friend Audrey Jonas, a comic who is so expert in the art of wedding guesting that she now offers classes in writing and delivering toasts, vows, and officiating. An icon!)
☮️ Tiny Notes:
Internet song of the summer “Planet of the Bass” (IN FULL) blessed us with its glory on Tuesday. My friend Lushia called Kyle Gordon an industry plant, but I don’t even mind if he is. Tell the world, stop the war! is a message worth blasting.
@elmcee is one of my favorite Instagram accounts, curating the best tweets and mutual aid resources around.
My sister’s music video directorial debut came out this week, and it’s so good! Colors for Colors is the band, Heartache is the song, our friend Zach who famously does not subscribe to this newsletter shot it, and my human sister Hannah Rehak directed it. Our friend Will even managed keep my folks’ cameo in the edit, if you can spot them:
Talk to you next week.
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