I’m eating my dessert first, and starting with my conclusion. If you’re an individual who wants to do Get Out the Vote work, but you aren’t sure which method is most effective?
Do whichever one you want.
If you’re a campaign organizer, it’s a lot more complicated. (In short: Read the book I’m reviewing here, it really gets into the nitty-gritty.) But if you’re a volunteer trying to maximize your impact? Do the method you want. Phone calls, texting, writing postcards, door-to-door canvassing — all of them work, none of them is a magic bullet, and if you judge by how many votes you’ll get out for every hour you spend, they’re all more or less comparable. I’ll get to specifics in a sec, but the basic message is: Do what works for you.
Content note: pet death. Please don’t offer consolation about afterlives or souls: we don’t believe in that and find those ideas deeply distressing.
Our cat Talisker died yesterday, Thursday December 28 2023.
Talisker (a.k.a. Tali), named after the Scotch whisky, was sweet and persnickety, stand-offish and affectionate, demanding and loving. She wanted things her way: she wanted laps to be exactly horizontal, she wanted skritches exactly how she wanted them and expected us to figure it out. She would often sit on our laps, demand intense attention for five minutes, then wander off. But she was almost always in the same room as us. She loved us and liked us and wanted our company, sometimes on our laps or at our feet, sometimes from a few feet away. When she did settle in on you for a long stretch, she really blissed out, and it was special: it meant she deeply loved you and trusted you. Ingrid was her extra special person, and she sat with Ingrid a lot: I was her second-favorite human, and I felt it as a great honor.
And Talisker loved her sister Comet, wildly and ridiculously. The two of them were an extraordinary bonded pair, especially considering how different they were. Comet is a high-intensity cat, super playful and affectionate, with a constant need for activity and absolutely no boundaries. It was clear that Talisker sometimes found her annoying, but she had nearly infinite patience with her sister, and the two of them snuggled and played together for hours every day. (We sometimes called them the Two-Headed Tabby Monster.) Comet misses her terribly, and we miss Team Tabby almost as much as we miss Talisker for her own self.
Talisker had cancer for over a year and a half: we gave her treatment that worked well for quite a while, but then it stopped working. We tried a stronger chemo but it didn’t take, and we made the hard decision to have her euthanized. She died at home with us, safe and warm and loved. We love her and we miss her.
Again, please don’t offer consolation about afterlives or souls. We don’t believe in that and find those ideas deeply distressing. Thanks.
(Please note comment policy at end. Content note: weight loss, weight regain, with discussion of specific weight loss methods.)
I lost weight the right way.
I lost the weight slowly, about a pound a week. I cut my daily calories — but not drastically. I counted calories — but I didn’t stress about getting them exactly right.* I dialed up my exercise — but not to an extreme. I enjoyed food, ate yummy things, and didn’t go hungry. I didn’t go on any fad diets or crash diets; I talked with my doctor first, and got info from reputable health care sources. I had a support system. My motivation was a specific health concern: I had trouble with my knees and feet, I wanted to alleviate the stress on them. And the weight I stopped at wasn’t super thin.
If there’s a “right” way to intentionally lose weight, a method that’s healthy with a good chance of success, this was it.
And I still gained all the weight back.
In fact, I gained all the weight back — and then some.
We saw Paul the other night. Buddy comedy: two best friends from England (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, of Shaun of the Dead fame) visit the U.S. for ComicCon, go on a road trip, and meet a chill, foul-mouthed space alien. Pretty good movie. Cute, funny, crass in a mostly good way, predictable in some places but very original in others. Lots of creative swearing. A good time.
Except for the “no homo” bullshit — the running jokes about how everyone thinks the main characters are gay and it freaks them the fuck out. The movie even used the F-word, more than once: no, not that F-word, the other one, the anti-gay slur. It was jarring, it was exhausting, it was totally unnecessary. So much of the movie was bro-y in a good-natured way, even loving and sweet, and it bugged me that their “nerd-bros don’t have to be reactive shitheads” message didn’t extend to queerness. It almost felt like they had to be heavy-handed with the “no homo” stuff to feel comfortable with the bro-y affection. (The thing came out in 2011, so there’s no excuse.)
And I started thinking: How could they have written this differently?
What if there was a running joke where everyone thinks the main characters are gay — and instead of freaking out, they’re totally used to it by now, and don’t care?
“You can’t judge the past by the standards of the present! It’s not fair. We’ve advanced so much since then. People back then didn’t know better!”
I see the point. But also — no.
Of course we can judge the past by the standards of the present. That’s how we move forward.
We look back, at history or old movies or whatever — and we say, “Wow. That was messed-up. Let’s not do that again.” We read history about slavery and colonization; we watch old movies depicting queers as pitiful and disgusting; we hear old songs that romanticize sexual assault; we see old cowboy shows where Native Americans are shown as savage enemies. We cringe. We cringe so hard it makes our faces turn inside out.
And we say, “That was some fucked-up garbage.” We learn. We pay attention to patterns. We learn how to see bad patterns, in ourselves and our society. We learn how to prevent, how to interrupt, how to intervene, how to resist.
MAJOR spoiler alerts for Good Omens, Seasons 1 and 2. Most of the ideas here were developed in conversation with Ingrid, and many of them are hers to begin with, including the core analysis.
The problem isn’t that it ends on a cliffhanger. Although it’s true that I don’t like that. Not when the next installment is probably years away and hasn’t even been nailed down yet. I think that’s bad writing, cynical and insecure, a breaking of the social contract between creator and audience. If you want people to watch your next installment, make your world and your characters compelling. Sure, leave some doors open, but provide enough closure to make your story feel like a story. As shitty as he is as a human being, Joss Whedon was really good at that with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: every season could have been the last, and it would have been satisfying. And Good Omens Season 1 did this beautifully. It was a lovely, perfect ending, leaving its audience basking in narrative afterglow — and leaving us in eager anticipation of the next round. Season 2 did the opposite of that, and it sucked.
But the cliffhanger thing isn’t a deal-breaker for me. I make exceptions. I cut slack. And even when I hate it, it doesn’t leave me shaking and seething.
And the problem isn’t that Crowley and Aziraphale don’t end up together. I’m okay with that. I adore them as a couple, and I like that this season brought their obvious coupledom out of the closet. But there are other queer love stories in the season that end more or less happily — Gabriel and Beelzebub (Beelzebub is non-binary), Maggie and Nina. I’d be fine if Crowley and Aziraphale’s story had some other creative, unexpected resolution. I don’t need the season to end with them walking off into the sunset. That’s not the problem.
It’s dry-farmed tomato season, which means I’m making big batches of Susie Bright’s roasted tomato sauce. This recipe is amazingly delicious and ridiculously easy — about 10-20 minutes of prep depending on how much you’re making, plus blending at the end. And it freezes really well, so whenever it’s tomato season, we make giant batches of it and freeze it for the winter.
You know that children’s book, Frederic, about the mouse who sits around in the summer gathering words and colors and sun rays to store up for the winter? That’s what this sauce feels like. When winter comes, and it’s been gray and cold and wet for days on end, we stick some tomato sauce in the microwave and put it on pasta, and it feels like pulling a bit of stored summer out of the freezer. And when the sauce is roasting, it fills the house with this ambrosial tomato perfume. We mostly make this to freeze, but we can never resist eating some of it right away, warm out of the oven.
I got the recipe from Susie Bright, and have adapted it over the years. Here’s my version.
I expected the Barbie movie to be enormously fun. It was.
I expected it to be gorgeous, art-directed within an inch of its life, with a look both explosively oversized and finely detailed. It was.
I expected it to be feminist, with a sharp and complex depiction of gender roles and gender expectations. It was.
I even expected it to be surprising, to the degree that you can ever expect to be surprised. And boy, was it surprising. It was a wild rollercoaster ride, an intense mashup of giddiness and sorrow, with unexpected emotional nuance and plot turns that came out of left field.
What I didn’t expect was a powerful humanist view of death.
Since the federal indictment of Donald Trump, I see a lot of political commenters beating their breasts about his hypocrisy, how he’s spouted the language of law and order while flagrantly breaking the law and acting as if he’s above it. And yes, it’s hypocritical as fuck.
But the concept of “law and order” has been around for a long time. And it has never, ever, actually meant that.
For decades, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, public figures espousing “law and order” have shown a deep indifference towards the law. They think it doesn’t apply to them. They think they can break it with impunity, in the name of “national security” or “traditional values.” If they don’t break the law themselves, they support and even glorify when law enforcement officers flagrantly, violently break it.
With the adult tricycle, the entire way I do grocery shopping has changed.
When I got the trike, the main thing I wanted to do with it was get groceries. The trike has a nice big cargo basket — it’s one of the main advantages over a bicycle — and I pictured myself like a quirky character in a movie, toodling around the neighborhood with grocery bags in the basket, a baguette and a bouquet of flowers poking decoratively out of the top. (Never mind the fact that I don’t like baguettes and we can’t have flowers because the cats will eat them.)
It is, weirdly, kind of like that. Life imitates art, sometimes. Except for the part where I’m still building my strength and stamina, and when the trike’s loaded with heavy groceries it can be a struggle. Sometimes I’m the cute old dyke on the tricycle gliding around the neighborhood saying Hi to people — and sometimes I’m the fat old lady straining and puffing to get up a two percent incline. It’s fine.