things i am watching and/or reading and/or listening to instead of doing my work
"oh shit it's the holidays?" edition
that’s mental by amanda rosenberg
amanda has bipolar 2 and is the most blisteringly funny mentally ill person i have ever had the pleasure of knowing, and i say that as a person with lifelong crushing mental illness who also writes jokes! it is not in my best personal and business interests to be complimentary to this bitch!!!!!!! that said, this “candid and deeply revealing look into mental illness is filled with confessional essays about the inappropriate, devastating, and strangely amusing side to being mentally ill” and it’s so fucking good, especially if you listen to the audiobook, which amanda reads herself. she’s got a gorgeous british accent, which automatically makes her sound smart, and i love to listen to a person read their own jokes. i am currently in the middle of the most frustrating writer’s block and can’t get myself out of it, and my current strategy to try and wake up my brain has been to read essays by women i admire (“see! writing things is possible! go to your computer and press more than the space bar, this lady did it!”) and i’ve been listening to amanda’s book all week and now i’m scared to write because it won’t be this great. spend one of those audible credits!!! i know you have some!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
my weird christmas! holiday playlist
now when i say weird i don’t mean upsetting. i mean, like, both bob dylan and the o’jays occupy space on this shit. you gotta be, ahem, real liberal and open-minded with your music preferences to get into it. i’m not kidding, it’s got al jarreau and lou rawls and herb alpert but also……………….i just added a kinks song? caveats aside, it bangs. i’m sorry i can’t help being the kind of visionary who appreciates the beach boys and mahalia jackson!!!!! mighty blue kings and barbra streisand? chet baker and death cab?? carlos vives and kelly price??? tori amos and nate dogg????? stop playing with me, man. here’s the spotify link again if you want it, and please listen on shuffle because i only make playlists when i’m fucking stoned and if you listen straight through? you can tell.
the 2021 hater’s guide to the williams-sonoma catalog
it bears repeating, yet again, that i love drew magary with the fire of a thousand suns. he’s just so damn funny. i will purchase any- and everything he ever writes and subscribe to whatever i have to to read his work. the hater’s guide this year is as good as it always is. what kind of sorcerer is this dude!
gabriels bloodline and love and hate in a different time
i love somber-ass melodramatic-ass funeral dirge-ass music and this is that but also with beautiful orchestral arrangements (i love a timpani in a pop song) and singing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slow burn: the l.a. riots
telling people what podcasts you listen to always feels so strangely intimate, like telling someone what kind of porn you watch (DILFs jerking off while being gently pegged) and waiting to tell you how dumb (or revolting!) you are. seriously, when someone asks what podcasts i listen to i just automatically respond “this american life, and that’s it” so i don’t have to watch their face contort in horror while i stammer “uhh…wellllll…do you know who new jersey housewife danielle staub is? ‘prostitution whore’?” and their eyes glaze over. anyway slow burn is always good and informative but this season is especially riveting? always humbling to listen to a chronicle of events i thought i understood only to realize i didn’t actually know shit.
this business insider list of the best thrillers of 2021, as chosen by total idiots
so here’s the thing: i try to read the highbrow lists, i really do. okay yes it’s more of a “skim” than a thorough read, but still. I TRY. anyway, i clicked on the new yorker’s best books of the year and the first recommendation was a 928 (!!!!!!!) page biography of charles de gaulle and i am so sorry, BUT: you have got to be fucking kidding me if you think i’m gonna keep scrolling through the rest of that list??? i appreciate the obvious hard work and painstaking research the author must have done to get this behemoth to print and my beef isn’t with him or even with the new yorker itself, my problem is that why is there no equivalent list for a dumbass who just wants to read about monsters and crime shit? the end-of-year “best of” movie lists are guilty of this, too; i wanna know what movies came out that have the most cool violence, they wanna tell me about “films” with “subtitles” that are “very long” and “mucho boring.” this business insider list was populated using goodreads ratings and reviews, which means it’s a bunch of books that stupids like me enjoyed, and i cannot wait to read every single one of them.
9-1-1 on fox
everything about this show is implausible. how did so many impossibly attractive firefighters end up on the same team? how do these same firefighters end up receiving every single weird call in the city of los angeles?? how can jennifer love hewitt’s character be considered good at her operator job when she’s so busy weeping all the goddamn time??? I DON’T KNOW AND I DON’T CARE. i have seen every episode of every season of this stupid ass show, some more than once!!!, and i will never stop watching it. ever. i just googled “the dumbest episodes of 9-1-1” for a laff and received a single answer in return: all of them. and it doesn’t fucking matter! it’s an incredible show!! this is what 90% of television should be like!!! here’s a vulture listicle my pal lindsey wrote called the 15 most bizarre 911 calls on fox’s 9-1-1 and it’s wild as hell but the show is so outrageous she couldn’t even find room for the episode when a girl jumps out of her man’s bathroom window because she was embarrassed she took a huge shit and broke his toilet during their romantic date!!!!!!!!! who’s writing this, me!??!!?! it is absolutely ridiculous, AND YET. i refuse to look away! also, the disbelief i have to suspend to swallow the storyline that angela bassett and peter krause are madly in love with each other is so great it nearly causes me physical pain, but individually they are so damn hot that it’s worth the strain on my nerves.
“where are we going?” marvin gaye
this is a perfect song. if i was stranded on a desert island, before i walked into the surrounding body of water with the largest island rocks i could find stuffed in my pockets this is the song i would want serenading me in my headphones. this is the perfect driving in the car song, the perfect peeling potatoes for lunch song, the perfect singing to yourself while scrubbing the toilet song. anytime you want to be in an incrementally better mood, this is your jam. my move lately is to sit in my special chair alone in the dark, incense smoldering, bathed in the soft lights flickering on the christmas tree, with marvin’s perfect falsetto crooning on repeat from the speaker as i pretend it’s 1973 and i’ve never heard of the internet.
a few vegetarian cookbooks
cool beans by joe yonan
the weekday vegetarians by jenny rosenstrach
grist by abra berens
i had to start seeing a nutritionist this year, which is a thing i will maybe write about in this book i’m currently not working on that is due in a week, and the main takeaways from our sessions are:
1 i have to eat breakfast every day and
2 i have to be vegetarian
as an avowed dessertarian this wasn’t the devastating emotional blow one might expect. karen, my food doctor (???), said “you’re taking this extremely well. some people start crying.” first of all she should just say “men,” and second i love a goddamn beefy hot dog but not so much that i’d cry to a stranger about it? the breakfast thing is hard because i have a problem getting up and literally never do so with the kind of gusto or enthusiasm that an arduous task like preparing a morning meal requires, but the only difficult thing about finding a way around carnivorous cooking is not resorting to pasta all the time. so i bought these cookbooks because i love a cookbook, man. i love looking at foodstyling and tablescapes and all that buttery shit plus, and this might be controversial, i enjoy reading all the stories that are like “the first time i banged my husband i made him this mushroom and fontina strudel afterward” or whatever. everybody gets so tight about scrolling past the recipe story to get to the ingredient list but i wanna know about your journey to get your toddler to start liking peas!!! THAT STUFF IS FUN. anyway, we’re eating a shitload of beans and farro around here lately. my car now smells mostly like farts.
merry merry, happy happy.