One of my former bosses was, among her many talents, a master of laying out a communications rollout: the sequence of events by which a piece of news emerges into the world. I thought of her often as I tried to put out last week’s post in the right order, to the right people, on the right platforms, in a proper sequence, that made sense, and didn’t offend anyone, and obeyed the hierarchies of Who Gets To Know What When.
I probably failed. But 🤷🏻
I’ll say this: the last three or four months have been a real blur, emotionally. Clarifying my gender identity while cresting the first hill of a nascent career swap… maybe not the best activities to pursue simultaneously. I had some really spectacular highs and some real can’t-get-out-of-bed days. It’s all fine! I’m fine! But it was a real reckoning with how much destabilization the Self can take in a confined period before the paint on the walls starts to drip and bleed.
Might be time to start a newsletter
Furthering the profound sense of strangeness and displacement of the past little while: I subscribe to a lot of (?1) newsletters, and since I don’t actually want to drop what I’m doing and read them right at the moment they arrive, nor do I want a particularly overloaded inbox, I tend to filter them straight to a “READ ME!” folder that I can peruse at my leisure.
In the summer, I’m finding that “my leisure” means later, in a big way. In the winter, when it’s colder and I’m taking more baths, I am prone to perusing the Read Me folder every couple of days; in the summer, I might only go in there every three or four weeks.
Which means, in a particularly cuckoobananapants month like July, I got to experience the entire cuckoobananapants news cycle twice.
DID YOU GUYS KNOW that in the space of like maybe a total of twenty days, Trump got shot, Biden dropped out, Kamala surged ahead, Elon Musk declared his daughter dead, the Republicans became weird, JD Vance proved it by fucking a couch, and JK Rowling comitted libel against an athlete who could beyond question turn her into Nearly Headless TERF with a single shot… and those were just the big ones???
Of course you did. But there is a hell of an emotional differential between experiencing that blinding assault in real time, and re-litigating it at a remove in the space of a couple of hours over a cup of coffee on the balcony, now that the weather has (finally! mercifully!) started to turn towards the One True Season, fall.
Anyway, all this to say2, I think the pilot project has succeeded, and that with ~ten weeks of regular posts in the bank, I can safely commit to starting a newsletter one of these days. By which I mean, I have accepted that the Modes Of The Universe have moved on, and that asking readers to occasionally remember to pop into this blog to read my work is just not Concurrent with the times that we’re in. You don’t want pull, you want push. Well, that’s fine.
I’ll check out ghost.io in the next week or so and will ideally let you know when and where you can sign up. It’ll basically be: anything marked “blog” hits your inbox instead of you having to go search for it. Yay for progress!
Proving how good I am at this, here are a couple links I forgot to post when I wanted to post them (but they’re still great)
- “We are at war with our nature, and nature will win.” The late Hilary Mantel — whose Cromwell trilogy I absolutely inhaled last summer — wrote about royal bodies over a decade ago, but on this page you can hear her read it, and it’s wonderful. (London Review of Books)
- 34 Useful Reminders to Energize Your Morning. (Strategy for Life)
- Ok, here’s a new one: this week’s Culture Study podcast, on the insidious tradwife cult, is a must-listen. As usual, because of the “this is about more than what it’s about” thing. (Culture Study)
- While we’re on the subject, Joe Adalian’s Disney podcast has been rocking my week. (Vulture)