cold week

everything I watched and read whilst sick in bed

I’m just coming back from a terrible cold that began with exhaustion and turned into one week of sinus turmoil and the most painful sneezes of my life. When I’m sick, I try to just be in the season of sickness and let the soft animal of my body sleep and watch bad TV. So that’s what I did. I thought it would be fun to share the highlights.

this is me, but it’s also Cookie Monster when he tried to quit cookies

Things that healed me in my season of snot:

• This recipe for soft pretzels. The instructions say to fold 32 distinct pretzels but I didn’t have the energy, so I just made 12 big pretzels and they turned out great.

• Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a novel about a single mom who starts an OnlyFans account. This was an especially good week for a triumphant underdog story, and this book is equal parts funny and devastating. I will be reading everything by Rufi Thorpe now.

• Under the influence of a powerful weed gummy, I sent myself an email with no body, just the subject line: REDISCOVER THE BOOK AS AN OBJECT. I almost only read on a Kindle and I’m constantly rediscovering that sitting at a table and flipping through a book, especially a cookbook, is the greatest activity ever.

• My dog, Louis, hates winter. He refuses to go outside if it’s snowing or below 10 degrees, and has trained me to cover him with a blanket whenever possible. He recently developed the ability to move about the house and relocate his resting spots while keeping his blanket on. I keep covering him in one locale and then finding him in somewhere else, blanket intact. Talent!!

  

  I left my sick bed for ten minutes and came back to this on top of my heating pad. Note the plaid blanket he transported from down the hall. How the sock got on his head is a mystery.

• I finally watched Severance on Apple TV, which is an office sci-fi show set in an alternate near-future where employees can opt to have a device implanted in their brains that allows them to go to work and disassociate entirely. Liz has been a huge Severance fan from the beginning, but I really struggled to get into it— most of the first season is just zany visuals and world-building, and I was rearing to solve the mystery already. Things start happening at the end of season 1 and now I’m very into it. Feels good to have a weekly watch again.

• While sick, I went deep into Rajiv Surendra’s YouTube channel. Rajiv is the actor who played Kevin G in the original Mean Girls movie. He’s now a full-time gay guy and potter who loves antiquing, cooking Tamil cuisine, and living a structured, beautiful domestic life. I can’t promise he’s never annoying, but his lifestyle videos are so sincere and non-commercial you can’t hold it against him. See: “Shopping for Tamil Groceries and Making a Vegetarian Curry Feast”

  

  I would watch this man do anything

Things that made my cold worse:

For all their wacky and wild politics, Liz and I are fascinated with Yellowstone and the extended Taylor Sheridan television universe. Periodically, we allow ourselves to enter one of his patriarchal worlds filled with gratuitous violence, abusive workplaces, and incredibly horny women and let it wash over us like rain. In Landman, which is out now on Paramount+, Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy, the titular “land man” for a small oil company in West Texas. Tommy is besieged by his ex-wife (Ali Larter), who’s plotting to get him back after many years with another man, and his son, who wants a job in the oil fields despite Tommy’s best efforts to send him to college. His daughter is “hotter than a $2 Rolex“ and is always in her underwear or a cartoonishly tiny bathing suit, doing overly sexualized workouts in front of Tommy and his friends (the character is supposed to be 17, the actress who plays her is 27.)

Tommy spends most of the show commenting on his own and other people’s follies with folksy metaphors-- “Honey, I think our marriage’s got an ice cube’s chance in hell of working out!“--and dispensing hardscrabble wisdom to everyone from Mexican drug lords to anti-fracking environmentalists and grieving Gen Z widows. The best way I can describe this character, and the general vibe of Landman, is that this is what old, out-to-pasture men think they sound like when they mansplain or correct someone using one factoid they heard on Fox News. For all his brovado, Tommy is intelligent and cares deeply for his friends and family. A common observation about Taylor Sheridan shows is that they’re not especially well-written, but they attract amazing actors who can do a lot with mere scraps. Billy Bob Thornton is so good in Landman, so is Ali Larter. Deeply watchable, but you will want to take a shower after.

I’m working late cause I’m a land man

After finishing the first season of Landman, Liz and I turned to another streaming western—American Primeval on Netflix, which is 6 hours of people getting maimed and murdered in sepia tones. Set in 1857, Betty Gilpin plays Sarah, a woman who kills her abusive husband and absconds westward with her young son. When Sarah and her son arrive in Wyoming, their plan is to continue on to Utah but it’s almost winter and none of the available guides want to help her. Luckily, Sarah meets a hunky mountain man named Mr. Reed (Taylor Kitsch from Friday Night Lights) who seems cagey and dangerous, but is actually just sad. Other men in this show are actually cagey and dangerous, though— like Brigham Young, who American Primeval imagines as a kind of gangster and spiritual hustler. In addition to approaching random Mormom families and telling them to have more children, he abets a Mormon militia in slaughtering a group of pioneers (based on a true story!! some historians consider the Mountain Meadow Massacre to be the first act of domestic terrorism in the U.S.). I respected that American Primeval is just violence-as-entertainment and not trying to say anything about this country, though maybe that is saying something and I just don’t want to hear it. In a small attempt to balance out the gore, the show introduces a kindly army sergeant who keeps a journal and has voiceover moments where he’s literally like, “What if we all stopped fighting and enjoyed nature??“ What if? The Mormon church issued a statement about this show where they were like, Brigham Young was NOT like that!!

me again

Lastly, I read the first half of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon, which is a book all about--you guessed it--depression. This book is massive in scope. There are discussions on everything from depression in literature, how survivors of Pol Pot’s death camps continue living after massive trauma, the world of SSRIs and other anti-depressants, alternative therapies, addiction, what depressed people are like as parents, etc. It was published in 2001 and some language feels dated, though I imagine it was pretty groundbreaking for its time in terms of openly talking about mental health, queerness, how racism affects mental health, etc. It really centers around the author’s and other white, upper class experiences with depression (the author undergoes so many therapies and treatments ranging from EMDR to talk therapy to a traditional healing ceremony in Senegal called a ndeup, at points I wanted to yell, how are you affording all this??), but it’s pretty self-aware of that fact. Definitely a book I will return to when I feel better, if only for the descriptions of depression i.e. “like feeling your clothing slowly turning into wood on your body.“

Anyways, that’s all I have juice for now. Let me know what you’re watching and reading in the comments :) xoxo, gossip maddy