Dinner Diary #4
Cougar Gold cheese, Daisy Jones and the Six, Certain Women, We Were Once a Woman, paint swatches, dog Prozac, and MORE
The end of March/beginning of April were bonkers for me. I was sucked out of my routine by travel, more public speaking than I am comfortable with, and some low-grade family emergencies. I also painted my bedroom, which meant disassembling my apartment and living in chaos for a few days.
Liz went out of town last weekend, so I put on a giant t-shirt and returned to my semi-feral single gal roots. On the way home from my Friday afternoon yoga class, I stopped at the grocery store and picked up 3 pounds of ground turkey, my current favorite hamburger-style protein option. I made a giant pan of enchiladas with Cougar Gold, the world’s greatest shelf-stable cheddar. The enchiladas came out of the oven bubbling in a really satisfying way. I ate them out of a giant bowl with sour cream and hot sauce. Then I used the leftover turkey to make three consecutive days of tacos. I also rediscovered one of my favorite desserts: a bag of frozen peanut M&Ms and a can of Dr Pepper.
To keep myself busy, I finished watching Daisy Jones and the Six, which is a fictionalized rockumentary and drama based on Fleetwood Mac. This show is simply bad—the Behind the Music talking head interviews have an infuriating way of restating exactly what happened in the previous scene, and it feels as if the show doesn’t trust us to understand anything. This show filled me with petty complaints. Namely, the Lindsey Buckingham stand-in is supposed to be in his early 20s, yet he looks 41. I firmly believe that 40s are a hotter decade than 20s, but the series opens when he’s still living at home and hanging around his high school-age brother and friends. There are so many references to his age that I felt gaslit. I guess they didn’t have skincare in the 70s. Everyone was a little more seasoned from chainsmoking and compulsive heterosexually marrying their high school prom date.
The men of Fleetwood Mac wore objectively fruity clothes and here, they’re totally butched up. Daisy shows so much more skin than Stevie Nicks ever would and everything she wears is so 2023—it’s a real Free People catalog shoot. At no point does anyone wear a big weird top hat. Also, Daisy has a baby in the end to signify that she’s healed from substance abuse and her traumatic childhood. There’s really no reason for a baby to be in this show, especially since Stevie Nicks is famously childfree and really outspoken about choosing her career over motherhood. There is, however, a subplot where two Black lesbians fall in love against a backdrop of the 70s disco scene in New York and nothing tragic happens to them. So that’s something?
Liz and I finally watched Certain Women, a movie I reference in conversation on a weekly basis. It’s made up of three loosely related stories set in rural Montana, including one where Kristen Stewart plays an overworked lawyer buckling under the weight of student loans and Lily Gladstone is a lonely rancher who falls in love with her. There are probably fewer than 20 total lines of dialogue, but it fucks me up every time. Lily wordlessly offers Kristen boundless, earth-shattering love and Kristen is too wrapped up in her own misery and self-pitying to see it. A while ago, I recommend Certain Women on my Instagram stories as essential lesbian viewing and not one, but two, people DMed me that they either didn’t finish or thought it was boring. It’s not my fault you cannot appreciate the subtle, minimalist filmmaking of Kelly Reichardt! Get off my porch. Goodbye!!