June First 🌷

on dogs, Mary and George, Facebook in 2024, The Idea of You, please buy my zine

Hi hello, is this thing on? I’m back after taking the past month off to deal with anxiety, housing woes, and a terminal lack of juice. My biggest struggle as a writer is striking a balance between taking myself seriously and taking myself too seriously—like, I need time and space to lay fallow and recharge, but I refuse to plan it ahead of time because I hate myself and don’t think of this as a “real“ job. This is a problem, I know. I’m working on it!!

Here’s what happened in May, plus some shows I watched and things I read. I’m very committed to this newsletter and have so much planned for the weeks ahead: author interviews, queer advice columns, and extended high thoughts about tv shows. There’s a new season of The Ultimatum: Queer Love on the way, though Netflix won’t tell us when exactly. I will recap it, of course. I will recap it so hard.

me on my way to try a new natural, baking soda-free deoderant

Happenings

• I visited the largest organic farm in New England, where I was approached by a confident child and informed that if you took every human alive and put them on one side of a scale and all the bacteria on the other side, the bacteria would weigh more than the humans. Crazy if true!

• Louis got loose and killed a rabbit, or at least I think it was a rabbit? He was shielded from view by tall grass, so I couldn’t see what he was murdering. I was so surprised he managed to catch anything--he is arthritic and older and runs kinda sideways after three expensive knee surgeries--but my neighbor told me that some homesteader-types moved away and released a bunch of meat rabbits into the neighborhood. This is a high Louis will be riding for a long, long time.

  

  he’s mad I described him as “old and not very fast“

• I watched the new season of Hacks and loved it.

• This essay in words and photographs that documents this moment for Palestinian-Americans—> The View from Palestinian America by Zaina Arafat with photography by Kholood Eid

• I keep checking for new episodes of Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), a new podcast by Jaime Loftus about “main characters,“ or, people who achieve viral fame for a short amount of time and then disappear from public view. The first two episodes contain an interview with Antoine Dodson, the man from the 2010 bed intruder song and meme, and I was in TEARS. Everything is so much deeper than it seems.

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Product Corner

Summer is here and my natural, baking soda-free deodorant journey continues. As a night shower-er with a scarcity complex, I use my “good deodorant” if I bathed the night before and my Tom’s of Maine when I haven’t showered. The rationale is that I’m already smelly and I just need to use up the Tom’s of Maine so it doesn’t go to waste. Reader, I bought this Tom’s of Maine during the Trump administration. It is the roll-on kind. It does not work and it will not die. It’s been years and the liquid level has not perceptibly gone down. My children will inherent this deodorant. My children will smell so bad as our climate continues to warm.

I’ve been experimenting my way through a rotation of “good” deodorants, and I’m partial to this spray-on stuff from Ursa Major. Liz is a big fan of the Aesop roll-on “déodorant” (it’s pricy but she argues that one bottle lasts her 6 months, so it’s actually pennies per use, and notes that the “herbal” option is not as effective as the regular kind), but recently ordered a three-pack sampler of Corpus deodorant sticks to try after hearing about it on POOG. I used the cedar one this morning and my pits remained cool and dry through IFS therapy, a spin through the bad grocery store, and some light cleaning. I don’t smell it at all when it’s on, which is a bummer because it smells really nice (I was buying Native deodorant for a second and besides being awfully named and containing baking soda, the scents are just too much).

If you have any hot deodorant takes or recs, let me know. I’m so sweaty.

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TV Time

I made it through five episodes of Mary and George, a show about hanger-ons of King James I, a gay king who ruled England and Scotland from 1603 to 1625 while also loving to fuck. Julianne Moore plays Mary, a destitute widow who strategically pushes her bi son (his name is George and he’s pouty and played by Nicholas Galitzine), into King James’s path and bed.

photo courtesy of Starz

On paper, Mary and George sounds like my kinda television. It’s a period piece about women and queers trying to obtain money and power by any means necessary. Great gowns, beautiful gowns. But the actual experience of watching this show feels like wading through dull, thick gravy—I turn to my girlfriend and ask “Wait, who’s that guy?“ at least 100 times per episode. Like, this is a show about power moving from the margins to the center, but we never really learn how power actually operates within this world. Obviously there are perks to being the boyfriend of a gay king or even the mom of a boyfriend of a gay king, but how will Mary and George’s lives be different once he secures the king’s affections?? How does the court function? What is a privy council? It doesn’t help that George doesn’t have much of a personality-- he’s an animate set of cheekbones who gets dragged into other people’s plots--and Mary is evil in a one-dimensional, predictable way (although she also does gay stuff, which is kind of compelling). The show charges forward at a breakneck pace and is constantly introducing new characters and scandals, and I just wanted to linger with the most important characters and get to know them and their motivations. I give Mary and George three out of five ruffly lace collars.

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I went on Facebook for the first time in basically a decade. I deleted my Facebook in 2015 because my account had existed since my junior year of HIGH SCHOOL and as a Sagittarius, I’m drawn to new beginnings and the concept of a fresh start. I also wanted to make myself slightly more difficult to contact—there are some people you meet once and really want to stay in touch with and then there’s your former co-worker who got called out on Tumblr for stalking and harassing a moderately famous indie musician—and it was the latter who was always messaging me!! You also have to understand that Facebook was my primary social media at the dawn of the 2010s, and my friends and I used it in the most annoying, maximalist way possible. Kids today will never understand having an entire conversation via wall posts, or making a fan page for your best friend. We were also really into sneaking on to each other’s computers and changing the profile picture to the IKEA monkey or writing funny statuses and tagging ourselves. We called this “hacking.“

I did not miss Facebook after deleting it. I refused to go back, even when I wanted to foster a puppy and the rescue told me that the only way to volunteer was to join their closed Facebook group (I just went out and adopted a dog because who am I kidding?)

Recently, there was scandal and intrigue in my corner of rural Vermont and it was all playing out on Facebook. Liz generously and lovingly granted me access to her semi-dormant account (she will tell you she only logs on to look at Marketplace [editor’s note: this is true]). I checked it multiple times a day for a week. I was prepared for Facebook to be a super ugly Walmart circular, but I wasn’t prepared for all the AI. Liz’s feed is filled with so many baffling, grotesque images with thousands upon thousands of likes and comments. Also, photo-shopped pictures of Keanu Reeves wearing gun rights t-shirts? Recipes for root beer-flavored protein shakes? I had fun with all the weird stuff, but I knew it was time to log out when I felt the urge to look up everyone I’ve ever known.

bread will disappear as soon as you like the photo

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I watched The Idea of You, a romcom starring Anne Hathway as Solène, a mom and gallerist who has an affair with a member of a One Direction-coded boy band (Nicholas Galitzine, again!!) whose name is like Brick or something. They both love art, and are compatible in the way where he has enough money to buy all the wacky vases in her gallery. Another reason they are compatible is that age is JUST a number. Soléne never got to be young because she had a baby in her early 20s, and Brick never got to be young because he joined a successful boy band as a teenager.

There’s a scene where Soléne orders room service cookies after getting railed in a nice hotel bed and is all tehehehehehee about it which I found so depressing. Like, I had to watch a movie to be presented with this fantasy? Let women eat cookies in bed. Let women be 40. After much deliberation, I will allow this movie.

Thank you so much to everyone who ordered Choose Your Own Dykeventure: Country Living, the follow-up to the Choose Your Own Dykeventure zine. I was able to cover a big chunk of Louis’s vet bills, and donate $500 to Palestine Legal and $100 to Gaza Funds. This zine is still very much for sale and I’ll continue to donate 10% of sales to Gaza Funds. I would absolutely love to send you 1 to 1,000 copies of print lesbian content via snail mail.

someone said this gave them “big feelings about being a dyke in rural America“