CAKE FOR BREAKFAST: 30-50 hogs ate my small children
Things have been hard and sad and hard in the world at large lately. Sometimes I wonder how people manage the low hum of anxiety that comes with staying informed and being proactive and uh...being a citizen in a country with disproportionately high rates of gun violence.
Here's how I've been coping: Drinking a glass of water. Contacting my reps. (5Calls.org and Resist.bot make it super easy.) Taking a few breaths. Donating to Everytown. If it helps, you can do the same. Then, come join me for dessert.
SOMETHING I ATE WITH MY MOUTH My life is Dot's Homestyle Pretzels now. They are twisty little pretzel sticks coated in some salty, savory seasoning that caters to me specifically. They taste like Gardetto's but just pretzels. (That will make sense if you, like me, subsisted on Gardetto's and canned Strawberry Kiwi Snapple for most of middle school.) If they sold the seasoning on its own, it'd put it in everything: popcorn, these garlic knots, french fries, an IV injected straight to my veins.
SOMETHING I ATE WITH MY EYES I did an extremely professional thing in last week's newsletter by just...not finishing it? I started talking about Swiped on Netflix which "stars" Noah Centineo. ("Stars" is in quotes because he is very much not the protagonist despite what the Netflix thumbnail algorithm wants you to believe.) Noah Centineo is a 23-year-old actor who looks like if the heart eyes emoji, a "Hey Girl" meme, and a bad guitar serenade had a hot son. He's what you imagined your high school crush looked like (but not what he actually looked like) and has Nice Fuckboi Energy. Like, he'd insist on shaking your dad's hand before he took you on a date where he fully intended on ghosting you afterward.
I got distracted by Noah Centineo's boyish good looks that are somehow both approachable and unattainable and forgot to finish telling you about Swiped. It is, by most measures, a bad movie. The lighting is strange. The camera work is confusing. Scenes are shot in locations they either got for free or managed to sneak into while no one was looking. These are not things I tend to pay attention to in movies because they're usually good or at least not distracting. Most of the movie has big, bad improv energy and the parts that are scripted are obviously so. There are uncomfortable party scenes with too few extras! There is a part at the end that is unexpectedly Christian! There is! A dedication! At the end of the film! To the director/screenwriter's late parents!!! It is the exact kind of visual trash I love to ingest on a weeknight. Don't watch it except please do.
The only other piece of cinematography that matters right now is this minute-long video of a boyfriend (drunk) sliding his girlfriend (also drunk) a Cheez-It under the bathroom door, asking her if she is okay and whether she "sees the Cheez-It." It is love. It is romance. It is synonymous of the kind of behavior I exude whilst inebriated in a bathroom. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is grabbing the Cheez-It, please.
SOMETHING I ATE WITH MY...SKIN? I have a disease in which I can't go to Target without buying many, many single-use face masks. Please help. My family is dying. My current favorite is this $4 Soap & Glory Pore-Refining Mask. I like to sit on the couch in a robe while my face tingles/burns. "Yep," I say while staring dead-eyed at Riley in my sheet masked face. "It's working." If you love to live vicariously through other people's beauty routines, I recommend comedian Cat Cohen's piece on Into The Gloss. We live. We laugh. We j'dore.
SOMETHING I ATE WITH MY BIG, BIG BRAIN Jia Tolentino's Grub Street Food Diary. My body and brain are forever hungry for Jia content, and you are out of your mind if you don't think that, after reading this diary, I promptly added "rigatoni to fuck in the ass" to my grocery list.
This Bitches Gotta Eat blog post by Samantha Irby in which she talks about pissing her pants, chronic illness, and poses the beautiful, sad, and perfect mantra: "With all of the evidence you've gathered for this experiment otherwise known as life on this dying ball of garbage, would you choose this again?"
This blog in GQ by Gabrielle Paiella about why everyone is on Twitter is talking about "30-50 feral hogs." (Spoiler: it is incited by a tweet on gun control. The internet is buck fucken wild.)
SOMETHING I MADE FOR YOU TO EAT Here are a few pieces I wrote for Bustle last week:
A blog on what your state's residents are called. "Utahn" fucked me right up.
This tutorial on how to delete your old LiveJournal. You better do it before I use my internet snooping skills for evil and find out who you loved in 10th grade.
A plea for someone to please, please adopt these puppies named after Taco Bell items. Bellegrande! Fiesta potato! DORITOS LOCOS! I die.
I also made this piece of fine art for Twitter/no one.
Stay hungry, my sons.
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