Hello, friends. Or should I say hell, friends? How are you doing? Have you also been sucked into the banjaxed abyss where all hopes and plans are scuppered on arrival? Are you also sleeping not great? Like the kind of sleep where you black out exhausted, fork over your passport to the gate agent in the Land of Dreams, only to arrive at the horror movie parody of your intended destination? Or are you dreaming, like I am, of a human circus peanut clambering through your window and then refusing to go away? What do you do when you wake up from this nightmare? Do you immediately decamp to your favored disaster YouTube channel, the one where the guy with the pleasing British accent lulls you back to sleep with tales of imploding deep-sea vessels? Or do you scroll through r/torties jealously wishing that your own stupid tortie looked more like the glint of a precious fire opal at an impossible midnight sunrise than a busted-ass black Datsun in need of $7 worth of Bondo?
Here is where I admit I’ve been indulging in some nostalgia. Hear me out: as long as you’re not basing policy on it, nostalgia can be a good thing if it reminds you of a time when you personally were happier or better in some way; i.e., it is not a national strategy. We don’t always get better as we age, whether you are a person or an idea! Sometimes, we get worse, and one thing I was much better at in my maidenhood was eating healthy and spending about eleven dollars a week on groceries, which adjusted for inflation is probably ten million dollars, so I have trotted out my hippie vegan cookbooks to prepare for some good old austerity spite eating. Hello, carob brownies! Hello, lentil loaf!*
To continue the 90s theme, next to my computer are two bound volumes of Time Magazine from November/December 1994 and January/February 1995. Yes, I promise I am working on this dumb book, and I mainly say for the benefit my childhood-now-middle-aged-woman friend Katie who I’ve invited to bully me into success, and who accepted the invitation suspiciously fast. This book, however, I do not want to be an exercise in nostalgia because a lot of how we ended up in this one-star vaudeville show is rooted in exactly that time period, the mid-90s, and it’s disheartening, to say the least, to again read in my early dotage the same gee-whiz commentary on the radical right that alarmed me as a teenager thirty years ago.
Speaking of writing projects! At long last, I am officially in thesis proposal mode. Tentative title: Is It Hot In Here, Or Is It Just Me?: Menopause in the US Workplace. Public Health Implications and Policy Recommendations. Though honestly, part of me feels like finishing my MPH at this point in history is like setting a fat stack of cash** on fire, and I’m inclined toward channeling Betty Draper post–terminal lung cancer diagnosis:
Incidentally, I misremembered Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” in the background of this scene (which is from the finale of Mad Men in case you have been living under a rock for the last 20 years), so down the rabbit hole I went and found this extremely haunting rendition by PJ Harvey and John Parish that I feel is very appropriate for our times:
That’s all for now. Please do the right thing, friends, whatever that is.
*Had to pause and see how much of our lentil supply was imported from Canada. Fun times!
**Will we even be using cash at this point next year, or will all our transactions be made in griftcoin?