the love/hate list (vol. 4)

In the spirit of life’s eternal equilibrium, once in a while I like to collect a little list of what’s currently keeping me alive, and what’s actively ruining my life.

Because balance! Because duality! Because being a person means delighting in a Korean cleansing balm one minute and losing your shit (literally) over bagged lettuce the next!

*Note: I get zero kickbacks for any of my purchasable recommendations here. That’s how you know I really love them.

Here we go:

In my experience, there are pretty much only two kinds of books that make you cry: the ones that are trying to, and the ones that get you while you're busy laughing at something else. The Sane One is the second kind, and it’s a much harder trick to pull off, and Anna Konkle — co-creator of PEN15, which remains, I will die on this hill, one of the best shows ever made — does it on nearly every page. I've never met Anna, but I've known her orbit for years. Between the theater and entertainment world, we have a handful of mutual friends, the same ones who turned me onto PEN15, a show I can't stop revisiting because it's like watching a perfect and somewhat painful home video of my childhood. After that, I made the very reasonable decision to consume anything she ever made, sight unseen. So I picked up her memoir already on her side, and she delivered. I haven’t stopped thinking about this book for months.

It's a coming-of-age story about being the stable one in a family that needed one — about loving a parent, losing them to their own chaos, and whether there's enough time to find your way back. I devoured it. The comedy and the devastation aren’t taking turns here, they’re holding hands, and it’s an incredibly rare and singular feat. She pulls it off without once making you feel manipulated, which is astounding. She'll get you laughing and then, before you've recovered, she's got you somewhere much rawer, and you didn't see the hallway between the two rooms because there wasn't one. It was always the same room.

Read it. Or listen to the audiobook (highly recommend, particularly for the chapter where she auditions for the musical theater program at NYU.) Then find me so we can discuss it, because I have simply not been able to stop.

We just got back from Lake Arrowhead with some of our closest friends, and for the first time, our kids were actually with each other. Not just in proximity, which is what the early years mostly are, but they were playing, finding each other, and collectively losing their minds over a nine-month-old as if he was a very small, chunky, drooling celebrity.

I should note that “together” at this age has a loose definition that includes throwing another child’s crayons on the floor, breaking one, and feeling completely unbothered about it. My two-year-old’s relationship with sharing, personal space, and apologies remains aspirational at best. But we’ll get there. The beautiful part of all this is that these kids didn’t choose each other. We chose each other first, years ago, before any of them existed. And now we’ve somehow made a whole new generation of them. I find that almost unbearably wonderful, even with the crayon-breaking.

One of the primary reasons I don’t wear much makeup is that I hate the process of removing it. The wipes that irritate, the cleansers that don’t do shit, the cotton pads accumulating on my bathroom counter— it’s all historically felt like punishment for the crime of having had a face that day.

This balm has solved that problem so completely and effortlessly that I’m a little annoyed it took me this long to find it. It dissolves everything, it rinses clean, and it does not leave you feeling like you’ve buttered your face, which is a bigger deal than it sounds.

Full disclosure: I have a small producing credit on this show, which means I’m not a neutral party and you should factor that in accordingly. What I can tell you is that I would be writing this even if I didn’t.

Stassi Schroeder and her producers Erin Foye and Jenna Rosenfeld have figured out something nobody else has: the fourth wall is a resource to be spent rather than a problem to be solved. House of Stassi is a show about Stassi and her friends and family, and it is also, simultaneously, a show about the making of a show about Stassi and her friends and family — and rather than that being a gimmick, it turns out to be the thing that makes it feel more real than reality television has felt in years. The form has been exhausted. Everyone knows the cameras are there. These women decided to just say so, and the result is something that feels less like a reality show and more like being let all the way in.

The bag says to let them thaw for fifteen minutes before eating, which is an impossible ask. I’ve tried, in the sense that I’ve placed them in a bowl and then eaten them immediately out of the bowl, which is not the same thing as waiting but feels adjacent to it and I refuse to be judged.

But the instructions are there for good reason. Fifteen minutes in, the chocolate gets a yielding, almost creamy texture, and the raspberry inside softens into the best version of itself. I know this because I’ve occasionally made it to the five-minute mark and noticed significant improvement and extrapolated. But the fully frozen version is also delicious, which is the real trap: there is no bad time to eat a TruFru. Thawed is better. Frozen is immediate. I will continue eating them frozen and feeling wistful about the person I could have been if I had more patience and better impulse control.

Every summer I try to eat better, and every summer something happens to make that complicated (usually ice cream). This summer it’s cyclospora, a parasite currently tearing through 45 states via contaminated fresh produce — bagged salads, leafy greens, fresh herbs, raspberries — causing what health officials have, with admirable commitment to accuracy, been calling “explosive diarrhea.”

I want to eat my vegetables. I have a child I’m supposed to be modeling healthy habits for. But I’m also a woman who has read the words “explosive diarrhea parasite” in multiple news headlines and can’t unread them. Summer is peak salad season — the one time of year I feel vibrantly enthusiastic about a bowl of greens — and instead I’m standing in the produce aisle having an internal crisis over a bag of arugula. The TruFru raspberries are frozen, which kills the parasite (I think?). I’m choosing to take that as a sign.

I’m sure you already know this but flying has become an absolutely ridiculous gambit. The prices aren’t even numbers anymore, they’re basically just an airline asking how badly you actually want to see the people you love and then charging you accordingly.

I booked a flight recently and spent the better part of an afternoon in a fugue state, tabs open, refreshing, convinced that if I just waited the right amount of time or searched in an incognito window or wished on something the number would change. Lo and behold, it did change. It got worse. There is apparently a correct moment to buy a plane ticket and I have never once been alive at that moment.

And then there are the fees. The bag fees and the seat fees and the fee to sit next to the person you came with, as though the airline is doing you a personal favor by allowing you to not be separated from your travel companion or child. I just want to go somewhere and I want it to cost a reasonable amount of money and I want to be able to bring a carry-on without feeling like I’ve made a risky financial decision. That’s literally all I’m asking for.

For weeks this summer, Mitch McConnell was hospitalized and his office said nothing, while the internet filled the vacuum with increasingly elaborate theories, and I — a rational adult with a healthy skepticism of online conspiracism — found myself reading them. Nodding, even. The prevailing theory: he’s actually been dead for some time, and Republicans are holding the news until after August 3rd, which is the deadline by which a vacancy must be declared in order to trigger a special election before November. Miss that deadline, and the seat stays conveniently empty until the regularly scheduled vote, safely out of Democratic reach. I’d love to tell you this theory is insane, but I can’t.

He has since released a statement confirming a fall, mild pneumonia, and that he is “regaining his strength” in a rehabilitation facility. They’ve released photos, and my new conspiracy theory brain doesn’t believe they’re real. And the fact that it took weeks of mounting public concern before his office said anything — while he is an 84-year-old man serving in the United States Senate — is a problem that has nothing to do with how you feel about his politics. The office is not private. The seat is not private. We are allowed to know. The conspiracy theories are a symptom and the secrecy is the disease.

Oh, and FYI: Mitch McConnell has now been on paid medical leave for over seven weeks. This is one week longer than the six weeks of maternity leave that women in the United States are not guaranteed after giving birth.

I have a finite number of outlets. And most people don’t design their homes with the intention of dedicating half of their outlets to a single device’s power brick, which is the size of a small animal and apparently requires the outlet next to it as a sort of personal space buffer.

Who approved this? At what point in the design process did someone look at a charger the size of a sandwich and say: yes, and also it should block the adjacent slot, that feels right. The laptop charger does it. The travel charger does it. Certain electric toothbrush chargers, which have truly no business being this ambitious, do it. I am one power strip away from a full mental breakdown and the power strip has six slots and I can only use four of them and two of those are already spoken for by things I can’t unplug.

I just want to charge my phone and my laptop and my husband’s phone and the baby monitor and the sound machine and whatever this other thing is, all at the same time, in a normal house with a normal number of outlets, without feeling like I’m solving a spatial reasoning test at 11pm. Make the chargers smaller. Give me back my outlet.

I see it all over social media and it makes me lose my mind: a picture of a screen taken from inside a theater. Footage of a movie, shot from a seat, uploaded to TikTok or Instagram or wherever, which means that while it was being filmed, other people in that theater had to contend with the glow of a phone camera and a tiny pixelated version of the thing they paid to see playing on someone’s screen in front of them.

Do you know how hard it is to get a movie made? Do you have any clue how many people spent how many years trying to get a story from an idea to a script to a greenlight to a production to a theater near you so you could enjoy the fruits of their labors? It’s so disrespectful to the filmmakers and movie-goers and God help you if I catch you doing this.

Stop figuring out how you’re going to make content out of the movie you’re watching and watch the movie. You paid for it. It’s right there. It is so much bigger than your phone screen and it will never be this big again. Watch the fucking movie.

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