Excellent job! This week, I uploaded all of the readings for the classes my boss teaches (except two, both of which list a book and say “selections” in the syllabus—homeboy hasn’t responded to my requests for clarification). I also worked out for an hour today!

I’m on a weird midcentury kick lately, so it’s been the soundtracks to Phantom Thread, Populaire (French film), and Feud: Betty and Joan. With a sprinkling of the Black Panther soundtrack, because Wakanda.

Oh, that sounds disappointing! Brandy is definitely a solid choice. Do you have Drizly out there? Here in DC, you can get liquor store inventory essentially ubered to your house.

I went with Szechuan chicken and brown rice, but both of those things sound delicious!

Hello, lovely people! I hope everyone is having a nice night. Mine is okay-ish; I was supposed to go to my childhood best friend’s housewarming today, but it was an hour’s drive and the wind was still intense and I was a big ol’ scaredy-cat about handling it in a rental car (I don’t drive regularly). So I feel like a…

Hell, I really want an actual telephone. Not a cordless phone, an old-school Bakelite that you can slam down satisfyingly when someone pisses you off.  

I once put my flip phone through the washer and dryer in college because I was an idiot freshman who didn’t think to go through my pockets before doing laundry. I reassembled it, plugged it into the wall, and that thing worked for another six months! It was a miracle.

That’s a really good point. Like, the phone you sell doesn’t have a camera or app functionality, but you have an Instagram account to sell it? Sure, Jan.

It’s like these people have no sense of hygiene! You do NOT shit where food prep happens!

A delight! It’s not as good as, say, Interweave Knits (mentioned upthread), but it has a solid mix of articles and knitting patterns. Though personally, when it comes to knitting patterns, I am all about Elizabeth Zimmerman and Arne & Carlos (Norwegian knitting duo, their YouTube channel is charming af).

Y’all have inspired me. Once I finish writing part of my paper today, it’s over to the Very Pink Knits channel I go!

No, that’s fair. It’s mostly that, in some of the circles I’ve moved in, my blackness has been accepted when it’s convenient for other black people to make a point about white supremacy; at other times, my proximity to whiteness is treated as delegitimizing my experiences as a woman of color. I absolutely get that…

That sucks! I hope you feel better soon!

I loved Eden’s Crush! They were so fun!

When I was 12, my mom’s friend’s father died, and his funeral (rich Maryland Unitarian Universalists) involved a stereo set playing “Memories” from Cats while we all just looked at the floor and it was the most uncomfortable funeral I’ve ever been to—and that’s including my racist white grandfather and the time my…

And especially for Black audiences—we were expecting that sort of ending, where he’s killed by the cops or ends up in prison. The ending we got uses, and then subverts those expectations, which makes it more fitting, in my view.

Any particular faves?

Isn’t that just, like, the eighth grade?

I mean, if you were in DC, I’d say today—no snow, but so much insane fucking wind that the government is shut down and DC Public Schools (campus, however, was not closed—because fuck you, that’s why!). Thankfully, my French history professor was not about to drive here in 60+ mph winds, and cancelled our 8 AM.

That...I just...the mind. It boggles. BOGGLES.