Emchap's Shit from the Internet 01/22/20 🍠
I spent most of the last week watching Cheer, Netflix's new documentary about a junior college cheerleading team. It is, as everyone has said, tremendous. The children in the film are terrifyingly talented athletes who you get to watch just fling themselves into the floor and the sky and each other in the way that's only possible when someone is very good and very young and very not yet fully having to deal with the consequences of a youth spent turning one's joint's into popcorn.
Part of why the documentary is so compelling is that the five-ish kids the crew follows all have just awful backstories. Some part of me wants to hope that that's just because this team is particularly full of those sorts of stories, but (though the editing specifically focuses on them) I know that's not the case. It's just a reminder that so many people you deal with in your day to day are dealing with just horrible, hard shit, and if you haven't yet been one of them it's just good luck.
I thought about this a lot over the year during which my mom was dying, and the immediate aftermath of her death. I was 22, which felt very young to lose a parent, but wound up being surrounded by friends who'd gone through the same thing (most at much younger ages). Some of them I'd known that about; some I hadn't. In all cases, of course, I hadn't really thought about what it meant.
Now that I'm moving away from the age in which the cultural narrative is that it is really unusual to have lost a parent (correctly or not) and into the age where that's more and more the experience of the people I know, there's a weird sadness in having the worst event of my life become sort of ordinary. Having a parent predecease you is a best case scenario; one or both of you has to go at some point.
One of the nice things about the documentary being out has been seeing folks' follow-up pieces on the kids. Most of them—even the ones who end the documentary particularly uncertain about their futures—seem to have found some sort of ground on which to land. I'm wildly curious where they'll be in five years, and for half of them, I deeply hope the answer is "in Houston."
Shit to read
SNL self-evidently sucks and has basically as long as I've been old enough to have an opinion on it, and this is messy and funny. Feuds in which one party no longer needs to sustain a positive community reputation are great.
As someone who is doing dry January (and who has overall really diminished my alcohol intake in recent years), I enjoyed this. It's weird to realize how much less of my social life is booze-focused than when I was in NYC.
As someone who spends a lot of money on skin that's currently very broken out, this spoke to me.
I think I've included this in this very newsletter before, but I enjoyed rereading an article on what it is to be a person who feels no pain.
AHP's much cleverer take on Cheer.
I saw this on Twitter and assumed they'd fucked up the restoration, but no, they were legitimately returning the alter to its original, freaky self. Spooky lamb has to be seen to be believed.
This birb vs. borb article seems spiritually of interest to my Because Internet fans out there.
Just a truly, horrifically grim study of what our employment stats actually mean.
This piece on urban noise and wealth has been bopping around in my brain. I have a houseguest who lives in the burbs, and they have been regularly startled at how loud my house (which is basically uninsulated) is.
A super depressing story about sexual abuse in Amish communities.
A lovely essay about a dress.
Shit to eat
Soak 3/4 cup of dry black beans in some water for the period from "when you decide to make this" to "an hour before you need to make this".
Drain them and put them on to boil in a big pot. Cover them with water and add salt and bay leaves and some smashed up garlic cloves. Come back in an hour, when they're edible and bean-y, and drain them.
Dump the beans into a bowl along with a handful of frozen corn, a chopped up couple of cups of whatever needs to get used in your fridge (carrots, for me), and some scallions.
Add some salt and cilantro, unless you're a soap person.
Stir it all up.
Take whatever cheddar lump you have in your freezer and shred it in a food processor. It will crumble but this also 100% doesn't matter.
Make a roux out of 2 Tbsp each of flour, oil, and whatever chili powder you have.
Add two cups of water, whatever half a tube of tomato paste you have lying around, half a teaspoon of garlic powder, a teaspoon of cumin, a quarter teaspoon of whatever pepper you have, a teaspoon of salt, and fish sauce.
Futz around with it until it's thick and tastes correct.
Take whatever square pan you have and drop half a cup of the sauce in there.
Cover it with whatever tortillas you have in the fridge. I went with taco-sized flour ones. It's fine.
On top of that, put a third of the vegetable mix, another half-cup of sauce, and some of the cheese.
Keep layering like that until you are out of ingredients.
Into the oven at 350 for 45 minutes, and enjoy a truly excellent lunch from the leftovers.
(Adapted from Budget Bytes.)
Shit to watch
Come talk to me about Cheer!
Shit to buy
Go to your local Armenian grocer and buy whatever novelty lemonade flavor is on offer.
Very into this spooky moon lamp.