Emchap's Shit from the Internet 08/14/19 🍠
On Sunday, I continued my recent, unusual spate of concertgoing with a trip to the Wiltern for Carly Rae Jepsen's show. It was, as you might imagine, magical (and ended with a burst of paper confetti). She sang everything I could have asked for; her between-song banter was charmingly weird; I didn't fall to my death from the mezzanine after tripping on the stairs, as is my constant and somewhat irrational fear. It was a great evening.
CRJ is, of course, the official patron saint of my flavor of internet weirdo (I was going to say quiet internet woman, but then two different male coworkers asked me how the concert was and expressed jealousy, so I think it may just be all of us?). She is cheerfully, wholesomely hornt.
Her entire song catalogue exists in one of three places: the deep throes of crushy obsession where you're strategizing how to make the hot senior notice you behind Language Hall; the first two weeks of dating someone really hot where you are just going to town on each other and have yet to disagree on anything and isn't it cool how you have the same favorite candy bar; and the two-weeks-after aftermath of an unspecified breakup where you've moved on just a little bit from the sobbing, but are still luxuriating a little bit in being sad before moving back to the first item on this list. Her songs are to some extent the anti-version of the John Mulaney joke about pop music that no one on god's own internet has gifed.
Because she sings mostly about the inner, goofy emotional experiences of love and its aftermath (NO ONE knows how perfect this mostly-imaginary simulacrum of a boyfriend is, NO ONE has ever known how sad you are, etc.), she can cheerfully sing about wanting to fuck on multiple bedroom surfaces while still not being music I'd feel that weird listening to around my family. (I mean, I will now.) Janelle Monáe is laying out exactly what she's going to do to your person with a back beat to match; CRJ is the adult soundtrack of being too dumbstruck to talk to the hot barista.
(This is a knock against neither; I love them both more than there are words and the Janelle Monáe concert I went to alone last year was a fucking emotionally transformative experience.)
But given my own particular Summer 2019 experiences, I was particularly excited to hear Party for One and Boy Problems, songs that are definitely about breakups and maybe about masturbation and fucking your friends, respectively.
Party for One in particular does a kind of interesting thing for a breakup song, I think, in that it captures the sort of stunned hurt of the whole process. It's not quite "fuck off, I don't care," so much as, "I care, very much, but I'm not going to hold out for someone who doesn't want me." It is a song about effort! Which is personally meaningful perhaps beyond the appropriate scope of a bubblegum pop song but was definitely fun as hell to sing along to with folks.
(Sidebar can we talk about what the meeting must have been like where Smirnoff agreed to sponsor the sad breakup video?)
So I sang those, and grumped about having to stand, and had a generally excellent time capped off by a McDonald's biscuit. I am excited to close out the rounds with an Avett Brothers show next week. (Who are perhaps the emotional opposite of CRJ: their last album contained a granularly specific divorce ballad.)
Shit to read
Anne Hathaway seems nice, and apparently had a secret baby.
Chicken tenders rule and also holy shit the people commenting on this article are angry.
This was a fascinating piece about social infertility and has given me a lot to think about! Shoutout to the button where we really just get the reemphasis of how broken health insurance in the US already is!
It's about Barbie but it's also about queer identity.
Oh this is good and sweet and sad. (Big ol' cw on there for descriptions of sexual violence.)
This is an old AHP piece and by and large I think these women are cowards, but I nonetheless thought it was interesting.
The only thing I want to read about Stanford.
The NYT is dumb as shit for lots of reasons but I think this is a compelling argument about the biggest one. (Subscribe to your local paper! Or mine!)
Protestors in Hong Kong are doing some truly fascinating shit.
I loved this memoir of Toni Morrison as a dessert-loving person who didn't like walking. I respect that.
Jia Tolentino and Sam Irby just go read it.
Shit to eat
Go to Ralph's, and attempt to buy flank steak. Realize that this is the third time you've tried to buy a meat cut that they haven't had. Curse them.
Look up substitutions for flank steak. Decide to shoot for skirt steak.
They won't have that. Search for whether flap steak, which you have found, can be substituted.
Decide that it can be, and buy a pound.
With it, buy rice noodles (where you expected), cherry tomatoes (same), green beans (get those from the farmers market outside), Persian cucumbers (hidden), and mint and cilantro (where you expected, but only because of hard-learned previous experience.
When you get home, put everything away and drink a seltzer. Read some fanfiction.
When that's done, stir up a quarter cup brown sugar, five tablespoons soy sauce, two well-juiced limes of juice, 3 chopped-up garlic cloves, and some red pepper.
Pour 1/3 of that into a bag, and add the meat. Put it in the fridge. Put the rest of the marinade in a jar with some oil, and shake it up.
More fanfiction. It is slowburn Aziraphale/Crowley, because the one X-Files writer who normally scratches that itch also watched Good Omens.
When you are done, put a large pot of salted water on to boil and take the meat out of the fridge.
Trim up the green beans while that's happening, and remind yourself that that's why you don't eat them more often.
Boil them for 2 1/2 minutes, and fish them out. Forget to put them in an icewater bath afterwards, and realize that only as you are writing your newsletter.
Heat the water back up to boiling and cook your rice noodles. Drain them and burn your hand minimally.
Pop on the broiler in your oven (you don't have a grill, you're not a baron) and cook the steak for 4 minutes on each side. Let it sit for 5 minutes before cutting it perpendicular to the grain. The cuts will be bad. It will not matter.
Into a bowl, add noodles, some chopped up cherry tomatoes, some sliced Persian cukes, mint, cilantro, meat, and some of the dressing you made with the marinade.
Eat, pleased, on your couch.
(Adapted from Smitten Kitchen.)
Shit to listen to
CRJ. Duh.
Shit to buy
GabiFresh stuff is on clearance at Swimsuits for All, go get some.
Be the fancy wine mom you want to see in the world.