Emchap's Shit from the Internet 1/17/18 🍠
On the train home from the gym today, I found myself grabbing a half-eaten roll of Tums out of my coat pocket. I popped two, and marveled again at how little the taste of them has changed since I was 10 and would sometimes eat them as a shitty candy alternative. (Tums, if you haven't had them, taste like sugary chalk.)
I ate them when I was 10 because my mother always had a tub of them in her purse and on the counter and in the 100 little places you wind up leaving the sort of medication you buy several of before scattering them so they're always at arm's reach. She did this because she often had heartburn, which has also become true of me in the last few months. I will eventually have a doctor look at it, but I assume it's just a genetic inheritance in the same way that my disproportionately giant calves and shitty eyes and tendency to talk too quickly are.
I was joking with my sister recently about doing hella squats to get more of an ass. My sister, who can squat more than my body weight, turned around and pointed at her own very flat butt. "I can promise you, this is all you're going to get." I want to believe that's not true for my vanity's sake, but I know she's right—we are Very Related.
A friend was over earlier this week and I joked to her about how it's weird knowing that—absent some sort of violent death—my family suggests that I will almost certainly die of heart disease or cancer or dementia. She laughed, because it was funny, if grim.
It is weird to realize that our biological families are in some senses just long-running lab experiment groupings. But it is helpful, when possible, to have a little roadmap for what might happen. It meant that I knew what aisle in the Duane Reade to head to for Tums.
Shit to read
I am about halfway through this Divine Comedy riff on being a Woman In Tech but it is brutal. A (male) friend and I sent it to each other at the same time this weekend; seeing the experiences I had told him about written down by someone else was validating and horrifying in equal measure.
This article on astrology did a more nuanced look at its appeal than the "millennials know this isn't science, right?????" take that often crops up.
The Awl and its sibling site The Hairpin closed this week, and my entire corner of the internet is profoundly sad. The work done at those sites can be directly traced to huge portions of the humor internet I've been consuming for the last 5 years (including perhaps most notably The Toast), and it launched the careers of huge numbers of people. Negroni Season remains the best thing, and Text Messages From a Ghost and its sequel are both fascinating as a glimpse into Mallory Ortberg's early writing career and as profoundly emotionally impactful pieces of writing that—at the very end—impactful entirely because of an internet-style run on sentence. The sequel made me cry actual-ass tears in a bar last night in front of god and everyone.
Ellen Pompeo seems fucking rad and talks about acting as a job and the whole thing is just GREAT.
This is a sad piece because it's about the mass die-off of a bunch of weirdo lil antelope but it's really well done.
Lindy West wrote an op-ed about the Ansari thing, go read it, it's great.
Shit to eat
Order a stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut because you're at a "fuck-it" stage of trying to seem cool in your life and you just want crust that's had extra tasty calories added to it.
Wait.
Wait some more.
At 30 minutes past when your pizza was supposed to be there, call the Pizza Hut.
A very apologetic young person will tell you that his delivery driver is the only driver today and the pizza will be there in 15 minutes.
It will arrive in 30.
Hustle out of your building to go pick the pizza up from the street, and get annoyed once again that pizza drivers of all the delivery drivers will not come to your door.
Guilt-tip 25% anyway, because at least the pizza is here.
Eat 3 slices while curled up in an armchair absently watching New Girl and getting teased by a friend about how you should have just gotten good pizza and some string cheese.
Shit to listen to
You should listen to "B.O.B" because it was re-brought to my attention while I was typing this newsletter, and I have danced to this song a LOT and it remains a delight.
You should listen to "Dress" off the New Bad TSwift Album because it is the queerest pop song I've ever heard (this is about her having sex with that model people think she's having sex with and this is the trash hill I die on). Like this could a THOUSAND percent be a Carly Rae or Tegan and Sara bop.
I saw Call Me By Your Name this weekend and I need some people to talk to about it; it was so beautiful and sweet and sad and great GO WATCH IT.
Shit to buy
I'm on board with this skirt and am tempted to purchase it.
I went to college with this dude, and he is both a fundamentally very nice person and hysterically funny—go buy/stream his comedy album.
Can someone send me their favorite interior decoration recommendations? I need to buy a couch, tell me what couch to get.