Emchap’s Shit from the Internet 10/3/18 🍠
Last night I went with a few of my non-dude coworkers to Wrecking Club. It's a place where you can go to break shit by throwing it at a wall/hitting it with a bat/stomping. It has a very long liability waiver.
The outing came out of the Kavanaugh hearings last week, and the pervasive sense of still hopelessness that has pervaded 2018 generally. (And of course the ramping-up is only now hitting me because I'm rich and white and cis and date men etc. etc. etc.) We delayed until this week, as this week is a company on-site, allowing us to all be in the same city.
I expected it to be a triumphant Girl Power Moment. And of course it was very fun! Hitting a printer with a sledgehammer and playing baseball with glass globes is great fun! I very much enjoyed beating the shit out of a metal keg with a bat! But there was a weird moment of feeling like whatever anger I had couldn't be summoned in the moment when I wanted to expel it. I'm sort of at a weird flat affect at this point.
I don't know what to do about that, particularly. Take up boxing, maybe.
But, deflated anger aside, it was a fun (although very sweaty!) outing. Beating the shit out of various old office equipment and glass dishes was fun, even if not entirely cathartic. Afterwards, I hustled a mile in the fall air and met a friend for a bananas baroque bar outing at a place themed after Oscar Wilde, and ate a very fancy grilled cheese. There are worse things.
Shit to read
Serena Williams' kid's doll has an Instagram, so that's a thing I have now learned. Good for her! Good for her child! Good for her husband who invented a terrible thing but seems like a nice dude currently!
I liked this poem very much.
The issues with a pan-Asian color identity in the US.
This comic is very good and very sweet and made me cry.
I am currently reading this book about racism/sexism/etc. embedded in tech and it's very good and very approachable for a general audience.
Shit to eat
Invite a friend out to a bar themed after a dead author and made mostly of marble.
Arrive covered in sweat and slightly out of breath from sledge hammering.
Fail to locate each other.
Locate each other.
Hug!
It'll be gross because you're sweaty but whatever.
A cheerful waiter will agree to give a table to you if you are eating food. Take him up on the lowtop in the back, which will be slightly less atmospheric but infinitely less loud.
The menu will have nothing that looks super appealing, because you really already ate dinner at work, but you'll soldier on. Get something with a very fancy name that you realize, shortly after ordering it, is actually a grilled cheese with fries.
It'll be good though. It's made with brie.
Eat the grilled cheese. Talk with your friend about her new job and your old boyfriend and your current mutual friends. Laugh very loudly.
After three hours, totter off into the night, slightly drunk and foul-smelling and happy.
Shit to listen to
I am very excited to listen to a new episode of the pyramid scheme podcast tonight!
Shit to buy
Less shit, if you're me!
But some good things to buy are: breakfast sandwiches at bodegas, friends' dinners, fancy gnocchi, a sesame sandwich at your old beloved sesame sandwich place, and small bottles of seltzer.