The (Post) Weekend Coffee™: Aliens vs Predators, Pioneers R Us, Highland Clearance, & Bodies Be (Not) Bangin'
Hey-yoooo! Welcome to another post Weekend Coffee. I’m still loving The Weekday Coffee Breaks, but I’m finding that by the time I get to the weekend, I’m burning out and just need chill on my couch-bed (I rearranged my sectional couch so that it’s in the shape of a bed and I LOVE IT) and read an actual book or two.
This past week was a grab-bag of emotions. There was the high of US Olympians winning gold at the Olympics…watching former Prince Andrew get arrested on his bday…great TV à la Summer House, The Traitors, and Love Story…and all of the exciting and legendary astrological transits that I sort of understand but not enough to talk about them intelligently.
But the dark side of this week could also probably be best encapsulated by the fact that I started watching the docu-series about America’s Next Top Model, excited for a deep-dive into early aughts nostalgia, some behind-the-scenes juice, and also some accountability, and then 10 minutes in realized that I just don’t have the emotional capacity to watch yet another group of folks shrug off the trauma and abuse they visited upon young women.
The world feels so weird right now. Sometimes I’ll scroll Instagram and read the posts from other people who are in it, too, and it will just hit me how different everything feels - how different WE feel - from just a couple months ago. I really lean so hard on the wins right now, and I make a concentrated effort to take the long view - that now that the truth of so much rot has been revealed, and if truth is power, then we now have the power to undo literal centuries of corruption and abuse - but I also just want to sell everything and go live in a little cottage by the ocean in a country far far away from here. I feel like what’s happening in Mexico right now is also the perfect example of how I feel about the world. Seeing all these posts of Americans on vacation watching the plumes of smoke rise above the city of PV and captioning their Threads or IG posts with “we’re safe and sipping margaritas” or whining about their current or near-future vacations being ruined makes me want to choke them out. It reminds me a lot of Covid and of the past two months of Minnesota, where people are literally fighting for their lives while a bunch of fuckin’ dum-dums shrug their shoulders and continue to blithely live their lives in bliss, unaware or uncaring. And sometimes I feel so jealous of that, you know? I feel like I’m constantly toggling between being terrified of the very real plans this administration has for folks of this country and staying hopeful through all the ways that I see people waking up and fighting back.
But also…I started writing this newsletter this weekend, and then yesterday morning I grabbed my Time-Life This Fabulous Century book series (we used to have these in the Red Wing school libraries when I was growing up and I would sit in the library and devour them one by one) and started digging into the 1870-1900 and 1910-1920 volumes, hoping to find something I could share that relates to the immigrant/pioneering and the WWI-fighting ancestors that I’ve already written about in True Story. Instead, I got more reminders of how cruel and corrupt the expansion out West was and how German-Americans were harassed and abused by both the government and their neighbors during WWI. “Oh, okay, so we’ve always been this violent and stupid,” I remember thinking, as I read about how we changed all the names of German foods like hamburgers to “liberty steaks” and arrested anyone who criticized the government or the war effort.
Every day I go back and forth on whether I want to stay or go. And I’ve had these thoughts long before all of this * gestures at everything * started happening, but now it feels even more crucial that I make some kind of firm decision. Some days I wake up and think that I’m not the kind of person to cut and run, that even if I don’t love the history of this country or the structures that built it, I love a lot of the people who are in it, and I have a ton of privilege that could be used to fight for those who don’t have the same, and so I need to at least stay and fight for them. And other days I wake up and I think, this whole entire country was built on a culture of violence and slavery and patriarchy. Everything we think could never happen here, everything we think the government would never do, has already happened here multiple times before. Why would I want to stay and see if they do it again? I don’t wanna fight for this country - I wanna wake up to sunrises over the ocean while I write my stupid stories. I want my taxes to go to things that actually benefit me and my community - things like healthcare, high-speed railways, easy or free access to higher education, workers rights, and a social support system that doesn’t criminalize people for being poor. I want to eat REAL food that doesn’t, through endless chemical fertilizing or purposeful processing, make me fat and/or sick no matter how little or “healthily” I eat. I want to live in a country that cares about all the people who live in it. And maybe our country could be like that, too, if we fought long and hard enough for it. But it feels clear to me, when I look through those Time-Life books, that that’s never what this country was meant to be. It was never supposed to be about building a place where we take care of each other. It was always about who can make or take the most the fastest.
There’s a part of me that feels like I was meant to deep dive into research about my ancestors this year, to learn about just how integral they were to the fabric of this country - from the Mayflower to the Revolutionary War to being part of the 1st Minnesota who held the line at Gettysburg to the pioneers who literally helped to further settle Minnesota to my Indigenous ancestors who have been in North America long before any of those folks even dreamed of this country. And I understand the ideals that they struggled and fought for, the freedom of safety, movement, and earning potential that they were seeking to attain for themselves and their families by moving across the world to a new country. But instead of tying me more firmly to American soil, it makes me wonder if instead they would tell me to do the same. That if the American Dream became so soiled and rotten that even the hardest workers couldn’t get their basic needs met, and if the government here became a mere vehicle for elites or just as tyrannical as it was in their origin countries, would they really tell me to tough it out and stay? Everything I know about their lives tells me that they would not. Almost every single one of them moved, migrated across the sea, in search of a better life. And I think sometimes we mistake the immigrant story to mean that we now owe this country our undying, generations-into-the-sun allegiance; that the only way we can truly honor and respect their struggle or service is to stay here forever, but isn’t it the opposite? If they loved themselves and their families enough to pull up the stakes and cross the sea in search of a better, safer life than they could get in their own home countries, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the real honoring of their legacy is having our own courage to do the same?
Anyway, just some thoughts I’ve been having!! Also if the calculations are indeed correct that we only have 13 years left of fresh water due to AI and data centers, etc, then I’m not fuckin’ doin’ life as usual, ya dig? Like I don’t know what’s truly meaningful if the entire world collapses and dies of dehydration in less than two decades, but if I’m gonna Thelma-and-Louise it, I wanna at least have an entertaining, non-cringe montage flash before my eyes, y’know?
And on that note, let’s get to a bunch of stuff that is definitely not meaningful in any sense of the word beyond our own silly lil’ entertainment!
Tara & Johnny: The real prize are the Traitors we meet along the way
Last week I did a mega edition of the lore of Tara & Johnny, and then of course, right after publishing, I remembered this commercial:
And then this also happened:
Also Mystic Michaela did a rundown on their auras, which I loved:
It was honestly a big week for Tara & Johnny - along with figure skating wrapping up and the two of them doing the commentary for the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, Johnny & Tara also had a tough showing on Thursday night’s episode of The Traitors:
Which, let’s just talk about this week a little bit, since we’re hurtling towards the finale. If you’re not caught up, skip to the next section, since there WILL be spoilers!
Here’s where I’m at: Tara and Johnny are literally the only people I like and respect who are still at the Round Table, but Tara deeply disappointed me this week. I get that her and Johnny no longer trust their own judgement, but it is so frustrating to watch Faithfuls be on the right track and then shoot themselves in the foot. Also, every time they brought up Candiace's vote for Rob, I wanted to scream, because Maura kept insisting that Candiace said it was a throwaway vote, and I wanted SOMEONE, ANYONE to remind her that she said that when she was defending herself at the Round Table, and the minute she was eliminated and shown to be a Traitor, everyone should have been looking at Rob. Also her side-eyeing Tara last week for saying she completely trusts Johnny when she won’t even entertain the thought that Rob could. be a Traitor was fckin’ RICH.
Also, Maura pisses me the FCK off. Her and Salley from Southern Charm should become best friends because those two Pick Me’s can keep it. She literally and figuratively gets carried through these competitions and then brags about how good she is at this game and it’s like…girl. Your wigs are bad and YOU are bad. You KNOW that when the truth of Rob is revealed she’s going to gush about how brilliant he was at playing the game instead of admit how stupid and dickmatized she’s been by him this entire time. Also, Rob isn’t actually playing a good game? I’m so tired of people acting like he’s being a genius at gameplay - he’s just being good-looking white boy who knows to keep his mouth shut most of the time. I’m so tired of this game raising up a mediocre semi-attractive white man and making him look like a genius gamer just because everyone else is too stupid to suspect that it might actually be the good-looking white guy who’s steering them wrong.
Anyway, back to Tara: I’m not a fan of Natalie because I think she’s been showing similar behavior to Maura, but I really did feel bad for her this week. Johnny and Tara leaving her out in the cold after plotting and planning with her all day was severely disappointing. They owe her an apology and I hope she gets one at the reunion.
But also - WHAT was this outfit????? Like body be bangin’ but baby - it’s 1 PM in the Scottish Highlands, like what are we doing???
“Love is Blind” makes me wish that it was also mute
This weekend I dipped into the current season of Love Is Blind, but technically only the second batch of episodes.
Y’all, I cannot do the Pods - I simply do not care to hear these idiots talk for six whole episodes. I wanna get to the part where they’re like, “oh, THIS is who I picked? YEEE-IKES” and then gossip about who’s having sex in Cabo and who’s not and judge each other’s living spaces and the way they do laundry and suffer through meeting each other’s families.
And when it comes to mess, this season is GIVING IT.
I don’t have space in this newsletter today for a full rundown, but I’m gonna drop this video here for those of you who may not be watching yet:
And yeah - it gets worse!
The next batch of episodes drops on Wednesday, so you’ll have plenty of time to catch up before we discuss it more next weekend!
In other news, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is coming back on March 12! America doesn’t need this but I do!!!!
You can catch up on last season by reading my rundown here. We WILL be talking about this new season on The Weekend Coffee™!
Anyway, I have to go do the work that currently pays me, so I’ll see you back here tomorrow with another chapter of True Story!
Turrah!
-Amber