The (post) Weekend Coffee™: Living the Dream, Neighbor Labor, Olympic Jock Jams, & Hating On Naomi Watts
Happy (post) Valentine’s Day Weekend!
(if you don’t know what this is referencing, hit up the Nick Kroll video in Friday’s post)
I hope that you, like JD Ejaculates-In-His-Pants Vance here, were able to spend the weekend with your special someone.
Me? I’m just letting Tina rep me in the dating world. I’ve TRULY never seen myself in another person as much as I do with her:
I started doing something new this week with The Weekday Coffee Break™ and honestly it’s been so fun. Remember how I said back in November (which now feels like a million year ago) that my current dream was this vision of sitting down at my desk in the early morning hours with my coffee to rap at’cha?
To own my whole day, and to get to spend it writing and making content that makes me laugh and also hopefully makes you laugh. Or cry, because that’s also fun when I’m doing it on purpose and not because of something stupid I said at Happy Hour after your cousin just died.
Side note: I had literally just made a friend cry at Happy Hour a few days before writing that because I stupidly and absentmindedly was like, “So how was your week?” after their family member had died just a few days before. And then I tried to recover by being all, “oh yeah, your close relative died, so obviously it was bad.”
So…you know…just in case you’ve ever wondered if people find me charming in real life, I think the above is a real strong case for “no.”
Anyway! So basically this week I made my own dreams come true without even realizing it. Except for the “to own my whole day” part…which is half true right now because work is slow so I actually have a lot of extra time to spend on writing this and other things. At some point I’m probably going to have to at least attempt to stick it to The Man and try to make a living out of * gestures to all of this * but everything is enough right now.
I will also say that it feels like divine intervention, to have been struck with the idea of doing a daily content blitz and then just doing it, because it’s also giving me something to get out of bed for and look forward to. Day-to-day, things are fine - we had a few more people join our patrols this past week, so that has added a bit of ease to the constant anxiety I’ve been feeling for some of my neighbors. I had to process this out loud with my BFF Katy, but I haven’t felt comfortable going out or doing things beyond my neighborhood because I just spend the entire time feeling anxious that there’s not enough people keeping watching who can sound the alarm if something happens. At any other time in my life, that kind of hyper-vigilance would have gotten me a gentle invitation to go back to therapy, but right now, it’s actually pretty logical for what’s been happening around us and in my particular general vicinity, especially these past two weeks.
The bright spot, though, is that I’ve gotten to know my neighbors like never before. Earlier this week, after a large crowd of legal observers followed a roving patrol around my general zip code and basically gave them a pretty bad day, CBP decided to punish our Ward with a low-flying plane that droned on for hours until after midnight. I laid in bed and texted back and forth with a couple of my neighbors, recalling all the nights of constant helicopters during the George Floyd protests and joking about what a bunch of fucking losers these federal agents are. And it was kind of nice! It was comforting to know that if one of us were like, “what the fuck is going on out there”, that we could text each other at 11 PM, even if only for moral support.
But obviously this stuff also takes a toll, too. I just think that, when all of this is finally over - and I do have faith that it WILL someday be over - everyone in Minnesota who’s been affected by this either directly or tangentially needs to get together and just have a big fucking cry.
So anyway - The Weekday Coffee Break™ is basically what’s keeping me going right now…? And, like, I hope you like it, too, but at this point I also don’t care because it’s getting me out of the bed in the morning and delivering the laughs in the middle of all the crying (like seriously - between what’s happening to the people in my beloved city and the stuff that’s in the Files and the stories coming out of the concentration camps in Texas…I literally cry at least three times a day. On the plus side I’m also drinking a lot of water because crying that much is very dehydrating and there’s nothing worse than that kind of deep, throbbing headache you get from crying too much) and it forces me to also focus on stuff that’s funny or heartwarming or feels like a win, and I severely need that right now! So I’ma keep doing them, even if they’re just for me!
I am probably going to transition Thursdays over to True Story, too, though, because if I keep doing only one True Story post a week, we’re gonna be talking about my grandparents until next year. Extremely ironic that this whole project is supposed to be about my dumb life and yet I’ve spent the last year researching and writing about other people! That is UNACCEPTABLE!
Villains à la Français
The only thing I really care about during the Winter Olympics is figure skating, which is why I am currently O B S E S S E D with the outright cheating scandal that took place during the Ice Dancing Pairs completion this past week.
If you haven’t watched Glitter & Gold on Netflix yet -
…then let’s catch you up:
Even people who didn’t know the backstory, though, could tell these two were rotted just from the vibes alone:
Anyway: Chock and Bates put in a STUNNING, near-perfect performance in their Olympic free dance. I watched it live, and from the costumes to the music to the actual skating, it literally an ice dance for the history books.
Then these French fucks take to the ice and not only perform a snoozer of an ice ballet, but the dude literally squats out of an all-important Twizzle.
And yet, when they joined their judges for the Kiss & Cry to wait for their score, it was like the whole world had the same intuitive hit all at once - they were going to win the gold over Chock & Bates, and what’s more, they already knew they were going to win the gold.
The thing that makes this even worse is that they also didn’t perform above the Canadian duo (also featured in the doc above), who put in an absolutely gorgeous performance and yet only took Bronze.
I mentioned in Friday’s Weekday Coffee Break™ that I was going to save writing about this for the Weekend Coffee Break™ because I had a feeling that something would happen per the judges scoring, but unfortch for us, that something was that US Figure Skating announced it won’t appeal Chock and Bates’ ice dance results. Which sort of makes this run-down land with a dull thud, which is something I will ALSO personally hold against US Figure Skating and these French villains. So while Chock & Bates are handling all of this with a lot of grace, that’s not me, baby!!! I never let a grudge go - I’ll make it my life’s mission to ensure that these Frenchies never have their gold medal mentioned without it also being brought up in the same breath that the judges rigged it on their behalf and that there was a likely an under-the-table deal the whole time. After all, wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened!
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette
Yesterday I dove into the first three episodes of this Ryan-Murphy-produced series (based off the biography ONCE UPON A TIME by Elizabeth Beller, which you can order from this locally-owned MPLS business and have it sent straight to your house because fuuuuuuuck Amazon), and now I’m super pissed because they drop three episodes to get you hooked and then draw out the rest of the season across 7 weeks. Personally I simply refuse…if you’re going to cut a season in half and make me wait 4 weeks in between each “part” when I’ve already waited two years for this latest season, then baby, I’m gonna go read my books and simply wait until the whole thing is out. The only time I will participate in that kind of streaming schedule is for a show like Game of Thrones, Succession, or White Lotus, where it comes on at a particular time every week and thus it’s appointment television and EVERYONE is talking about it on social media at the same time.
I also think Ryan Murphy productions have an over-inflated sense of their own importance when it comes to scheduling their series like this. They did the same thing with Swans, and instead of it building anticipation, it backfired because each subsequent episode was more disappointing than the last. I don’t know if Love Story will fall into the same trap, though. If I’m completely honest, I’m probably going to watch the first three episodes all over again today. And despite how much I wanted to love it, I did NOT feel like doing that with Swans.
It’s not a perfect series: Sarah Pidgeon is a tremendous actress, and you cannot take your eyes off of her when she’s on-screen. You can also tell that Paul Anthony Kelly studied JFK Jr. down to minute details like the way his face would flex when surprised by a question. But - and I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an asshole - I think a general rule for movies or series like this should be that you have to get actors who resemble the characters but are even more mesmerizing than the original, so that you don’t have the inclination to even think about (or Google) what the real-life person actually looked like during that particular moment. The Crown did this spectacularly, where you found yourself actually preferring to think about some of the real-life people as the characters who played them (Emerald Fennell as a young Camilla Bowles? NAILED IT).
Instead, I found myself slipping into the mindset that I was instead watching a fictional series about a love story about two interesting people living in Manhattan in the ‘90s, instead of a biopic about two of the most iconic, legendary names of my time. And when I did that, I actually found it more enjoyable!
EXCEPT FOR:
Is Naomi Watts hurting for money?! Why did we have to spend SO MUCH the second and third episodes on Jackie Kennedy? It felt so self-indulgent and almost disrespectful to an audience who signed up for a story about JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette. Like obviously Jackie played a huge role in John’s life and her death was also a major catalyst for what came next for both John and Carolyn, but there are at least five long scenes that could have been easily cut in favor of more time spent on the ACTUAL main characters. Like there’s at least two scenes where we have to watch Jackie waxing poetically about Camelot that had me yelling “WHO CARES! GET BACK TO THE SEXY PEOPLE!” It was clear that whoever wrote episode 3 really just wants to do a series about Jackie, which…okay? Then just do that and leave the rest of us out of it???
Also, I think I’ve had it with Ryan Murphy’s obsession with Naomi Watts. SHE IS NOT THAT GOOD OF AN ACTRESS. In fact, she’s actually kind of terrible!! Like she had one good turn in Mulholland Drive 25 years ago and yet I’m still being forced to contend with her ruining every movie and show she touches??? Her and Scarlett Johansson need to GET THE HEEE-ALLL OFF MY SCREEN!
Anyway, the biggest pro/con I can give you for Love Story is that it made me absolutely ravenous for more smart, stylish series set in the fashion-house-obsessed, Supermodel ‘90s.
Which is great for getting one to watch the rest of this series but is also bad news formoi because WHY ARE THERE NOT MORE SMART STYLISH SERIES SET IN THE FASHION-HOUSE-OBSESSED, SUPERMODEL ‘90S????
Also the music? So good! The way they end E1 in particular is 🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻
Anyway, that’s it for this weekend + today! I’ll leave you with this, which feels timely post V-Day and also because I woke up today with my whole body feeling sore and tight for no reason??? It’s probably just all the cortisol that’s been building up in my body this past month and a half that has likely started to tighten up all of my fascia and calcify my muscles, though, so no big deal!!!
Tippity-tap-taps on your lil’ nose -
-Amber