If your wondering what I’m yapping about semi-regularly on social media, you can click right → here. This is moody and grumpy and I’m not sorry about it. You’re welcome.
Happy Solar Eclipse.
Perhaps you don’t have a hot girl who’s obsessed with the sky to remind you of all things astrological happening in your life and therefore you’re unaware, but today there was a completely visible, total solar eclipse happening. The next one that will be fully viewable in the states won’t be until 2044! If you’ve ever heard someone refer to something as “eclipse season” it’s because eclipses travel in multiples/pairs, so this total solar eclipse is following a lunar eclipse that took place a couple weeks ago. Eclipses are notable for change, fate, and not to quote everyone’s favorite internet lesbian at the moment (/s), but also karma.
I don’t know about any of you but I have been feeling this eclipse season. My sleep schedule is off, in the middle of that I’ve been having dreams about being straight (?!), my anxiety is palpable every morning and only soothed by sweating it out for at least an hour a day, and because it’s smack dab in the middle of Mercury Retrograde as well (casual!!!!) I’ve also been navigating watching estranged people come back to metaphorically cop-knock on my door and I’m trying to not let that completely disregulate me. More on that later!
Every time I talk seriously about things like astrology or tarot or cord cutting or even just the impact of the moon phases, I can hear a voice in the back of my head that says something to the effect of, “You’re just using this as an excuse to make yourself feel better.” That somehow placing the circumstances of my life on things like the trajectory of Venus, drawing The Lovers reversed as it pertains to a specific question, watering my peace lily with moon water, or feeling like shit during eclipse season is silly and reductive and merely slapping a celestial band-aid over a bullet hole I really should seek professional assistance about instead.
But then I remember that astrology is literally thousands and thousands of years old, that J.P. Morgan the OG finance bro famously said, “Millionaires don't use Astrology, billionaires do.” That references to tarot date back to the 15th century and historians have called Western views to its practice as “the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched.” That the moon controls the tides and human beings are 60% water so if the gravitational pull is strong enough to move the ocean why wouldn’t it be able to pull us too?
So yes. For the past week and a half or more I’ve been feeling more raw, exposed in a way, exhausted but unable to reach REM, caught between wanting to be coddled and wanting to just cocoon myself in my room with just my Kindle for company. And maybe that is simply because being a person is, in fact, exhausting. Or maybe it’s because for thousands and thousands of years eclipses have marked periods of extreme transformation and internal evolution and how could that NOT be exhausting?
Maybe we’ll never know! But either way, happy eclipse season, friends. I hope it leaves you with what you need.Basically all celebrities suck.
If the last year had an thesis statement for me it would be never meet your heroes. But bigger than that (or more all encompassing? idk) is that truth be told there really aren’t very many people worth considering as your heroes anyway. People are unfortunately just people meaning they’re/we’re all fallible and wealth and notoriety are diseases that poison even those who began with the best and purest of intentions.
Those who pay attention to goings ons in the food world have probably already seen the news that celebrity chef and restauranteur David Chang has (through his company Momofuku) been sending cease and desist letters to other brands over the terms “chile crunch” and “chili crunch.” Momofuku is not only comprised of the notable noodle bars and fine(r) dining restaurants, but also holds stakes in Milk Bar (Christina Tosi was originally a pastry chef for Momofuku before branching out with Milk Bar at the suggestion and with the support of Chang), is part of Chang’s larger media production company, and since 2020 has branched out into the CPG world selling their chili sauces, soy sauces, dried noodles, and more. While the company filed for trademarks for both “chile crunch” and “chili crunch” last month, they have not officially been awarded either at this time. Nonetheless, the cease and desists have still been shipped out to small businesses like Homiah and MìLà who have crunches of their own, with five already reportedly acquiescing to the desist(s) fearing legal ramifications.
There have been whispers (or open conversations, depending on who you ask) about David Chang for a long time. A lot fall under the classic, dickbag (technical term) chef story—verbally accosts people, moody and temperamental, prone to outbursts and generally up his own ass. Chef Sohla El-Waylly called her brief time at Momofuku her “worst time ever” in a kitchen via her Instagram stories. Former employees are not exactly quiet about being traumatized by him, citing desk breaking, wall punching, and just the general bullshit that far-too-many chefs (mostly straight men, but not all unfortunately! women and gays can suck too, don’t forget it.) perpetuate in the industry.
Which brings us here, where a man worth an estimated 60 million has decided to essentially lay claim over a condiment label. Where his massively successful company that does something like 100 million per revenue stream each year is specifically going after (by comparison) minuscule companies—often small batch and women and POC owned—knowing that if they choose to stand up for themselves and their brands they do not have nearly the legal power required to do so effectively. Is this what big businesses do? Without question. To them it’s awareness and protecting their brand, nothing more nothing less. “It’s just business.” But regardless of the knowledge that this is what capitalism does, it’s still a move that indisputably puts a bad taste in my mouth—pun fully intended.
Something I preach about at length (mostly to Swifties iykyk) is how you can never put a celebrity or really any person onto a pedestal because they will almost always disappoint you. In part because all humans are flawed and imperfect and will make decisions that in a matter of days, months, or even years they’ll look back on and say, “I should have and wish I would have done that differently.” But also in part because when you’re considering the fact that all celebrities are also businesses, that is an entire other layer of disappointment waiting to happen.
I’ve been a fan of Momofuku for a while, and until the cracks from the aforementioned wall punching began to show, David Chang directly. I liked the candidness, the frankness, the mix of high and low on the menus, the painter’s tape label on the soy sauce, even his unwavering love of the microwave. Exposing my friends to caviar buns and five-spice carved table side duck for my birthday was a dinner unlike any other. I put chili crunch on everything from my popcorn, to my noodles and eggs, to my bagels in the morning.
But it goes without saying, no one’s a hero, and even the guys you think are good should probably be considered guilty until proven innocent. And if you forget that there’s a good chance you’ll end up disappointed with an artisan condiment you no longer want in the pantry. I’m still going to use it up—no food waste here—but it’s a $15 I most likely won’t be spending again any time soon.
Anyway! If you’re looking for some other brands to support here’s a few:An unfortunate right of passage for being a woman.
Brief TW: Going to chit-chat about men being fucking invasive and gross and creepy and will be doing so pretty aggressively and in some detail involving being underage. If you’d rather not read that, skip to number four which is much, much lighter and funny haha I promise.
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Not a single one of my femme friends has not experienced a man becoming intensely obsessed with her and him being incapable of letting it go to a point of it being, well, a problem. Sometimes it ended in a harrowing way with her having to involve law enforcement or deciding to move or some combination of the both and others. Most times though there was nothing really TO do except utilize the various block and restrict tools our phones give us, avoid certain bars and gyms or even just social accounts, and try to enlist in the oh-so-helpful whisper network that lets us know: “This guy is Bad™.”
Before my eventual retirement from heterosexuality circa 2016, I only had a handful of boyfriends. Some more serious than others, but still only a few that I ever actually called my “boyfriend.” This is not to say I didn’t date and wasn’t actively in a plethora of casual relationships until I was 26. The stories are plentiful. But in terms of “boyfriends”… not so much.
One of these people who I unfortunately bestowed the boyfriend title upon for a grand total of a few weeks before I was even old enough to be in high school has never let it go. This is not an exaggeration. Though never provoked by me this then boy’s obsession with me led his then girlfriend’s mother to corner me back when I was a teenager in a Barnes and Noble and call me a whore. He had only been my boyfriend for again, a few weeks when we were pre-teens. Around that same time this guy put photos onto MySpace that with what I know now I can justifiably call revenge porn. I was told stories from mutual friends who I’d experimented with about him finding them at freshman year parties and prying for details. And this was all before we were old enough to drink.
Despite now being well over the legal age for consumption and renting a car and (supposedly) having fully developed frontal cortexes, it still hasn’t stopped.
Randomly and without warning at times over the last two decades he will pop up and remind me of his existence. Sometimes it’s him just liking an Instagram post and forcibly re-following me even though I have removed the follow every single time for the last 10+ years since Instagram gave us the option. Sometimes it’s him messaging me and asking me if I’m sure I actually don’t want to sleep with men anymore, or asking me about past partners, or telling me I’m “the one that got away.” He is married; I’ve told his wife about this and shown her what he does. Her response was that I just must really want the attention.
I think it’s pretty obvious who is desperate for the attention here.
And to a certain extent, here you go! You’re getting it! For behavior that, yes, I will concede could be a lot worse but is undeniably as I said in the trigger warning: fucking creepy.
I’m not sure who said the phrase originally but it blows my mind that people will willfully choose to decide that “no response is response” simply does not apply to them. Who will see you deliberately doing things that would have anyone with an iota social awareness saying, “oooo I don’t think this person likes me” and they just decide to ignore it. Who think their attention is not only wanted, but appreciated. Who think their fondness is reciprocated, even when all of the evidentiary support that there is would suggest firmly if not loudly and repeatedly that it is not.
When you see women being enraged by men for things that “aren’t that bad” I can almost always assure that we know. I know this could be worse. But also…what if circumstances were different?
What if I didn’t live 1600+ miles away from this person? What if we still ran in the same circles? What if I had an office where it was easy to “just drop by”? What if I didn’t understand how to properly utilize filters and safety measures on social media? What if I didn’t know what revenge porn was? What if his wife had been more confrontational with him 10 years ago? What if I hadn’t been as resolved to just disengage entirely? What if it had gone differently? What if, what if, what if.
I don’t know why this most recent reappearance of him over the weekend really struck the worst nerve, but it did. Be it the audacity, the redundancy, the patheticness—something about seeing this new follower notification followed by him specifically liking pictures that could be considered a thirst trap while skipping over any that would have a hint of a relationship platonic or otherwise that wouldn’t include him made me infuriated.
As Cheryl Strayed said in a column for Dear Sugar in 2018: “It’s incredibly difficult not to feel burned by the patriarchy. We have indeed been burned.”
I don’t spend a particularly large amount of time thinking about men. Thank you, de-centering men in your life! I don’t even really dwell on how or why I spent 9 active dating years thinking I was straight and then a year and some change in bisexual land. I just don’t really care to. So I also spend very little energy talking about men and the ways in which they have wronged me.
But this man absolutely wronged me. And has continued to for twenty. fucking. years. He was so weird about me that an adult felt compelled to unjustifiably slut shame me when I was a minor (this is also on her, fuck that lady). He put compromising photos of myself and other girls online because according to him “it was funny” but mostly because it was a power move and he could. He sought out gratification from experiences that were not his own. He took advantage of his wife’s trust and our mutual lack of proximity in order to try get more gratification. He has been, for lack of a more eloquent word, a fucking creep who has justified his behavior by referencing a few kissing sessions in a middle school practice room for a few weeks back in 2002. Tell me what other word you would use to define that other than creepy, because I can’t think of one.
And he doesn’t get it. He never has. More than that, he clearly doesn’t want to.
Hopefully this time he’ll see the blocked notification and take a fucking hint.
If not he has this substack to reference which puts it all out very plainly. See you never.Just some brackets for the girlies.
Let’s lighten things up, shall we!!!
If my Googling serves me correctly college basketball is basically (if not completely? idc) over and Caitlin Clark unfortunately will not be walking away with a championship. That is…about all I’ve got on the sports side. I don’t know anything about basketball other than Caitlin Clark is extremely good at it and more than one person asked me if I wanted to fill out a March Madness bracket. I did not. I know—shocker.
But!! I do love games so I made some brackets of my own within topics where I’d actually be able to form an argument as to why they should be picked. Things like historical tragedies, the best scents for candles, and the only sparking water to buy. Enjoy.FWIW My Winners:
The Salem Witch Trials
La Croix
Rhode
Fresh Soil
Shrimp Cocktail (this was brutal i’m v sorry)Good Luck, Babe.
Chappell Roan Ladies, rise up! We have been given another single!This song is solely responsible for getting me through a workout on a Monday morning. Stomping at an incline to the words “you'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling” on repeat is truly cathartic. Especially when enraged by men during eclipse season. Highly recommend.