9 Things I Loved This Month

Crocheted falafel, feeling rarely understood & Allan - just Allan

I love writing these, I wish I could write one every week, but it feels impossible with a job and children and writing a book and, of course, Wilhelmina (Willie) the puppy.

But here I am, collecting a few of my favorite things, things I want to talk about with everyone I know, and I’m grateful you all seem to enjoy reading them. As always, this is longer than what I thought it would be and has some serious stuff, but it’s a list so you can skip what bores you!

1. The pink pink pinkness of the Barbie movie

I loved it. I loved it so much, I wrote a whole big long review and recommendation right here on this Substack!

What I want to add here is that I love the way in which it embraces the pink pink pink that so many girls (and some boys) love, without condemning it. It reminds me that the mistake we make so often when parenting is thinking we should (or even can) control what our kids like. Back in the day, that meant enforced “girlie” femininity for girls and rough-and-tumble masculinity for boys.

These days, families like mine often want to discourage princesses and nudge girls away from pink or frills or glitter — as if controlling what our girls play with or wear will protect them from becoming lost to patriarchal or abusive relationships.

Similarly, we may try to keep boys from feeling anger or expressing physicality in ways that seem aggressive to us. We jump ahead a few decades and imagine our sons in prison for destruction of property or assault, as if his toddlerhood crashing Thomas the Tank Engine and his pal Percy together set in stone a future of debauchery and exploitation.

The problem was never the pink or the princess, it’s not the stick smacked against the tree by a little boy or the way brothers or buddies may wrestle. The problem was always enforcing the binary — or enforcing rebellion against the binary where it isn’t necessarily authentic to the child.

Embrace the pink for your pink-loving child. Soon enough, they’ll be into sports or goth/emo/screamo/metal and you’ll be longing for whatever it was they loved as a little one.

2. These incredible crocheted play foods

I love finding little gems on resale sites like Poshmark and The RealReal. I’ve acquired a truly bonkers mauve-ish Bottega wristlet and a long white caftan from Onia, both previously loved and offered for a steal compared to their original price tag.

A side benefit to this little hobby has been discovering these tiny little works of art made from yarn and crochet needles, made by a woman named Ariana — a.k.a. @bananas_shop on Poshmark.

Courtesy of ArianaRoseCreates on Lovecraft

On her Lovecraft site, she says, “It was two weeks before my little brother’s birthday I had inspiration and picked up a hook and started crocheting. It wasn't until after the little wonky lookin', half inside-out, plush dinosaur I crocheted for him, that I was indeed hooked (pun intended)!” She also sells original patterns for gorgeous little creations, including frosted Chanukah cookies and the most adorable little happy s’more.

While I started buying them for my daughter, I’m definitely the one most interested in them now. There’s something I love about owning something that an artist loves to make, sometimes it feels as if joy radiates from them.

My favorite is a little pita set with tiny crocheted falafel balls, onion slices and tomatoes. These are things I’d like to keep in a bowl even after my daughter is done playing “kitchen” because they’re just so lovely and assembling a little pita is just too fun to resist.

Crocheted pita kit courtesy of @Bananas_shop

3. Allan from The Barbie Movie

I promise this is the last list item from Barbie! I just couldn’t ignore that Gerwig was able to identify the ways in which a prescriptive gender binary often leaves out certain men along with women (though differently, of course). In this case, we have Allan, played by Michael Cera.

Allan isn’t a Ken and he isn’t a Barbie. He’s just Allan. There’s only one Allan, as they say in the film.

While he can fit in Ken’s clothes, he doesn’t want to. He’s not trying to be a Ken.

What caught my interest is that Gerwig made a non-Ken that isn’t a feminine guy — and that would’ve been an obvious trap to fall into. He’s not Barbie’s stereotypical gay BFF, a cardboard cut-out for a gay man. He’s just a different type of man — one who doesn’t fit the Kensculinity (I just made that word up) mold.

Allan and Ken are actually a great representation of what happens when masculinity is so restrcitive. Men are supposed to be like Ken: ripped, confident, showy, performative. When they’re not, they’re on the outside. As a result, Allan is lonely.

But being on the outside also gives Allan an advantage. He’s more aware of what’s happening around him. He can zoom out and see the bigger picture on how the system isn’t working. Allan is also there for laughs, a little awkward but never pathetic, which would’ve been another easy trap to fall into.

Personally, I’m waiting for the Allan spin-off. But only after they make the President Barbie film starring Issa Rae.

4. Cousins

I’m one of those people who grew up with a lot of cousins. My oldest cousin on my mom’s side is 11 years older than me, and the youngest one who is still living (our youngest cousin passed away when he was in college) is just a few months younger than me.

This past 10 days a whole giant swath of us met up in West Michigan with our various wild children of various wild ages (5 through 24) and my boys were blown away by the sheer number of people all in one place — especially the women — who remind them of their mother — including my own mother and aunt.

cousins - including some who don’t like being on the Internet and also some children who are anonymized

We are a group of women prone to furrowed brows, lips and cuticles lightly chewed with nerves, passionate opinions, loud speaking voices, booming laughs, and very specific areas of professional expertise. We analyze, discuss and we talk talk talk. I believe we are good mothers, but we don’t sit around talking about our kids or how to be better parents.

We drink a little but generally don’t get drunk (well, I don’t drink, but when I did, this was how I did it), don’t back down from any challenge we deem worthy and laugh at the ones we don’t care about. We can stand up from sitting on the floor without using our hands and we will prove it to you. We like similar TV and movies and discuss them without shame, love to riff on one theme and bring it back up later in the conversation for effect, are comfortable with disagreement, and, I believe, are probably similarly misunderstood by those who haven’t known Dutch women.

Driving home from a big picnic and s’mores up in Muskegon, my son said, “Mom, I never understood why you said you don’t fit in with other people very well, because it seems like you do. But I get it now, these really are your people. You really fit with your cousins.”

5. Sleeping With Other People (a film on Hulu)

I felt a need to put “(a film on Hulu)” here in the header because I was concerned people would think I recently discovered the act of sleeping with other people and was going to write about that. But alas, that is not the topic here.

I randomly discovered this romcom on a flight and was blown away. I had to watch it a second time to figure out if it really was as good as I thought or if I was simply relieved to be freed from the tedium of IAH→LAX.

It was just lovely, even on a second watch.

Pre-Lasso Jason Sudeikis and a post-Community Alison Brie (released in 2015), play characters who lose their virginity to one another and then go their separate ways, uniting 15 or so years later as adults with careers and scars on their hearts. They become best friends who fall in love. While it’s not exactly an innovative storyline, their path is different, even after they realize they’re in love. And their chemistry is just lovely.

Spoilers below:

What’s most astounding to me about this film is the absence of jealousy throughout. From the first scene (where she’s trying to get the attention of a different guy) until well after they’ve established they love each other, the love they have for one another is profound and unique, and they never feel a need to possess or claim one another.

The writer/director, Leslye Headland (who wrote and directed the film Bachelorette, wrote the charming remake of About Last Night, and then went on to direct and showrun on Russian Doll, my favorite show ever), seems to envision a love that isn’t trapped in convention — but isn’t pushing any other agenda or relationship paradigm.

It’s just about love, about how it changes us and shapes us, and about how truly pure it can be when we just allow it to be and stop trying to make it fit a label or trap it in a box.

6. This lovely essay about grief

Losing someone you deeply care about changes you. Losing someone you didn’t expect to lose changes your entire universe.

I was extremely close with my grandfather and my stepdad, who died within 18 months of one another, but they were both losses we expected and both were able to pass on their own terms. In fact, each of them planned to pass the night in which they died. This is sort of how both of them lived, too. Forceful but generally quite calm. I said goodbye to them both, a gift most people aren’t given.

When my friend Misti suddenly died at age 45, with a husband and two small children at home, I understood something I previously only knew intellectually: bad things happen. You think you know what that means, you have heartbreaks and losses, bankruptcies and illnesses, but you don’t really know what it means until you have the nearly-unbearable experience of having to hear one of your friends say “She’s gone,” and then having to call your other friends and tell them the same. You say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” to the person who told you — you’re sorry they had to tell you, you’re sorry for their grief, you’re sorry for your own. And then you hear, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” from every friend you have to tell and the pain spatters out like a crack in your windshield.

For Generation X, losing Sinéad O’Connor was tough. She was a rebel and an activist, a voice for rebellion in a relatively conformist era (here in the United States, at least — in the UK, a hell of a lot of activism was happening). But what hit me hardest was this essay by Alexandra Blogier, published by my colleagues in the News & Entertainment division at YourTango (not my division, so you know I’m not tooting my own horn, so to speak), about O’Connor and actor Angus Cloud, who both passed away after experiencing deep grief from sudden losses.

Blogier does a fantastic job of showing respect for two people who likely died of heartbreak.

“In a series of tweets on July 17, 2023, O’Connor expressed the depths of that loss and her ongoing heartache. She wrote, 'Been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul. We were one soul in two halves. He was the only person who ever loved me unconditionally. I am lost in the bardo without him.’

Bardo is a Tibetan term that can be defined as ‘the intermediate state or gap we experience between death and our next rebirth.’ For O’Connor to refer to her life after her son’s death as occurring in liminal space is a fitting description of that particular kind of mourning.

The fact that she survived her grief for so long shows her innate strength.”

That last line.

It’s important to remember that in most ways, heartbreak is experienced by the brain and body the same way a broken bone is. It is physical pain. It causes physical manifestations of stress. It is real pain and the human body and brain will do almost anything to escape or ease our pain. This is one reason addiction is a disease that affects people of every social tier: we all have pain, we are all animals trying to outrun it, licking our wounds, pacing and circling and trying to hide the wild look of a creature that is suffering. If we don’t have an effective way to manage our pain, we easily maladapt and lean on a substance or process that harms us. This is a near-universal human trait made worse by a general disrespect for the seriousness of emotional suffering.

As Blogier writes, “There’s an overarching attitude in our culture that grief is something we move on from. There’s a mourning period, a specific amount of time when we’re allowed to feel every feeling that accompanies losing a loved one, and then, it’s over. But that’s not really how it works.”

Grief doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It is a skipped stone, hurled in such a way that it touches, touches, touches, touches the surface and then drops. It may sink to the bottom of the lake while tiny concentric waves ripple out and overlap again and again until they are too tiny to be seen. But the stone remains there, at the bottom of the lake until another hand lifts it, rubs it with a knowing thumb and skips it again.

My stepdad died at the end of July of 2020, during lockdown. Three years later — just yesterday, actually — my daughter asked me, “Mama, how do you hear Pop-Pop from up in the sky?”

This didn’t come out of nowhere, I’d been talking about how I thought Pop-Pop was happy we were driving his car while we were in Michigan. I hadn’t stopped to think about a five-year-old’s interpretation of the things I say all the time about him, about my grandpa, about “Auntie Mist”. I didn’t think about how she interprets all the things I “hear” them saying.

My boys got quiet as I thought of what I could say to my daughter that was both true and understandable, and my eyes flooded over.

“I just get quiet and I listen inside my own mind,” I said, my throat pinched and burning.

That is the truth. It’s what I do. Maybe it is my imagination, maybe it is Bardo, maybe it is heaven, maybe it is just the gift of memory, but I can hear them.

And I’m lucky, because they still make me smile.

7. Glasses that disrupt a monopolized industry

When I buy glasses, I make a point to not support Luxottica, the global eyewear brand that has monopolized the prescription and sunglasses market for years, ratcheting up prices well beyond what makes any sense for the market — especially considering nearly all Luxottica brands (including Ray Ban, Prada, and many more) are mass produced in places where manufacturing tends to be much cheaper. They also own LensCrafters and other eye exam outlets.

When I buy glasses, I go to my friends Jen and Steve who own 90265-Eyes in Malibu and who are truly amazing small business owners. They won’t carry Luxottica brands, but rather support indie labels that create high-quality products they feel confident servicing for as long as you own them. I know this because I’ve brought in my old pair of SALT glasses for new lenses when my Rx has changed or “tune-ups” after I’ve sat on them one too many times.

9026EYES

9026EYES on Instagram: “So many glasses, so little time! Which ones are your faves??? 1 - @laibachyork 2 - @bevelspecs 3 - @stateopticalco 4 - @laibachyork w custom-tinted lenses ✨ #laibachyork #bevelspecs #stateopticalco #9026eyes”

July 1, 2023

Obviously, not everyone can just cruise into their friends’ shop in order to fight the Luxottica tsunami. Warby Parker was one of the first disruptors to this system, though many say their quality leaves much to be desired. Since then, others have tried their hand at fighting the rapids against such a domineering force.

When I was in Hawaii, I needed a new pair of sunglasses and didn’t want to buy some garbage or anything that would fund this monopoly, so I googled local sunglasses brands and found Mohala. It was founded by a woman who is Asian and mixed-race, specifically to create frames that will fit a wide range of faces in a variety of widths and nose bridge sizes. She discovered that in the USA it was hard to find sunglasses because, as the website says, “Most US eyewear is designed to fit a narrow, Euro-centric face.”

from Mohala eyewear’s website

They offer a service like Warby Parker does, where you order 3 pairs online and put down a deposit, then keep only what you want — and there’s an online fit test that takes a few minutes.

I was able to try on a bunch, and bought a pair of frames called Pikake, in a clear light pink, size Medium. Despite being about as Euro-typical looking as possible, I have very low ears that are oddly pitched backward that have made glasses uncomfortable.

The amazing thing about these glasses is that this frame was designed to not get stuck on your cheeks when you smile or hit against your eyelashes, regardless of your nose bridge size. I had assumed this sort of cheek-interruption action was just a consequences of my face/ears shape — but it’s been wonderful to be free of this problem. So far they’ve held up well and are still super comfy.

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