Wednesday. Midday. A morning of errands. Always the errands. The endless loop of things to get done—the post office, the dog medication, the Modern Love essay I want to submit, the this/the that. How is it possible I have so much to take care of? I’m still struggling with this cold, the drip drip drip, and the bitter weather isn’t working in my favor. And this week is already a nail biter—last night, I was at the Taylor Mac show at Town Hall when the news alert came through on my iPhone: Doug Jones had won Alabama. Over the creepy af, Roy Moore. And ninety-seven percent of the black women of Alabama voted for Doug Jones. I dreaded looking at my phone, the campaign so vicious, the losing candidate so vile. In the wake of the election, I don’t know the citizens of my country anymore, not in the way that I thought I did, as a New Yorker, a liberal open-minded human. I knew of course, of the deep-rooted isms—racism, anti-semitism, like that—but I had no true insight to how rampant the strain of what Aziz Ansari referred to as the “lower kkk” truly was until 45 unleashed that Pandora’s Box. Now, of course, I do know, now I watch an election for a Senate seat closely, now I care what happens in Alabama. There’s also the open enrollment for Affordable Health Care, which I desperately need and which I can’t truly afford, and so I sit here, debating what the better option for my family is. And the ultimate of the week’s nail-biter: whether my daughter gets into her college of choice, that one particular institution she applied for Early Action/Decision. It’s no longer a slam dunk, what school you get into, the competition so fierce it is. And so. I sit. On a Wednesday. Filing my blog post. Laying in wait. Hope your day is not as in the in-between as mine is.
Salma Hayek: “I had brainwashed myself into thinking that it was over and that I had survived; I hid from the responsibility to speak out with the excuse that enough people were already involved in shining a light on my monster. I didn’t consider my voice important, nor did I think it would make a difference.”
We should all be following Maxine Waters Twitter account.
Cecile Richards: “The danger is what this administration is doing—and Vice President Mike Pence is the orchestra master on this—of putting people into places of authority that will now repeal and take away women’s rights, where we have actually no public discourse.”
Joan Severance: “This is beyond Playboy — this is the inside of me. This is where my passions lie: in destruction and transformation and creativity, and figuring and calculating, and designing and formulating.”
Did you know there was a word of the year? I DID NOT. But I’m happy it’s Feminism.
Tina Smith will take over for Al Franken.
And now have a laugh with Laurie Kilmartin.
0 Comments