🥀 Valentine's Day thoughts + Taylor's Super Bowl weekend 💕
Your Weekly Breakdown
Whether we like it or not, we’re about to be inundated with talk of love. Red hearts. Roses. Valentine’s Day.
After we loyally observe Taylor’s Super Bowl on Sunday, I predict the social media flow will go something like this:
your friends post their thoughts or memes of how it’s all overdone, overrated, commercialized
moms will post photos of making Valentine’s Day crafts and cards for their children’s classmates
single gals will post about “galentine’s day”, with artsy photos of their alcohol-free cocktails and fabulous shoes they can afford because they don’t pay for childcare
wellness brands will post about “Self Love” and try to convince you that you need their products to feel better (anyone selling these vibrators gets a pass on this because you do, in fact, need one and you will, in fact, feel better)
assholes like me will post about how we don’t need anyone to feel loved but will still post photos of opulent flowers that admirers send
And then it will be February 15th and we’ll all go back to languishing for the remainder of the winter.
Does Feb 14th give you the ick? It is a bit of a limp dick day, isn’t it?
Whether or not you celebrate Valentine’s Day...whether is *is* commercial nonsense, or you are vehement that love should be expressed endlessly and all of the time not just on a single goddamn day, I have a thought:
What is we just do whatever it is we can to extend small delights in whatever from we can to as many people we are able for however many days per year we can manage?
Do I want to argue with you about the ridiculousness of a ‘holiday’? No, I do not. All I desire is to eat chocolate, preferably those salted caramel ones. Do I want to whine yet again about how much the expression of kindness and love and care falls to women? Yes, I do, but instead I will bite my tongue and grab another chocolate and text my girlfriends and the women in my life how much I admire them and appreciate them.
Anyway, the weekly roundup is full of things I love, just for you! This is me, showing you that I adore you. I hope you feel it!
PS come hang out on instagram as well for all of your humour and additional links and reading recommendations!
Recommendations
📺 Watch
If you’ve been doing your homework, you’ve started to watch Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. While the show is much slower paced than the trailer leads us to believe, it’s still a dishy piece of TV. And, for all of the love that the Swans are getting (played by a solid cast of Naomi Watts, Chloë Sevigny, Diane Lane, Demi Moore, Calista Flockhart, and Molly Ringwald), the real hero of this show is absolutely Tom Hollander, who plays Truman Capote. White Lotus fans will remember him as one of “those gays” making Jennifer Coolidge’s life miserable (but exciting) in season 2.
Even with that cast, the book is better!
For my elder Millenials and Gen X readers, The Greatest Night in Pop is a fantastic documentary on Netflix about the behind the scenes race against the clock top to get 46 of the world’s most talented singers together to record We Are The World - yes, you are already humming it! - to raise funds for famine relief in Africa.
Blowjobs!!! Aptly titled, Get On Your Knees is, yes, an entire comedy special dedicated to them. It’s awesome.
🎧 Listen
June McDoom’s With Strings, a strings-infused folk album that is perfect for an easy Saturday morning.
Chris Stapleton set the bar high with his last album Starting Over in 2020, but his latest release, Higher, will make you want to hook up an IV and inject your veins full of his soulful tenor. Good Saturday night make out music, IMO.
Mitski’s The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We: enjoy the mellow, whimsical artist’s best album yet while you find time for some leisurely Sunday pursuits.
📚 Read
Hong Kong Noir is a series of 14 dark, gritty short stories that paint a multilayered perspective of just what makes up Hong Kong’s history.
When Nancy Hale’s The Prodigal Women was published in 1942, it was viewed as a scandalous piece of writing. The books tells of three young women in the Roaring Twenties, and much of what our heroines face is the same shit we deal with today: uncertainty about motherhood, exploring our careers and the limits within them, and how we dare to be in our sexuality. You guys, not much has changed!
A Court of Thorns and Roses is sexy, face-paced, and full of action. I’ve been reading a lot of ‘literature’ and I honestly can’t go that deep every night before bed, so I appreciate a sexy fantasy novel! It’s a really popular book, so you may have already heard about it or even read it. It’s not that I eschew what is clearly popular, it’s just that I…
Wait, no, honestly it’s exactly what I do, sorry!
Anyway slip into my DMs and we can chitty chat about it! 🔥