I am ragged still, and I do not have a lot of jokes. With all due respect to Ms. Kübler-Ross, my grief has gone through at least 1200 stages in the past two days, #84 being "At least I don't have to keep scraping for blog content twice a week because I am never going on the internet again." And this was a significant relief to me! I pictured a long stretch of low-effort, un-photographed Meatless Mondays and Taco Tuesdays and Where Is That Takeout Menu Wednesdays and Thpagetti Thursdays and okay look it has just now become clear to me that while I have a pulse I will also have some degree of silliness, it is a natural process of my body somewhere between "breathing" and "caffeine processing."
But it is now Friday morning and I came here, because this is where I come on Friday mornings. Because I wanted a place to say "I am ragged." That I am scared for my fellow citizens who do not have the incredible protection of being straight and white and middle class. That I am sad for myself and my daughters who do not have the respect and the dignity and the opportunities that would be afforded to us had we been born men, not yet, no matter what we are told.
And because my friend Tara wants me to make some intensely Australian recipes for the entertainment and edification of my readers and I have not gotten to that project yet. And because I just realized yesterday that Ivy calls this movie "Chancey and the Meatballs" and it was important to me that you know that too.
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| Like a band in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon |
And also because, as hauntingly poetic as it would be to have the last words I ever typed in this space be a link to Five Thirty Flippin' Eight, that's a little on the nose, even for me.
A lot of people smarter than me have offered a lot of advice as to how to proceed now. Swistle made a list, because she is my Internet Grown-Up and she is on top of things and I love her. Most of you reading this have probably seen Leslie Knope's Letter to America. This helped me. I imagine fewer of you have listened to Travis McElroy's fireside chat (transcript here, although I advise listening if you can) and that helped me too. And it's okay to reject optimism at this stage and say "please don't tell me things are going to be okay, white people/straight people/men, because I do not think they're going to be okay for me." Actually, I am giving you blanket permission to ignore all advice from straight white men going forward, you're very welcome.
But it's also okay, if it helps pull you from the fog of despair up into the pit of let's get to work now, to imagine someone supportively holding your hand. To embrace the stereotypical, touchy-feely liberalness that is mocked and derided and dismissed but is ultimately, for some of us, the best and most hopeful part of humanity.
I am holding your hand.
