In This Letter From The "Starting To Socialize Again" Front, I Can Confirm That Choosing The Fried Chicken At A Good Restaurant Is ALWAYS The Proper Choice.
Lovelies! It’s Thursday, it’s mid-month, it’s still summer, and last night I had the chance to attend a group dinner (gasp!) at a restaurant (double gasp!) and meet strangers (all of the gasps!). Amongst the customary awkwardness of none of us remembering how to small talk, I of course dove into “let’s talk about our trauma” because I have no time for shallow convos anymore. I sat and spoke to a woman still in her residency at UCSF and asked her about what it felt like to be a young doctor at the top of the pandemic, and heard about how devastating it was to hold an iPad so a family could communicate with a dying loved one (she expressed that working with families is part of what gets her motivated as a physician.) Hearing her experiences after having shut those types of stories out of my brain for a year was deeply grounding. We have so much to process as a society, and it’s not over yet.
I also spoke with another doctor who railed against the selfish idiocy of “personal liberty” arguments against vaccination after treating some of the worst COVID patients in the city. Needless to say, I was nodding along so vigorously I nearly gave myself whiplash.
TO THE INTERNET
I’m working from Calgary, Canada next week so that I can finally see (and hug!) my extended family, and while I won’t have time to partake in The Greatest Outdoor Show On Earth, I am enjoying checking out their website of new midway food, which includes Cool Ranch Dorito Corn Dogs, a Krispy Kreme Donut Tornado (donuts! Wrapped in cotton candy!), Pickle Lemonade, Seafood Ramen Poutine (what the actual sam hell…) and deep-fried Pork Intestine. Hey Calgary Stampede, u ok?
Is anyone at all actually surprised by this? Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House. (The Guardian). So two things: 1) can you imagine how much the Former Guy is straight up bellowing over this story, haunting the halls of Bedminster ? And 2) as a liberal, I want to apologize for whatever ignorant snark I uttered about Mitt Romney when he talked about Russia being the “number one geopolitical foe”, because as this 2019 ABCNews article states, dude was spot on and we should have listened.
This line from the WSJ article on a humanoid robot who keeps getting fired makes me smile whilst nodding knowingly: “More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.”
For our younger readers, you may not already have a visceral sense of how trash Ken Starr is from the stunts he pulled during the Clinton impeachment (I swear, being in junior high during the senate trial broke my developing brain) but rest assured, the revelations of his antics to get Jeffrey Epstein off the hook will do that for you: Ken Starr's Completely Inexcusable Career Has a New Chapter Titled 'Jeffrey Epstein' (Esquire)
And finally, I never read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out in 2016, despite so many people insisting I do so after the results of the 2016 election. And with all of the BS that author J.D. Vance is pulling now, I’m glad I didn’t: The Moral Collapse of J. D. Vance (The Atlantic). I know that’s a petty and stupid flex, but I’m taking the wins where I can get them right now.
You’re great. Be kind to yourself and to each other, drink some water, and maybe try out some box breathing today?
xoxo Amy