Infrastructure Week
For real! Maintenance is so important!
We’re going to be more thoughtful than this baby about where to send our donations but we like the energy here
Dames Nation, we’ve got a call to action this week. Our neighbors, friends, and family in Texas have been experiencing the worst winter weather conditions the state has seen in over 30 years, and due to the state’s power grid not being kept up to date, many of them have been without power and clean water for nearly a week. Because nobody in a position of leadership in Texas took the necessary steps to maintain the power grid (in the main, they were too busy pouring their time and energy into ensuring their own re-election and grip on power, no pun intended), not only has the state’s normal life been derailed, but people are dying. Not merely being inconvenienced for a few days, DYING fully preventable deaths.
Obviously, Your Dames are answering the call to contribute to relief efforts. We’re donating $300 to mutual aid groups in Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth, and hope you’ll contribute any amount you feel capable of donating, too. If that’s not feasible for you, signal-boosting is free & genuinely helpful -- word of mouth is how we often learn about organizations addressing causes we care about, so please do spread the word!
We’re big fans of mutual aid organizations like those listed here (slide 10), here (slide 6), and here (a massive Google Doc). It’s worth noting, too, that just as people in elected leadership positions failed Texas, the everyday people of Texas had already built the social infrastructure of intra-community care that’s so indispensable in a crisis.
You may recall a couple of weeks ago, when I described Reply-All’s 4-part series on the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen implosion as essential listening. You may recall countless other glowing mentions of Reply-All in these pixel pages, as well. Having written so admiringly so many times about the show in general and this mini-series in particular, I’m obliged to share with those readers who don’t spend much time being very online that Sruthi’s reporting on the largely race-based BATK reckoning led directly to a similarly race-based reckoning within Gimlet Studios (the company that produces Reply-All).
Over the course of the last week, past and present Gimlet colleagues have detailed increasingly appalling behavior -- actions that were abusive, anti-union, cruel -- by Sruthi Pinnamineni and PJ Vogt. Both have removed themselves from the BATK project and Reply-All generally. Rusty Foster at the blessedly resurrected Today in Tabs has a good roundup of the events and related conversations of the past week.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by this turn of events, but I was, and more than I should have been, which is disappointing, too. It’s a reminder that I’ve fallen into the trap of conflating good work with goodness, which is very easy for me to do and which I’ll be training myself to avoid doing in future.
I really don’t want to talk much here about the pandemic wall, other than to acknowledge that I have hit it, at speed, and it seems capable of and perhaps even delights in the prospect of hitting back. I’m mostly ok, thanks to therapy and meds and family and friends and making myself lay out and put on cute outfits and the weighted blanket that’s helping me toss & turn less and good tv shows & movies & old favorite audiobooks and tasty, nutritious food. All of those things & more have been propping me up, and if they weren’t accessible to me I’d be a complete mess, rather than the almost mostly non-to-moderate mess I’m working on remaining. One thing it’s easy to lose sight of -- as so many of us are focusing on putting one foot in front of the other each day and enjoying everything it’s possible to enjoy under the circumstances -- is the fact that the entire concept of the pandemic wall “is governmental failure masquerading as personal fatigue.” In other words, once again, the scam is structural, yet we as individuals are expected to weather it and if we can’t, somehow that’s our fault. I don’t care for it! And I’d like to remind you that if you’re in a bad place mentally, that’s not on you. You’re doing the best you can -- not your actual best, but the best you can.
Related and very germane, my friend Bryce has shared both a recording of and the slides she developed for a 50-minute webinar called Per Your Last Email: Trauma-Informed Communication...in trying times & all the time. If you can invest 50 minutes to watch or listen to her presentation, it’s well worth doing so. If all you can manage is 10 minutes, read through her slides. There’s no foolproof method, and Bryce herself is very upfront about the fact that her own trauma-informed communication skills are a work in progress. That’s fine, by the way! Doing something perfectly is not the goal here, as Bryce points out so succinctly: “With every interaction we can make trauma-informed, the more mental and emotional room we’re able to cultivate as individuals and as a community.”
I’ll close out with two small fun things. First, Wishtrend is running a sale on skincare products in the I’m from line. All are 30% off with the code IF30. I’m a big fan of the inflammation-soothing Mugwort Mask and the silky-textured Rice Toner and will be stocking up. The second is the blissfully beautiful world of yarn company, knitwear designer, and avid knitter Instagram accounts. Everything is cozy, pretty, and soft, which is everything I want to be surrounded by these days! A mishmash of favorites: dreareneeknits, slipstitchldn, manosyarnsusa, callmedwj, kelbournewoolens, fiber.for.the.people, margotchien, poisongrrls, and boylandknitworks.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
The cutest li’l canine creeper you ever did see
A Name That Tune-winning baby saying “THAT’S MY JAM!!!” and rocking out accordingly
Making one’s way through the indispensable Captain Awkward’s advice on productivity and life hacks handy during a pandemic!
We appreciate you, readers of Dames Nation!
Every time you tell a friend to subscribe, some woman, somewhere, treats herself to some high quality socially distanced local theatre & encourages you to do the same.
Help us build Dames Nation by upgrading to a paid subscription on Substack
Share your saucy opinions with us on Twitter whether jointly as your @twobossydames, or in single size servings as @MrsFridayNext & @sophiebiblio!