Pre-Thanksgiving Ughhhh
(not the real title) (lololol too late it is now)
Dames Nation, Gifts Season is Upon Us!
And, as we cherish you all with every fibre of our beings, we have a small gift for you: 20% off all subscriptions you purchase from today-December 6th. [Update: the discount works for both monthly and annual subscriptions, yay!]
Nothing says You’ve Got A Friend like just the right gift
If you would like to treat either yourself or a friend, you can do so via the sale page or by using this handy button:
Dame Margaret On Surviving a Break-Up, Week One
All of First Wives Club: break-up goals, particularly this fantasy wherein an all-white outfit remains pristine at the end of a fundraising dinner where red wine was served.
So, last Saturday, my relationship of two years came to a sudden, painful end. If we’re IRL friends and this newsletter is the first you’re hearing of it, it is no reflection of our intimacy, only an indication that the pain of telling each new individual has slowed the speed at which I’ve told… anyone. I’m writing about it here both because it’s one way to let a lot of people know all at once and, more importantly, because it would otherwise be a LOT to write around in the coming weeks and months. As the mere fact that I have been coping this week is borderline miraculous, all I will detail here are my methods of coping.
Have a great mom who will stay the first couple of nights with you, capably alternating between holding you while you cry and binging The Crown with you.
HYDRATE. If ever there were a time for an enormous, Kacey Musgraves-inspiredmotivational water bottle, this is that time.
SEE! Your therapist. TAKE! Your meds. If you don’t have either, consider finding one and securing the latter because BOY would I not be in great shape if I didn’t have access to them.
Remember that (if you are lucky enough to have a job with benefits), vacation time and sick time both exist for a reason, and make good use of them. Eyes so swollen from crying that you can barely open them? That counts as sick. Need to make you sure you have something you can look forward to in the near future? Cash in that vacation time and plan a trip to visit friends.
Where you can afford to cut yourself slack, do. For me, that meant taking a Lyft to work each morning this week instead of forcing myself out of bed earlier to wrestle with the T. If you eat your sadness instead of sleeping it, your answer might be getting delivery.
Meet a really great baby.
Accept in advance that being extremely heartbroken will inevitably lead to you identifying to an embarrassing degree with whatever break-up anthem happens to be getting a lot of radio play at the moment. Would I elect to spend the rest of my life with embarrassingly sincere feelings about a song inspired by Justin Bieber? No, I would not. But it appears like I do not have much say in things. At least I managed to sidestep Lewis Capaldi.
Remember that grilled cheese and tomato soup both exist, and act accordingly.
Take care to cultivate exceptional friends who will send you, in order of receipt:
A gorgeous piece of custom embroidery from Kady MacFarlane (technically an early Christmas present). These one of your Dames’ collective things to either give or buy, and there are two important dates to keep in mind pertaining to them: if you want a custom piece done for Christmas, there is still time! Contact Kady on Etsy or Instagram with your idea by Thanksgiving and know yourself to be a God Among Gift Givers. OR, if you just want to buy one of the many gorgeous pieces she has already made, go to her Etsy on Black Friday when they will be available for sale. You will be so happy you did. (THANK YOU, KERRY!)
The world’s cutest flower arrangement, who has been named Harry after a certain scamp we all know and love. (THANK YOU, CATHERINE!)
A Starbucks gift card (NEVER UNWELCOME; THANK YOU, DIMITRA!)
And a personalized video of Adrianne Curry, America’s first Next Top Model, giving really frank (and explicit!) words of encouragement about making it through a breakup. TRULY A STEAL at $35!!! (THANK YOU, DEANNA!)
Seek out engrossing entertainment that’s light on kissing/happy couples. If you are experiencing a break-up right now, I have one piece of good news for you and it’s that Knives Out is a perfect night out. An escapist romp where good is rewarded, evil is punished, and knitwear is luxurious without a love story in sight.
And, if you can possibly arrange it, have one of your very favorite artists announce her first record in two years, and release a fire single that seems weirdly pertinent to your situation:
And that will get you through 6/7ths of the way through week one.
Dame Sophie’s Grab Bag of Internet Selections
Ok, yes, this is very pretty. BUT.
According to the weather app on my phone, sundown in my neck of the woods took place at 4:37pm today. I feel about this Gloomvember countdown to the solstice the way John Mulaney feels about the new Nazis:
I know that once we (punch all the Nazis AND) get to December 21, things are going to turn around, but in the meantime, [insert exhausted raspberry sound here]. I gotta tell you, I broke the seal on Christmas music the week we switched back to Standard Time, and it may be my best small-scale decision of 2019. It’s like sonic twinkle lights for my soul. The very first Spotify playlist I created is A Nice Jewish Girl’s Guide To Christmas Music, and if you’re looking for something to make your spirits bright with a bunch of holiday classics featuring minimal religious content, you can’t go wrong with this batch of tunes. There are a couple of weepies in there (I am moiself, after all), but it’s mostly jingly & jolly as heck and if you can’t wait until next Friday, deny yourself no longer!
This wonderful thread -- on sticking with a thing you want to do, through the phase of being terrible at it, because you have a feeling that getting to the other side will be satisfying and worthwhile -- meant a lot to me this week. I came back to knitting recently after about a dozen years of knitting exactly zero stitches. I had been an avid knitter (and, ok, yes, yarn collector/stash developer) for several years, and then dropped it at some point during the toddler years, and had been vaguely thinking about taking it back up again for the last two or three years. I’m specifying the years because I had to tiptoe and inch my way back to this hobby. Would I need to re-learn everything after years away from it? (Happily, no, though I am still a little rusty.). Now, I’m making Kate Davies’ beautiful and just-challenging-enough revival of a 20th century classic, The Owls Sweater. My grandma made one of these for me in the mid-80s and I just love it. Naturally, I’m already mentally casting on several future projects at once, but am also really enjoying the process of making this particular one. I swatched very carefully and cast on for real, and then had to rip it out and start again upon discovering, after happily knitting two inches of 2x2 rib, that I’d twisted the stitches while joining them in the round, but now I’m on a roll and will be cabling in the owls around the yoke before I look around. Messing up and forgetting and relearning how to do things and having to just keep going while waiting for a flash of understanding, at some point, is part of the whole deal, as Delilah Dawson’s thread illustrates. It’s nice to have low-stakes, tangible ways to relearn that lesson.
Another of my Gloomvember management strategies is making and sharing nice things to eat, and goodness knows tis the season (of baked goods). For Thanksgiving next week, I’m going to bake my usual fall classic honey cake and some cranberry thing. Maybe this Cranberry Pie With Thick Pecan Crumble? This Cranberry Bundt Cake, featuring Chinese five-spice powder, in intriguing! I keep thinking about this fancy cranberry jell-o mold, but I know my Dad has food trauma from the horrifying jell-o molds of his youth, so I’ll probably pass on that, but it’s so pretty! Someone should make it!
Vulture reports that the aforementioned John Mulaney’s new Netflix special -- John Mulaney and The Sack Lunch Bunch -- lands on Christmas Eve! I’m thrilled that he’s doing something different from his usual standup special excellence! He can do anything right now, and what he’s been doing in 2019 is taking his buddy Pete Davidson out on the road to do standup (as Davidson recovered from his breakup with Ariana Grande) and creating a variety show featuring singing & dancing by both child and adult performers, with songs by Eli Bolin (again, a Vulture piece, if you’re watching your monthly limit). He’s mentioned both Maurice Sendak and Carole King’s Really Rosie special and PBS 1980s touchstone 3-2-1 Contact as inspirations and those are both so extremely my jam I am kind of beside myself about what this special will hold.
The Strategist ran a round-up of gift ideas for 7 year-olds and novelist Rumaan Alam suggested buying a big box of colorful Post-Its, an idea which he self-deprecatingly characterized as “insane” but which is empirically brilliant. For $20 or less, you give a child access to something they know is grown-up, and which also gives them license to create whatever they want that can be made out of 3x3-inch squares of paper with adhesive on one quarter of it. My grandfather used to let me & my cousin Play Office in his office way back when. We generated paperwork, devised filing methods best described as whimsical, sharpened all the pencils we could find, tested and sorted markers and pens, and wasted so much paper in his adding machine that he eventually had to ask us to just use calculators instead. All of which is to say, the “kids love office supplies” conversations on Twitter today have been a true delight. In that same spirit, as someone who has never outgrown the delights of Playing Office, I bring you an office supply item that I’ve found invaluable at work recently. Say hello to EZStax organizers. (The link is to a now-concluded successful Kickstarter campaign, which you can still order through.) EZStax are made of recycled plastic, are super-lightweight, and let me organize the many, many pieces of paper in my life in the way that makes the most sense to me. I routinely stack all the papers I’m actively working on, or don’t have the mental bandwidth to make a decision about immediately in one undifferentiated mass, which eventually threatens to take over all of the flat surface it lives on. My papers at work are now organized in a way that makes sense to me, and that I can actually maintain. I’ll be attacking the paper stacks at home with these guys, too.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
Isabella Rossellini’s unbridled delight when her ducks began laying eggs
The everyday majesty of trees
And, obviously, the grink!
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