Hurriquake 🌀& writing about other people [Like You Know Whatever]

Hi friends!

How are you?? I’m doing pretty well! As I write this, we are at the tail end of Hurricane Hilary’s presence in Los Angeles. Imagine: a hurricane in Southern California! How fun! I have to admit, I did not prepare at all. I remember the first time a big hurricane hit New York while I was living there, I bought giant gallon jugs of water and canned foods, taped X’s on my windows, and filled my tub up with water. For Hilary, I was like, “Eh, we have a ton of La Croix and candles from Anthropologie, we’ll be fiiiiine.” I did buy a bunch of food, but it was all perishable and in the fridge, so we’d have been fucked if the power went out. I guess you could say that I did not take this one very seriously. I just figured it would rain a lot, and after this winter, I was pretty confident that my apartment could handle rain. Luckily, that held true. It’s hard to say the damage as I write this, but I’m hoping it was pretty minimal.

Oddly enough, I have some fond memories of hurricanes Irene and Sandy from my time in New York. I know that Sandy fucked that area up big time, but the biggest impact on me in Prospect Heights was that I didn’t have to go to my cubicle job that I hated for a whole week because their servers were underwater or something. This was back in the Dark Ages, before work from home was a thing, so I would have to literally call into the office every time it snowed or stormed and wait for the nasty HR woman’s voice on a recording saying the office was closed. (I think it’s a rule at most corporate jobs that HR has to be the most unpleasant, human-hating person alive.) My boyfriend at the time (now husband 😇) biked into work in Manhattan from Brooklyn a couple times while the city was still fucked up, and I remember him saying how spooky it was in lower Manhattan with all the street lights out.

We were in our mid-20s, so those hurricanes came with all sorts of reckless, foolish behavior, like getting drunk with friends and said friends going out into the rain and wind in the streets in their bathing suits. I recall that during Irene, one dear friend, while very drunk, poured rum on a coffee table and danced in it. During Sandy, he and another good buddy came over post-bar and he played my rarely-used guitar while I made cacio e pepe for everyone. We called him the Hurricane Savant. Fond, fond memories.

One thing that Hurricane Hilary had that Irene and Sandy did NOT have, though, was an earthquake! Or, as I like to call it, a hurriquake. We got so many emergency alerts on our phones on Sunday, it was hard to keep up, but one of them was from the USGS about an earthquake saying, “DROP, COVER, AND HOLD ON.” I crawled under my desk and then of course went on my phone on my now-defunct Twitter account to see if it had already happened and I missed it. Apparently, it was a 5.5 up in Ojai, so my friends on the west side definitely felt it, but I didn’t feel shit in Highland Park. Which is just as well, since my desk is currently covered in make-up as a makeshift vanity table, and I would have had Super Shock shadows raining down on my head. Like I said, I’m very prepared for natural disasters here.

One question I still have: what am I supposed to do with my cat during an earthquake? What CAN I even do? I know that animals are supposed to have an innate sense for these kinds of geological disturbances, but she seemed blissfully unaware, flopped in sleep on her perch next to my desk the whole time. If I’d tried to grab her and bring her under my desk, she for sure would have squirmed out of my arms. So like… I guess she’s on her own? Idk. I don’t like it, though.

I’m sending this early because I’m headed up to the Bay Area on Wednesday through Friday. My husband, Ross, has a work trip there, and I decided to tag along and take advantage of the free hotel room to see some friends in the area and eat some burritos. I also realized that Weezer was playing a show there during this time. Can you believe I’ve never seen them live before? They are not playing L.A. on their summer tour, so my only options to see them were getting a hotel in San Diego to see them over Labor Day weekend or flying up to San Francisco, and it actually turned out that flying up to San Francisco was more economical (although, regrettably, much less carbon-friendly). I’m considering this writing research for a thing I’m working on, so maybe I can even write it off! (I’m joking, please don’t send the IRS after me. I’m even having them take taxes out of my unemployment checks, see, I’m responsible!)

I know: is flying to another city to go to a Weezer concert really the smartest use of my money right now, considering I don’t have a job or any prospects? Well, like I said, the hotel room was free. This is one of those ridiculous expenses I file away in the “I don’t have kids, so YOLO” folder, along with buying a special outfit for seeing the Barbie movie and the Mary-Kate and Ash-Tray.

By the way, someone recently asked me what I thought of the Barbie movie and I realized that I never shared my thoughts in here. I loved it! Of course I did. What other reaction could I possibly have? I’m a feminist, and I loved Barbies growing up. I had about 400 Barbies and maybe 2 Kens, one of which was an Aladdin doll, I think. My Barbies were all divorced or widowed and strong independent women. In my headcanon, they also all lived in San Francisco. Maybe because of Full House? I always wanted to live in California, even though I had never been there. And now I do, although I don’t live in a three-story house with a rooftop pool like my Barbies did. Those capitalist bitches.

Alright, should we get into this? I really just have one topic I want to write about today: And Just Like That. So, here are some AJLT things:

- Stanford Blatch becoming a Shinto monk. Oh, Stanny. If you’re unaware, Willie Garson, the actor who played Carrie’s gay bestie Stanford passed away in 2021 at age 57 from pancreatic cancer. If I’m not mistaken, he appeared in at least one episode from the first season of And Just Like That, but his absence was definitely felt as the show went on without him. It’s always a horrible, awkward thing when a TV show has to reckon with the death of one of its actors. I think the best I’ve seen it handled was by The Sopranos, with the character of Livia (played by Nancy Marchand). Even though they’d planned for her to be a long-standing source of conflict for Tony, him working through his grief and anger and other emotions about her sudden death actually made the show better. When an actor passes and they choose to have their character pass on the show, too, it also kind of allows everyone the space to process that loss, and gives a finality to their character arc that other options don’t.

Like, for example, having their character move to Japan and become a Shinto monk.

Okay. A few things. I totally get why the show would not want to write in another character’s death after the earth-shattering impact of losing Mr. Big in the first season. We already had a whole season about Carrie’s grief, and losing Stanford would just be… too much. I also think it’s lovely that the ending the show gave him had him finding happiness and peace.

That said… what the fucking fuck?! A monk?

Look, I honestly don’t know if I could’ve come up with anything better, it’s just… odd. And I’m sad that Stanford, who we’ve seen go through many ups and downs in his personal life, did not find the love he deserved. Yeah, he found love within himself and inner peace, blah blah blah, but that’s not the point. He didn’t have anyone to dick him down real good! I always thought it was a bad choice when they had him end up with Anthony (which I think happened in one of the movies, right?). Anthony, who was such a little asshole to him about not looking enough like a young Ed Harris when they first met. That writing choice was like every straight girl when they get a second gay friend and decide they need to matchmake because now they know two gay men and wouldn’t it be so cuuute and funnn if they got together??

Actually, if it weren’t for Anthony’s arc in this current season, I would say that Stanford becoming a literal monk is another example of Hollywood neutering gay men by removing sex from their storylines in order to make them more palatable for their presumed audience. However, this new plotline about Anthony losing his “ass virginity” is actually great and smart and the kind of classic intersection of sexuality and modern dating norms that Sex And the City was always so great at handling. (And I sincerely hope that that’s why Samantha is calling. “Honey, I heard someone’s losing their ass virginity! Where do I send the champagne?”)

- Che’s standup set about Miranda. Hooooo boy. As a comedy writer who often writes about my life and occasionally about the people in it, I thought this storyline was so, so interesting, because every writer I know has different boundaries when it comes to this issue. Some, like Che Diaz, have no boundaries at all! And yet, they somehow expect other people to not have a problem with that? Wild!!!

There is a popular quote among writers from Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird that goes, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” And while I agree that we own our own stories, I don’t believe that we own everyone’s story that falls within our stories, if that makes sense. To put it simply, you can’t write about other people and publish or perform it for an audience and then expect them not to feel a way about it! That is called being an asshole!

I don’t consider myself an especially private person about many things (pretty sure I’ve told you my exact antidepressant cocktail down to the dosages before), but one thing I take very seriously is not fucking up my relationship with my husband. Before he was my husband, or my fiancé, or even my boyfriend, he was one of my very best friends, and so when we started dating, I felt the weight and importance of that, of preserving our friendship and protecting his trust in me. So, from the beginning of me as a writer, I have always checked in with him before I published anything remotely questionable about him, from long stories that he factored into down to funny snippets of our conversations that barely a few hundred followers would see. Now, have I fucked up, and had to apologize or take something down? Oh, you know it! I will say, now that we’re on year 14, I have a pretty good sense of what he would consider objectionable, but I still check in with him sometimes. For one thing, boundaries are not static. And for another, his mom reads these email newsletters.

That’s the thing about writing about people in your life. Everyone has different boundaries, and they can shift depending on the situation. For instance, with Ross, there are some things that I know he’d be fine with me mentioning in here, like recently, when I told you that he was away visiting family. There are other occasions where he’s been cool with me sharing something conditionally, like sharing a screenshot of a text exchange between us as long as he is anonymous. And still other times, he’s just like, “Nope, you can’t post that,” and I can be grumpy and whine about it, but I accept it. What I DON’T do is post it anyway and try to justify away his righteous feelings of hurt with, “I’m a comedy writer! I write about my life!” like Che did in this most recent episode.

But also, if I’ve ever published something about you that you felt was crossing a boundary, I’m truly sorry! As you can see, I try to be very conscientious about that kind of thing. You can always tell me, and I can edit it or take it down, as the case may be. I actually have some friends who love reading about themselves in here, and wish that I would write about them MORE, lol. You can tell me that, too.

Che was writing/talking about a person who was no longer really a part of their life, so that’s obviously a slightly different situation, but I still think they were the asshole in that situation. Frankly, there are people who are no longer in my life who treated me very poorly who I don’t write about because… well, first of all, some of them are straight-up narcissists, and they would enjoy it too much. But also, I wouldn’t be coming from a good place in writing about them, and they would be right to be upset about it if they found out. And who wants someone who was a jerk to you to be right about something?

I think another issue with Che’s set was that they weren’t centering themselves as the butt of the joke, it was all at Miranda’s expense. If you’re going to claim that you own your stories then they actually have to be your stories, you have to be the main character. That’s my rule, anyway, and it’s worked pretty well for me so far. There’s a reason why the number one question that David Sedaris gets asked is, “What does your family think about you writing about them?” It’s because a lot of people would not be okay with their brother or son sharing a story like that about them. He has said that his family loves it, and he wouldn’t be writing about them if they didn’t. And I think that’s pretty much the long and short of it. If you want to maintain good relationships with the people you write about, you either know their boundaries really well, you keep them anonymous, or you check in with them. Now, quick, someone go tell that to Che Diaz so they can salvage their friendship with Miranda and stay as a character on this show.

- Let’s end this newsletter talking about something totally different: Virgo season! It starts on the 23rd, and I am so ready for that gentle earth sign energy. Virgos are grounded, sensitive, introspective, kind, supportive, practical, type A perfectionists. They love to clean and organize, and be outside with nature. They are the prime suspects in “oops, I brought home another plant.” They are hardworking and can be a little neurotic at times. They give great hugs and make very good friends, although sometimes they’re in their feelings and isolate. Did I mention they are perfectionists?

It occurred to me recently that three of my best guy friends from college (I’m including my husband in that) are all earth signs. These dudes really feel more like family than friends to me at this point (or “familia,” we’re also unfortunately cemented by the bonds of the Fast and the Furious franchise. It’s a long story, and I’m not really even sure how it began). They are all very grounded people, and complement my floaty, expansive air sign energy. Earth signs make awesome friends, is what I’m saying. Virgos are wonderful listeners, Tauruses are loyal AF, and Capricorns will always call you on your bullshit. Guess which one I’m married to! (It’s the Cappy, duh.)

Of course Beyoncé is the most famous celebrity Virgo (she even wrote a groove for the season), which makes sense. Again: perfectionists! Other famous Virgos in history include Amy Winehouse (sensitive!), John Locke (practical!), and Mary Shelley (um, obsessed with the natural world much?).

So, how best to celebrate Virgo season? Clean your home and get into that new school year energy! Journal in a park! Obsess over an email you wrote! Adopt a new pet or plant! Get stoned and go to a natural history museum! Go to an outdoor concert and become one with the trees and the vibes! Get really upset about something critical your mom said once! Keep it grounded and feel your feelings!

And with that, I’ll bid you adieu until my next newsletter, two weeks from now.

Don’t forget to like, comment, and share this newsletter if you’d like–you can use the buttons at the bottom or the top. You can also upgrade to a paid subscription if you want more content–there’s a special button for you at the bottom of this email!

Until next time—seriously, a fucking monk?

Love,LizXOXO