The TueDo List: Maisel Returns + Margit's Mattress + Booze-Free Winter
Plus a whole bunch of words men don't know
THIS WEEK
📖 READ: Tavi Gevinson interviews Stevie Nicks. Appreciating the orgasm as an act of self-care. The rise of over-50 fashion mentors. From a few years ago: Erykah Badu and Joi talking about the legendary Betty Davis, who died last week. “The older we get, the more we need our friends – and the harder it is to keep them.” Adidas wants an award for freeing the nipple while Dolly’s over here paying for everyone else’s college. In case the NFL needs more halftime show ideas: The 10 best hip-hop albums by women, according to Hypebae.
👀 LOOK: The winner of the Super Bowl: Lizzo’s outfit. The Smithsonian is launching an exhibit of 120 life-sized statues of contemporary women STEM innovators and role models. And the Library of Congress is archiving Black Lives Matter art. Someone made a chart showing words women know that men don’t, and vice versa. Portraits of Black hair trends, as an homage to Madam C. J. Walker.
🎧 LISTEN: Tressie McMillan Cottom recommends we just “get on with it” – and get a CPA. A new podcast about the history of Marvel’s Black Panther.
🛒 ADD TO CART: Spice Girls LEGOs. The Wirecutter’s best black tights for 2022.
🤣 LOL: Titanic with a cat. An outline of the second season of And Just Like That… Someone made a perfume that smells like french fries – and it’s already sold out. Happy Valentine’s Day from Facebook: Here’s a photo of you and your ex. Freelancers will appreciate these clients from hell.
📺 WATCH: The fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel drops Friday. (Prime)
OBSESSED: Margit Goes to the Mattresses
By Margit Detweiler
I’d been waking up congested, bleary-eyed, coughing and sleeping so close to the edge of the bed that my husband would remark “You’re going to end up on the floor.”
From my side-hugging perch, I could see fine grains of yellow dust sprinkled across the floor.
“What the heck is this?”
My husband wedged himself under our bed.
“Oh… this thing is falling apart,” he noted, also coughing
For two big and tall-ish people in their 50s, we’d outgrown our Queen-sized closeness, and our 16-year-old Stearns & Foster mattress was falling apart. It was time to get a new, bigger bed, something we could get up the stairs of our Brooklyn walk-up, and something that wouldn’t make us sick. (Google was telling me that my decomposing bed was likely causing me congestion, headaches, and possibly cancer, digestive issues, clown nightmares….)
Panicking, I began my quest for:
THE VERY BEST MATTRESS
THE VERY BEST MATTRESSES 2022
THE VERY BEST MATTRESSES 2022 THAT WON’T HURT MY HIPS WHEN I SIDE SLEEP CLOSE TO THE EDGE.
I eventually ended up on Reddit.
Until recently, I thought Reddit was a sketchy geek-boi space for user-generated muck, and maybe it still kinda is (save for the occasional AMA from notables and the politically-inclined), but in the last few months, I’ve joined several niche groups on everything from the TV show Yellowjackets, to SNL to, yes, mattresses.
Pro tip: Set aside large chunks of time to spend in the 34k-member Mattress group. You will never believe how deep you will go into the pros and cons of latex, side sleeper options, and mattress toppers. Not to mention, mattress companies are notorious scammers, bed-review sites are often paid to say nice things, and there are no right answers. The more you research, the harder it gets. As one poster titled their post, “I Hate This Group.”
After months (yes months) of Reddit research, I decided on a bespoke Sleep-Ez series of organic latex mattresses. When I called Sleep-Ez to place my order, the Arizona-based rep came dangerously close to telling me who he voted for in 2020 before I told him, “Shhhh, tell me more about your natural Talalay latex.” Before long I was plunking down cash for a series of latex mattresses that came in four layers — extra-firm, another extra-firm, firm and medium. Never did I think I would DIY my mattresses, but here we are. After doing research in the same Reddit group, I also got a gorgeous Thuma bed frame that —with its Japanese joinery — is the freaking easiest thing in the world to assemble (with the YouTube videos to prove it.)
For what it’s worth, I’m not being paid to tell you any of this, but I am very happy with my purchases. And I have room to sprawl! I am still a bit congested but I think that has more to do with living near the very, very car-congested Flatbush Avenue.
Now if we could both work on our snoring.
IN THE COMMENTS! Do you have a fave mattress or bed? Something that made your sleep more snoozy? (Don’t make me rethink my choices, but…)
DEEP CUTS: How to Survive the Freeze — Without Booze
By Susan Linney
Sharing a good one from our archives, courtesy of the inimitable Susan Linney…
I hate winter. Especially once January hits, and we’ve got four long months ahead and nothing but freezing forecasts and deceptive wind chills. I get blue. Really blue. Like a lot of us do: Seasonal Affective Disorder is in the DSM, after all, and while I may suffer from a touch of it, I think most of my melancholy comes from this disease called alcoholism. A disease that, I’m now learning, I’ve suffered from for a long time before it really dug its teeth into my soul and brought me to my knees…
Cool Mom Picks: 11 excellent new children’s books for Black History Month – and the rest of the year too.
Curvily: 64 Cozy Plus Size Sweaters To Snuggle Up In In 2022.
Everything Is Fine Podcast: Different Players, Different Fields.
Navigating The Change: 10 Things I Learned about Menopause after Launching a Menopause Podcast.
Jumble & Flow: The perimenopause and menopause support we deserve
We Are Women Owned: Tech Tools, Software, and Apps We ❤️️
Sing it like you mean it, TueNighters!
JOIN TUENIGHTERS | LATEST ISSUE | ADVERTISE | INSTAGRAM | SURPRISE
I feel this whole thing in the very center of my feels! My husband and I had a really lovely sort of - what do you call it, like we kind of had a renewal moment in our marriage? It's the kind of thing nobody really tells you about marriage, that for all the times when you feel like you hate them you also connect again and it's deeper every time. Anyway that's not the point. The point is that we celebrated by getting a new bed.
I really, really love a good purchase-research project. After creating a large spreadsheet of options, I sent him a foto of a Craigslist post depicting a wild, swooping, shiny, possibly tacky, but also wonderful king-sized bed that had a sort of Art Nouveau vibe. Honestly, I'd never seen anything like it, and he replied with lightning speed: "On what planet do we not get that?"
We hired movers from the track-suit mafia and trundled out to the middle of Nowhere, New Jersey where we viewed it in situ and agreed it was worth spending probably the same amount of $ on moving it as we were paying for the bed and its side-tables and vanity. The couple selling it offered us the mattress as well, but we demurred.
What we didn't realize was that this bed looked unusual because it hailed from Europe, which is awesome, except that the mattress sizes are different there. So when we fell in love with a standard-king-sized mattress, we figured out that it wouldn't actually fit our bed.
This threw us into an agony of despair. We piled our old terrible double-mattresses onto the frame and I began a new spreadsheet of custom-sized mattresses. This was a confusing and terrifying market where mattresses could cost $800 and be "great for an RV," or $5,000 and lined with horse-hair that was extra expensive because it was "ethically sourced," which I absolutely did not believe it was.
My husband is very tall and large all over. I myself am a delicate flower who would definitely feel a pea under 100 mattresses. It took well over a year for me to finally find the courage to commit to a not-very-expensive but seemingly pretty good mattress that would be custom made for us in Utah. It had foam, but it also had coils. And a cooling top layer.
There were delays, this being Covid-time. Many delays. Meanwhile the coils on our old terrible mattresses felt like they were burning holes in my back, as if I were going to an ancient practitioner of cupping to heal my chills and ague.
Last week, it finally arrived, rolled up in a box EVEN THOUGH IT HAS COILS. My 13-year-old son and I dragged it upstairs with sitcom-level difficulty. We sliced open the box, unfurled the mattress, and lo and behold -- a bouncy, stiff, soft-but-not saggy mattress, perfectly aligned with our fency European structure, lay on the bed of my dreams. We opened the window so it could offgass safely and that night, I had dreams of flocks of sheep not jumping over my bed, but cuddled together under my grateful body.
The best part is that I can roll over and be the big spoon to my bigger husband without fear of falling into a chasm. Never underestimate the joy of this small convenience. The end.
Aways love the TueDo list. However was kind of a bummer to run into a gross transphobic slur at the end of the “words men don’t know link.”