The TueDo List: Janet Doc + Pandemic Plants + Male Hot Flashes
Plus a "dirty" version of Wordle
THIS WEEK
📖 READ: “Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life” and other perfect Dolly Parton quotes. Nicole Chung is learning how to say no. I bought a BDSM whip in a bid to save my marriage. Always check your spam folder. On the rise and fall of Esprit. Outside’s advice for a 50-year-old woman who wants to do her first solo thru-hike. Scotland’s First Minister feels a responsibility to talk about menopause. Zadie Smith on the genius of Toni Morrison’s only short story.
👀 LOOK: André Leon Talley: A life in pictures. Golden, Netflix’s new social media channel dedicated to celebrating the pan-Asian diaspora. If hot flashes happened to men.
🎧 LISTEN: Roxane Gay has a new podcast.
🛒 ADD TO CART: Sluffers: Part puffers, part slippers (which TueNighter Margaret C. discovered back in April). Schitt's Creek Monopoly. Meryl Streep tarot cards.
🤣 LOL: Wordle, but make it dirty. Or Boggle.
📺 WATCH
Now: Single Drunk Female, a comedy about sobriety (Hulu); TueNigher fave Murray Hill in Somebody Somewhere, a dramedy about adult friendships (HBO Max); and March, a docuseries about HBCU marching bands (The CW).
Friday: Janet (the Janet Jackson documentary) (Lifetime, A&E); Tiffany Haddish in the murder mystery/comedy series The Afterparty (Apple TV+).
Sunday: W. Kamau Bell’s We Need To Talk About Cosby. (Showtime)
STORY: My Struggle With God Ended on a Plane
By Dionne Ford
As the plane rocked, the man in the seat next to me confided that this was his first airplane ride and asked, “Is it always like this?” I told him no. He crossed himself, and, for the second time that day, I cried. I was sure I was about to die. I was afraid to drown because death wouldn’t be instant. I’d have to struggle, water filling my lungs, for who knew how long before I could finally succumb. But mostly I was afraid of God. And I was tired of it. I whispered into the dim cabin, “I don’t want to be afraid of you anymore.”
OBSESSED: Garden Planning in the Dead of Winter
By Stacy Morrison
Winter may make some people want to stick their head in the proverbial sand and wait it out, but not me. Instead, I put my head in the dirt – my garden dirt. If you ask those who love me and have to live with me, I can be excruciatingly specific about my garden dirt. That’s because I’m studying up!
I moved to a new home in the summer, and that means new beds that have to be made with the heavy clay soil of the Hudson Valley. My dirt school education involves strange shipments of green sand and dolomite limestone, and learning the different soil-improving benefits of perlite vs. vermiculite. And the dirt’s not all: I’ve ordered 64 kinds of seeds, for vegetables, fruit, flowers, and vines. I’ll be starting my seedlings soon, delighted to have the smell of warming earth and germinating things next to my desk under grow lights and on seedling-heating mats.
I’m so obsessed I’ve mapped-out garden beds on graph paper, and made lists of the trees and shrubs I’d like to buy. Yes, there are even spreadsheets. Excel’s mathematical calculations must be off, because my wish list totals somewhere north of $3,500 and that can’t be right, can it? I can’t work in my garden in January, but I can still plan for the eventual delicious hours of having my hands in the earth, planting minor miracles, and having a reason to be up and out and seeing, smelling, FEELING after these long dark months (and these long dark COVID years, TBH). So I’m diging in. If not for the plants, then for the reminder that nature can remind us how to begin again.
Stay nasty, TueNighters!
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Like Stacy, I can’t wait to get my hands dirty :) C’mon Spring!!!!!