Friday Flames | 6.2.23
A weekly synopsis of what we figured out.
Welcome to June, when we celebrate dads, grads, and Pride! We thought LGBTQ nation had established a fundamental standard when nationwide marriage equality was declared in 2015, but the hundreds and hundreds of new bills limiting the rights of LGBTQ people to live and love freely make those eight years seem a lifetime ago.
We love to see all the supportive rainbows and flags, but it’s painfully clear that the passive #loveislove stuff only goes so far. Our friends—and our friends’ kids—are under attack, and we won’t sit idly while the radical fringe of a ruling minority tries to impose its twisted moral code on the rest of us.
The pandemic has beaten us all down, but as it recedes we’re feeling a renewed energy to research the concrete steps we can take to protect LGBTQ people from dangerous, politically-motivated abuse. We’re volunteering, calling our political reps, volunteering some more, paying attention to watchdogs like MAP and the ACLU, and basically trying to put all of our no-longer-actively-parenting time to good use.
New Look of the Week
Now that we’ve completed a few weeks of existence and content published work, we took a look at our home page and thought two things:
Wow. That’s a lot of orange.
Our logo looks a bit too … apocalyptic? Maybe go with a little less brimstone?
So we realized our visuals were ripe for a bit of a tweak.
If you have feedback, please share it. It’s all very valuable when you’ve gone ahead and started a Substack without knowing a super lot about Substack.
Maudlin Thought of the Week
Right after our dual nest officially emptied, Magda went to her fiancé’s 30-year college reunion and Doug’s high school class began planning its 40th. Talk about sunrise-sunset whiplash!
The high school graduates were predictably much more ebullient than the college alums, but shouldn’t it be the other way around? By your 50s, you know yourself so much better because you've learned how to cope with all the Crappy Stuff. The teenagers still have so much to more learn and so many more mistakes to make.
As the classic line goes in Lost in Translation: “The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.”
Currently reading
Magda is working her way through a reading guide called "Trans Studies Syllabus for Bullshit Times.” (Full disclosure: She’s reading the abstracts, because many of the cited papers themselves are over her head. At last check, she was not a gender studies theorist.) It’s not fun reading, since theory takes more effort for an older brain, but it’s stuff we should be familiar enough with to affect our viewpoints and activism.
Doug is reading waaaay too many articles and think pieces asserting that AI will kill us all—and thinking of all the people using non-serif fonts who are wondering, “Who is Al, and why doesn’t he just cut it out?”
Currently (not yet) watched
Magda has not seen a scene of Succession, but judging by everyone’s responses to the end of the series, should she start watching it? Or is the moment over?
FWIW: As a huge fan of Jesse Armstrong’s work, Doug watched all four seasons in real time. He thinks even if the show does hold her interest early on, she’ll soon tire of the coarse, baroque dialogue delivered by (mostly) execrable people.
Coming next
Episode 4 of the podcast arrives Wednesday, June 7, when we talk about college admissions with Akil Bello, testing and admissions contrarian and Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at FairTest. We've known Akil for 25 years, so this was a possibly-too-honest and blunt conversation about a really bizarre, feckless industry and rite of passage for a lot of parents.
Thanks for reading, and may we all feel as free to express ourselves as Julia Louis-Dreyfus after a plate of hot wings.
Magda and Doug