Take A Break

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A Different Sort of Dry January

We drove down to Miami for a ten-day trip to visit family over the holidays, and when we got back to Madison, I started a new job. While my new job gives me more breathing room to read, write, and watch stuff in my off time, I still felt pretty overloaded by a whizzbang couple of weeks. And so I’ve mostly taken a break this January, refraining from digging into too many new things, letting myself get comfortable with media I’m already familiar with. Rewatching clips from comedy shows. Rewatching movies. Listening to old music. Or just avoiding any narrative stuff at all.

At times it can be overwhelming to position yourself as a cultural critic, even if it’s just once a week for a small newsletter. I love how the expectation to write about something makes me more active in watching and listening to stuff. But at the same time, it can start to feel like a job. Every time I walk the dog or do some chores there’s pressure to listen to a new album. Every time I fold laundry, I wonder if I should have put on some movie I’ve never seen before. \

I’m generally happiest when I live by my own schedule—I tend to put up holiday lights late in the year and leave them up through February—and taking a break from actively pursuing new media in January has let me reconnect a bit more to some things I’ve long forgotten about. Like those two Masta Killa albums that are pretty good. Or revisit things I love like Prometheus, which I somehow find to be an endlessly rewatchable movie.

So here’s to February and finally watching After Yang, but for now, I still have a few more days left to dig into the hits. And if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to write about the TV show I was just sent screeners for.

Read

• Saga 

I recently got an iPad and that means I can go back and read all the comics series I love. Also, turns out that Saga is back—after 54 issues, the book took a long hiatus and I’d written it off as another comic series that ended prematurely. I was wrong. I’m currently halfway through the original run for about the third or fourth time, and there’s something really stunning about how Vaughn and Staples mesh fantasy, science fiction, and modern literature into a comic series that’s unafraid to take massive, consequential leaps in its narrative.

Watch

• NBA Basketball

I mean, have you seen what these players can do? We’re currently in a strange new world of incredible basketball and scoring records are being shattered left and right. A lot of teams right now are very, very good, and the athleticism on display every game is mind-boggling. If you want to see something you’ve never seen before, professional basketball is breaking rules in an era that narrative TV is not.

Listen

• BigSoftTitty.png Podcast

Demi Lardner has one of the most fascinating minds on the planet. Take, for instance, the time she told the story about how she inadvertently brewed coffee for a week with a boiled spider in the kettle because she never filled the kettle through the lid and only filled the kettle through the spout. Or how she convinced Tom (her husband and comedy partner) for years that he was colorblind only for him to finally get tested and realize that, no, it was Demi who was colorblind this whole time. As you can probably surmise from the name, the show covers topics that aren’t necessarily for everyone, but at the same time, goddamn if it isn’t the funniest thing I listen to every week.

Consume

• Vegetables

I was traveling for my job all last week through Chicago and Fort Wayne, and goddamn there were almost no vegetables available to eat. Vegetables are my favorite thing to eat—there’s a lot of fun stuff you can do with them, they taste good, and they feel good in your stomach. I tried multiple times to order a salad for dinner and was met with mostly iceberg lettuce. In 2024. Wild stuff.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.