I know this discourse is long behind us, but the Superbowl ads were either absurd, evangelical, or straight up body horror. Seal as a seal? Eugene Levy’s fugitive eyebrows? Eli Manning riding on a giant blue foot? Tom Brady’s arm opening up to reveal batteries? The kid born with the cowboy hat made of his own flesh? The TONGUE? No thank you. I was actually thankful to see a Clydesdale.

I have been crying off and on for days about the dying little fish that swam to the ocean’s surface and our human projections on what the fish was actually thinking. Here’s the news story. (NYT, gift link) Here is one of the more creative works about it. (Defector, gift link)
Do you want to know what makes me tired? All of the scammer dudes on every social media platform I’m active on. For example, I’ll see that somebody liked a review I wrote on Goodreads. I get a little thrill: somebody likes my writing! And I’ll click on the notification and it’s a dude. Oh, and he’s also sent a friend request, but this dude has only read two books and is only following women. I’ll log into Tiktok and see that a dude has liked every single video that I made and left comments on every single video complimenting my looks and asking to chat. And then there are the rando dudes who send friend requests on Facebook and Instagram. It even occasionally happens on Pinterest. I hate that there is no calm place where I can go online and not be scammed or hit on.
After decades of liquid hand soap, I’m gravitating back toward bar soap. Bar soaps smell nice, I feel cleaner, and my hands aren’t chapped/cracked. I buy bars from soapmakers on Etsy, cut them in half so they’re easier to hold, and (because others in the house still use the liquid soap) they last a very long time. Win/win.
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