Occupy Wall Street had the best signs. As a protest slogan, “Shit is fucked up and bullshit” pretty much sums up the frustration and anger that has been bubbling in this country for a decade.

And it’s also really brilliant in the way it reflects a sort of inchoate understanding that we have reached a point in human history where despite the wins of the past, and despite the optimism of the young, all gains and all joy are local.

The media, like the machines in The Matrix, have figured out that to keep humans pliable, to keep them inline, we need a certain amount of anxiety and frustration. They feed us a steady diet of crime and potential crime, both real and fictional, raising the general level of anxiety such that we don’t know what to do with happiness. At this point in late-stage capitalism, happiness makes us uneasy in a way we don’t quite recognize.

Sure, we’ve got comfort. There’s the big screen TV, all the streaming entertainment you could possibly want, books galore, music on demand. We have access to our friends lives, or the version of their lives they want us to see, at the tap of a finger mediating our need for human interaction. You can even order frozen, prepared dinners and an appliance in which to cook them, out sourcing the most basic choice a human can make to some corporate entity.

But all of that doesn’t make us happy. I narcotizes us. It preps us to be more efficient workers, better cogs in the machine earning money more money faster for our corporate overlords. With efficiency as the prime driver in corporate America, is it any wonder we have so much more narcissism than we used to?

Empathy is inefficient. If someone I work with shows up in distress and I have empathy, I sit with them, letting them externally processes or helping them find an answer to whatever is causing that distress as they so desire, and that costs time away from getting the work I’m being paid to do completed.

The malignant narcissist, however, sees all relationships as transactional, interacting with people only to extract the value they can provide. It’s focused, efficient human interaction. And it’s why so much of tech culture centers on lone genius paving the way for a new world. Don’t believe me? Just see Elon Musk’s Twitter feed.

Shit is fucked up and bullshit pretty much sums it up.

I work at home now. I realize how lucky that makes me. I have what in the BeforeTimes^TM most of us dreamed of: no commute. But in those times we dreamed of no commute based on the idea that we could go out and do other things, like hit that 4 pm movie or join a sports team near our house where games started at 5 pm.

There’s not a lot of going out and doing other things in my life. And the net result of having no commute, in addition to not having to slog to work in the rain and the cold, and not having to deal with subway delays, I am under stimulated, starved for novelty, which is how I found myself watching And Just Like That…, the Sex & The City reboot.

Reviews for the show have been decidedly mixed. The New York Times called the show “…an awkward bid at relevance” while Entertainment Weekly gave it a B- saying “It’s better than the movies, at least” and NPR’s Pop Culture podcast summed up their review with “All we can do is cringe.” Even The Atlantic did a piece focusing specifically on Miranda, how her character had changed, and how those changes made very little sense.

Weird, cringy, overly woke, these are some common themes in the reviews. I knew all that going in and I watched it anyway (see starved for novelty). I’m not sorry I did.

For one, Sex & The City has never been about reality. It presented a vision of 1990s New York that was no more real than the idea that Monica and Rachel could afford that apartment on Friends.

Sex & The City was always about the idealized potential of New York, where culture and glamor were a mere cab ride away, never worrying about what the cab ride cost or if there was going to be someone puking in the gutter when you got out at your destination.

And guess what? It absolutely was weird. The first couple of episodes feinted toward acknowledging the pandemic with:

• Specific dialogue about how great it was to be coming out of the pandemic
• Background characters wearing masks who suddenly basically disappear altogether (though some of this is handled with an awkward opening credits time passing montage)
• How Miranda and Steve were coping with having their son and his girlfriend in their “pod”
• Anthony’s hunks delivering bread business, born during 2020 when everyone was doing sourdough

But the show essentially took the stance of “Hey, let’s just live in a world where we acknowledge the pandemic was a thing but act like it’s totally over and we’ve gone back to ‘normal.'”

Was it cringy? Maybe. My guess is most of that feeling is generated by the internalized misogyny that causes discomfort with talking about the sex lives of 50-something women whom we were more than happy to watch when they were in their 30s.

Overly woke? Perhaps. Woke is such a trigger word. I’d reframe it this way: It wasn’t overly woke so much as working extra hard to surface the third leg of Hollywood’s Minority Trope stool: The Magical Queer.

A Lesson in Character Tropes: The Magical Negro and The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Hollywood has already given us the first leg of the stool, the Magical Negro, the Black character who Wikipedia says is “typically, but not always, in some way outwardly or inwardly disabled, either by discrimination, disability or social constraint.”

The Magical Negro trope character has no life of their own, and typically very little back story. The character usually works in a job seen as menial – janitor, housekeeper – and exists in the story to help the white lead character achieve their goal, often at great personal sacrifice.

The Magical Negro often has access to spiritual wisdom, through their inherent savagery, that is closed off to the white characters. We see this a lot when this trope is the Magical Native American (or Magical Indian if you prefer)

On a bigger scale, the Magical Negro exists to assuage white guilt, to legitimize continued racism in American society by saying with subtext “See, these people serve a valuable purpose in the position they are in.”

The second leg of the Minority Trope Stool is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists to “help the [male] protagonist achieve happiness without ever seeking any independent goals herself.”

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) isn’t new. TV Tropes maintains she’s been around since the 1200s even though this specific term wasn’t coined until 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin in response to the movie Elizabethtown and the character played by Kirsten Dunst.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is everything the label says: high-energy, in contrast to our brooding hero’s natural malaise, and quirky enough to make your teeth ache like you’ve been on a sugar binge.

Unorthodox, spontaneous, often with hair an unnatural color, and always, always white and petite, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has a lot of projects going on but nothing she isn’t willing to drop to make the hero realize his own potential. Oh, and take for granted that she is sexually aware and most likely bisexual but in that non-threatening way that straight men prefer.

Some have argued the that Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope is finally done. Nathan Rabin himself has disowned the term. I think she’s just been replaced by the GirlBoss Trope. More on that later. Misogyny runs deep enough that the MPDG still belongs here.

Meet the Magical Queer

That third leg of the stool is something new: the Magical Queer. Until recently, queer character and plot tropes were more about pity and less about how these characters could enable the main characters to live their fullest lives and be their best selves. It was less “thanks for the assist” or “you have served your purpose in society” and more “there but for the grace of God” in feel.

But as queer people have become more accepted by so-called “mainstream” society, some of these character and plot tropes have slowly eroded and a new one has emerged that has much in common with the Magical Negro.

The Magical Queer by benefit of struggles against society’s prejudice is able to see and speak truth that the straight main characters can’t and identify it as what is holding them back. Most often, the Magical Queer is a transgender woman, and typically one who appears gender-conforming.

Part of what made And Just Like That… seem so horribly woke is that it doubled-down on the Magical Queer, first in the form of Che Diaz, a non-binary they/them pronoun using, masculine-presenting, polyamorous bisexual fuckboy who checked so many non-conforming boxes there might as well have been a literal checklist used to build this character.

Che, who is a third of the featured personalities and Carrie’s boss at the podcast where they both work, has a lot going on: active love life, successful podcast, stand-up career. Che, as The Atlantic noted, has zero reason to be interested in stuffy, uptight, traditional, rational Miranda.

And it’s a pity, too, that they stay together for more than a weed and booze fueled grapple in Carrie’s kitchen after which Che tells Miranda to “DM me sometime,” because Che isn’t a character so much as a Magical Queer who finally clarifies for Miranda the middle-aged funk in which she finds herself 20+ years into a marriage and a career.

Che shows Miranda through that Magical Queer vision that the world can be as you shape it to be, especially if you’re a well-off, gender-conforming white woman. Your power is so great, in fact, you can get someone who has no business being in love with you to uncheck one of those boxes that is so dear to them and lean toward a more traditional life.

One thing I will say, whether this is at the behest of Cynthia Nixon, a real life, late-in-life lesbian coming out story, or if it was the show runners trying to tap into some sort of zeitgeist that they see coming, it was gratifying to see two female-bodied people, one of whom was obviously masculine-presenting, in an intimate relationship.

Our other Magical Queer comes in the form of the transgender Rabbi Charlotte and Harry finally hire to officiate their child Rock’s (nee: Rose) “they-mitzvah,” which I really hope isn’t a thing. This woman finally makes Charlotte and Harry understand what the other Rabbis they tried to hire wouldn’t tell them: That their child hadn’t bothered to prepare at all for the ceremony, which seems at best unrealistic to me given how important an event the -mitzvah is in any Jewish child’s life.

Regardless of how it happened, And Just Like That… seems to be at the forefront of a trend that needs to die an early death. If we’re going to see more trans and gender non-conforming characters on TV, let’s skip the trope phase and let them be real people from the start.

And Just Like That… is available on HBO Max.

Instead, I find myself contemplating National Blog Posting Month as an alternate November. Again.

We are entering a third pandemic winter. Third. Not second. Third. And I am tired.

I am tired of this pandemic. I am tired of my life being small, of feeling like I can’t go anywhere or do anything.

I am tired of having a small risk tolerance. I’m tired of having to assess every single activity – from picking up lunch for carry-out to getting a haircut to going to the dentist – against the prospect of death not just for myself but also for those I love.

I am tired of the changes aging has wrought on my body. I’m tired of the extra weight, of my old clothes being slightly too small and the next size up being slightly too big. I’m tired of worrying about how everything I eat might affect my physique.

I am tired of not getting enough sleep, no matter what I do.

Exercise: Sleep poorly. Don’t exercise: Sleep poorly.

Hydrate: Get up multiple times to pee. Don’t hydrate: Wake up multiple times a night anyway.

I’m tired of not being able to eat dessert because sugar keeps me up at night now.

Since March 2020 the world has been simultaneously chaotic and static. Forces I can’t control, like SARS-CoV-2 variants and whether people in our local area are getting vaccinated, have been pushing my life out of shape. As a result, my life has gotten very small. So small, in fact, that if I leave the house more than twice it’s been a busy month.

My last two years have been insanely stressful. Let’s see there’s:

The whole living through a global pandemic thing

• Getting laid off
• Finding a new job in an industry that thinks I’m 15 years past obsolete
• On-boarding to a fully remote job for a company headquartered in another time zone
• With a team in transition from small and scrappy to almost double the size in 6 months without any proper process or scaffolding
• Did I mention the living through a global pandemic?

The thing I am most tired of, that I am terrified is a consequence of getting older and not of the insanity of the last two years, is feeling almost nothing.

Vaccines have taken away the true terror of COVID. I no longer have a panic attack when TheGirlFriend goes to the grocery store for the weekly shop. Fear has become a low-level background hum.

I have this mass of sadness clustered in my chest, yet I am incapable of crying.

The inequities of the world are being laid bare, exposed by the receding flood waters of white supremacy and capitalism. Climate change, something 20 years ago we were already 25 years too late to stop, is becoming a daily reality genuinely risking human lives and the lives of the rest of the species with whom we share the planet.

And I feel…numb. I can’t get angry any more about injustice, not like I did even 10 years ago.

If this is a natural consequence of aging…fuck this.

But the thing of it is, society doesn’t want me any more, not even my own fucked up corner of society.

Lesbian has become a bad word because so many people who refuse to recognized the humanity of others claim that label.

Kids in GenZ don’t know the difference between sex and gender – and yes, children, they are different – and insist that Butch isn’t a gender identity but is merely cosplay.

And still the LGBTQ community revolves around gender-conforming white men. So what have we really done to change anything?

I am menopausal. The medical establishment has relegated me to the dustbin, every complaint receiving the response of “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ because menopause!” with no thought given to how to actually make my life better.

I know control is an illusion but like every other absolute, that can’t be the whole story.

This month I’m going to rant and rave and possibly be politically incorrect. But I control the narrative here. And this is how I get back whatever shred of control the last two years have robbed from me.

If you missed the show in its brief run between 1988 and 1991, it follows a cast of characters around China Beach, a real location near Da Nang for troops to catch some rest and relaxation to which the show’s creators added the 510th Evacuation Hospital and Graves Registration Unit.

One of the structures the show rests on as you get to know the characters – a numbed out, shut down nurse from Kansas, a burned out Marine acting as life guard and chief entertainment provider, an arrogant doctor, and a female entrepreneur willing to engage in the world’s oldest transaction if she must – is the idea that there is Viet Nam (in-country) and there is the world, which was often stricly defined as “the United States.” Turns out it was a little more complicated than that.

This concept plays out in every non-fiction book I’ve read about the war, and I’d read more than I have fingers of which I have the usual number, and I took the time a while back to ask my uncle M. about his experiences as a Marine in-country from 1967 to 1968 in a mechanized platoon.

The basic idea is what happens in-country is separate from the world so what happens in-country doesn’t matter. Some people used it as an excuse to be horrible human beings but for most, I suspect, it was a way of dissociating, of pretending the experience was happening to and around someone else. Thinking it through, this may be why 30% of Viet Nam veterans have PTSD diagnoses compared to lower numbers from other military engagements post-World War II according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

And dissociating is what most of us have been doing lately, and will probably continue to do for the next couple of years or until this fucking pandemic finally gets under control, only we’ve been doing it with binge watching Netflix and refusing to put on pants that don’t have a stretchy waistband instead of getting hooked on heroin. The problem is, dissociating isn’t really going to work for us the way it “worked” for troops in Viet Nam.

They had the advantage of a hard dividing line: in-country, with the atrocities of combat, the constant fear of death, the physical discomfort, and the ordinary struggles of being forced to be in close proximity to people you didn’t choose, or the world where everything was clean and shiny and death, both physical and of the soul, didn’t lurk around every corner. According to my uncle, even R&R in Thailand away from the combat theater wasn’t “the world” because it was still Asia, exotic and far from home.

It’s not going to work for us because the horror – climate change, fractious politics, the pandemic, school shootings, racism, rape culture and rampant misogyny to name a few things – has been going on so long we’ve lost our ability to flatten and divide it into small enough pieces to cope with.

And is it any wonder? Nadia Boltz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor, author, and bit of a badass, wrote beautifully recently about why we are unable to cope over time: we just aren’t made for it, in a literal, biological way.

It also doesn’t help that corporate America is gaslighting us, turning real psychological problems from all of the things we face in the modern era into the equivalent of “she was asking for it because she wore a short skirt.”

Even worse, they’re marketing the solution to the burnout created by late-stage corporate oligarchy pretending to be capitalism back to us as the self-care industrial complex (available mostly to white women at every outlet near you).

Dissociating isn’t going to help us. Unlike the GIs in Viet Nam, the world is the same as being in the shit.

It bears being said that at nearly the end of 2021, more than a year into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, things are not going well.

States with the highest vaccination rates seem to have the slowest growing case counts for COVID-19 while states with the lowest vaccination rates are replaying 2020 with ICU beds unavailable and daily death tolls in the 100s by county.

DC, where I live, is above the average for folks who have received a single shot and about right in the middle for folks who are fully vaccinated. The areas surrounding me, if you drill down to the county level, are doing pretty well too.

Enough of the rest of the country is acting as if nothing is going on that things will never be the same. And that feeling, that distinct dividing line between Before and After, is what both Mandel’s book and this pandemic are really about.

My previous employer sent its workforce home on March 13, 2020. According to The New York Times, the 7-day average case count was 273 and 556 new cases of COVID were reported across the United States. A year later, the 7-day average was 55,045 and newly reported cases numbered 49,557.

The 7-day average on my birthday, more than four months after vaccines started becoming widely available: 151,227 and newly reported cases 87,011, where everyone agrees that the newly reported cases number is likely low because break-through infections in folks who are fully vaccinated are often mild enough that those people don’t get tested.

Here, have a visual courtesy of The New York Times.

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers, to become obsessed by them, because they provide the illusion of control. If we can just make the numbers go down then everything will be okay.

Everything isn’t going to be okay if you define okay as a reset to exactly the way things were before this pandemic. Nothing will ever be exactly as it was in the BeforeTimes^TM.

And that’s because everything that came before, and everything we are clinging to now as part of the new normal, is fragile and fleeting and the result of decades of concerted effort that most of us never bother to think about.

In 1978 TheGirlFriend had the pleasure of having Mitch McConnell, then the County Judge Executive for Jefferson County Kentucky, speak at her high school graduation. During this speech, McConnell bragged that over 90% of the U.S. now had indoor plumbing.

Putting that declaration in perspective: 1978 was just 43 years ago.

I’m betting for the majority of the U.S. population that last time they thought about whether a house might have indoor plumbing is exactly never.

The sheer volume of things we take for granted in the U.S. – food production, fresh water, medicine – these are basic things a huge chunk of the world couldn’t take for granted even in the BeforeTimes.^TM

The infrastructure – plumbing, fresh water, electricity, cell phones – those are just icing on an extraordinarily unstable cake.

Mandel’s book is a beautiful not because it’s well written, which it is, but because it burrows its message into you like an oak mite: so subtly that you don’t know its in there until you’re already thinking about it as if the idea originated with you.

And maybe it’s okay that everything doesn’t go back to “normal,” back to the way it was before SARS-CoV-2 busted out of China unannounced in December 2019.

Maybe These Trying Times^TM will help so many of us, me included, appreciate what we have for whatever fleeting time we have it.

Yesterday I saw a wild turkey fly into a tree and roost about 30 feet off the ground. The world is an amazing place. I intend to try to be amazed by it as often as possible from now on.

I’ve heard a lot of things over the past 90 minutes. Let me start by saying that I don’t appreciate the personal attacks. For some reason, you’ve chosen to make me the villain of the story you are telling about the traffic issue.

The only reason I’m presenting the data here is because I am a professional data nerd. We did the car count study over three weeks in March and April 2017. I stand behind those numbers.

Regardless of your ancedotal, COVID-lockdown observations from the past year, nearly 2,600 cars used the alleys to travel southbound during a defined “morning rush” period over the course of 15 days that year, and 2,200 of those used the alley in my block.

We did this study because our ANC rep at the time who is on this call can most charitably be described as uninterested in anything except her on point of view on issues that personally affected her. We knew that without data, DDOT would never pay attention to our concerns.

What I’ve heard in this meeting is your concerns – about damage to your vehicles, about safety, and about parking access are legitimate and that our concerns – about damage to our vehicles and our homes, about threats of physical violence and at least one person hit by a car, which are directly caused by the fact that traffic is using alleys that were not designed for that traffic are “selfish.”

It is human nature to prioritize your own concerns. To devalue others’ concerns as selfish when they are, in reality, the same concerns you have, is beyond selfish. It’s hypocritical.

To the person who commented that she bought her house because the street is one way: I understand. I bought a house on a dead-end street. I now live one door away from a busy corner. I was not given a choice in the matter.

To the person who commented that only the addresses in these two blocks are affected by this traffic flow: I will tell you that is bullshit. Every home on every side street in the adjacent two blocks and our neighbors in the block to our south on the street in question are affected by this. Please, ask your neighbors on our most narrow block about their vehicle damage sometime.

We have a traffic problem in this neighborhood, a traffic problem directly caused by the actions of one conniving old man who, ironically, had off-street parking behind his house.

If you are so concerned about the volume of traffic and the speed at which cars travel through our neighborhood, what have you actually done about it?

My guess is nothing. My guess is that you have sat comfortably in your homes and said to yourselves: Someone else will take care of this.

Someone else attempted to take care of it but since you don’t like the solution – putting cars back on the street where they by objective fact of civil engineering actually belong – you have chosen a villain.

Consider this: We asked for this study in May 2017. DDOT finally executed it via pressure from our current ANC member in January 2020. It took them until February of 2021 to release a recommendation.

Do you honestly believe this is because DDOT had a multi-year backlog on analyzing 48 hours’ worth of speed counter data?

Whether you like it or not, something is coming. And if that something requires that this street accept two-way traffic, there is fuck all you can do about it.

I look forward to watching this play out over the next few years. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

Actually, the first 25 days of January were just fine. There was even vegetarian haggis for Burns Night. It’s better than it sounds, really.

But then the 10 minute meeting happened.

Pro-tip: when you and most of your department get a request for a short meeting bad news is on the wind. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the bad news I thought – that my department would be undergoing to some minor cuts to full-time staff due to one of our directors moving out of the group at the beginning of January.

It was actually worse. Oh, so much worse.

The Chief Marketing Officer at LargeFinancialInstitution, where I have been on staff since 2019, decided that my group was “too expensive” and that he would be eliminating approximately 70% of the staff positions (40 out of 57 people), including two of our three directors and our Vice President who has been with the company for her entire 21-year career.

To say it was a shock is the understatement of this barely-legal century. Why such a shock, you ask?

LargeFinancialInstitution declared a profit of over $4B in Q4 of 2020 and ultimately went on to declare a profit of nearly three times that for 2020 overall. Yes, you read that right. That’s billion with a capital B.

Needless to say, that 10-minute meeting extended to 25 because, as you’d expect, when people are told they are about to lose their jobs in the middle of a K-shaped recession caused by a seemingly never-to-end pandemic they have questions. Questions like:

• When’s our last day?
• Will there be severance?
• Where can we get information about continuing healthcare coverage? (oh, so urgent in the middle of a fucking pandemic, this one)

And the CMO had no answers. None whatsoever. Neither did the HR representative who sat mute on the call.

Let’s not point out that LargeFinancialInstitution has a 42-page PDF available on its Intranet to cover just such situations, a PDF the HR rep should have been prepared to direct us to immediately after the meeting but no, we had to sleuth that shit on our own.

The worst cut of all: fucker didn’t even have the courtesy to brush his hair and put on a dress shirt. We got what looked like post-workout hair and his best Nike hoodie.

The only thing he could tell us at the time was there would be jobs posted by COB Wednesday and we were welcome to apply for those jobs. Oh, but wait, he did answer one question: Would we be competing with outside candidates for those jobs?

The answer we got was no, only with other internal candidates. The answer we got was either wrong or a lie as at least three of the jobs ended up posted on LinkedIn at least two weeks before the close date for internal candidates. Of those 19 jobs only 6 of them were even vaguely related to what people in my group do. And, bitterly, none of them were in my specialty area.

I’ve spent the last 6 weeks updating my professional portfolio, polishing my resume, and meeting way more strangers than I ever wanted to meet under pressure. One of my soon-to-be former colleagues describes it accurately as “dating, only not optional.”

And here’s the thing: Searching for a job sucks. It sucks at the best of times. But it especially sucks when companies aren’t sure if they need to hire but put job postings out there anyway, and leave them up long after they’ve made an offer to a candidate.

I’ve had some really great experiences this round – most companies have gotten the idea that a robo email saying they received your credentials is the bare fucking minimum they should be doing – and I’ve had some really shitty experiences – like the recruiter who kept pinging me until I told him to go away. Seriously, who texts someone after they’ve been sent to voice mail after calling twice in 5 minutes?

The layoff experience…It’s not my first time at the layoff rodeo. The only thing Large Financial Institution did right was give us a month’s lead time to telling us our last day was in mid-March.

But that’s a story for after I’ve collected my severance check.

Like a stereotypical urbanite creative, I started meditating recently. To my credit, I actually started before “these trying times” way back in August 2019. And while I was inconsistent in my practice, I did it enough to get a taste. What I didn’t realize is that for me, someone prone to anxiety, it actually does what all those patchouli doused hippies claim meditation does.

It calms me down.

On days when I don’t get my morning routine – which consists of morning pages (thank you, Julia Cameron) and 10 minutes of meditation – I’m like an over wound toy. Jangling nerves and snappish replies, followed by the inevitable guilt and shame which just winds me up even more. In a year when nothing worked right, this actually did.

And the app I’m using, the orange dot one, taps brilliantly into two aspects of human psychology: streak theory (or the theory of sunk costs) and nudge theory.

Streak theory powers every frequent buyer reward program in existence. For continued action – such as buying a certain number of sandwiches – someone gets a small reward. In sophisticated programs, or in certain educational settings, longer streaks earn rarer rewards. Keeping a streak going taps into our desire to make our sunk costs, the money or effort we’ve already put into something, be worthwhile.

Nudge theory, for which Richard Thaler won a Nobel prize in economics in 2017, is a concept that says that subtle shifts in policy are more effective at getting people to make decisions that are broadly beneficial for their lives. Digital apps leverage nudge theory by pinging you several times a day with light touch, often humorous reminders to buy that sandwich or do that meditation session.

In the digital realm, apps use these pings, or nudges, to leverage your working memory. Miller’s Law tells us that the human working memory can hold 7 plus or minus 2 things on average, unless something comes along to push it out of your mind, you’re probably going to do that session, or get that sandwich from that place when it comes time for lunch.

Streak theory and using nudge theory in this way both have a dark side, though. Keeping a streak going can be a form of addiction. It can also lead to paying for things you don’t really need.

There is also a school of thought that says streaks alone, which are neutral, aren’t effective at forming habits. To form habits, we need behaviors to become ingrained. They need to be things we do without thinking about them.

This is where the habit trackers come in. It isn’t simply a matter of getting that badge or seeing that graph add one more point for my completed activity. I also need the reminders. I need to use the addictive, distracting nature of cell phones to my advantage.

If I’m going to look at the thing, it needs to serve me in developing better habits.

The other thing I’m doing is off-loading responsibility to the application for making the decision to spend time on something.

If I’ve got the app nudging me to do morning pages, do my meditation, drink enough water, and take my vitamins then hey, I’m just responding to this thing. It’s not really me making the decision to spend the time on those tasks instead of having back-to-back meetings and working an average of 4 extra hours a week.

You were wrong.

Happiest Season centers on Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) as a couple who have gotten far enough along in their relationship that they’ve moved in together and, in typical American disapora fashion, still haven’t met each other’s families.

In Harper’s case, this is because they live in a city several hours’ drive away and in Abby’s case, as is repeatedly emphasized to the point that the fact is included every time Harper’s mother introduces Abby to someone, there is no family to meet because both her parents are dead.

Employing the usual holiday movie tropes – a new(ish) couple not entirely secure in their relationship status, family drama and traditions, and a high pressure event (Christmas) – Happiest Season hits all the notes you’d expect from a movie like this. What is unfortunate is how it gets there.

Set-ups for conflict get dropped into the plot the same way kids lost in the woods drop bread crumbs.

Instead of taking the risk and insisting to her mother that because of the packed house for the holidays it’s totally okay if she and Abby share a bed, Harper lets her mother put Abby in the basement bedroom where there is no lock on the door.

You know what happens next, right? In case you don’t, the inevitable scene where someone hides behind a door to avoid being found out may greatly delight you.

Expository dialogue designed to give us backstory in a compressed time frame strips the skilled actors in this cast of any opportunity to convey actual emotion beyond the most broad strokes. And this is the real disappointment of this movie: the leads have almost zero chemistry with each other.

When Harper’s secret high school girlfriend Riley (Aubrey Plaza) shows up as a foil to Abby’s growing irritation over the presence of Harper’s high school boyfriend Connor (Jake McDorman), the sexual tension between Riley and Abby is a welcome relief from wondering what Abby sees in Harper.

When the final emotional confrontation finally arrives it’s a doozy. Everyone spills secrets including that the “poor little orphan” schtick Abby has let drag on is a sham. Her parents died when she was 19 and she has plenty of happy family Christmas memories.

Add to this the ghastly brown wig someone thought to put on Mackenzie Davis, a wig so distracting for the first 20 minutes of the movie I couldn’t watch anything else, and the unearned family acceptance, and you’re left with a deep sense of disappointment. Given the cast and the writer/director (Clea Duvall), it feels like this could have been so much better.

Holiday romantic dramedies already draw their characters and their plots with the most broad-tipped marker. Just switching up some of the circumstances and the sexual orientations of the main characters doesn’t improve on that quality.

While it’s great to see more representation on screen, I fear that all Happiest Season has done is show us that movies with LGBTQ characters in the leads can be just as awful as movies where we don’t exist at all.

Rating

As recently as 6 years ago, people were doing research to discover just how your cell phone can distract you. The answer is: just by being in the room (2014, 2017, 2018). The mere presence of the device, even if it is out of sight, draws part of your mental attention creating Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).

I’m betting you can feel that itch along your palm as you unconsciously reach for your own phone right now, if you aren’t already holding it as you read this.

Attention is something I have very little to spare right now, and I haven’t quite figured out why. I’m fairly certain it’s due to some fucked up internal coping mechanism that tells me as long as I’m busy I’m controlling my environment, and if I’m controlling my environment I can’t get hurt. My anxiety is a tad transparent these days.

But because I’m working hours ridiculous enough that I’m rolling into the last two weeks I will work this year with almost four full days of uncompensated overtime, dealing with personal administrative crap when I’m not working hasn’t been a high priority.

The shift to e-bills at the beginning of the pandemic fed my anxiety something fierce. My blue collar roots take pride in always being able to pay something and to do it on time. The prospect of missing a bill led me to activate the Updates tab in Gmail.

Huge mistake. Massive.

It went okay for the first couple of weeks as Gmail learned based on what ever algorithym the bro who programmed it determined. And then shit went off the rails.

Bill notifications started going to promotions. Stuff from my mother started going to updates. Nothing was where I expected it to be. I told myself for months it was manageable. It manifestly wasn’t.

About a month ago I killed the Updates tab by moving everything into my inbox. Now everything that’s 90% relevant is in one place.

Every.thing.

Today I’m declaring digital bankruptcy. I’ve done a cursory pass through the 1,500+ emails in my inbox to try to find things I might actually need. And now that I have, everything is going into archives on the theory that if I handle things as they come in I can reduce the amount of noise.

Let’s hope this works.