Brilliant funny humane writers and just a bit of math
The Chicken Lady sketch is still absolutely terrifying
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Algebra
In recent months and years, I’ve been working on the idea that the world doesn’t need to hear me opine about every topic, even when the topic is hugely important. Plenty of good takes out there in the world already. I try to take some self-care by choosing quietness.
But one thing: I was not good at math in school. Took algebra two years in a row because I couldn’t figure it out the first year. (Maybe this means I’m GREAT at algebra because I have twice as much algebra as the average person but I doubt it.) But even though I’m bad at algebra, EVEN I can do this:
Other countries have just as much mental illness and the same violent video games and movies as the United States has. The variable is guns. We have so many more guns. We have more guns than we have people. And so we have more gun deaths - homicides, suicides, accidental shooting deaths - than any other country, by a mile.
x = guns.
And another thing:
Also, the governor of Texas is eager to paint school shootings as a mental health problem but he’s cut funding for mental health programs.
A Texan I like better than the governor is Jenny Lawson
She had a rough day:
So last night I was supposed to be moderating an event for Christopher Moore, who is one of my favorite authors and I was very excited about it but on the way there I started to feel sick and it was the kind of sick that precedes an anxiety attack (racing heart, dread) but it wasn’t incredibly surprising since I’d been reading about the horrific events in Uvalde and I thought I could just push through it or at least make it to the church where we were having the event so that I could have the anxiety attack in the parking lot and that was a terrible idea but turns out I wasn’t having an anxiety attack. I was having a panic attack.
These seem the same and can be interchangeable in language but for me an anxiety attack is horribly shitty but lasts about 20 minutes and with deep breathing and xanax it’ll pass. A panic attack is something so violently awful that you literally are not sure if you’re going to live. Chest pains so bad it mimics a heart attack, stomach pains like you have food poisoning, and sometimes passing out entirely. They’re very rare for me (thank God) and this was the second worse one I’ve ever had in my life.
Jenny is a dear person and an amazing writer. If you don’t know that already, learn that. Or just trust me. One of the great kindnesses that she offers the world is being honest and illuminating about her own mental health struggles. She makes a better world for people.
You may enjoy my interview with her!
Me Talk David Sedaris Today
Unlike most days, today featured an hour-long taping of an interview with David Sedaris that you’ll be hearing in the coming weeks. He was in between massive multi-city tours and had fairly asymptomatic covid. Covid Sedaris.
I’ve interviewed David before but it was like 15 years ago, back when I was KUOW in Seattle. And he gets interviewed so often that of course he didn’t remember and so it was a fresh experience. Something I’ve found about interviewing people whose work I know very well, as was the case today, is that it’s often very… easy. I think if you read a lot of someone’s work, especially memoir and non-fiction, you get to know their voice to the extent that you imagine being in a sort of conversation with them already. So when you do get into that conversation, it feels very natural.
The interview was pretty amazing and I don’t want to give it away but a lot of it was about his father, who passed away fairly recently. There were a lot of things that David couldn’t say when his dad was alive that are now very much in the conversation. A lot of those things are shocking, others are painful. There were a lot of mental health issues in that family that I was not aware of.
In his new book, Happy-Go-Lucky, he also talks a lot about his sister Amy.
AND HERE THEY ARE ON THE DREW BARRYMORE SHOW?:
Good Bones
I know I talked about Maggie Smith’s appearance on the podcast this week a bunch already but it seems to be getting more attention in light of recent events. In the interview, recorded a few weeks ago, Maggie talks about her name surfacing a lot online whenever something horrible happens, often gun violence.
It’s because of her poem, Good Bones, which I don’t really feel like I should display here in its entirety but it’s not hard to find. Here it is.
And here’s an old Kids in the Hall sketch that you might like:
Ooh and here’s one from their new season MANY DECADES LATER BUT STILL FUNNY:
Okay, back to horrible mental health developments
Virginia official says staffers are leaving mental health facilities to work at Chick-fil-A
Yeah, okay, that’s not good.
“Part of it is some of those people do get paid less than you might get in fast food or Target or Walmart or something. And it’s not as stressful,” Littel said, adding that the state’s mental health workers are “doing lifesaving work every day.”
He said he was mostly referring to workers who may be in housekeeping or direct support staff roles and might make around $13 to $18 an hour. Recent Virginia job postings for Chick-fil-A, which advertises all workers get Sundays off when its restaurants are closed, offered similar pay, with some locations offering starting pay of $15 an hour.
I don’t want to link to anything fun related to Chick-fil-A here so I’ll just do a Kids in the Hall Chicken Lady sketch:
I had to take Algebra in Summer School. I remember when it “clicked”. It was a great feeling....Eureka, I suppose. I don’t remember much now, at 56. I am not a math person, really.