Ep. 17 - Anna Sale, death, sex, money, and hard questions
Also wrestlers, Reese Witherspoon, David Bowie, fires, climate anxiety, and 18,000 year old Shaq
Takeaways
This week’s show is a conversation with Anna Sale of the podcast Death, Sex & Money and it takes advantage of the fact that Anna has really painted herself into a corner with her willingness to talk about difficult, sensitive topics. Because is she is willing to go there, that’s where I want to go with her. It’s a little like being a firefighter and people keep calling you to stop their homes from burning down.
Here are some things that stayed with me:
A lot of Anna’s expertise on hot topics like death and sex and money and family and identity and mental health comes from pretty simple things that are within the grasp of all of us. She’s a proponent of listening and of empathy. She’s all about understanding what the other person is going through and getting at the root of what makes it hard. It’s not about defeating the other person, it’s about teaming up with them.
Anna’s area of specialty came about because she had been forced into a lot of difficult discussions as a result of the end of her first marriage. These were tough talks with her then-husband and within herself about how to handle the situation. After those were finally wrapped up, she stayed interested in the notion of tough topics, why they were tough, and what can be done about them to make them less terrifying.
I’ve been listening to Anna’s show and while I can never endorse the lack of Oxford comma, even with the ampersand, it’s worth noting that the episodes don’t always fit neatly to the three subjects in the title. At least one of those things is usually in there, often more than one, but it’s not like “this will be a Death episode”, the show is just stories that run into those topics and bring them out to be noticed and discussed in an empathetic way. It’s cool.
Also, the show abbreviates to DSM and that acronym also refers to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of mental health diagnosis. And you know what that means? Nothing at all. Still: these are things my brain notices.
An idea
Death, Sex & Money would be a great three-man tag team for pro wrestling. “They’re hard to talk about! They’re TOUGH SUBJECTS!” Here are some of my favorite pictures of three-man tag teams.
Climate change has an effect on mental health
I mean, yeah, that makes sense. I guess I haven’t thought much about that. But Cristina Carujo at ABC News has.
"Climate change can affect mental health by just increasing people's stress and worry about the issue, the more they hear about it," said Dr. Susan Clayton, a professor in psychology and environmental studies in The College of Wooster, in Ohio.
"It's been described as an existential threat, something that really challenges the way we think about the world. And I think it has the potential to really erode our sense of security," Clayton added.
I’ve visited The College of Wooster and enjoyed it very much. I say this because honestly I’m fearful of putting climate anxiety too far into my brain right now. They have a lot of black squirrels on that campus, which is located in Wooster, Ohio, and the film director Duncan Jones went there and his father is David Bowie.
This seems to fit kinda:
And here’s one with Annie Lennox:
And now, a diversion
So when I was in junior high, I was nominated to spend a week at an arts camp in Port Townsend, Washington. I guess it was a thing where schools could nominate kids in particular areas and I was sent for drama. Our school had no drama department to speak of but I had done a semi-professional play in town and they remembered it. This is the school I’ve spent my life complaining about, like a jerk.
Anyway, I go, have a great week, make a lot of friends, most of them girls because I had confidence that week, and keep in touch with one of them afterwards. We write letters, as people did at the time, and I sent her some mix tapes. Then the correspondence withers because we were like 14 at the time and lived far apart. Many years later, I wonder what became of Kirsten Smith and I learn that she freaking wrote LEGALLY BLONDE. Because now she’s a big-time Hollywood screenwriter.
All this to say, it’s a great movie and Kirsten (we’re back in touch through Twitter!) is featured in this entertaining oral history in the Times.
KIRSTEN SMITH (screenwriter) We were sent a fiction manuscript by Amanda Brown [by] a couple of different producers and Marc Platt was one of them. It immediately struck us as one of the greatest movie ideas ever, and we pitched it as “Clueless” meets “The Paper Chase,” one of those law school movies from the 1970s. I might have worn a lot of pink in the meeting.
Okay back to climate anxiety
And ACTUAL FIRES.
I don’t think anyone is really expecting fewer wild fires going forward. Probably going to be more. And where there’s fire, there’s going to be smoke. A new report from UCLA says there’s plenty to worry about with the smoke alone.
“Living under the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic gives some sense of what this is like,” said Eisenman, who has studied the aftermath of disasters from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the 100,000-acre Woolsey Fire in 2018. “The isolation from community and the dread that leaving the house to go into the world outside is fundamentally dangerous – this might sum up the isolating and fearsome experience of the pandemic and persistent wildfire smoke events.”
I kinda wish there were fewer reasons to be scared of leaving the house.
Not to be, you know, ANXIOUS or anything.
This made me laugh more than it should have
