Gaby Dunn: lots of things, lots of places, all at once
This week on the pod, a conversation with podcaster and author Gaby Dunn.
Great talk, Gaby’s great. It’s all great. And it’s all interconnected.
The conventional wisdom with interviewing or with writing is to pick a focus and then hammer at that. So with Gaby, it might be personal finance. They have a show about it and a book about it so the traditional approach would be to keep returning to that topic, to bring all conversation back around to that.
With Gaby, that would be a disservice because there are also issues of gender identity, sexuality, and bipolar 2, as well as addiction in their family of origin. And these things don’t really have a simple A to B to C correlation.
My original script for the intro talked about how a podcast is inherently sequential. You can’t say all the words at the same time, it would be confusing, so you have to artificially construct a linear framework. I ditched that intro in favor of comparing a mental health situation like Gaby’s to a bowl of spaghetti:
Mental health is not generally best viewed as a straight line. It’s much more like a bowl of spaghetti.
It’s not a matter of because of A, B happens and then C fixes it and you arrive at D completely fine. It’s just noodles all over the place. And that’s about as far as I want to go with the spaghetti metaphor.
Next week: Elizabeth Ito!
I am so excited for you to hear my interview next week with Elizabeth, who is the creator of the amazing Netflix series City of Ghosts.
City of Ghosts won a freakin’ Peabody AND Netflix canceled it after one season. Go to Hell, Netflix.
She also wrote a bunch of episodes of my favorite tv show, Adventure Time. Including this one:
Kaiser Permanente mental health care workers in California are on strike
On account of how badly the system sucks.
“We’re striking to make Kaiser fix a mental health care system that is broken,” said Brandi Plumley, a crisis response therapist at Kaiser in the Bay Area. “There’s no excuse to make anyone with severe depression wait up to eight weeks for a therapy appointment. We can’t let Kaiser get away with illegal, unethical care.”
And yeah, it might seem a little counter-intuitive to become less available to patients as a means of protesting the lack of availability to patients, but sometimes labor needs to cause a crisis to get management to deal with a greater crisis.
Online library of notes and things left in library books
Librarians are the best, man.
Sharon McKellar, the Teen Services Head at Oakland Public Library, has created a substantial archive of the meaningful ephemera left behind when a book is returned.
Some are heavy:
Others not so much:
Humans are beautiful.