Hi Toasts, how are you all feeling today? If you live on the eastern seaboard, please feel free to commiserate with me about the incoming Nor’easter. Is it already snowing where you live? Do you have all the essential supplies?? Do you understand why we LIVE here??? Relatedly, did you know that as of Wednesday evening there was not a single damn sled you could order with your Amazon Prime subscription that would actually arrive before the storm, even if you were willing to pay extra for “same-day shipping”?
This week Jaya and Matt gave us the January Dad Mag, PLUS our first look at the COVER of DAD MAGAZINE: THE BOOK (available for pre-order now!).
Katie Klabusich wrote so honestly and beautifully about her relationship with her mother in light of recent revelations that shook her faith in the adoption story she’d always been told.
The Toast’s Middle-earth correspondent Austin Gilkeson teamed up with artist J. Longo to bring you “The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne,” a piece so shocking I could only respond with “WOW — CONTROVERSIAL” when it was first sent to me. I do not necessarily agree with everything we publish here, I just present it and allow you to form your own opinions, because that is (I’m told) how journalism works.
ZEUS: where is it
HERA: I don’t understand the question
ZEUS: where is the baby
HERA: idk
i threw it off the mountain
so i guess whatever at the bottom of the mountain is
As all Toasties already know, Mo Moulton is so great, and so is her “Watching Downton Abbey with an Historian” column, now in its final season. Gather her insightful historical asides while ye may! Just don’t be this commenter:
(No.) Anna Cabe wrote about her love of kdramas and what the shows mean to her in terms of representation, and It Was Good:
Before I found Korean dramas at eighteen, I had lived in a culture where the pictured ideal was white — or at least as white as it could possibly be. … If Asian girls were present, particularly in a romantic scenario, they were usually a) in a relationship with a white man, and b) romanced on. They were the object of pursuit, often an accented, exotic, passive lotus blossom from the East — nothing like the American-born, mouthy Asian girls of my own extraction. Think Suzie Wong without her delightful, defiant tall tales. Think Liat from South Pacific, who barely speaks at all. These depictions of Asian women in romantic relationships were all created by white men and tinged, uncomfortably, with “yellow fever,” even if some were intended to critique the stigma against interracial relationships.
I sometimes wonder if that — plus the Catholic guilt and my conservative Filipino upbringing — is why I was so discomfited by overt displays of sexuality and bald yearning, especially in romantic films. That somehow, that expression of sexuality, of emotion, of pursuit was clearly not meant for me. I could never be the actor, I could never be the pursuer, I could never be the one falling head over heels.
I have the perfect job, and still always greedily devour Dear Businesslady’s excellent column and learn so much from it. I find it highly motivating every month. I demand a performance review.
“Don’t forget that it’s me who’s the Queen of the Goddamned May around here.”
I hope you all have a great weekend, and that those of you in the path of Storm Whatever Its Name Is Since We Started Naming Winter Storms stay safe and snug and warm! They’re forecasting 18 to 36 inches where I live, which is an upsetting and also PRETTY WIDE RANGE, so, Weather Science, I think you could try a bit harder next time. I am staring down this four-day snow weekend with small children, and am thus about to discover precisely how many times you have to watch Big Hero 6 before the super-sad parts just bounce harmlessly off your cold, dry husk of a heart like so many tiny nerf balls. We could do with some more chocolate-covered pretzels here, honestly, but other than that I think we are prepared.
