So I quit my job this week
Listen I know this is coming at a less-than-wise publishing time, but it's a newsletter not a BLOG. It'll get to your inbox and hang out there until you read (or delete) it. It's here waiting for you! How nice.
Anyway, so, yeah, I quit my job. First there were weeks of handwringing and anxious deliberation, then there was lightning-bolt clarity, and now I have three weeks left. "Oh cool, where are you going?" you might be wondering, and the answer is: nowhere! It's super scary, but then again, the circumstances are very close to those in which I left my last job, which I also loved very much. On September 19, 2013 (almost three years to the day! what's up with this time of year!) I blogged the following:
It was not the wrong decision then — I've spent the past three years lucky enough to work my literal dream job, with some of the best, funniest, smartest, kindest people I will ever meet — and I hope it is not the wrong decision now. I'm leaving to write more things, longer things, which I hope people will be interested in. You better believe I'm emo as heck about it, and — this will get to books soon I promise!! — while I'm really in it I just want to say, for the record: how deeply I believe in gut instinct and in the freedom of making "bad" decisions; how easy it is to belittle myself and my abilities, and how important it is to fight that impulse, to remember I have been brave and can continue to be; how there is a benefit of living with such an exhausting and unrelenting anxiety and it is that doing so makes it impossible not to know what is going on in my head, and to trust it when it's telling me what it is time do. There's a good chance this will be a disaster! Hopefully it won't. But I've been broke before and I can be broke again. There's always waitressing.
Now let's talk about Jillian Tamaki and This One Summer.
Jillian Tamaki is so fucking cool. SuperHuman Magic Academy was one of my favorite books I read last year. She gets teenage angst and draws it with such understated perfection. Once, at a comics festival, my boyfriend was like "Oh, Jillian Tamaki is here, I'm going to have her sign my book," and I was like "wow ok have fun" and I literally left without telling him because I was so jealous he was meeting and obviously falling in love with such a cool, smart artist babe. She's great. And — shoutout to Caitlin Semp for the rec — so is This One Summer, which is illustrated by Jillian Tamaki and written by her cousin Mariko. It is beautiful!!!!
It's about two girls, Rose and Windy, during a pre-teen summer spent at the small beach town their families visit every year — and, until I saw a smartphone pop up, I assumed it was placed in the 90s. I tried to find markers throughout the early pages that had convinced me of this, but realized they were just moments of recognizing myself in these girls. The last time I'd really been in the thick of much of this (crushes on older boys, confused and judgmental ideas about femininity and lust, inarticulate anger at parents who had the nerve to be human, a fearful and sometimes cruelty-tinged need to be cool) I was in my early teens as well, so seeing it displayed so clearly on these pages was like taking a (very charming) ride on a time machine.
Look at how she draws Rose as she's about to see the older guy she likes!
Rose likes this guy despite his being a scummy teen who has spent the summer ghosting on the girl he got pregnant. It's the girl Rose hates, and she calls her a slut again and again. Maybe she's mimicking the language she hears among the teenage boys around the town. Maybe she's just jealous they had sex. (She's certainly fascinated by it, and she makes Windy, who is a year younger, explore the dark area of the woods where she know the older kids go to "do it.") She says she's angry because "it's stupid that girls can't, like, take care of their stuff and then everything is fucked up" — and it's an anger that seemingly stems from frustrations with her mother's depression, her own lack of agency, her growing awareness of how the world treats girls around her, and how the world expects her to be. I think of the years I spent (mis)directing disdain at girls and women instead of men and society in general (I'm going to let you in on a shameful secret — I used to be a girl who believed I didn't get along with "other girls") and the years I spent recognizing and undoing internalized misogyny, and before I know it I'm crying on the train.
Oh, it's so good. We haven't even gotten into the mother, and her inability to comfort Rose or Rose's father ever since miscarrying; or Windy's hippy mom; or the way the blue tones underline the reader's bittersweet understanding that this is probably one of the last summers the girls are still connected to their youth — yes, Rose wants to see where teens have sex but she also wants to dig a big hole in the sand and play MASH and collect rocks. It's all there, and it's all a delight.
Here are some links:
When I Said All Trump Supporters Are White Supremacists, I Meant It (Ijeoma Oluo, The Establishment)
The Outback Special (Liam Lowery, Eater)
What I Learned From Executing Two Men (Semon Frank Thompson, New York Times)
41 Of The Most Messed-Up Things I've Photoshopped Over The Years (Jen Lewis, BuzzFeed) — enjoy it, bookmark it, return to it whenever you need it
ok BYE!