“In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!” 
― Dave Barry

Happy weekend, ducklings!

Jeff and I did Thanksgiving at The Mayflower again (why ruin a tradition that’s 5 years running at this point?), and I restricted my shopping impulses on Black Friday to only replacing ripped tights and Christmas presents for other people. *pats self on back*

This weekend I’m flinging myself into the holiday spirit. I have cinnamon scented candles going, I’m spooling up the Christmas music playlists, and finally getting my ass in gear to do some gift shopping and house preparation. November has absolutely skated by and I feel very unprepared for the end of the year and all it entails.

Here is your batch of weekend reading, to help make sense of the world and/or avoid it.

The world could use a few more dames, I feel.

This enrages me. The administration is making it easier for employers to exclude birth control from health plans, using the justification that women can obtain birth control from public family planning clinics. Which, you may remember, they have also underfunded to a ludicrous degree. When I worked for a religious university, this was exactly my experience. It was easier for me to get a prescription for birth control and source it more cheaply through Planned Parenthood than it was via my healthcare plan. Thank god I had a job, a car, and the money to afford such things, not all women do.

lololololol.

This also enrages me.

Brexit and Steve Bannon, the hideous gifts that keep on cursing us.

Mr. Bannon has been getting a lot of coverage here in Europe, where he has set up shop since being evicted from the White House, in promotion nationalistic and far right agendas. But to what effect? (We need the phrase, “Narcissists don’t make good populists,” printed and promoted everywhere.)

This story is a couple weeks old, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

This piece pulls absolutely no punches about Mr. Trump but feels fundamentally correct to me. He’s a malignant narcissist and everything is quite literally all about him. And it’s annoying and tragic that we, the public, have no immediately obvious way around paying him the attention he so desperately craves. After all, he’s the President of the United States.

Everyone just delete your account…

Seriously, just delete.

Just in case you thought 2016/17 were the worst years on record…

The pitiful fizzle of a coup against Ms. May was so strange to watch. I honestly didn’t know whether to expect her to resign last week or not… before I remembered that it’s 2018 and the rules and presuppostions of politics don’t matter anymore.

Hm. What does it say that the troops were deployed before the election and are being summoned home before “invading” force arrives? Sorry, too cynical?

I firmly believe we need more and better social programmes and structures for boys. I also firmly believe that this is NOT IT. The collective leaning back towards toxic gender roles (and other equally bad things), especially when we’ve seem to acknowledge that toxicity, baffles me. “We know it’s bad but we’re going to keep doing it because changing would be hard” is an indefensible moral position.

I…uh…what…?

Goals.

EXTREMELY near and dear to my heart.

Of course this story dropped over a holiday weekend. It’s still worthy of note, as is scrutiny of the network in question.

Can we stop “both sides-ing” this yet? We need solutions and we need them across the spectrum: economic, structural, and societal.

Lisa Eldridge has finally dropped a lipstick launch! I’m not allowed to buy them so someone else needs to and report back.

I’m very much looking forward to the end of year lists, let’s kick off with history books!