It’s Friday night, I’m single, and I have nothing to do. The Christmas lights are down and the discarded trees are almost all gone from all the sidewalks. Tonight in CVS I saw that they’re already Valentine’s Day candy.
My social media news feed seems like it’s almost entirely about Aziz Ansari. I first heard about his transgression last Sunday and it’s been impassioned statuses and links to thought pieces ever since. I have yet to read the account but I read Lindy West’s article in the New York Times and the Rebecca Traister article she cites. I can’t say that I agree with everything in the articles but I am trying to listen.
Tomorrow marks one year since the inauguration of Donald Trump. (This incidentally marks approximately fourteen months since it became official that Hillary Clinton would be nowhere near the White House and time soon. Conservatives on the internet, kindly take note.) The Times let Trump voters speak for themselves on Wednesday. I found their continued support to be graded on a curve (apparently they wanted Neil Gorsuch and the declaration of Jerusalem as capital of Israel from the beginning!) with hints of victimhood at the hands of that amorphous specter of liberal hatred, “the media.” I seethed most of Wednesday. The New Yorker published Trying to Explain Trump’s First Year in Office and A Year of Donald Trump in the White House. Both are extremely pessimistic about the damage that has already been done and the fact that we’re measuring the success (or rather the tolerability) of his administration on the fact that there is currently no nuclear war occurring. Tomorrow there’s another women’s march. The fight continues.
Now that we’ve recorded the events of the day for posterity, let me get back to me. I watched the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror last night, which was the one that everyone said I needed to watch after writing my critique of the first three episodes. It was pretty amazing and not soul bruising like the other episodes. I also finished Purity by Jonathan Franzen. I enjoyed it but I also put it down for about three months two-thirds of the way through, so, take that for what it’s worth.
And now I face the conundrum of the single forty year old on a Friday night in the most exciting city in the world. What do I watch on Netflix?
