Because You'd Cry If You Didn't

The president is mean and empty and sure it hurts my feelings, but I'm not gonna tell HIM that.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! Every ♥️ makes me softer on the inside but stronger on the outside, like all the best kinds of candy!)

I have been avoiding the news because it hurts my feelings. Every executive order issued via social media, every illegal funding rollback, every hearing to confirm another government official who doesn’t believe in government, makes me want to waah waah waah!!! like a tiny baby. And while in most contexts, I think it is good/necessary/transcendent to be vulnerable, in the current political climate, being vulnerable makes me feel like a fucking idiot. It feels too late to be sad. Embarrassing to feel grief over a completely predictable outcome. All I can do, in response to every venal executive gesture over the last two weeks, is laugh. I muster my bitchiest cackle at everything Trump and his beta cucks say and do. I can’t be offering up the warm, softness of my belly, the way an animal does when it wants to be comforted by a trusted hand. It’s really a question of safety. Right now, our exteriors need to be hard. Like crocodile scales.

Not an appropriate way to be RN!!!

Take this week. Now, if something scary happens in the world of commercial aviation, my husband is talking about it. I’m not totally sure where the morbid preoccupation comes from, but I do know that until we had kids, my husband had to pop a xanny and wash it down with three beers just to make it through a two hour flight, so life hack: have children. They will irritate the aerophobia right out of you. My point being, even though I’ve been avoiding the news, it was impossible to be married to my husband and not hear about the terrible plane crash outside of Reagan National Airport. He showed me the video, and when I asked where the plane was heading, he explained “No, it was coming from Wichita. It was just about to land.” That detail, that the plane was about to land instead of taking off, made what was already a tragedy seem that much sadder. Why should that be? Maybe because it throws into relief how close the crash was to not happening. Like when a person makes it to 80 without dying of cancer, then gets mowed down in a mass shooting.

Feeling raw about near miss of it all, I couldn’t NOT pay attention to the news. Which is how, the next morning, NPR talking heads chattering away as I packed my kids’ PB & Js, I accidentally caught Trump’s contribution to the moment of national mourning. What could I do but laugh when he blamed DEI for two aircrafts’ disintegration over the Potomac? When he pulled out his list of the FAA’s targeted diversity efforts, rattling off, hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, psychiatric disability and dwarfism? What the actual fuck was happening? The night before I’d watched The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City reunion (Part II). What was the difference, really, between Meredith’s fixation on being absolved for starting rumors about Angie K.’s husband, no matter how often Andy tried to change the subject, and Trump’s circuitous circling back to the evils of DEI? Our president is a Real Housewife. And not even a fun one. So instead of grieving the rotten hollowness that must fill the space inside a person to make him say the things he does — like when you slice open a bell pepper and find it’s full of mold — I find myself choosing to scoff at the stupid stupid stupid stupidity with which he presents it. It makes me wonder, a year and a half into writing a newsletter called “That Hurts My Feelings”, are feelings for chumps?

I’d like to ignore everything outside the five block radius of my home, my kids’ school, my spin studio and some good restaurants for the next four years, but that’s impossible. I asked my husband what he thought the path forward was for being responsible citizens while not weeping all day like the pathetic snowflakes the Tucker Carlsons of the world accuse us of being. He said we should focus on what’s around us. Ignore the clowns in Washington. What can we do for our kids? Our neighborhood? Our city? Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched the people of LA care for each other in ways that make me feel lucky to live here. We live ten miles from Altadena, a neighborhood all but destroyed by the recent forest fires. For weeks, my older son’s school kept everyone indoors all day, not wanting the kids to breathe in whatever immeasurable poison had wafted over from the rubble of 9,300 incinerated homes. Some of those homes belonged my kid’s classmates. But you can’t spend fifteen minutes on Instagram without clicking through five or six GoFundMes that friends and friends of friends have posted for people who’ve lost their homes. A weekend hasn’t passed without a clothing drive, an aid concert. A friend who lost her house told me that some generous momfluencer even gave her a cache of medspa coupons. These times may weigh heavily on our souls, but that doesn’t have to show on our faces! It’s kindness, LA-style. We’ve been fine-tuning this collective care since the pandemic, when the most privileged among us realized what a lot of people in this country already knew: no one is coming to help us. WE have to help us. The same asshole was president back then, too. Weird.

Me, 1982-2024

My approach to life has generally been, Be Pudding. Mushy. Warm. Quivering. Now is not a time to be pudding. But if Trump is teaching me anything, it’s that now is not a time to be the opposite of pudding either. I’m laughing at how truly fucked up everything is, not out of apathy or totally spent mania. I’m laughing because this second term has made me realize, cruelty is laughable. Cruelty is fucking ridiculous. In times as trying as these, it’s actually insane to be anything but kind.