Weekly quick consumptions

Cold brew recipes, memoirs by comedians, and the never ending pain that is Drag Race.

The beginning of the year is going well for me because I still have the energy and optimism that I might change my life in a radically but self-affirming way. So to celebrate that, here are some quick consumption thoughts on the things I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to.

Quick consumptions

• Maria Bamford’s Sure I’ll Join Your Cult.
  Generally speaking, I try and avoid memoirs. I appreciate the writing style of memoirs, but mostly I find them just a bit boring and a tad indulgent. I’ve only just started Bamford’s memoir and it’s just…so strange. Her type of manic tell everyone everything standup has always been appealing to me, but something about seeing it in print seems so gonzo and off the wall while also brilliant.¹ I kind of want to compare it to Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion which is another book that’s full of meandering and disjointed paragraphs, albeit for a different reason.

• Red Wine Supernova
  God, the lyric “I just wanna get to know ya/Guess I didn't quite think it through (nah-uh, girl)/Fell in love with the thought of you/Now I'm choked up, face down, burnt out” is so real.

• The Wheel of Time Series
  I’ve written a couple of times about The Wheel Of Time series. I recently finished book three by swapping between audiobook and regular reading and while I will be continuing the rest of the series I have to say absolutely nothing happens for 60% of these books. He seems to have a formula of: 20% rehashing what happened last book, 60% characters traveling and sitting in inns, and 20% action-packed conclusions. It’s maddening.

• Drag Race Season whatever
  This is the first time a season of Drag Race has premiered where I didn’t feel intense pressure to watch it live.² Part of that is probably because I’m gone from Twitter and lack the live commentary from Gay Twitter. Bluesky, unfortunately, made barely a peep about the new Drag Race. I don’t know how I feel about this season yet. I think the Queen ranking (stolen from the Circle) has the potential to be funny and turn Drag Race back into a competition³ rather than just a feel-good 90 minutes, but I also don’t envy being the queens who have to justify their ratings to all of social media.

• Right Back to It, Waxahatchee, MJ Lenderman
  Nothing major just liked this c:

• A Cher Christmas ornament that my boss got me
  Probably one of the nicest gifts I’ve received which would be a micro-aggression if I had not told my boss that DJ Play a Christmas Song was my go-to Christmas song last year.

• Making my own cold brew
  I’m trying to save money and earnestly cold brew is a big part of my weekly expenses. I was getting a weekly delivery from Barretts (which is IMO Austin’s best coffee shop and I am so bummed I no longer live across the street from them), but even that was pricey ($15 a week!). So now I’m making my own. It’s been touch and go and I’m still experimenting with what makes a better brew. If you have a ratio you use that works or beans you know really work please tell me!⁴

• Carol and the end of the world
  I didn’t expect to like this series but I fully cried on episode 3 or 4. It’s a pretty interesting concept: the end of the world is coming fast and one woman doesn’t really know what she wants to do. I think it tackles grief and longing and the desire to connect with people around you in a really smart and mature way.

1. She has this bit at the beginning of the memoir where she explains “how to use this book” and highlights several icons she’ll be using throughout the book and what they mean. Then, in like a later chapter she uses an icon for the first time, so you naturally go back to the beginning to see what it means, only to realize the first sentence of the chapter was “in case you forgot and had to go look, here’s what this icon means” which is just so good to me.

2. instead, i went to Cherrywood which was a ghost town, I have literally never seen that few people in that building, so sad to see Austin changing.

3. There are a lot of problems with Drag Race, but chief among them is it can’t decide if it wants to be a talent show or a reality competition. By placing so much emphasis on the idea that the best, most deserving queen wins, it pushes all the queens to vote strictly on judges’ critiques. Which is fine, if that’s the show it wants to be. But the editing suggests it wants big arcs about heroes and villains, and the way you get that is by reminding the queens that they’re competing for 200k and they SHOULD be trying to stab each other in the back. The reason they can’t do that is because fans are so toxic that they forget this is a reality show and the queens are acting! Survivor fans don’t get that obsessed, they understand the way to play the game is to be cutthroat! If we let the queens start being a bit more shady, we’d start enjoying the seasons more.

4. Right now I think my ratio isn’t the issue. I’m using a 1:4 beans to water ratio to make the concentrate then a 2:1 concentrate to water to make the brew, because I like a stronger brew. I think my grind isn’t right because coarse grind seems hard to get on the type of grinder I have.