Hello friends! Some news: I’m going to start monetizing this Substack now that I’m no longer employed full-time and shelling out/going into debt for law school. I don’t want to gatekeep important life things, though, so here’s how it’ll work:
Most of my posts, like my recent one about law school orientation, will remain 100% free to read.
Once a month on the second Saturday, I’ll do a post structured like this one - interesting links, short stories I want to tell that aren’t quite enough to justify a standalone post, pop culture stuff I’m enjoying, and a pic of Molly for good measure. This first off-schedule one is free, and starting in September I’ll put it behind the paywall.
I may put other posts behind the paywall if I want to talk about something particularly sensitive that I’d rather not have fully public and potentially indexed by search engines. I don’t anticipate doing this often and may not do it at all, but I do want to leave the option open.
I’m setting the price at $5 per month, or $30 per year if you want to pay up front. Both of these are the minimums that Substack allows, and I don’t want to charge any more than that - my initial idea was $2 and $20, respectively, both of which Substack rejected. If you just want to continue reading for free, I’m happy to have you! But if you’d like some extra content and want to buy me a couple of Diet Cokes, I’d be glad to have you subscribe.
As a thank-you for subscribing and a hopefully fun perk, paid subscribers may choose 1 song lyric when they subscribe, and within 3 months, I’ll find a way to use it as the title of a post. This is optional, so don’t stress about it if you want to subscribe but that sounds more like work than fun, and it may be any lyric as long as it’s PG-13 rated or lower and not something I’d find abhorrent (aka, please don’t suggest anything from “Try That In A Small Town”). Trolling me via lyric choice is acceptable and encouraged.
I can gift subscriptions, so if you want to read All The Things but don’t have the cash to spare, send me an email and I’ll set you up.
Interesting things I’ve been reading
I really loved Perry Bacon Jr.’s essay “I left the church - and now long for a ‘church of the nones'.” (That’s a gift link, so you can read even if you don’t subscribe to the Washington Post.) Our experiences with religion are quite different, but we ended up in a similar place. Being queer and culturally Catholic, I had several very good reasons to leave the church I was raised in and not find the evangelical alternative I attended for a couple of years in college to be the right long-term fits for me. And yet, I had valuable experiences in and around church, including volunteering to lead a Bible study in the Bergin Correctional Institution when it was still open. I, too, would like to find a place of community and shared values like church but am not sure that the one for me currently exists.
The story of Michael Oher, subject of “The Blind Side,” suing his supposed adoptive parents is a wild one. Instead of legally adopting him, the Tuohy family entered him into a conservatorship (a tool meant to be used for a caretaker to assume legal authority over someone so incapacitated - usually by brain injury, dementia, or mental illness - that they are fully incapable of making their own decisions). That gave them the power to manage his contracts and business deals, even while he was playing in the NFL. Oher is also alleging that he didn’t see any money from the book and movie deal about his life, even though the Tuohys and their biological children were paid $225,000 and a percentage of the movie’s earnings each.
Conservatorship/legal guardianship was in the news in 2021 when Britney Spears finally broke free of her conservatorship, which her father entered her into after she suffered a mental health crisis in 2008 and kept her in for 13 years, even while she was much more stable and well enough to record albums, go on tour, and perform at a Las Vegas residency. The arrangement made a lot of money for Britney’s father and lawyers, while she had no rights of her own and was kept on an “allowance” far lower than what others made off her own work.
I also learned a lot about the issue of conservatorship abuse from a 2017 New Yorker article “How The Elderly Lose Their Rights”, which focused on how unscrupulous, for-profit guardians can take control of older peoples’ lives against their wishes and the wishes of their families, spend the money enriching themselves, and keep their charges too isolated and drugged to resist. Even when conservatees and their loved ones want to end the conservatorship, they have no legal right to do so. Conservatorship needs to exist in some form, there are definitely cases where it’s needed, but reform is badly needed to protect people against abuse.
I found this Twitter thread to be enlightening about a trend I’ve noticed - “car bloat,” in which larger and larger trucks and SUVs replace smaller sedans and compact SUVs as our primary vehicles. Automakers, of both gas-powered and electric cars, are moving production toward larger cars. They blame this on consumer preferences, and while the desire is there, it also leads to higher prices and larger profit margins for those automakers while prices go up for consumers. The large vehicles are bad for pedestrians and cyclists, our environment, and our roads, and I hope to see the trend reversed soon.
Story time
I recently started working at a dispensary on Sundays to earn some extra money and avoid my student debt reaching crippling levels. So far, it’s going well, and I’m very happy to have found a job that was understanding of my other commitments and what type of schedule I need and still wants to have me on board. Plus, I get a pretty hefty discount on their products (I do partake, it’s so helpful with my sleep) and I’ve learned far more about different cannabis strains and consumption methods than I ever expected to, which is pretty cool!
I did have an amusing “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment during the training seminar I attended, though. A woman asked about the feasibility of having both a medical card for cannabis and a pistol permit, because the form for a pistol permit asks about any illegal drug use and includes medical cannabis use as a disqualifier. Of course, the answer was “no, don’t have both, telling an easily falsifiable lie on a government form leads to bad things,” but it was quite the culture shock after 10 years in Democratic politics for this to be a common issue!
Fun pop-culture things
A new artist I’ve really been digging lately is Blondshell, whose self-titled debut album is up on all the major streaming services. Someone described it to me as Gen-Z grunge revival, and as a proper 90s kid I’m 100% here for that. Her lyrics are sharp, eloquently exploring toxic relationships and addiction, and the sound is a delightful ode to grunge and indie rock.
I’ve been playing F1 Manager 2023 to fill the void during Formula One’s summer break, and it’s pretty entertaining, if a bit expensive for what you get. I’m not much good at racing sim games, but I really like strategy games and it’s fun to take the approach of a team principal, determining race strategy and how best to build the team. Plus, if you simulate a few years into the future, the AIs running the other teams can do hilariously weird stuff. (For instance, imagine Charles Leclerc joining Red Bull in 2025. That happened in a game of mine!)
F1 is of course returning this weekend, but after my favorite Daniel Ricciardo broke a bone on his hand during a crash in free practice and can no longer race, this no longer qualifies as a fun pop-culture thing. I am wishing AlphaTauri reserve driver Liam Lawson the best as he makes his debut, though!
Monthly Molly
After getting into a discarded sauce container and somehow getting it on her fur toward the back (yeah, I don’t even know how), Molly got a bath last night. She did not enjoy the experience, though she grudgingly tolerates it.
That’s all for today! Hope you have a lovely, relaxing weekend and a great week ahead.