Category: Cultural Commentary

These can be reflections on personal events or my commentary on politics, religion, education, public opinion, the future, or the past.

Posted in Cultural Commentary, Small Business Notes

Myth Phrases: The Language Business Owners Use to Avoid Deciding

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Thirteen common business phrases — from “multitasking” to “self-starter” — tested against one question: good strategy, or an impatient entrepreneur avoiding a decision?

Some phrases show up in business so often that nobody questions them. I’m calling them myth phrases. They sound like descriptions of real conditions. Most of the time they’re excuses dressed up as strategy. The test for each one is the same: is this actually a good, deliberate business decision, or is it an impatient entrepreneur refusing to sit still long enough to choose?

“Multiple Competing Priorities”

This phrase comes from business owners who can’t choose. Some are scattered. Some have ADHD, and that plays into it. Some legitimately see several ways to reach a goal and can’t tell which is fastest, most sustainable, or lowest-friction. Whatever the reason, they can’t pick, so they say they have multiple competing priorities.

If two, three, or four things all sit at priority one, you have nothing at priority one. Skip that line and go to priority two. There’s probably only one item there, and that’s the one that matters, because it’s the one you can actually focus on.

Strategic or impatient? It’s never strategic to have four priority-ones. A real strategy produces a ranked list with one thing on top. “Multiple competing priorities” is what you say when ranking feels like loss — like admitting the other three don’t matter as much. That’s not a planning problem. That’s an attachment problem.

“Multitasking”

You cannot literally do two things at once. You cannot chop onions and fold underwear at the same time. When you say you’re cooking and doing laundry, what happened is this: you put the laundry in (task one), washed your hands, and started chopping onions (task two). Then you set the onions to cook and took a few more steps while the washer ran for 30 to 45 minutes. You alternated. You never did both at once.

Mental tasks work the same way. You cannot think about two things at the same time. You can alternate. I can say “candle, crystal, candle, crystal,” but I cannot say both words at exactly the same time with one mouth, one set of teeth, and one set of vocal cords.

Strategic or impatient? Multitasking isn’t a skill, so claiming it isn’t a strategy — it’s a cover story for not sequencing work. I prioritize efficiency. I want the most done in the least time so I can go do nothing. My Facebook memories still turn up posts like “door to door, an hour and 30 minutes, seven things done”: groceries, meds, a drop-off, a Marketplace pickup. That wasn’t multitasking. I picked a route — farthest stop first, work back toward home, straight line out, straight line back. My grocery list follows the store layout: produce, packaged goods, freezer, checkout. That’s organization. It’s structure and planning, done in advance, so the execution looks fast. Multitasking, as a word, erases the planning and pretends the speed happened by magic. It didn’t. The planning is the work.

If “multitasking” appears in a job description, run. Or, if you enjoy malicious compliance, ask in the interview: “Can you give me an example of how multitasking shows up? Who is literally thinking two things at once, speaking two things at once, or standing in two places doing two different things?” Let them explain that they mean something else.

“Fast-Paced Environment”

Usually sits right next to “multitasking” in the same listing. It’s code for wanting someone younger, who can be manipulated into accepting multiple priorities, attempting multitasking, burning out fast, and quitting. They’ll be cheap, so it’s fine.

Strategic or impatient? This one isn’t even the entrepreneur’s impatience — it’s institutionalized impatience, baked into hiring. A genuinely fast-paced business has fast, clear decision-making. A business that advertises “fast-paced” as a selling point usually has no decision-making at all — just constant reaction to problems nobody planned for. Speed without direction is just chaos with a better reputation.

“Low-Hanging Fruit”

We say low-hanging fruit when we mean the easy, gullible clients. The phrase makes targeting the least-informed, least-able-to-push-back customer sound like smart resource allocation instead of what it is.

Strategic or impatient? There’s a real version of this — the quick win that funds the harder work. That’s legitimate triage. But look past the immediate sale. A gullible client is gullible because they can’t evaluate what they’re buying, which means they also can’t evaluate whether it worked. Short term, that looks like free money: low effort, fast close, no pushback. Long term, it’s the client most likely to feel misled once they figure out what happened, most likely to leave a bad review, most likely to chargeback or demand a refund, and least likely to refer anyone, because they don’t have the standing in their own network to vouch for a purchase they’re privately unsure about. “Low-hanging fruit” measures effort to close. It doesn’t measure what that client costs you six months later. Most of the time “low-hanging fruit” doesn’t mean efficiency. It means picking a mark and not pricing in the cleanup.

“Above and Beyond”

Unpaid work presented as a virtue. The job or contract already defines what “and” covers. “Beyond” is whatever nobody wants to pay for. And this is the phrase that implicitly allows for a performance review policy where a 3 out of 5 is the average performance score across the company and no one ever gets a 5 – because there’s always something “beyond” whatever you just did that was “beyond.”

Strategic or impatient? Neither, really — this is about the entrepreneur’s unwillingness to scope the work correctly the first time. If the work is required, it belongs in scope and in price. If it isn’t required, it’s a favor, and a favor has to be voluntary to be a favor. “Go above and beyond” is a request for free work wearing a compliment as a disguise.

“Other Duties as Assigned”

This is “above and beyond” with a contract clause attached. It’s the line at the bottom of a job description that lets a boss expand scope indefinitely without ever expanding compensation to match. Every task that doesn’t fit cleanly anywhere else gets filed under it, forever, with no renegotiation trigger.

Strategic or impatient? It’s the same unpaid-scope problem as “above and beyond,” just written down in advance and pre-authorized. At least “above and beyond” has to be asked for, in the moment, by a person who can be pushed back on. “Other duties as assigned” removes the asking. The scope creep is already signed off on before the job even starts.

“Wearing Many Hats”

Said about small-business and startup roles like it’s a perk. What it usually means is one salary covering several jobs that should be several salaries, or at least several line items in a budget.

Strategic or impatient? There’s a real version early in a business, when there’s genuinely no budget for five separate hires and one person has to cover the gaps out of necessity. That’s a resourcing constraint, not a myth. It becomes a myth the moment the business can afford to split the roles and doesn’t, and keeps calling it a hat collection instead of understaffing.

“We’re Like a Family”

Said in onboarding, said in the culture deck, said right before someone is asked to skip their kid’s recital for a deadline. Families don’t fire you. Families don’t performance-review you. A business relationship that’s actually like a family would include job security and unconditional loyalty in both directions, and it never does.

Strategic or impatient? Not a business decision at all — it’s a manipulation tactic, dressed as warmth, used to get people to accept conditions (unpaid overtime, blurred boundaries, guilt-based retention) that they’d refuse if the relationship were correctly described as transactional.

The caveat here is that some families are exactly like that, and it’s not a compliment. Toxic families fire people too — they just call it being cut off, written out of the will, or uninvited from Thanksgiving. Members quit those families constantly — it’s called going no contact, and it’s the same severance as walking out of a bad job with no notice. And plenty of families run performance reviews already, they just don’t use the term: the running commentary on your weight, your choices, your partner, your parenting, delivered as “concern,” is a performance review with worse boundaries and no HR department. So “we’re like a family” isn’t even false advertising. For a lot of people, it’s an accurate description of exactly the dynamic they’re being asked to recreate at work — and that’s the problem, not the slip-up.

“Self-Starter”

A job posting phrase that means: there is no training program, no onboarding documentation, and no manager with time to manage you. You’re expected to figure out the job by doing it, with the risk of early mistakes placed entirely on you.

I worked for one company in my past that explicitly stated – coached management to believe – that rockstars in a particular line of roles would “train themselves.” Turns out this was code for will seek out and pay for themselves to go through training because the company didn’t actually value that job. This same company also directly advised specific hourly/salary ranges form 2000-2020 for this role that aligned more with a 1970s female secretary idea of compensation.

Strategic or impatient? Impatient — and worse than that, it’s a PIP that started before day one. A real PIP at least has the decency to come after a failure, with documented specifics about what went wrong. “Self-starter” skips all of that and front-loads the failure into the job description itself. The employer never defines what success looks like, never explains the unwritten systems, never hands over the context that would let a new hire actually start fast. Then, three months in, the gaps in that undocumented knowledge get read back to the employee as a performance problem — as if not knowing the thing nobody told them were a character flaw instead of a training failure. “You should have figured that out” is the employer taking their own lack of specificity and repackaging it as the employee’s lack of initiative. The job was never “start without guidance.” The job was “read our minds, and if you can’t, that’s on you.” That’s not autonomy. That’s liability transferred from the employer, who had the information, to the employee, who didn’t.

“Quick Call” / “Quick Question”

Never quick. The word “quick” is doing the work of avoiding the real ask, which is: an unscheduled interruption, scope undefined, duration undefined, on someone else’s calendar, right now.

Several years ago, as a thank you to one of my favorite coaches, I was honored to share a pink, sparkly hourglass gift, and she posted about this very topic:

Strategic or impatient? Impatient, specifically about scheduling. If it were actually quick, it wouldn’t need the word in front of it — it would just be asked. “Quick” is a pre-apology for taking more time than the asker is willing to name up front.

Some leaders have made a bit out of this, and it’s worth telling on them. There are managers who keep a literal hourglass or a phone timer on their desk and start it the moment someone opens with “got a minute?” or “quick question.” It’s played as a joke, a little team legend, ha-ha-look-how-busy-I-am. But it’s not a joke, it’s a confession. A person who needs a physical prop to track whether a conversation stayed under sixty seconds has already told you the real answer to “got a minute?” — no, and they resent being asked. The honest version of that interaction is a closed door, a “not now,” or a scheduled time later today. The hourglass version lets them perform open-door availability and punish you for using it, in the same gesture.

“Just Circling Back”

An unanswered request, restated, with “just” doing the work of pretending this is light and easy rather than a second ask after the first one got ignored. It lets the sender avoid naming what actually happened: nobody responded.

This phrase always brings to mind the 10-foot long spiral telephone cord I grew up with on the single house phone landline. Specifically, I remember the kinks – because in this analogy, that’s what stops the cycle.

Strategic or impatient? Not strategy at all — it’s conflict avoidance. A direct version would say “you didn’t respond to my last message, following up.” “Circling back” removes the accountability from both sides: the sender doesn’t have to say they’re chasing something, and the recipient doesn’t have to acknowledge they dropped it.

“Hustle Culture”

The myth that constant motion is the same thing as progress, and that exhaustion is proof of commitment rather than a sign the business lacks process. Hustle gets treated as a personality trait to admire instead of a symptom to investigate.

The other version of this phrase carries IMO more insidious implications – specifically “the side hustle.” The “side” part has always bothered me in it’s diminution of value, importance, validation to the person running it. It’s a very “female” thing to do, which aligns since it’s usually women who need to make more money – both single and partnered women – to achieve financial equity with their male counterparts. Especially in a hetero marriage, it’s the woman giving up her time and energy on a “side hustle” or additional part time (or second full time) job to bring more money into the marriage. In this way, “side hustle” skews “female,” making this is hot button gender equality issue for many.

Strategic or impatient? The clearest case of impatience on the whole list. A business running well doesn’t need anyone to hustle, because the work is sequenced, scoped, and resourced correctly. Hustle is what fills the gap when none of that happened. It’s not dedication — it’s the cost of not planning, paid in someone’s hours.

“At a High Level”

A way to sound informed without committing to anything specific. It means the speaker hasn’t done the work, doesn’t have the numbers, or doesn’t want to be held to the details.

Strategic or impatient? Impatient, almost every time. A high-level summary is useful when it’s a deliberate compression of detail you already have. It’s a myth phrase when it’s the only altitude the speaker has ever flown at. Ask for the next level down. If the answer is another “at a high level,” there is no next level. The summary was the whole thing.

The Common Thread

Every one of these phrases lets a business owner, or a business, skip a decision and call the skipping a method. “Multiple priorities” skips ranking. “Multitasking” skips sequencing. “Fast-paced” skips process. “Low-hanging fruit” skips accounting for long-term cost. “Above and beyond” and “other duties as assigned” skip scoping and pricing the actual work. “Wearing many hats” skips hiring. “We’re like a family” skips honesty about the relationship. “Self-starter” skips training. “Quick call” and “quick question” skip scheduling. “Circling back” skips accountability. “Hustle culture” skips the planning that would make hustling unnecessary. “At a high level” skips the analysis.

None of them are strategies. They’re all the same impatience, wearing a dozen different outfits.

The test is always the same: ask for the literal, concrete version. Ask who’s doing what, in what order, for how much, and with what detail. If the phrase collapses the second you ask that question, it wasn’t a decision. It was a way of avoiding one.

Posted in Crystal and Divination Work, Cultural Commentary

Sun, Moon, Rising: The Three Charts You’re Actually Carrying Around

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Sun sign, moon sign, and rising sign explained — what data each one needs, where the system comes from, and how to read all three together.

Someone asked me my moon sign recently. I didn’t know what that meant. I’ve been doing crystal work for thirty years and I did not know my moon sign, which tells you something about how compartmentalized my metaphysical education has been. So I Googled it, worked it out, and got an answer that turned out to be half right. That’s usually how it goes with astrology: everybody knows their sun sign, almost nobody knows the other two, and the explanations floating around the internet are either dumbed down to uselessness or written for people who already have a chart in front of them.

Here’s the actual breakdown, and here’s mine.

Three Signs, Three Different Questions

“What’s your sign?” is really three separate questions wearing a trench coat.

Sun sign is the one everyone means by default. It’s determined by where the sun appeared to be positioned against the backdrop of the zodiac on the day you were born. Because the sun moves through roughly one sign per month, your sun sign only requires your birth date. This is the sign in the horoscope column, the one on the mug, the one people mean when they say “I’m a Scorpio.” In the traditional framework, it represents core identity — the central character, the thing that stays consistent.

One disclaimer, because it comes up every few years and someone will bring it to me eventually: there is no second, newer zodiac that quietly replaced this one. The rumor is about a constellation called Ophiuchus, the “serpent-bearer,” which sits on the ecliptic between Scorpio and Sagittarius. The Babylonians knew it existed and left it out on purpose, because they wanted twelve equal slices to match a twelve-month calendar, not thirteen unequal ones. NASA’s Space Place — a science-education site for kids, not an astrological authority — ran an old post explaining this, and it resurfaces on social media roughly every two years framed as “NASA just changed your sign.” It didn’t. Astronomy and astrology are different systems, NASA studies the former, and the twelve-sign tropical zodiac this post is built on hasn’t moved. For the actual debunk, Autostraddle’s explainer and CNN’s coverage of the recurring hoax both walk through it clearly.

Moon sign requires more information and gets talked about a lot less. The moon moves through the zodiac in about 27 days, not 12 months, which means it changes signs every two to three days. Your sun sign is fixed for a full month; your moon sign can flip in an afternoon. That’s why knowing yours requires a birth date and a reasonably accurate birth time — get the day wrong by a few hours near a sign change and you get a different answer. Traditionally, the moon sign is read as the emotional and instinctive layer: how you process feeling, what you do when nobody’s watching, the internal weather system underneath the public-facing sun sign.

Rising sign, also called the ascendant, is the one nobody explains well. It’s the zodiac sign that was rising on the eastern horizon at the exact moment and place of your birth. The Earth completes a full rotation every 24 hours, so the horizon’s position relative to the zodiac shifts constantly — the rising sign can change every two hours. This is the one that demands all three pieces of data: date, precise time, and location, because latitude and longitude change what’s on the horizon just as much as the clock does. Traditionally, the ascendant is treated as the outward presentation — the first impression, the mask, the way you come across before anyone gets past the surface.

Put together, the shorthand some astrologers use is

Sun is who you are,
Moon is who you are alone,
Rising is who people think you are before you open your mouth.

I’m not fully signing off on that framework as gospel, but it’s a useful way to keep the three straight, and it explains why “sun sign” astrology — the kind in the horoscope column — is such an incomplete picture. It’s one-third of the data set, and it’s the one-third that requires the least information to calculate, which is exactly why it’s the one that got mass-marketed.

What It Actually Takes to Find Yours

This is the part that trips people up, including me a few weeks ago:

  • Sun sign: birth date. That’s it. The sun’s position is stable enough across a full day that unless you were born within hours of the calendar flipping from one sign to the next, the date alone settles it.
  • Moon sign: birth date plus birth time. The moon moves fast enough that date alone isn’t reliable — you can be born on the same day as someone and land in a different moon sign depending on the hour.
  • Rising sign: birth date, birth time, and birth location. This one is entirely dependent on the local horizon at a specific moment, which means the same birth minute in two different cities produces two different ascendants.

The rising sign is why “I don’t know my exact birth time” is a real obstacle in astrology circles and not just an excuse. Without a documented time, down to reasonable precision, and a location, the ascendant can’t be calculated at all — you’d be guessing at which of twelve signs happened to be crossing the horizon in a window that moves every couple of hours.

Where Any of This Comes From

None of this is New Age invention. The underlying system is old, and it didn’t originate as a personality quiz.

The zodiac — the practice of dividing the sky into twelve segments and naming them after constellations — comes out of Babylon, in Mesopotamia, roughly the first millennium BCE. Babylonian astronomer-priests were tracking planetary movement against a fixed set of constellations for calendrical and omen purposes long before anyone was assigning personality traits to it. The twelve-sign zodiac they developed is the direct ancestor of the one still in use.

The leap from astronomy to astrology-as-personal-destiny happened in Hellenistic Egypt, after Alexander’s conquests merged Babylonian astronomical tradition with Egyptian and Greek thought, centered in Alexandria. This is where the idea of a birth chart — a snapshot of the sky at the moment of an individual’s birth, used to say something about that individual specifically — took shape. The Greeks contributed the mythology: the zodiac constellations are named for figures out of Greek myth — the bull, the twins, the scales, the scorpion, the archer, the fish — and those origin stories are baked into how each sign is still described today.

The system got its major written codification from Claudius Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian scholar working in Alexandria in the 2nd century CE. His text, the Tetrabiblos, laid out the astrological framework — signs, houses, planetary rulerships — in a form structured enough that it became the reference point for astrology across the Mediterranean and, later, the Islamic world and medieval Europe. Astrology moved through Persian and Arab scholarship during the medieval period, where it was preserved and expanded alongside astronomy, before re-entering Europe through Latin translation.

One distinction worth knowing if you’re going to talk about this with any precision: the zodiac used in Western astrology — the one that produced my Scorpio sun — is the tropical zodiac, anchored to the seasons and the position of the sun relative to the equinoxes, not to the actual current position of the constellations in the sky. Vedic astrology (Jyotish), out of the Indian subcontinent, uses a sidereal zodiac, which tracks the actual constellations and has drifted from the tropical system over the centuries due to the Earth’s axial precession. Ask someone their sign in a Western context and a Vedic context and you can get two different answers for the same birthday. They’re not both wrong — they’re two different reference systems built on the same original Babylonian foundation.

The Chart, Since I Went to the Trouble

Birth data: some day in late October, mid-morning, on the northern side of the southeast Atlantic coast of the US — Eastern time. Daylight saving time had already ended for the year by my birth date in my birth year, so that’s a straight Eastern Standard Time reading, no ambiguity about which hour it refers to.

Run against that data:

  • Sun sign: Scorpio. Correct on the one thing I already knew.
  • Moon sign: Virgo.
  • Rising sign: Sagittarius.

That last one is the correction to make out loud. When this came up originally, the answer Google and I landed on was “Virgo moon rising,” which collapses two separate placements into one phrase. Moon and rising are not the same axis, and mine don’t match — the moon is in Virgo, the ascendant is in Sagittarius. It’s an easy conflation to make when you’re new to reading a chart, since both terms show up back-to-back and neither gets explained in the places most people first encounter them. Now I know better, and so does anyone reading this who’s about to make the same mistake.

Scorpio sun, Virgo moon, Sagittarius rising. Three different questions, three different answers, and it took a birth certificate’s worth of information to get all three.

What Each Sign Actually Carries

Since all three of these are mine now and not just an abstraction, here’s what the tradition assigns to each — traits, strengths, the anxieties that come attached, and the correspondences (color, stone, element, mythological figure) that show up across astrology and crystal work alike.

Scorpio (Sun) — Water, ruled by Mars/Pluto

  • Traits: intense, magnetic, private, strategic, perceptive to the point of unsettling other people
  • Strengths: resilience, loyalty once earned, investigative depth, emotional courage — willingness to go into the dark room other signs avoid
  • Weaknesses / anxieties: jealousy, control issues, difficulty trusting, a tendency to hold grudges and read betrayal into ambiguous situations
  • Colors: deep red, black, maroon
  • Stones: obsidian, garnet, malachite, black tourmaline
  • Mythological figure: Hades/Pluto, ruler of the underworld — the sign most associated with death, transformation, and what’s hidden beneath the surface

Virgo (Moon) — Earth, ruled by Mercury

  • Traits: analytical, meticulous, practical, modest, oriented toward being useful
  • Strengths: precision, reliability, discernment, a work ethic that doesn’t need supervision
  • Weaknesses / anxieties: perfectionism, overcriticism turned on self and others, anxiety rooted in loss of control, a habit of overthinking small details into large problems
  • Colors: hunter green, navy, earth tones
  • Stones: moss agate, amazonite, peridot, citrine
  • Mythological figure: Astraea, the virgin goddess of justice and harvest who, in one version of the myth, ascended to the stars and became the constellation Virgo when she abandoned a corrupted earth — also linked to Demeter/Ceres, goddess of the harvest

Sagittarius (Rising) — Fire, ruled by Jupiter

  • Traits: adventurous, philosophical, blunt, optimistic, allergic to being fenced in
  • Strengths: honesty, big-picture vision, enthusiasm that’s genuinely contagious, a broad-mindedness that resists small thinking
  • Weaknesses / anxieties: restlessness, tactlessness, commitment aversion, a tendency to overpromise and then need an exit
  • Colors: deep blue, purple, turquoise
  • Stones: turquoise, lapis lazuli, sodalite, amethyst
  • Mythological figure: Chiron, the centaur — unlike most centaurs in Greek myth, wise and civilized rather than chaotic, known as a teacher and healer, which fits an ascendant that’s the first thing people meet before they get to the rest of the chart

Does this remind you of anything? If you’ve ever taken a “personality” assessment (likely for a job), this might feel very similar, especially in the output. Things like DISC with it natural and adaptive styles of communication feels very much like the three angles from which you can be seen. I see some Enneagram references in here as well. In some ways, astrology is the original personality test.

Posted in Cultural Commentary, Everyday Musings

The Three Happiness Questions Nobody Asked Me

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

A response to Oxford’s World Happiness Report: three “happiness questions” that assume you’re partnered, trusting by default, and flush enough to give — and leave the rest of us out.

Inc.com ran a piece this week distilling the 2025 World Happiness Report into three questions that supposedly predict life satisfaction better than money or success. Eat meals with other people. Expect strangers to be trustworthy. Do things for other people. Answer yes to all three and, according to Oxford’s data, you’re happier than the people chasing a raise.

I read all three and thought: this is a survey built by and for a very specific person. Partnered. Extroverted by default. Financially stable enough that generosity is a free choice rather than a math problem. Socially trusting because nothing ever taught them otherwise. That’s not most people. It’s certainly not me.

Question one: eat with other people

No.

Eating alone, in public, with no one to coordinate around, is one of the more reliably pleasant parts of my week. The article frames solo meals as a loss — missed connection, missed networking, missed happiness you didn’t know you were leaving on the table. What it doesn’t count is what a shared meal actually costs to produce. Making plans and then having to break them. Working around someone else’s dietary restrictions or medical needs — timing a meal around a dining companion’s diabetes management, for instance, means the food itself becomes a coordination problem before anyone’s taken a bite, because insulin gets dosed against what’s actually delivered, not against what the menu implied it would be. Add in managing conversation, gauging whether the other person’s having a good time, and reading a room while also trying to eat in it.

Then there’s the part the survey has no column for. I’m a recovering anorexic of almost forty years. Eating in front of someone is never just eating. There’s a background process running the entire meal, tracking whether the person across from me is clocking what’s on my plate, whether they think I should have ordered something else, whether they’re doing math about my body while I’m doing math about my body. That process doesn’t turn off because the research says shared meals correlate with happiness. It’s exactly the mechanism the research is asking me to opt back into, framed as self-improvement.

Solo meals aren’t a consolation prize. For a lot of people, they’re the only version of eating that isn’t also a performance.

Question two: expect strangers to be trustworthy

What.

I’m Gen X. Stranger danger wasn’t a suggestion, it was the entire curriculum. Nobody under fifty was raised to assume the person they don’t know is safe by default, and treating that instinct as a happiness deficiency gets the causality backwards. The examples the article reaches for — ride-share, in-home services, marketplace platforms — aren’t evidence that people trust strangers. They’re evidence that an entire economy got built specifically because people don’t. Uber doesn’t run on faith. It runs on ratings, GPS tracking, background checks, and a review layer that exists precisely so nobody has to extend blind trust to anybody. That’s not trust. That’s trust infrastructure, built by companies that understood the default answer was no and monetized closing the gap.

Conflating “I’ll use a platform with five layers of accountability built in” with “I generally expect strangers to be trustworthy” is doing a lot of quiet work in that research question. They’re not the same disposition. One is caution with guardrails. The other is the thing I was specifically trained out of by 1985.

Question three: be kind to others

Here’s where the neurodivergent point comes back around, because it always does: volunteering, donating, and “helping strangers” all assume a baseline of social bandwidth and extroverted engagement that isn’t universal, and treating that baseline as the default path to happiness quietly pathologizes anyone whose brain doesn’t run that way.

But set that aside, because the bigger problem is economic, not psychological. This research keeps getting used as a stand-in for the happiness of the average person at the exact moment the average person is single, in a K-shaped economy, watching the middle class shrink in the rearview mirror. Prices are outrunning inflation. Compensation is lagging behind it, even for people who did everything right and stayed salaried. Benefits are getting trimmed. Pricing structures across housing, insurance, and household costs were built around two incomes and haven’t adjusted for how many people are now running a household on one. “Live within your means” only works if your means hold still. When price keeps outrunning what you’re paid, your means shrink every year — a second job, a side hustle, just to keep living within them. Eventually the means shrink enough that you can’t even afford to move somewhere cheaper. There’s nothing left over for a place where donating feels like an option again.

Telling that person their happiness is one volunteer shift away isn’t wrong because it’s unkind. It’s wrong because it’s not describing their economy.

The gap

Three questions, one implied profile: partnered enough to always have a dinner companion, safe enough in their formative years to default to trust, and flush enough in time or money that generosity is a choice rather than a luxury. Introverts, single people, independent people, and anyone currently underwater just don’t show up in that model — not because they’re less happy, but because the questions were never built to find out.

Posted in Cultural Commentary, Everyday Musings

Crone Era Early Admissions: I’ve Been in My Crone Era Since my 20s, but I Just Found the Word

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Fifty, done with organized religion, and finally naming a lifelong pattern of choosing solitude, judgment, and mortality on her own terms. One woman’s case for the crone.

Earlier this week I was talking to my neighbor (F, 25-ish), who is roughly half my age, about what I’ve been watching lately. Vampire Diaries. I’m nearing the end of the series. She lit up — oh, you have to watch Originals next, oh, you have to watch Legacies. I told her I’d already seen both. In fact, I’d seen them first. I watched Legacies before I ever touched Vampire Diaries, got curious about Klaus Mikaelson’s backstory, went to Originals, and only then worked my way back to the beginning. I’ve been going backward through the whole thing on purpose, which is apparently not how anyone else does this.

Zoe (on the stool) and me watching a later season episode of Vampire Diaries.

She also asked if I’d seen Gilmore Girls. I told her that one aired a little after my time as a young adult — I was already past the demographic it was written for when it aired. Now I have to go back and watch it anyway, because I’ve spent twenty years watching most of that cast grow up and get better at their craft in other things, and there’s no reason not to close the loop.

None of that is the point. The point is what happened after she left: I sat with the fact that a conversation about teen vampire shows had somehow confirmed something I’d suspected for a while.

I don’t think I’m entering my crone era. I think I’ve been in it since I was much younger, and I only just found the word for it.

What Crone Actually Means

The maiden-mother-crone triad shows up across a lot of pre-Christian and folk traditions as a way of mapping womanhood in thirds, roughly tied to a woman’s relationship with fertility rather than to age or ungendered life experiences. The maiden is beginning — curiosity, discovery, a life not yet spent on anyone else. The mother is the productive middle — creation, caretaking, output, whether that’s children or work or anything else built for others to use.

The crone is the third phase, the one that arrives after the culture stops expecting fertility and production from a woman, and it gets read two very different ways depending on who’s doing the reading.

The unflattering version, the one baked into most fairy tales, treats the crone as used up — a woman past her use, cast off, shriveled, dangerous in a bitter way. The older, more honest version treats her as the one who’s finally free of the expectations that ran her first two-thirds, and dangerous in a completely different way: she has nothing left to prove and nothing left to lose, which means her judgment finally belongs entirely to her. She knows things because she’s outlived the point of performing for anyone. She’s associated with wisdom, with the ability to sit with death without flinching, with cutting straight past politeness to what’s actually true.

Artist: Crocula; Source

That second definition is the one I mean. Not withered. Unmanaged. I’m not describing a phase I’ve entered at fifty. I’m describing a way of operating that the culture doesn’t have a slot for until a woman is old enough that it stops trying to sell her something.

Judgment Is Not for Rent

I read constantly as a kid, which in the capital “S” Southern culture I was raised in meant one thing if you were a girl: you were going to be an English teacher. Not asked. Told. By everyone. I started college in that degree program, got into the program, and hated almost every minute of it — not the literature, the bureaucracy of the K-12 education system. A room full of people who had never met me deciding how I was supposed to think and what I was supposed to do with a skill I already had. I left the systemic education path but continued on exploring language and literature. The teaching I did in higher education and the teaching I do now in business, much later and in a completely different form, is mine.

There’s an older, heavier version of that same expectation that follows a lot of women: you are the eldest daughter, so you will be the one who manages your aging parents, financially and otherwise, no matter what that costs you. I’m not going to get into the specifics of that one here. What I’ll say is that I looked at what was actually being asked of me, weighed it honestly, and said no. That decision cost me a relationship a lot of people would have kept out of obligation. I don’t regret it.

Somewhere in between those two things sits something much smaller and much more physical. A few months after I turned fifty this year, I stopped shaving. Legs, underarms, all of it. I’d already been drifting that direction for a decade — weekly, then biweekly, then monthly — but this year I just decided to stop doing it at all. The hair grew in sparser than I expected and softer than I expected. I don’t feel it unless the wind picks up. I’m not making a statement when I shower. I’ve just stopped thinking about it, which might be the most honest measure of how little it ever mattered to me in the first place.

Even punishment when I was a kid came with an expectation attached, and I never met it. Getting grounded is supposed to feel like a loss — kids are supposed to want to run around and make noise and messes, want the TV, want the phone, and sulk when all of that gets taken away. Instead, grounding meant a closed door and permission to read in silence for as long as I wanted. When they took the phone away too, it barely registered.

None of these three things are the same size. But they’re the same shape. Somebody hands me an expectation with their confidence attached to it, and I check whether it actually serves me before I put it on.

Trusty Old Reruns

The shows and movies I go back to on purpose have a pattern I hadn’t clocked until I said it out loud: Big Bang Theory. Charmed. The old Roseanne, before the reboot muddied it. Hackers, from back when being a teenage computer expert on dial-up was genuinely disruptive. Goonies, because I had that exact childhood — a pack of kids building forts in the marsh behind our neighborhood and disappearing into our own version of an adventure nobody adult had sanctioned. Fast and Furious. Pitch Perfect. Harry Potter and the unfinished Fantastic Beasts run.

What ties them together isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. It’s that almost all of them center people who are marginalized, odd, or building something outside the system they were handed — witches, hackers, outsiders, a family that doesn’t look like the sitcom standard — and I go back to spend more time with them on purpose. Watching a show out of publication order, it turns out, was just a streaming algorithm doing its job. Rewatching is the actual habit, and it’s not about knowing what happens next. It’s about choosing, deliberately, whose company I want to keep for a few more hours.

I’d rather stay in on a weekend night in pajamas with a rerun with a predictable story arc and ending than go out for the sake of going out.

I know that reads as introverted at best and neurodivergent at worst to some people.

I’m fine with both readings.

The Church I Was Handed Back

Part of why this has been on my mind this particular week: the drag performer Jinkx Monsoon made news arguing that children shouldn’t be raised inside a single religion at all — that they should be left alone to explore belief once they’re old enough to actually choose it, with real consent, instead of having a faith installed before they’re capable of agreeing to it. The word doing the work there is “consent.” Every infant baptism, every confirmation, every first communion is a parent deciding what’s right and then installing it in a child who has no vote. That’s not a technicality. It’s the actual mechanism.

I’ve watched this play out at both extremes. One person close to me was raised Catholic, later questioned her gender identity in a way the church wouldn’t accept, and was rejected outright for it — a door closed permanently over something she didn’t choose and the church refused to make room for. Someone else I know spent years questioning his own gender identity and left religion early in life partly because of it, then later in life settled into a more traditional identity, got married, got baptized, and now practices comfortably. I’m not saying either path is wrong, or that you can’t leave and come back. What unsettles me is the size of the gap between those two outcomes and the question sitting underneath it: is a return to religion, at that point, a genuine belief, or is it the price of being accepted somewhere? “Acceptable” and “true” aren’t the same word, and I don’t think organized religion has ever reliably known the difference between them, especially not with children too young to ask the question themselves.

There’s one expectation I left out above because it’s bigger than the others and it deserves its own room: I was raised in the church, and I don’t practice any religion now. For clarity, I define “religion” as a systemic and observable set of rituals and doctrines accepted as fundamental to identifying as a [name of the religion or religious sect]. Religion is not limited to Judeo-Christian options or even to theistic options.

I was baptized as an infant into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and raised in one of the oldest continuously operating Lutheran congregations in the country, in Charleston. My mother’s family were Southern Baptist for generations before a family friend brought her to that Lutheran church instead, and it stuck hard enough that it became the church she was married in and the one she raised us in. My father, Southern Baptist by birth, never practiced anything in my lifetime; in him I have a model for agnosticism sitting across the dinner table from me my whole childhood, and he’s a perfectly good person. I was born on October 31, which is Reformation Day — the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his complaints to a church door in 1517 and launching the protestant reformation that would result in the establishment of the Lutheran church — and my mother took that as confirmation, literally, that she’d picked the right religion.

So I was raised to be Lutheran the way most kids raised in liturgical traditions are: infant baptism, Sunday school, no vote in the matter. In ninth grade I ran a small project, half school assignment and half genuine curiosity, visiting other kids’ churches and talking to their families about what they believed and why. That was the beginning of treating religion as something to investigate rather than something to inherit, though I didn’t have that language for it yet. And it’s a key reason that after confirmation, instead of continuing on into high school Sunday School and the youth group, I joined the choir instead — a small, quiet redirection that in hindsight was the first step out the door rather than further in.

College made it even more obvious. I went to a Lutheran college, one my home church had helped found, in a town built around it. I stopped going to church entirely. Not the weekly campus chapel, not a local church, nothing. I came back to church four years later while in my first bought of graduate school; again I joined a choir in a church I chose myself, and reconstructed years later how much of that was actually about the music. The second time I went through graduate school at that same university, I didn’t go back to church at all, for three years, and nothing about my life felt unfinished.

When I moved to New York, church became a way to build a social life in a city where I knew no one, and it worked, mostly through the choir again — the friends I made there were fellow paid singers, not members of the congregation. I even served on the church council and substituted as worship leader and sermonizer twice. I was good at it. The service is so patterned it’s easy to run once you know it. I can still recite the entire liturgy from memory. I can sing the cantering without opening the book. That’s pattern, not faith. Being good at leading it and finding it meaningful turned out to be two completely separate things, and I knew that even while I was up there doing it well.

The clearest moment came when I moved back to South Carolina to help with my parents and was expected to return to the church I grew up in. I couldn’t. Not because of doctrine — because of identity. To that congregation, I wasn’t a person; I was Marsha’s daughter, expected to be a younger copy of my mother. At a women’s retreat, someone called out that they needed Marsha’s daughter to come lead a song. I stood up and walked out. That was the hard stop. The next time I went to church, I had found two workable substitutes after that: a paid singing position at a Presbyterian church, which was a job, and membership somewhere large and casual enough that no one would ever ask me to lead anything or know who my mother was. Both let me be present without being claimed.

Then in 2020 I moved during COVID, and church simply stopped. No congregation to return to or establish a connection with, easy livestreams to half-watch instead of attend, and once that habit of engagement broke, it never came back. Two more moves came and went — a couple of visits in North Carolina, none at all in Virginia — and by the time I landed in Florida I was watching family navigate their own version of this: they’d left one church over its stance on nontraditional life choices and found a Lutheran congregation that welcomed the same people fully, in membership and in leadership, which mattered enough to them to make the switch. I went with them occasionally, filled in as the responsible adult getting the kids to church when their parents traveled, and enjoyed all of it exactly as much as you’d enjoy a pleasant, low-stakes social occasion. When those same kids, no longer needing the Lutheran church’s acceptance, drifted back toward the Catholic church that had pushed them out in the first place, I didn’t go with them. By 2025 I was telling my family plainly that I was done with church, even for the occasions they considered significant. My local family has accepted my choice.

What replaced it started around my fiftieth birthday in 2025. My birthday, that same October 31st my mother once read as proof of her own correct choice, is also Samhain — a pre-Christian holiday marking the turn toward the dark half of the year. I don’t celebrate it. I don’t ritualize it. But sometime around turning fifty I started taking seriously an idea I’d been circling for years: that the word “magic” and the word “faith” describe the same thing, and the only difference is which one your culture has agreed to protect.

Consider this example: Rose quartz is supposed to open you up to love, and I can’t prove how, scientifically, and that gets called magic. Wine and a piece of bread are supposed to become the actual body and blood of a man who never handed either out at a table for people to eat, literally or otherwise, and that gets called faith.

The rose quartz tower and rose quartz, white jasper, and ocean jasper spheres I have in my bathroom to help me start my day with love.

Both are claims about the unseen that nobody can produce evidence for. One of those claims used to get women burned. I’ve never been able to unsee that asymmetry once I saw it, and I have no patience left for a culture that spends December insisting one specific unprovable belief is the reason for the season while treating every other unprovable belief as a threat.

I used to think this started in the last year or two. Looking back at the ninth-grade project, I think it started closer to age fourteen or fifteen.

Domestic, Witchy, Wild — Same Thing

This year I expanded from quick refrigerator pickling, which is really just a fast infusion, into actual heat-processed canning/pickling and fermentation. Shelf-stable, not quick-fix. Partly that’s for its own sake. Mostly it’s practice — I’m preparing for a more frontier-oriented life in Alaska, where the growing season is short and intense and everything after it depends on what you preserved while you had the chance. But sometimes I find myself self-identifying as “the witch in the woods” when I’m doing things like this.

I don’t draw much of a line between domestic, witchy, wild woman, and frontier woman.

People sometimes hear “domestic” and picture a fifties housewife with her makeup on before her husband wakes up. That’s not it, and it’s not close. What I mean is something more basic: paying attention to the physical world around you, understanding what it offers, and bringing it into your house and your daily life instead of outsourcing all of it to a supply chain.

This week I made fire cider for the first time — the kind of thing that sits exactly at the intersection of all four of those words. It’s a folk remedy, it’s fermented, it’s built from what you have on hand rather than what a store sells you, and it assumes you’d rather understand how to take care of yourself than default to someone else’s version of the answer. It fit into the same week as a jar of something else preserving on the counter, which is more or less how my kitchen runs now.

Fire cider made 9/5/2026: tumeric, ginger, garlic, red onion, rosemary, thyme, lemons, oranges, cinnamon sticks, black peppercorns, whole cloves, apple cider vinegar.

The Ending Is a Fact, Not a Crisis

Here’s the part that actually convinced me the crone era isn’t a 2026 development.

In 2000, my grandfather was in a coma. The adult members of the family took shifts sitting with him. Eventually the hospital raised the question of turning off life support, and the decision landed on my grandmother, who couldn’t make it. It passed to her two daughters, who couldn’t agree with each other. As the oldest grandchild, it would have come to me next. When I understood where things stood, I said it plainly: if the decision comes to me, I will turn the machines off. His life was over. Keeping the equipment running past that point wasn’t kindness. It was practical, humane, financially sane, and true, all at the same time.

I’ve since told other people, in other families, that I’ll be that person for them too — the one who says the sentence out loud when everyone else is too tangled in their own grief or love or guilt to say it. That’s not coldness. It’s that I don’t carry the same emotional fog most people carry around death, so I can see the decision clearly enough to make it.

This week alone, Dolly Parton died, Tim Curry died, and Gloria Steinem died, all in their eighties or nineties, and the reaction online was somewhere between shock and outrage, as if any of that should have been avoidable. It wasn’t. Bodies end. Most of what we call medicine is organized around postponing that fact indefinitely, which is, by definition, insane — doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome, when the outcome has never once been different for anyone. The mind isn’t bound by that. Whatever people mean when they talk about someone’s spirit or their work outliving them, that part isn’t made of the tissue that’s going to fail. The body is a different category, and I’ve never had trouble telling the two apart.

I have benchmark ages where I stop and take stock of where I am — not to fix a number for my own death, but to check whether I’m still living the life I actually want. The next check-in is sixty, a little over nine years out. Between now and then, the job is to make sure that when I get there, I can genuinely be at peace with however much closer I am to the end. That’s not morbid. It’s the only planning that’s ever made sense to me.

The maiden-mother-crone framework predates the religion I was handed at birth by a long way. So does the version of me that walked out of a women’s retreat rather than answer to my mother’s name, that had already decided to turn off a machine when two grown women couldn’t, that decided a rose quartz and a communion wafer are making the same unprovable claim and only one of them gets protected. I didn’t arrive at any of this in 2026. I just spent forty-nine years assuming it needed a better explanation than the one I already had. It didn’t. It needed a name, and the name is crone — not a phase I’ve entered, but the thing I was doing the whole time, before anyone had agreed to let me do it.

Illustration of a white magnolia bloom with a red rubber stamp reading "JUDGY" across it, header image for "I Am a Judgy Bitch (And I Love It)"
Posted in Cultural Commentary

I Am a Judgy Bitch (And I Love It)

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

This is my perspective. Yours may differ. I’m not asking you to agree — I’m asking you to notice.

We Don’t Judge

A year or so ago, everyone’s feed filled up with the same video format. Someone would sit in front of a camera, say some version of “we listen, and we don’t judge,” and then confess something — a belief, a habit, a choice — that they were bracing for the world to call controversial. Weird. Wrong.

The setup did the opposite of what it promised. If you have to announce that judgment is off the table before you speak, you’ve already told everyone in the room that judgment is exactly what’s coming. The disclaimer wasn’t protection. It was an admission.

I didn’t have a problem with the confessions. I had a problem with the premise. Because judgment isn’t the enemy here. Judgment is the entire operating system.

We Judge Constantly. We Just Rename It.

Your annual performance review is a judgment. Someone sat down, looked at what you did all year, and decided how good it was. They might call it an “evaluation” or “feedback” or “a data-driven assessment of your contributions,” but strip the euphemism and you’re left with the same act: a person deciding whether you were right or wrong, good or not good enough, and putting a number on it.

A test score is a judgment. A grade is a judgment. A performance rating, a Yelp review, a tenure decision, a “how did that landing look” from a judge holding up a card at a competition — all judgment, dressed in whatever costume makes it feel palatable for the room it’s in.

We don’t actually object to judgment. We object to the word. So we launder it. We call it “feedback” instead of criticism. We call it “assessment” instead of judgment. We call it “discernment” when we like the person doing it, and “judgmental” when we don’t. Same act. Different PR.

Roseanne did the best version of this I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t even about judgment — it was about death, which runs on the identical mechanism. In “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home,” Jackie has to call a relative and tell her their father died. She can’t say it. She works through euphemism after euphemism — passed away, gone, not with us anymore — each one softer and each one failing to land, until the relative on the other end still doesn’t understand, and Jackie is finally reduced to shouting the plain words: dad’s dead.

It’s one of the funniest and bleakest scenes in the show’s run, and it works because it’s true: euphemism doesn’t actually protect anyone from the fact. It just delays the moment someone has to say the fact out loud. Judgment gets the same treatment. We circle it with softer words right up until the moment the plain one is the only thing left that’s actually clear.

Where the Fear Comes From

I think a lot of this traces back to a very old idea: Judgment Day. Christianity’s the easiest cultural driver to point to for a Western audience, but it’s nowhere near the only one. This isn’t a Christianity problem. It’s a species problem.

Ancient Egyptian belief weighed the heart on a literal scale against a feather, and a wrong verdict meant the soul got devoured on the spot. Islam has Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of Judgment, deeds read from a book and weighed — same bones as the Christian version, pass or fail, no partial credit. Zoroastrianism, which likely predates and influenced both, has the soul crossing the Chinvat Bridge: wide and easy for the righteous, razor-thin and impassable for everyone else. Judaism has its own version at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — being inscribed in the Book of Life or not — though it leaves more room for repentance and revision than the others do.

Different religions, different centuries, different continents, and they all independently landed on the same idea: a moment where you get judged, and the verdict is binary. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern. Humanity keeps building the same myth because judgment — real, final, weighted judgment — is one of the load-bearing concepts in how we think about a life meaning anything at all.

But final judgment isn’t the model for the judgment we actually do all day. Final judgment is binary. A performance review has levels. A test has partial credit. A friend’s opinion of your choice isn’t a verdict on your soul — it’s one data point from one person. We inherited the terror of the word from the myth and then slapped it onto the mundane, everyday version, where it never belonged in the first place.

What We’re Actually Trying to Sell Instead

If judgment is off-limits, something has to replace it. And what we’ve replaced it with is easy.

Easygoing. Affable. Accommodating. Low-maintenance. Not a big deal. These are the traits we now market ourselves by — at work, with friends, in families, and especially, I’ve noticed, among other parents, where the fastest way to get frozen out of a group is to be the one who has opinions about anyone else’s kid. Being easy has become the social currency that judgment used to be measured against.

Here’s what’s actually underneath that trade. Judgment carries a real, structural risk: if I judge you and land on the bad side of it, we might not be friends. I might not tolerate your choice. There might not be a place for us to connect. That’s the actual stake people are avoiding when they perform “I don’t judge” — not the judgment itself, which they’re doing anyway, but the possibility of the conclusion costing them the relationship. Calling yourself easygoing lets you keep judging privately while advertising that the judgment will never cost anyone anything. It’s a promise of no consequences, not a promise of no verdict.

The Word That Gives It Away

If you want to catch judgment in the act, stop looking for the word “judgmental” and start listening for “should.”

“Should” is judgment’s most common disguise, and it’s a worse disguise than people think, because it isn’t really hidden at all. “You should do this.” “You should have done that.” Every single one of those sentences is a verdict about the gap between what a person did and what the speaker has decided was the correct action. That’s not description. That’s not neutral. That’s a judgment wearing a very thin coat.

I’ve got a favorite way of flagging it: say it as “shouldy” — like you’re saying “shitty” with a lisp. Don’t make a shouldy decision. It’s a little joke, but it’s doing real work, because it forces you to hear what “should” already smuggles in: a moral grade, dressed up as friendly advice.

Here’s a recent, unignorable example. On July 20, 2026, at a Cubs–Twins game at Wrigley Field, a fan stayed seated during the national anthem. A man sitting behind him leaned in, told him to stand, and struck him on the back of the head when he didn’t move. (source) The video went viral, and the online argument that followed was, almost word for word, a referendum on “should”: should you stand for the anthem, should you stand as a sign of respect, should you be legally required to stand. There is no law requiring spectators to stand, and the underlying choice not to is protected symbolic expression — but that hasn’t stopped the internet from litigating the moral question anyway, in exactly the vocabulary this essay is about.

Look at the sentence “you should stand for the national anthem.” That’s not a statement of fact. That’s a judgment, wearing the word “should” as its delivery mechanism, about a choice the speaker believes is morally correct — and a judgment, by implication, of everyone who chooses differently. And here’s mine, plainly, no “should” required: a man hit a stranger. Full stop. That’s battery. He should be arrested. Yes, that’s a “should” too — I’m not exempting myself from the mechanism, I’m just not pretending the word isn’t doing exactly what it always does.

Yes, I know that both men continued their discussion later, and the man who was seated during the anthem declined to press charges or allow security to remove the man who hit him.

Bless Your Heart

Nobody has ever formalized the art of judging someone while smiling at them quite like the American South did.

I grew up in it — capital-S Southern culture — and it runs on precisely this move. “Bless your heart” is not a blessing. It is a verdict, delivered in a register soft enough that the person can’t object without looking thin-skinned. It says: I’ve judged you, I’ve judged you unfavorably, and I’ve wrapped the judgment in enough sugar that you’ll thank me for it. It’s judgment with plausible deniability.

Steel Magnolias built an entire comic sensibility out of this. Clairee, played by Olympia Dukakis, has a line about wanting to be the one people bring their gossip to first — an invitation dressed as generosity, when it’s really an appetite for judgment served hot. Later, at Shelby’s wedding, she and M’Lynn watch a woman on the dance floor and land on a line comparing what they’re seeing to two pigs wrestling under a blanket, plus a dig about all that money spent on the dress and none of it on the undergarment to hold it in.

It’s vicious. It’s delivered with total warmth. That combination — the warmth as the delivery mechanism for the verdict — is the whole Southern trick, and it works because it lets everyone in the room feel like nice people while being exactly as judgmental as I am. They just found better packaging.

That’s the case for why I reject the idea that judgment itself is the problem. Every culture does this. Every one of them has built a socially acceptable disguise for the exact same activity — grading, ranking, deciding who’s in and who’s out — because the activity itself is universal. Some cultures call it feedback. Some call it discernment. Mine called it “bless your heart.” None of it is an absence of judgment. It’s just judgment with better manners than mine.

I’m a Judgy Bitch

I’ve known this about myself for a long time — since ninth grade, 1989, when a Myers-Briggs assessment gave it a name for the first time. I test as an INTJ. The J stands for Judging. In that framework, it’s not a mood or a bad day. It’s structural. It’s how my mind is built to process the world: gather information, then reach a conclusion. Not “gather information and hold it open indefinitely.” Conclude. Decide. Judge.

I could put on a mask that makes it look like I’m not doing that. Plenty of people do. But the native process underneath doesn’t change. I look at something and I form a conclusion about it. That’s not a flaw I’m managing. It’s not a character defect I’m in recovery from. It’s the shape of my mind, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it.

I am judgmental. I am a judgy bitch. And I don’t think that’s a bad way of thinking.

Things I Will Judge You For

Since we’re being honest: here’s a partial list.

I will judge you for maintaining a pristine, manicured lawn of foreign invasive grass instead of using that same square footage to grow food — something that actually feeds the soil, feeds a body, and puts something healthy back into the environment instead of a chemical-dependent monoculture that does nothing but look tidy. Yes, I know HOAs are often the reason. Push back on the HOA. If more people prioritized function over appearance, we would not be nearly as deep into the climate mess we’re in.

I will judge you for saying “mis-CHEE-vee-us” instead of “MIS-chi-vus” (there is no fourth syllable in mischievous — it does not exist, you invented it), because you sound like an idiot.

And I will judge you for insisting that Sprouts or Whole Foods is “actually cheaper” than Target or Walmart’s store brand. It isn’t. What you’re actually saying is that you’re too bougie to buy the store brand, and you’ve lied to yourself about the math to avoid admitting it. That self-delusion is the part I’m judging — not the shopping preference.

I will judge you for dropping a random apostrophe into a year or a last name ending in “s” when all you’re trying to do is make it plural. Years are never possessive. There is no situation — none — where a possessive year is correct. The 1990s do not own anything. Neither do the Harrises, the Joneses, or whoever else you’re trying to talk about in the plural. An apostrophe means either possession or a missing letter. Pluralizing an “s” name or a decade is neither. Put it down.

And I will judge you, hard, for citing “that’s the law” or “that’s the rule” or “we’ve always done it this way” as the entire argument and stopping there. Laws and rules are not neutral, and plenty of them were built to encode exactly the discrimination or injustice you’re being asked to examine. Hiding behind the rule instead of engaging with what the rule actually does is not a principled stance. It’s a refusal to think, dressed up as one. If your entire justification for an action or an inaction is that it’s the law, full stop, no further thought required, I’m judging you as an absolute jackass — because you had the option to notice and acknowledge the egregious injustices of the system you’re operating inside of, and you chose not to.

The Part I Actually Want You to Sit With

None of that list is a character indictment. It’s just me, doing what my mind does natively, out loud, without the sugar-coating. I could deliver every one of those the way Clairee would — warm, smiling, plausible deniability fully intact. I’ve simply decided I’d rather skip the packaging.

So if you cringed reading any of it, ask yourself what you actually flinched at. Was it the conclusion, or was it the fact that I said it plainly instead of finding a gentler word to hide it in? Because you scored something today. You ranked a restaurant, rated a coworker’s presentation in your head, decided a friend’s decision was a mistake. You judged. All day. Constantly. The only question is whether you’re going to own the word for it, or keep calling yourself easygoing while doing nothing but.

I am a judgy bitch. I’d rather be honest about what my mind is doing than pretend it’s doing something gentler.

Posted in Cultural Commentary

The Shape of This Thing: Workshopping the Trump Second Term Nickname

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

The Nickname Always Comes

Every presidency gets a nickname. It’s how history takes notes. And we are absolutely, already, in the middle of writing this one — even if we won’t admit that’s what we’re doing.

The New Deal. The Great Society. The War on Terror. Even the ones we’d rather forget get compressed into something portable — a phrase that does the work of a thousand policy papers in a single breath. The nickname isn’t assigned. It emerges. It’s the thing that survives when the news cycle finally exhausts itself and what’s left is just the shape of what happened. ([1], [2])

This One Is Different

Donald Trump’s second term — non-consecutive, which is its own historical oddity, the first since Grover Cleveland — presents a particular challenge to that process. Because you can’t entirely separate the second term from the first, and yet they aren’t the same thing either. The first term felt like an experiment. The second feels like a conclusion. And the nickname, whenever it solidifies, will have to account for both the man who showed us what he was and the country that, knowing exactly what he was, said yes again.

This one has a different problem. The shape keeps changing. Or rather — there are too many shapes, and they’re all accurate, and none of them are quite enough.

The Metaphors I Tried First

I started with the Homecoming King President. It’s the kind of framing that lands differently if you’re a Gen X woman — if you were there, watching from the bleachers, already fluent in the language of unearned social power. The performative popularity contest, the sash, the way the title confers status without requiring competence. For those of us who watched the football captain and the head cheerleader crowned on a gymnasium floor while the rest of us observed, the metaphor felt viscerally right. Social dominance dressed up as celebration. Power that was never really earned, just… confirmed.

But it didn’t hold. Partly because homecoming court has actually changed — younger generations have genuinely disrupted who gets crowned, and increasingly it’s queer kids, kids with disabilities, kids who would have been invisible in our era. The institution got reclaimed, at least partially. Using it as a stand-in for retrograde power feels like it insults the reclamation. And partly because the metaphor lives in the past. It explains where this came from. It doesn’t capture what it’s doing.

The Fraternity President came closer. White fraternities — and the whiteness matters here, because it’s doing specific work that Black fraternities, with their entirely different histories and purposes, are not — spent the 1990s hemorrhaging legitimacy through hazing scandals that exposed what the culture actually required to sustain itself. Conformity enforced through humiliation. Hierarchy maintained through ritual degradation. Brotherhood that was always conditional on your willingness to absorb harm and call it tradition. Sound familiar.

And they’ve been declining ever since. Chapters closing. Membership shrinking. Younger generations simply refusing to accept that this is who runs campus culture anymore. The Fraternity President metaphor works because it’s not just a description — it’s a trajectory. It captures the last gasp quality of this moment. The guy holding the paddle insisting this is still how things work, while the quad empties out around him.

But even that isn’t quite big enough. Because the quad isn’t just American anymore.

The Abdication

The nickname that keeps pulling at me is something in the register of The Abdication. Not because it’s the one that will stick — I’m not sure it’s culturally sticky enough — but because it names what the rest of the world is actually experiencing. The word has history. When Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936, it was a single act by a single man that rewrote the trajectory of the monarchy, the country, and arguably the course of World War II — because the man who stepped into the void, George VI, was a different kind of leader entirely, and the alliances that held or fractured in those years turned on questions of character and commitment at the top. One abdication. Seismic consequences. The ripples are still visible if you know where to look.

The parallel isn’t perfect — it never is. But there’s something in the structure of it that fits. A voluntary relinquishment of responsibility dressed up as something else. In Edward’s case, love. In this case, grievance, nationalism, and the transactional worldview of someone who has never encountered a relationship he didn’t believe could be reduced to a deal. NATO allies quietly recalibrating. Long-standing trade relationships treated like inconveniences. Decades of diplomatic architecture dismantled with the energy of someone clearing out a storage unit. Other countries aren’t just watching America change. They’re building around American unreliability the way you’d build around a neighbor who stopped maintaining their property. You don’t wait for them to fix it. You put up your own fence.

The Other Side of the Workshop

There’s a version of this that his supporters would call long overdue. America finally stopped subsidizing the world’s problems. Stopped playing global hall monitor. Started putting its own interests first. The nickname from that vantage point might be something like The Correction. The Restoration. The Return. Something that frames this presidency not as destruction but as recalibration — a rebalancing of a system that had drifted so far from its original constituency that a wrecking ball wasn’t just inevitable, it was necessary. Those nicknames are being workshopped too, in different corners of the internet, with equal conviction and, it should be said, with genuine grievance underneath them. The people who feel that way aren’t wrong that something had stopped working for them. They’re just wrong about what broke it, and who broke it, and who’s going to pay for fixing it.

The Naming Problem

Which brings me to the naming problem that keeps me up at night more than any of the others.

MAGA will almost certainly make it into the final characterization. The movement is too dominant, too self-branded, too deliberately constructed for posterity to be left out of the historical shorthand entirely. But I hope — and I mean this as something more than preference — that it doesn’t end up inside the nickname itself. Because MAGA is a self-constructed brand, built for exactly this purpose: to colonize the historical record on its own terms, to be the thing that gets written in the margin forty years from now. If the nickname the culture lands on includes MAGA, the movement wins a kind of posterity it hasn’t earned. It gets to name itself. And that is not a neutral act.

And MAGA didn’t arrive alone. It arrived with a blueprint. Project 2025 — the 900-page governing document produced by the Heritage Foundation before a single vote was cast in 2024 — is the thing that separates this presidency from every chaotic, norm-busting moment that preceded it. Trump spent much of the campaign distancing himself from it, which is its own telling detail. But the fingerprints are everywhere: in the dismantling of federal agencies, in the restructuring of the civil service, in the systematic removal of institutional friction that used to slow the exercise of unchecked executive power. MAGA is the feeling. Project 2025 is the architecture. The nickname that history assigns to this era will have to reckon with the fact that what happened wasn’t improvised. It was written down. In advance. With footnotes.

What It Says About Us

The nickname that sticks will be the one that holds both registers at once — the absurdity and the damage, the spectacle and the harm. The one that makes people in 2040 immediately picture something. Not a policy. Not a party. A feeling. The specific feeling of watching something load-bearing get removed from a structure everyone was living inside, and realizing — too late or just in time, depending on where you stood — that nobody was going to put it back.

We – the public – are workshopping that nickname right now in real time. This piece is proof. And what that says about us — that we’re already reaching for the historical shorthand while the history is still happening — might be the most honest thing any of us have written about this moment.

Presidential Nicknames To Date

You can check out previous presidential era nicknames at these sources:

Wikipedia — List of Nicknames of Presidents of the United States — comprehensive, covers every president with sourced context for how each nickname originated

Fiveable — Presidential Nicknames to Know — more analytical; connects nicknames to their historical context and what each reveals about the era, not just the man

A dark plum-toned illustration of a cracked glass pane with two separate fracture points, beside the title "Twice Cursed" and subtitle "with Glass Child Syndrome," marked with the years 1986 and 2006.
Posted in Cultural Commentary, Healthy in Mind and Body

Twice Cursed with Glass Child Syndrome

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

At T-minus nine months to turning fifty, I finally have a name for my trauma: Glass Child Syndrome.

And I’m twice cursed.

Let me set the stage. I am the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter and a middle son. That is not a throwaway detail. That is the whole architecture of what happened to me, twice.

What Glass Child Syndrome Actually Is

The term was coined to describe the siblings of children with chronic illness, disability, or significant behavioral and medical needs — kids who become see-through in their own families because all available light is bent toward the sibling in crisis. The name comes from the idea that these children are treated as though they don’t break. No one checks on the glass. Glass just sits there, transparent and load-bearing, until it doesn’t.

The research on this is not exotic. Family systems theory has documented for decades what happens when a household reorganizes itself entirely around one child’s needs: the other children absorb the household’s stress without receiving any of its resources. They become hyper-independent early. They stop registering their own needs as legitimate, because there is no bandwidth left to meet them. They often become high-achieving, hyper-competent adults who cannot ask for help, because the lesson was never “someone will help you.” The lesson was “there is no one available, so figure it out.”

Glass children are not neglected in the classic sense. Their parents are present, often exhausted, often loving. That’s part of what makes it so disorienting. The neglect is structural, not personal. It doesn’t look like abandonment. It looks like a mother who is simply, completely, somewhere else.

The First Curse: The Eldest Daughter Script

Before any of this happened to me, I was already cast. Oldest daughter of an oldest daughter. My mother inherited a role before she ever had children — the eldest-daughter job description: manage the household’s emotional weather, absorb what nobody else will carry, be capable so no one has to ask twice. She didn’t invent that script. She was handed it, the way eldest daughters are handed it, and she handed it to me the same way, without either of us voting on it.

So when the second curse arrived, it landed on ground that had already been prepared. I wasn’t just a glass child. I was a glass child who had already been trained to believe that being useful was the price of being loved, and that my own needs were, at best, an inconvenient rounding error.

1986

I was in sixth grade when my brother, in third grade, was diagnosed with ADHD. This was 1986 — early days for that diagnosis, which made my mother’s response even more totalizing. She put him into individual counseling. She put herself and my father into family counseling. She rebuilt the pantry around elimination diets, chasing the theory that the right foods could out-behave the wrong ones.

I got none of it. No counseling, no dietary consideration, no discussion. I also got no praise and no punishment — which sounds like freedom and is actually its opposite. A child who is punished is still being watched. I wasn’t being watched at all.

I became anorexic. It took three years for anyone to notice.

I want to be precise about what that timeline means. Three years is not a lapse in attention. Three years is a fully organized household in which one child’s body was quietly disappearing and no one was positioned to see it, because every eye in the house was pointed at a different child’s diagnosis.

2006

Twenty years later, my brother suffered a brain aneurysm. My mother did what she had always done, at full volume: she turned over her money, her time, her identity. She constructed a private mythology of blame, convinced some invisible failure during her pregnancy had caused this. Guilt, in her hands, became another form of devotion to him.

I was living in Brooklyn at the time, in the final pre-tenure stretch of an academic career I had spent a decade building. She didn’t ask once. She spent six months laying the case at my feet, a phone call at a time. How much everything cost. How hard it was to run a business and manage my brother’s care in the same day. How my father taught all day and commuted for hours on top of it, which meant he wasn’t available for any of it. Every call was a new signal, in slightly different language, that she could not do this alone and could not do it without more money. She never said “come home.” She built an eighteen-month case for why I would have to conclude that myself.

I gave up the tenure track and moved home to manage their care and their finances, because she had already spent everything she had on him and there was nothing left to spend on the crisis itself. That wasn’t a season. It was thirteen years. From 2006 to 2019, I lived in their house, paid their bills, and did whatever else the moment required, because the moment never stopped requiring it.

I did not get talked into this in a direct or obvious way but with systemic hints and little guilts over eighteen months. I did it the way glass children do everything — automatically, because the alternative required a version of myself that had never been allowed to develop: one that says no.

Now

I’ve lived out of their house again for seven years. I am invisible in the exact same way I was in 1986, just with better production values. I surface in their world when there’s something to buy, something to fix, something only money or competence can solve. That is still, apparently, the whole of what I’m for.

The Gen X Layer

There’s a generational version of this too, and it’s not incidental. I am Gen X — the latchkey cohort, the ones who let ourselves in after school and were praised for our independence as though it had been a choice rather than an absence. Gen X was collectively trained to read “no one is coming” as a virtue. We call it resilience. It was supervision that never arrived.

My brother is two and a half years younger than me and is, in every way that matters, barely Gen X. He is a millennial in temperament, in expectation, in his relationship to being taken care of. Two and a half years, and an entire generational contract shifted underneath us — inside the same house, under the same roof, from the same parents. He got the version of parenting that shows up. I got the version that watches from a distance and calls it trust.

That’s the second curse, really. Not just being the glass child. Being the glass child who was also handed the eldest-daughter job description and the Gen X survival manual, all three telling me the same thing in three different vocabularies: don’t need anything, and you’ll be fine.

I wasn’t fine. I was just quiet about it, for a very long time.

Not Quiet Anymore

I’m not quiet anymore. And I’m not the same person who spent thirteen years in that house without ever being directly asked to stay. That version of me didn’t know how to say no. She thought silence was the price of being loved, and being needed was as close to it as she was going to get. I rescued her in 2019, when I finally left that house behind and moved away to build my own life and my own career again — to go chase what made me happy instead of what kept everyone else afloat.

What that means going forward is simple, and I want to say it plainly instead of letting it sit as subtext: I am not going to be the daughter who steps in to manage aging parents or a disabled adult brother a third time. Not because I’ve stopped caring what happens to them. I have just been excluded from being family for so long, and so consistently, that I no longer qualify for the role I’d be stepping into. You cannot be structurally invisible for thirty-five years and then get handed the job that only exists for people who were seen. That job was never going to be mine. I’m done applying for it.

Further Reading on Glass Child Syndrome

Cleveland Clinic — health.clevelandclinic.org/glass-child A clinically reviewed overview of the term, its symptoms, and its long-term emotional impact, written for a general audience by one of the country’s leading hospital systems.

“Recognizing Glass Children” — Alicia Maples, TEDxSanAntonio (2010) — YouTube The original talk that coined the term. Maples, who lost one brother to autism and another to a terminal illness, traces how “glass child” entered the public vocabulary in the first place.

Psychology Today — “I Was a Glass Child. Here’s What the Term Means to Me.” A journalist’s personal essay tracing the term back to Alicia Maples’ 2010 TEDx talk, with a thoughtful look at what the label does and doesn’t capture.

Sibling Support Project — siblingsupport.org Founded in 1990, the oldest and largest national organization dedicated specifically to siblings of people with disabilities and chronic illness — peer support groups, research compilations, and community for sibs of every age.

Newsweek — “I Was a ‘Glass Child’ — It Made Me an Anxious Adult” Reported coverage that grounds the personal accounts in peer-reviewed research and commentary from psychologists and family therapists.

Posted in Cultural Commentary

So Poop Spray is a Real Thing

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

The videos are hilarious and clever, some evoking a Mel Brooks-esque Robin Hood: Men in Tights and others reminiscent of a cross between “My Little Pony” and “Care Bears” – depending on the brand.

FACT: spray that claims to neutralize the most noxious and permeating bathroom disasters is a real thing.

 

EVIDENCE

  • there are currently 3 unique brands: Poo-Pourri, Unicorn Gold, and V.I. Poo
  • one brand even appeared on Shark Tank for another product and won investment from Shark Lori
  • these brands sell their product online individually
  • some of these brands sell their product on a subscription, so you’re never out
  • all of these brands sell in stores, some boutique but up to being carried by Target
  • there is an entire DIY movement already in full swing

NOTE

Before I go on – and before you read on – know that I have not tried any one of these products either as a retail purchase, a donated item, a conditional trial, or even a DIY. I first thought the videos I started seeing about 3 months ago were spoofs, and when I finally saw an actual television commercial, I added this idea to my stocking stuffer list for my parents – one for home and one for travel.

 

vipoohowtoTHE BASICS

Of the three, V.I. Poo’s graphic is the simplest:

 

HOW THEY WORK

So far, there are two chemicals method for neutralizing the odors of poop:

Poo-Pourri and V.I. Poo uses natural essential oils to create an oil film on top of the water that will trap the poop and its odors under the surface of the water. Because oil is hydrophobic – hates water – it stays on top and, even when broken by the poop, will quickly close the rift so as not to mix with the water. One instance of verbiage on the V.I. Poo website seems to indicate that the scents are from Air Wick, and I can confirm that the V.I. Poo line of products is carried directly on the Air Wick website, listed under the Products menu heading.

Unicorn Gold uses gold nanoparticles to create a neutralizing reaction with sulfur, the main mineral causing the worst of poop odors; after that, your chosen scent takes over to product a pleasant experience. The product claims to use essential oils for the pleasant scent, and also claims to be the only marketed product that works below and above the water line – which means this one may have some effect sprayed even after the “incident.”

 

IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE

poo-pourri-recipeAs I mentioned in the Evidence section, one way to verify that a product has market traction is by the size and breadth of the DIY community. A simple Google search for “DIY poop spray” reveals what one site claims is the Poo-Pourri recipe; this is the very first search result, by the way.

While the essential oil version of poop spray is pretty simple to crack and copy, the formula using gold – incidentally the only one claiming to work on poop rising above the water line – is less simple, less easily DIY-able, and likely less cost effective to accomplish by DIY.

 

HOW ABOUT A PRICE COMPARISON

They all recommend 3-5 sprays per use, before doing the deed.

They all come in a 2 oz size; some come in larger sizes as well.

The average price for the 2 oz size is $10.07 – ranging from $9.95 to $10.25.

 

CAUTION

I have to assume that the 3-5-spray recommendation is designed for low-water toilets because I simply cannot imagine that’s enough oil+carrier solution (it’s a 100% oil solution) to create a uniform film over the often 8″x8″ water surface of an old fashioned toilet. Perhaps trying will out the truth.

 

WHAT WILL CECE DO?

Because Poo Pourri is available at four local stores within 5 miles of my home, I am most likely to purchase my first bottles as the stocking stuffers I first intended them to be. All of these stores are locally-owned and operated independent businesses, not part of chain stores small or large.

 

 

 

Posted in Cultural Commentary, Healthy in Mind and Body

I tried THINX period panties and…

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

CeCe's THINX Panties
2 of the 3 pair of THINX I purchased; I’m wearing the 3rd pair now.

I’m keeping them. And getting some more!

NOTE: The following account of my trial of THINX is completely unsolicited and unpaid; I paid regular price out of my pocket for these period panties and have had no communication with THINX other than the purchase transaction.

Here’s why I tried them:

Aside from performance, I’m always looking for a more sustainable way to manage hygiene, and these are reusable with no solid waste to cause biodegradability concerns.

That comes with the added benefit of being more cost effective in the long run; I estimate it will take 2 months per pair of panties for the cost equivalency of my current disposable method.

And then there’s the education and supply mission of the company: for every pair I purchase, they donate a pair to a woman in a country where period products are simply not available, where girls are banished to a shed for their week a month, missing school, work, income opportunities, etc. Like Tom’s shoes in that way.

Here’s what I chose as my trial kit:

For starters, I got 3 pair (best discount) of the hiphugger style to try; it’s one of two styles designed for “heavy days”. If I don’t like them (doesn’t seem like that will be the case), I simply send them back for a refund – even if I’ve used them.

I ordered the 2x, which is currently their largest size. For sizing comparison, I wear a 22 or 24 in pants without stretch, 20 in pants with stretch.

Here’s my period profile:

So that you can judge how THINX would perform for you, it’s necessary for me to disclose my period profile. I’m a 100% free-bleeder, using pads exclusively.

My period lasts almost exactly 5 days:

  • First 12 hours: comparable to spotting
  • Next 24 hours: what I consider regular, using 1 pad per 12 hours
  • Next 24 hours: what I consider heavy, using 1 pad per 6 hours largely due to clotting – really tricky for the overnight
  • Next 48 hours: return to regular, sometimes with a 4-6 hour period with no bleeding at all
  • Next 12 hours: spotting through completion

THINX has attempted to give guidance on how long you’ll be able to wear a particular pair, but as they only use standard tampon size as their guide, those of us who free-bleed (especially those who have only ever free-bled and not used tampons at all) have no frame of reference. I will attempt to provide that below, even specifying the brand and size of pad I typically use during different phases of my period.

Here’s how they performed:

Day 1: since I started midday, and my first day is just spotting, I used a pad. No sense in wasting one of my three precious pairs of THINX on spotting IMO.

Day 2: roughly 9 am – 11 pm – regular flow

Today is my regular flow day on the front end, and I’ve been wearing the first pair since about 9 am. The only time I feel wetness is when I pull them up after going to the bathroom. It’s a fleeting coldness more than wetness that lasts less than 15 seconds. I’ve also paid particular attention to smell, and so far, I’ve had to put my nose within 12 inches of the panties to smell anything at all and even then it’s faint. No leakage at all, and again, I’ve had one pair on for almost 12 hours now.

I’m not at my heaviest flow yet. That will start overnight tonight and continue through tomorrow, so I’ll let you know on that. For reference, during my heavy flow, I use two long, overnight Always pads as the same time with an overlap right in the middle. And I clot pretty significantly during that 24 hours.

Day 2 Overnight: roughly 11 pm – 10:30 am – Transition from regular into heavy

The overnight went great. It wasn’t until the morning wake up when I get a little restless that the panties slipped and sagged in the butt, allowing 1 small leak onto the bedsheets. The panties are comfy, but I didn’t really register that the material is much more slippery, silky almost, than my regular cotton panties. So they slide easily. In addition, I’m a side sleeper and it was easy to see how the side (around the leg toward the outer hip where there’s no absorption planned) has more blood than the front panel (where there is absorption planned). This likely won’t be a problem for back sleepers as that’s where the full coverage absorption is in the hiphugger panty.

Day 3: roughly 11 am – 3 pm – Heavy day

This day was the truest test. I deliberately checked frequently (went to the bathroom) and tried to keep them on as long as possible to really test capacity. Just as when I wear pads during heavy days, the THINX filled quickly and started slipping off, creating the same saggy butt problem as I experienced when first waking up. It’s the same problem babies have with a full diaper. I had 1 leak while sitting, but to be fair, it was right as the panties hit capacity, not any kind of deficit in the design or concept.

They lasted 5 hours, just shy of my double-pad 6 hour stretch, so I consider that a huge win for capacity.

With only one pair left to test, I switched to regular panties with double pad because first pair were not yet dry to wear (not surprising, just noting). I’ll address my laundering experience below.

At this point, I estimate the capacity to be as follows: 2 regular tampons (THINX estimate) = 4-5 hours on heaviest day = 1 tampon per 2.5 hours.

This is pretty consistent with other accounts of THINX performance by both paid and unpaid trials. (Reminder: my trial is completely unpaid; I paid regular price out of my pocket for these period panties and have had no communication with THINX other than the purchase transaction.)

Day 4: are they dry yet?

I mentioned laundering earlier, and it is actually the part of the THINX concept that elicited the most varied criticism, with users reporting anywhere from 24 hours to 4 days for the washed panties to dry enough to be worn. So here’s what happened with mine:

The first pair I wore (day 2), I rinsed in the sink (as instructed before washing) and hung them to dry; I didn’t wash them immediately because I really wanted to find out about the drying. I’d read that the panties took up to 4 days to dry, so there would practically no way to wear a pair twice in one cycle. Thankfully, I can confirm that roughly 36 hours after rinsing (they were thoroughly soaked) the first pair is completely dry. I suspect that, as with the “feeling of wetness” issue, the panties dried in an air conditioned setting were simply cold, not actually wet.

I started them drying in the bathroom overnight, hung from a hook in the shower where they didn’t touch the wall or anything. In the morning, I moved them to a hanger and hung them from the door jamb so they could continue to benefit from full circulation. By 8 am this morning, they are completely dry and ready to wear again.

For comparison, the two other pair stayed in the bathroom and are still quite wet. It should be no surprise that hanging dry in the least humid room of the house will speed up the drying, but it was worth the comparison.

So after a brief switch back to pads during the heaviest phase of my cycle (since all three pair were in rinse, clean and dry mode), I’m back in the first pair and also back to a regular day and expect to be able to wear one pair for the day.

Here’s what I’ll try during my next cycle (September):

I want to test the hiphuggers a little further during my heavy days/nights, especially the sagging and leakage to see if it was/is a result of capacity or if the panties just won’t stay put. So in September I’ll be using pads in THINX during the heavy phase.

This is pre-emptive of simply purchasing the only fuller coverage panty available from THINX.

Here’s what I really want to do when my budget allows:

I intend to purchase six more pairs

  • three pairs of the high waist for the heaviest day and for overnights
  • three pairs of the hiphuggers to round out the set

That should allow me to get through my entire cycle without having to worry about laundering and drying when it’s not convenient.

Costing It Out:

The site runs a special discount when you purchase three pairs that basically makes is $100 for a 3/pack. With the basic economy pack of pads coming in a $7 and lasting (me, at least) 2 months, that’s $3.50/mo in pads. At that rate, it will take 7 years and 2 months to break even on the panty investment ($300/3.50/12).

I don’t necessarily foresee a need to replace the panties before then if they’re only being used 12 times a year (assuming I get my full 9-pair collection) – that’s roughly 85 times over that period.

In that same amount of time, I would NOT be using and disposing of approximately 1,600 pads.

Special Shout Out to a Man

I doubt I would have the candor or even simply the idea to be this open and natural about my own period or the process of managing a period if I hadn’t had one specific man-friend many years ago ask as part of the sexual history part of our getting-to-know-you. Thank you to the unique men who recognize that physical processes and activities are not shameful, are part of a shared life with a female partner, and respect that many choices result from those conversations.

Posted in Children, Cooking, Crystal and Divination Work, Cultural Commentary, Everyday Musings, Healthy in Mind and Body, Published Writing, Singing, Small Business Notes

Welcome to Singing about Cooking

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Happy New Year 2011!! Just a feeling, but it’s gonna be a fantabulous year.

My blog Singing about Cooking is my first attempt to introduce the world to my secret passions: singing and cooking. Only a small circle of friends and family know what these two things really mean to me, but I’m pretty sure it’s time to let my voice out and feed the world…so to speak.

Let’s see, I started 2011 out singing with my favorite soprano friend Loretta Haskell, owner and teacher of More Music Please voice studio. But my first official performance of 2011 will be on Sunday, February 20 at 3:00 pm at Christ Church, Mount Pleasant; I’ll be singing the second lead aria “The Trees on the Mountain” from Carlisle Floyd’s Suzannah, with a finale reprisal of “Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti” by Rossini, a duet with Loretta!

Hmmm, the first thing I cooked in 2011 was Greek lemon mahimahi, Greek roasted potatoes, and sauteed brussels sprouts for possibly the pickiest eater in the whole world, my friend Marty. Again, thank you, Jeanne (his momma), for letting me invade your kitchen!

The first thing I learned in 2011 is that being laid off from my job of 3.25 years is possibly the most liberating thing that has happened to me in years. Yes, I’m worried about when I’ll run out of money. Yes, I’m looking for a new job. Yes, I have plenty to keep me busy. But most of all, yes, I’m focusing on doing the things I LOVE!!

The first thing I organize in 2011 will be my grandmother’s Christmas decorations. Today I’m headed over to “undecorate” her house and put things where they belong, so next year I’ll be able to find everything again.

I’d love for you to just follow or even to join me on my journey to discover more about the things I do that prove I am truly living and not just marking time. And if you ever feel moved to share through more than just a comment, please ask to be a guest author on a topic! Living is not possible without meaningful interaction between people who share desires…even (sometimes especially) if they don’t agree.