Cultural Commentary – Singing about Cooking

I Am a Judgy Bitch (And I Love It)

Posted on August 8, 2026July 23, 2026 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.

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

Posted on July 11, 2026 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

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

Cultural Commentary, Mental Health

Twice Cursed with Glass Child Syndrome

Posted on February 2, 2025July 11, 2026 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.

Category: Cultural Commentary