Friendmendations 5.4.21

hit me with your best friendmendations, fire awayyyy

Hi, hello! Last week was truly terrible, but this week is a fresh start. I got my second shot yesterday!!

Mother's Day is this weekend, so I want to once again hype up one of my favorite organizations. The National Bail Out is raising money to free Black mothers and caregivers from prisons in Atlanta, Georgia; Memphis, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; Durham, North Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; Dothan, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Camp Springs, Maryland. They've bailed out over 500 people since 2017, and this year their goal is to raise $500,000. Donate if you can!

Another week, another cake

I've talked once before about Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito’s Baked Elements, a perfect cookbook for desserts that feel a little bit fancy without being too overly complicated. This weekend I tried the book's caramel cake, and it was absolutely divine. The cream cheese frosting does a great job offsetting the sweetness; I added shaved dark chocolate to the top and served it with strawberries to further balance it out. Make this the next time you need a crowd-pleasing cake!

Helpful framework alert!!

I found a link to the comic "You should’ve asked" by French cartoonist Emma in this thread about women leaving the workforce to shoulder more household responsibilities.

I feel like the concept of "the mental load" has been mixed up with the more popular "emotional labor," which has itself become watered down past all meaning, so it's nice to see a simple framework explained clearly.

Directly up my specific alley

I adore June Diane Raphael, one of our finest unhinged actresses, so I was thrilled to hear that she was starting a podcast with her friend and fellow comedian Jessica St. Clair. "The Deep Dive" is exactly as weird and goofy as I was hoping, though its first episode was also oddly touching – their talk about "completing the stress cycle" after the pandemic is a great way of framing the weird feeling I'm having at this stage.

Focus music

Promises is an album mentioned in a recent episode by June's How Did This Get Made? co-star Jason Mantzoukas, a man with impeccable music taste whom I married in a dream just last week. The album is gorgeous, and I've been listening to it at night when I want to shut off the noise of the world.

I also recently got into Intelligent Change's "Productive Day" playlist, an eclectic mix of upbeat songs to work to.  

Not focus music

Apparently some people didn't watch this video all the time in high school. My research actually indicates that very few people did this.

Okay, that's it for me. I promise I'm going to start publishing on my normal schedule again. I leave you with this:

This week last year:

"Friendmendations 5.4.20" – lmao @ me celebrating getting through ONE MONTH of quarantine and finally getting my vaccine an entire year later. Also: so many links about representations of desirable womanhood, a couple of links about politics, a strange artist and a sweet YouTuber, and some good merch

"I didn't feel empowered by Sucker Punch" – bad movie!