When I was a kid my mother made me make a promise. Perhaps knowing what kind of a girl she had on her hands, she made me promise that if I was ever going to elope, she had to be there.

And so she was. Before that, got our hair done good. Eloped but we stayed in the hood.  What a delightful afternoon spent engaging in government bureaucracy. Always said we weren’t going to do it till everyone could, so why not now?  Honeymoon coming soon.

Re: The title of this note…Elopez! I love it- patent pending. Though I can’t claim credit for it- our dear friend and photographer Ashley Zadel came up with it.

QUEER EYE

I showed my newly-acquired husband Queer Eye in the way we attempt to share beautiful creations of humankind with loved ones— with earnest joy. But alas he has unjustly lumped it into the genre of product-placement TV, and so every night as we watch it, a cynical narration in my ear about materialism and blah blah whatever I’ve put on the subtitles so I can still enjoy this in peace leave me alone I don’t even know who you are anymore.

But still. The second season episode with trans guy Skylar left me feeling… like I needed an opinion piece on it. Sometimes I’ll search online to find an opinion piece that articulates my own unprocessed feels, to save me the hassle of using my brain. Otherwise known as being a consumer of the internet.  I really liked this piece by Samantha Ridel about the ep: A Review of Queer Eye’s Trans Makeover, By an Actual Trans Person. My own feelings and then some much smarter ones. Given how naive some of Tan’s questions come across in the episode, it was interesting to read just how constructed his scene was.

And side note: I never thought I’d recommend branded personal finance content, but this article with Jonathan Van Ness subverts the genre into almost stream-of-consciousness storytelling delight.

OTHER BEAUTIFUL CREATIONS OF HUMANKIND

I am and I am not Aboriginal (just… the writing!). Lost in Books: Help out a multilingual kids’ bookshop in Australia’s most culturally-diverse area. The podcast On Being always elevates the spirit somehow, but this ep on physics and mathematical beauty by Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek was surprising and wondrous. And I say this as someone whose mathematical side of the brain has caved in on itself from lack of use. This from Dr Wilczek made sense in the act of creation:

Several of the most important episodes in my scientific career have been driven — not in a vague way, but very concretely — by wanting to make things beautiful. I remember almost a magical moment … and the equation almost wrote itself. And it was just so pretty that I knew it had to be correct, and that turned out to be the key to a very important investigation…

Till next month.

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