Hi Reading People and thank you for doing it here,

I know Ken Stringfellow somewhat. Not super well, but well enough that when I went to search for my emails with Dana on this topic she had proposed writing about, a long list of friend-group emails he and I were both on starting in 2007 or so popped up (I never delete anything). I certainly spent time with him but nothing stands out from it and I haven’t talked to him in years.

I somehow missed the reports years back of all the accusations against Ken from a number of beyond credible (of course) women. (I was probably launching something new and when I’m in that state, I block out a lot of “news,” but Dana will explain the women’s horror stories in her piece below.) And when Dana pitched writing about her own involvement with Ken, the subject seemed valuable to cover, regardless of whether I knew or liked him or not (always a rule). However, I wanted to look for something more in it beyond the disgustingness and the #MeToo and #MenToo angles which were already covered. I wanted some further enlightenment about why this shit keeps happening and new insights into ways we can all help stop it.

And then as I read more of Dana’s powerful writing about her experience, another aspect that we saw together in her story raised something meaningful and moving for both of us. It has to do with how women are constantly put in the position of belittling other women or seeing them as pathetic over their feelings and hopes for a guy rather than supporting each other and placing the blame strictly where it lays (no pun intended).

Without saying anything more, I hope you “enjoy” her piece, and let’s all talk about our reactions to it and our own experiences in these situations with Dana in the comments. I think we can create some change in attitude here if you do, and I would love to try.

I also want to announce the new AJPT Editorial hire I have been talking to you all about for eons.

I’m calling it the initial hire because we plan to bring more of you on as soon as this first one helps me become more efficient. So before I even tell you that name, any of you who have written to me, know that I still have all of your information and I still have my notes at the top of all of your submissions, and I am still overwhelmed with respect and appreciation for all of you, so let’s get you hired next. (Like you Amanda, who just wrote me again this morning with that list of so many fucking impressive skills I could salivate and still am. And in another incredible example, if your initials are J.d.P., you have put so much into this hiring process and I know we will get to work together on AJPT soon because, come on, it’s only fair!)

There are hundreds of others of you I could write these notes to here also. If you want more specific feedback and can’t wait for me to notify you, you can definitely send our email threads back to me again with a new subject line that says “what the hell, Jane?” And I’ll work my way through them to give you the specific feedback notes I have for you. You are so wonderful and accomplished and creative and beyond deserving and I am so grateful for your openness to all growing this thing together.

Having said all that (and still not having said enough, but I will), our initial hire from this round of applications is Christine Morrison and she is officially our first ever Another Jane Pratt Thing Editor-at-Large! (Editor-at-Large has always been one of my favorite titles. I’ve never had it myself, but boy is it appealing because it connotes to me flying around the world on adventures while still being considered productive and also the “large” part makes me think of the phrase “large and in charge,” something I have always wanted to be called.) So congratulate Christine in the comments – also because she may be helping me go through and respond to you all on the next round of hires soon, so it might be a good move to be nice to her if you still care and still even want to be involved in this.

Again (and again), I deeply appreciate you all. Now let’s read and talk about Dana’s story! I thank her tremendously for it and thank all the other people in it, including those who wanted their names changed and those who didn’t but all of whom wanted to be part of it and tell their stories too. I will of course let you know about backlash I get from my friend group, etc. I expect it. I love you.

Jane

PS You can order an amazing SASSY shirt via the little green button below (while I maintain the original low pricing even though we don’t make money on a lot of them) - or you can get one FREE by taking out an annual or lifetime subscription here!

Get One While It's Still This Cheap

By Dana DuBois

“You sing pretty good, boy,” a grizzled regular drawled as Ken finished his song and stepped down from the corner stage with a flourish.

We all giggled. The old man had just seen a 30-something dude in a hoodie karaoke his best “Band on the Run.” We knew more: the singer was Ken Stringfellow, co-front man for beloved Seattle ‘90s power-pop band the Posies, a legit local rockstar and my crush of the moment. After a brief flirtation over email — it was 2002, after all — I’d asked him out to karaoke, and to my delight, he said yes. We agreed to meet at the Baranof, the diviest dive bar that ever dove, on a Monday night, and that we’d each bring a friend.

I brought three.

Liz and Corin [This is a fake name, as are some of the others in this story. These will be the only fake things in this post, or anything else that you see on AJPT, and we did it to protect people, of course. — Jane] were eager to witness the wonder of a favorite musician in civilian mode at karaoke. Just a few months later we’d go on to launch our local indie music website, Three Imaginary Girls, though none of us knew it yet that night. Melissa came too. She wasn’t a fan of the Posies but was a good friend of mine, and was always down to witness whatever dating misadventures I managed to find.

Ken rejoined our booth after his Wings performance and cozied in next to me, sitting a bit too close in the best of ways, our table strewn with the strongest, cheapest cocktails this town has ever seen. We cheered and drank some more.

He was pretty good, indeed.

Ken also didn’t come alone. He brought a friend and to my surprise, it was a woman, Amy, and they’d known each other for years. She clapped as we sang, and drank as we drank. She seemed cool enough.

She also seemed deeply, hopelessly besotted with Ken.

As the night fueled forward on double vodka sodas and ridiculous song choices, we all got giddy drunk. Amy, however, became sad and clingy. The more Ken and I flirted, the more attention-seeking her behaviors. He seemed unfazed by it all but my friends and I noticed, exchanging knowing glances and rolling our eyes at her histrionics. At one point we escaped to the restroom to compare notes.

“Is it just me, or is Amy acting really weird?” I asked them.

“Oh, it’s not just you,” said Melissa. “She’s being ridiculous.”

“Why is she even here? Doesn’t she know she’s crashing a date?” Corin added dismissively.

We all laughed, aligned that Amy’s behavior was out of line, pathetic even. Then we heard Liz’s name called out from the bar.

“It’s my song!” she yelled, darting out of the restroom and onto the stage, where she delivered her utterly non-ironic, hilarious rendition of Tone Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina,” and perhaps one needs to know Liz to know how out-of-character and singular this performance — this night, truly — was.

At closing time, we tumbled out of the main bar and into another room, where to our left sat a piano. The instrument looked older than time itself, a forsaken relic moldering in the anteroom to the bar. Instead of heading out, as ordered by the bartenders, Amy plunked herself down on the bench, hunched over the keys, and proceeded to play what I have to assume were very out-of-tune minor chords. It was dissonant, almost haunting, and again–to my tipsy, crushed-out ears–pathetic.

“KEN!” she wailed, “Ken, can you hear how beautiful this piano is??”

Each word echoed like an inebriated lament over the plod of the discordant keys.

“Ken, we love this piano, don’t we?” Her lament turned to a plea, but to no avail; he’d turned his attentions to me as we tumbled outside. Then Ken and I gave any late-night passersby on Greenwood Ave one helluva show as he delivered a goodnight kiss worthy of capping off such a spectacular evening. I’m pretty sure Amy trudged outside to unwittingly witness it, though my memory here is woozy from the embrace, cocktails, and two-plus decades that have since passed.

I’m not proud of how much we drank that night. But I don’t regret it. The night was a glorious blur of abandon, music, silliness, and bonding. It was one of the first times I hung out with Liz, who ended up as one of my lifelong best friends and the top creative collaborator of my life. I’d like to think our younger, rowdier days served as building blocks to the foundation of fun that later built Three Imaginary Girls.

But one thing I do regret?

TO KEEP READING AND BE ABLE TO READ EVERY OTHER EXCLUSIVE ARTICLE ON THIS SITE, YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE BELOW. I’M SORRY EVERYTHING CAN’T BE FREE, BUT I NEED TO PAY THESE WRITERS.

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Hi Popsicles,

If that greeting doesn't make you want to unsubscribe right now, especially following that harrowing quote from Bee’s story above it, you're my kind of sunshiny weirdo. By the way, speaking of unsubscribing, I got more unsubscribes after the Fourth Of July post than from any other to date. Wahoo for continually breaking records! (One of today’s unsubscribers from that piece goes by @fartina so Ani and I had a great time with that because we are so mature.) A close second for eliciting multiple subscription cancellations was this story about getting addicted to a bizarre MAGA-funded exercise regimen. There definitely seems to be a political through-line here. Which makes this as good a time as any to all send MILLIONS OF CONGRATULATIONS to my former colleague and always friend, E. Jean Carroll for getting almost enough money to make up for the disgusting horror she endured. I’m still sorry it happened to you, E. Jean, but you have used your platform brilliantly and can now help other women get heard AND pay for lunch if you insist.

Anyway! I'm not going to continue to yammer on in my usual fashion before I let you get to your horoscope reading today. I just have two importantish updates:

We started selling all these gorgeous new Sassy shirts in various carefully selected colors and the styles you requested after the original pink-on-pink version was such a hit. Your orders came in and in and in and it was so much fucking fun to see which colors you liked best, etc. BUT then we had issues with our production partner (I would usually name them and everyone who wrongs us, but they may now be doing the right thing so should I encourage that by not calling them out or do you want me to name them in the comments? Let me know there and it’s totally up to you).

Without warning, said company started charging us more to produce the shirts than we had agreed to, which meant in some cases more than you were paying. Then some of you got letters from them because they tried to fix it by canceling your orders. Fortunately, I’ve talked to you folks who that happened to and have been happily able to make it up to you with new shirt orders and some comp subscriptions, so ok. So now the setup is better and we can all feel fairly assured that the $28 you’re paying per shirt will cover its cost. We may have to raise our prices eventually but I am stubbornly keeping them where they are for now. Making it a great time to order a ton of these can’t-pick-just-one-or-two shirts now.

AND I am herewith extending the offer that ended July 5 and will now give a free shirt of your choice to anyone who upgrades to an annual or lifetime AJPT subscription by the end of this month. You can follow the instructions from the original giveaway and comment in that thread about what style you want. Your comment also puts you in the running to get a signed or unsigned old issue of Sassy sent directly from me and I promise it will be real Sassy and not the zombie Sassy it became after the original staff was gone. Happy shopping and/or subscribing (subscribing is my recommended option, because you will also get to read the sequel to Leslie’s gripping story about her abusive mom and more AND because getting something for free can feel good).

Second update: If you are one of the thousands of people who applied for the writing and editing position here at AJPT, I am getting in touch with the first hire this week and will announce her on my next post (yes, the winner identifies as female, so that narrows this down by about .00000001%). I’m so excited to get to work with you! Let’s grow this thing together so we can hire more of you wonders, etc. fun etc.!

And love always,

Jane

PS: Do you ever get an alert on your phone that your camera lens is dirty? I get it all the time and sometimes it not only admonishes me to “clean the camera lens” but even more helpfully, “clean front camera lens.” If this has ever or never happened to you, could you tell me that yes or no in the comments, please? I want to know if my daughter is right that no one besides me ever sees this.

And now for something meaningful…. Thanks Bee!

By The Zine Witch

“Do you believe in miracles?”

I remember stopping for a second in the foyer because it wasn’t the sort of thing I expected to hear in my building lobby that afternoon. A man had recently retired from our building after 40 years and she was filling in temporarily. I hadn’t really had much of a relationship with any of the door staff before. We would exchange pleasantries, talk about a package, maybe discuss the weather. That was about it.

I would later learn her name was Linda. She had curly hair and a warm, expressive light about her. The kind of presence that makes you pay attention. The kind of person who walks into a room and somehow changes the energy into a dance party. A true lighthouse. Yes, Linda was a lighthouse.

I spend my days thinking about fate, timing, coincidence, and the strange ways people’s lives intersect. I spend my days listening to people’s stories and looking for patterns. Yet somehow I didn’t have an answer ready. Instead, I found myself carrying the question home with me. Do you believe in miracles? The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had been asking myself that question for a long time.

I later learned, Linda became homeless after a devastating car accident in 2024 changed everything. Before the accident, she had stability. She had a food truck and a home. She had a future that made sense. Then one day everything changed. First, the accident, then the stolen food truck, then the loss of her home. Since then, she has spent nights sleeping in her car and other nights staying wherever she could while trying to rebuild her life with her son. She’d do anything to have a home again, her business. She works three jobs but remains homeless. Yet, she smiles.

The thing that struck me wasn’t her hardship. It was her generosity. She had every reason to be angry. Every reason to become cynical. Every reason to give up on people. Instead, she became one of the kindest and most joyful people I have ever met. We became instant friends. Gossiping, joking, and having deep conversations all day from 3 pm to 11:30 pm when she left. It felt like a sitcom as we both navigated the trials and tribulations of an ever-revolving cast of characters who live and work in the building. We were an unlikely duo. She, a devout Christian black woman who had never heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” before we met. Me, a Jewish, autistic witch heathen. We both carry a certain talk show host energy but we never compete for who has the best joke. We somehow balance each other out while still leaving room for the other to be herself. We have very little in common, but somehow, we make it work.

The timing of our friendship matters to this story. She started calling me her daughter. Later, I learned that her own daughter had the same unit number in her own building that I do. We FaceTimed and her daughter cried and said that she always wanted a sister. A miracle.

But here is mine. For years, I have been dealing with Tony, a maintenance worker in my building. I repeatedly told management that I felt unsafe around him. Other women in the building also expressed concerns. Many have notes asking him never to enter their apartments. Still, the situation dragged on for years. His menacing has gotten worse over time.

Tony moves through the hallways like a man who believes the walls belong to him. There is something heavy about him, something that made the air smell like a whoppie cushion after he passes. You know, half plastic, half rotten egg. Not a storm exactly — storms at least announce themselves — but the slow gathering pressure before one. He carried himself with the confidence of someone accustomed to taking up space, as if other people’s discomfort were merely furniture to be stepped around. You could feel him before you saw him. Linda sure did. Serial killer vibes. He hates women and has no qualms about sharing that with the residents of this building and his fellow staff members. “He’s an asshole,” they say. “Just ignore him.”

But it’s hard to ignore a man who makes fists at you. That belittles women regularly and expects you to agree with him. That pushed Linda as she sat in a chair. Some of Tony’s best thoughts: women don’t have big enough brain cells to fix things. Our job is to be at home having a family, and unless we are doing that, we have absolutely no value. His 17-year-old daughter needs to get a job or no one’s going to take her seriously. He even bragged about abusing his late grandma to multiple people in the building.

One day, after I reported comments Tony had made about women having no value if they chose not to have children, he cornered and intimidated me in the elevator. It felt retaliatory. The building manager reviewed the security footage and was able to see the incident for himself. I remember thinking that, for the first time, someone might finally understand what I had been trying to explain. That I wasn’t too sensitive. This man felt like a true psychopath.

But no apology was made. No accountability from management. And nothing changed. I was left feeling trapped.

Home is supposed to be where you feel safest. I study men’s violence for a living, and I know how this tends to escalate. I’m legitimately scared every day that I will be murdered by this man when he just snaps. I deserve to be safe. But instead, I find myself constantly scanning my environment. Wondering who was in the hallway. Wondering who was in the elevator. Avoiding doing my laundry so I didn’t have to see him. Wondering if today would be another day where I would be expected to tolerate something that made me feel unsafe. I began cutting myself for the first time since high school. I wanted to die every day. Even when I asked for the condo president’s information so I could bring it to a meeting, the property manager never responded.

There is another layer to this story. I am autistic and I have CPTSD. When I tried to explain to my landlord (who is also my brother-in-law) why this situation was affecting me so deeply, I was told I was “too sensitive.” I have heard those words my entire life.

The truth is that my family has never shown much interest in understanding autism, ADHD, and CPSTD. They have never shown much interest in understanding trauma. They have never shown much interest in understanding what it is like to live in my body. That is a much longer story and probably an article of its own.

A few years ago, I read an article about a study that found autistic people die significantly younger than the general population. One number stayed with me: 36. Frankly, I was amazed it wasn’t lower. This is due to the suicide rate, not illness.

I think about the bullying we go through. The isolation. The poverty. The willful ignorance from Neurotypicals which creates misunderstanding. The constant pressure to adapt to environments that were never built for us. I think about what happens when someone spends their entire life being told they are “too sensitive.” Every time I think about him, it feels like a demon is running through my body. Sometimes something does. It’s not me. A death metal voice that I have never heard before comes out of me, describing the millions of ways that I would murder him and decompose his body as sacrament.

I reenact the “Euphoria finale” with me in the role of Ali. The whole system is broken. I want to take them all out. I have no choice. Every night, soaking wet in my shower, I stand crying with my death metal growls dying from within. Gotta love CPTSD. This is my lived reality. I have no one fighting for me. No one. I have to fight for myself.

I think about what happens when people refuse to believe your reality because they do not experience it themselves. I cannot afford to move. I live on an astrologer’s salary and lost my food stamps due to new regulations. I’ve lost so much weight from barely being able to afford food some days. I have begged and pleaded for opportunities that could get me out of my situation. But here I am: I cannot leave. For years, I have been trying to heal in an environment where I do not feel safe. It’s a no-win situation. I feel so defeated.

Eventually, the weight of that became too much. About a year ago, I attempted suicide and spent a week in the hospital. When I came home, Tony was still there. The building was still there. The problems were still there. Nothing had changed.

That is, until Linda came along. Linda came into my life during one of its darkest periods. She listened and remembered things. She checked on me during my dental surgery when friends and family did not. She treated me like a person. There are friendships that take years to build, and then there are friendships that arrive exactly when they are needed.

Which brings me to Cancer season. Every year when the Sun moves into Cancer, astrologers start talking about home, family, roots, and belonging. This year, I keep thinking about safety. What makes us feel safe? Who makes us feel safe? What happens when family is not the place where we find shelter? What happens when safety comes from unexpected places? What happens when the person who helps you survive a difficult year is someone you never would have met if another person hadn’t retired from your building? Those are the questions I find myself sitting with this Cancer season.

For years, I have lived with grief, family estrangement, coercive control, trauma, and fear. Some days I feel terrified about the future. Some days I feel terrified about my personal safety. And yet I keep coming back to Linda’s question: “Do you believe in miracles?”

I recently learned that Linda’s contract was not renewed. Soon she will be leaving the building, removing the only bridge of safety I have felt in years. I wish I could tell you everything worked out neatly. I wish I could tell you I suddenly felt safe. I wish I could tell you all the problems had disappeared. They didn’t.

I’m heartbroken Linda is leaving. Tony is still here. My suicidal thoughts are creeping back in. I still can’t afford to move. I am still trying to build a life that feels safe. But I also know this — A woman who was carrying struggles of her own found the time and energy to help carry mine. Her contract may not have been renewed, and she may be leaving the building, but she will never leave my heart.

And maybe that is what a miracle is.

A person arriving exactly when you need them. A reminder that kindness still exists.

A reminder that you are not alone. A reminder that even in the middle of a difficult story, something beautiful can still walk through the door. Someone who sees your daily battle and understands its abuse. Someone who validates the abuse I went through for years with her own experiences with Tony. And perhaps that’s all I need to survive the future of my everyday reality. Until then, it’s back to my shell.

Best Days:

Best Day To Win a Fight: July 28

Best Day to Take a Gamble:…

To repeat, Best Day To Take A Gamble: July 29

Horoscopes

Just a reminder, I write for your rising sign, otherwise known as the Ascendant. This is the sign that was rising in the east when you were born. This tends to be more accurate if you know this particular placement in your chart. But if you don’t, feel free to read for your sun sign. You can pull a chart at Astro.com.

Aries & Aries Rising - The answer you’re looking for may be sitting much closer to home than you think. Joy is not a distraction from your path; it is the path, so say yes to what feels fun without needing to justify it. A friendship, group, or long-held dream reaches a turning point, bringing clarity about where you belong and who belongs with you. Pay attention to who claps when you win because the people who genuinely support you are becoming impossible to miss.

Taurus & Taurus Rising - The conversation you’ve been putting off may end up changing more than you expect. What you’re building behind the scenes deserves just as much attention as what everyone else can see. A career goal, public role, or long-term ambition reaches a turning point, bringing recognition, clarity, or a decision that can no longer be avoided. Trust that the small steps you’re taking every day are leading somewhere important.

Gemini & Gemini Rising - A trip, teaching, or personal quest you’ve been on begins to reach a meaningful crescendo. Something you’ve been studying, writing, discussing, or trying to understand finally starts to click into place, reminding you that your voice and ideas have real value. A belief you’ve outgrown may fall away, making room for a perspective that feels more honest and alive. The right conversation, book, journey, or opportunity could change both how you see the world and what you believe you’re capable of.

Cancer & Cancer Rising - People are noticing something different about you, even if you can’t quite put your finger on what has changed. Don’t be surprised if you’re reminded of your worth and asked to stop settling for less than you deserve. A situation involving home, family, or your living space reaches a turning point, bringing clarity about what truly feels secure. The more you invest in yourself, the easier it becomes to recognize what is genuinely valuable.

Leo & Leo Rising - Something you’ve been carrying quietly for a long time is ready to be set down. Trust the urge to spend a little more time listening to yourself before rushing into the next chapter. A relationship reaches a turning point, bringing clarity about where you stand and what you truly need from the people closest to you. The more honest you are with yourself, the easier it becomes to attract connections that meet you where you are.

Virgo & Virgo Rising - Not every opportunity needs an immediate answer, and not every battle deserves your energy. The right people are quietly finding their way toward you, even if things feel uncertain right now. A work, health, or daily-life situation reaches a point of clarity, making it easier to see what is helping and what is simply taking up space. Trust the doors that open gently and the commitments that leave you feeling lighter, not heavier.

Libra & Libra Rising - The right people can change the course of your life, and you’re being reminded of that now. A friendship, community, audience, or shared dream is gaining momentum, opening doors that would be difficult to open alone. A creative project, romance, or matter involving a child may reach an important milestone, bringing a moment of pride, clarity, or celebration. Don’t underestimate the power of one invitation, one connection, or one person who believes in what you’re building. That’s your miracle this month.

Scorpio & Scorpio Rising - This is a big month for thinking about where you’re headed and who you’re headed there with. A lot of your attention is being pulled toward long-term goals, your reputation, and the communities, friendships, or networks that support your future. You may find yourself having important conversations about plans, collaborations, or opportunities that help you see the bigger picture. At the same time, something is coming to a head at home. A family matter, living situation, or emotional issue you’ve been carrying quietly may finally need your attention. The balance this month is between building the life you want in public and making sure your private life feels secure enough to support it.

Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising - This month may have you thinking deeply about what you believe, where you’re headed, and what needs to change for you to grow. You could find yourself drawn to learning something new, planning a trip, exploring a spiritual practice, or questioning old assumptions that no longer fit. At the same time, there may be conversations that bring an important realization or decision to the surface. News, paperwork, writing projects, or discussions with siblings, neighbors, or close friends could reach a turning point. The bigger theme is finding the courage to look beneath the surface while also widening your perspective. Sometimes the answer arrives not through certainty, but through a conversation that changes the way you see the world. That’s your miracle this month.

Capricorn & Capricorn Rising - This month puts a spotlight on your closest relationships and the agreements you make with other people. You may be spending more time thinking about partnership, trust, support, and what you’re willing to share emotionally, financially, or energetically. At the same time, a money matter or a question of self-worth could reach a climax. You might finally see where you’re undervaluing yourself, charging too little, giving too much, or holding onto something that no longer feels secure. The lesson here is that healthy relationships require healthy boundaries. As you become clearer about what you deserve, the people around you will have a better understanding of how to meet you there.

Aquarius & Aquarius Rising - What’s feeling like it’s ready to be released? The person you are becoming is ready to introduce themselves to the world this month. A version of you that once waited for permission no longer needs it. Let it rip. Don’t be afraid to let your strange ideas, unusual dreams, and authentic voice lead the way. The right people will recognize you when you stop trying to be recognizable to everyone. A door opens the moment you stop knocking and simply walk through it.

Pisces & Pisces Rising - You don’t need to keep every promise you made to an older version of yourself. This month, something may naturally drift away, creating space where there once was obligation. Let what is leaving leave. The future has a way of finding people who are willing to travel lighter. You may need a little extra time alone to hear your own thoughts above the noise. Solitude is not the same thing as loneliness; sometimes it is where clarity finally catches up to you.

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Hi Girls (in the all-genders highest-compliment-ever sense)!

I gave a little speech last night at Columbia University* and was talking about the importance of all-out honesty with you. So I asked what I should do for this intro today because typically these intros are love stories about how close I get with each writer during the editing process, but this one is more complicated than that. I was encouraged by these smart educated people to continue to tell the whole truth, so here it is.

To set the scene, Shani (as she will tell you in her much more interesting and funny writing below) and I started DMing on Instagram after I found out that she had been a contributor to my last defunct publication xoJane (as opposed to my three, count ‘em, prior defunct publications: Sassy magazine [1988-1996, not including the anti-Sassy years after it was taken over by the owners of ‘Teen magazine], Jane magazine [1997-2007, including the years when it was called Jane but no one with that name was working on it], and let's not forget equally defunct Dirt magazine – the Sassy for boys edited by Mark Lewman, Andy Jenkins and Spike Jonze briefly back in the 90s).

I was so so so excited that Shani was willing to write for me again and she sent me so many ideas that all were so absolutely fantastic that it was hard to pick one. This rekindled romance was going really really well! I chose for her to revive a hilarious and popular piece she wrote for xoJane called “Stuff Not To Say To Your Single 30-Something Friend.” I love when things come full circle, don’t you?

Shani quickly submitted her story and I quickly loved it and told her so and we got pictures and captions and all of that organized. As you all know, things have been super busy here for me – which is one of the reasons I need to hire one of you and will so soon, thank goddess. This was back in April and that’s when things got rockier.

I never ever mean to ghost anybody. Though, to be clear, a few years ago I did fail to return my fairly long-term (for me, anyway) boyfriend’s phone calls and texts for what turned into a year (I was busy) and was flabbergasted when I was thinking about getting back in touch with him and saw that he had married someone else. Harumph.

Anyway, I was so happy with the story (still am!) and slated it to run. But I was so overwhelmed and backlogged that our publishing schedule meant that about two months went by. Shani reached out to me. There was some tension, let's say. Understandably. So I wanted to ensure that this tiff didn’t become a full-blown split and told her the story would run in July. And here it is. And I think and hope that honoring my promise by publishing it now and making amends puts our longterm relationship back on track because I love her writing and she is one of the funniest people I know. Thanks for your forgiveness if I have it, Shani! Let’s all now tell our own stories in the comments about stuff that’s been said to us at our ages that we can’t stand, as Shani does so well here (that time-tested make-up trick of turning both of your anger onto someone else - it works, right?).

I love you and thanks for bearing with me. You all are so great.

Jane

P.S. Thanks to that Platner guy, I now not only know what stealthing is but that it is common enough to have that name and illegal in California (and hopefully other states soon). Thanks?

*Let’s at some point ponder why my own alma mater Oberlin has never once asked me to come back and speak there. There are many valid potential reasons - like taking 18 shots of Bacardi 151 on my 18th birthday and then throwing up all over their cafeteria or that experimental semester when I made the intellectual decision not to study at all to see what I actually naturally retained and the answer was nothing at all. Anyway, I want to talk there so if you go to Oberlin, tell them to please invite me.

And now, over to more important stuff from Shani!

These Are Selling So Fast It's Crazy

By Shani Silver

If you read AJPT, there’s a solid chance you read XOJANE. If you read XOJANE, there’s a flea’s chance in the ocean that you remember my name. Thirteen years ago, I wrote “Stuff Not To Say To Your Single 30-Something Friend” for Jane Pratt. Everything has changed since then except my relationship status and my willingness to share too much on the internet. Therefore I give you: “Stuff Not To Say To Your Single 40-Something Friend.” I’ve missed you.

“You Never Know.”

Being single in your 40s is very different from being single in your 30s. I want to make it clear that hope for love and openness to romantic connection do not fade as a result of age alone. But by god motivation to participate in the fruitlessness of dating culture sure does. In your 30s you still have the delusional energy it takes to put on clothing and makeup for a first date with a stranger even after you’ve already done that four times this month and have nothing but disappointment and therapy visits to show for it. You just keep going and going thinking that surely one day your efforts will be rewarded, because that’s how life is supposed to work. A decade later and you’ll learn that nothing works the way you think it does, least of all dating. In your 40s you know the difference between a new connection that’s got juice, and all the other ways modern dating culture is a fucking waste of your time.

In your 30s, You haven’t found your rage yet for the phrase, “you never know.” I can assure you that in your 40s, it’ll show up. You’ll stop thinking that you have to give literally any man who exists a chance because “you never know.” You’ll stop thinking that if you don’t agree with your friends when they say “You never knooooowwwwww!” they’ll shame and blame you by calling you “jaded.” As if they wouldn’t be “jaded” too if they hadn’t married the barely cute guy they hooked up with while shitfaced senior year of college. Or they’ll blame you for your own singlehood because you dare to know what you like and you have the audacity to reject what you don’t like. Typically we only let men get away with that behavior. In your 40s, when someone tells you to “step outside your comfort zone because you never know,” you simply never speak to them again.

“Omg I could never date nowadays, I don’t know how you do it.”

You’re right, Rachel. You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t withstand it. Ten minutes on a dating app and most partnered women would throw their phone into the sea. Dating is as bad as you think it is, probably worse, because the dating industry built an ungoverned world where anyone can say and do whatever they want to anyone, free from consequences apart from a block button; all under the guise of finding a romantic partner. There’s no way they’d have been able to bait this many people into their web otherwise. Then they put actual human connection behind a paywall, and gathered enough data on everyone to keep us intentionally separate from good matches on purpose. Babe, that’s what they’re doing. When two people find love on a dating app, that registers as an algorithmic failure in a boardroom. Think about that the next time you want to blame your lack of matches on your profile photos.

Offline, we’re dealing with invisibility, because men our age still think they can pull 26-year-olds, even with those hairlines and child support payments they’re sporting. They’re fresh out of marriages that ended because they cheated but all they’ll ever say to us is that their ex wife is “crazy.” And that’s assuming we ever come into contact with human men at all. Straight men in their 40s are either married and their social calendar is 100% reliant on their wives, or they’re not married and they literally don’t know how to leave the house. When we go out, it’s all women, everywhere we go—and in your 40s you stop complaining about that. Go out to a bar tonight. Count the number of men who aren’t there with a woman. It won’t take long. “You could never date nowadays” because dating doesn’t exist if only one gender can be found in the wild. Telling your 40-something friend you couldn’t handle dating right now is just a glaring reminder that you don’t have to, but if we want companionship, we do. You’re not paying us a compliment for withstanding a firehose of bullshit, you’re reminding us that you get to stand entirely out of the way.

“You’re so lucky you’re single.”

If you have a spouse and you want to say this to a single person, either get a divorce or keep quiet. We don’t want to hear how envious you are of our way of life when you have absolutely no intention of living it. This is a polite society way to say “I hate my husband” without any pressure to do something about it.

No, women in our 40s are not pining for relationships with men. The general sentiment for our age bracket is that we’re “open to the right relationship” if it comes along, but we’re not settling, hell no. We’ve come too far for that. There are many of us who feel this way, but we also never meet anybody, so hearing that you did meet somebody and you don’t want him anymore but you also don’t want to leave him—where does that leave us? Where does that leave your 40-something friend who is “so lucky” she’s single but also you don’t want to be like her? It leaves her feeling insulted, because you’re not really saying that she’s lucky. You’re saying you’re miserable and hoping we’ll let you vent about the thing you got that we didn’t. Nah.

We are lucky. Women who are single and never married in our 40s (we exist by the way, women in their 40s aren’t exclusively reinventing themselves post-divorce), we are extremely lucky that we’ve been single this entire time, growing wiser and hotter every day. We’ve statistically and literally avoided so much strife and so many divorce attorney’s fees, “lucky” feels like a mild way to put it. But it’s never said that way, is it? It’s never said in celebration of singles, it’s always said in complaint of marriage. So don’t say it to us, but maybe say it to your spouse. Unless you’re afraid to, in which case, what are you afraid of? Becoming single again? But I thought you said singles are so lucky?

If you tell me I’m lucky I’m single at 43 I have only one response for you, and it’s not going to involve listening to you complain about your husband for half an hour and then forgetting everything you just said the moment he walks in the room. I’m so lucky I’m single? Yeah babe. You’re right.

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Also: If you liked this essay as much as I did, Shani Silver’s new book, What If We Never Get Married? A Happily Ever Answer, is available now.

This Unpopular Opinion is a little bonus ditty (as opposed to a doozy, like this crazy It Happened To Me by the same writer - I would say to check this link out first if you haven’t read it already - because it’s crazy and because it will give you background on who Emma is and where she is coming from). And today’s is just an extra story for anyone who's in the mood for some topical or relevant programming for your holiday weekend. I am not doing anything particularly Fourth of July-oriented, so I'll be hanging out here working and in the comments with anyone else who is not participating. (I'm making it sound like a political stance when actually I just have no plans. But I have political stances too and I will happily share them in the comments if you like.)

I love you all so so much every day of every year wherever in the hell we are.

Jane

By Emma Margraf

The moment the moms and aunts set their chairs down on the beach, we kids were free to roam like a pack of sweaty, sand-covered explorers. Jersey summers were humid, and we were fueled by our crumb cake and iced tea breakfasts, followed by afternoons chasing down the ice cream truck. I’d just turned 10, born on the 4th of July, and we were staying with family friends in an inherited beach house in a quiet part of the Jersey Shore. I was old enough to be on my own in the ocean with my gang of cousins and friends, floating up and over the waves, crashing under them, and getting back up over and over again. It was the ‘80s, Ronald Reagan was president, and everyone on the shore loved Bruce Springsteen. “Born in the U.S.A.” played everywhere on repeat.

I loved being out past where I could stand in the ocean, floating on boogie boards, hanging out with the older kids. We were celebrating the 4th of July and my birthday, and the older kids were arguing about Bruce, what they heard from their parents about Ronald Reagan, and protest.

“Born in the U.S.A.!” sang one cousin.

“Happy birthday Emma!” called a neighbor as she floated by.

“You were born on July 4th?” an older girl looked sideways at me. “That must be your favorite song, right?”

Everyone was talking at once, and another kid said, “Born in the U.S.A.! It’s all about this country being the greatest country in the world!”

“Shut up, dumbass, that song is about how our country sucks!”

“What? No way.”

“Her birthday should be another day,” said Sara, “she hates fireworks!”

“What?!”

“How could anyone hate fireworks?” a neighbor kid asked, like I’d committed a crime.

“’Cause they are boring and loud and they suck. We always find trash in the water after them too,” said Joey, a devoted surfer and always the one most likely to have my back. He smiled at me, everyone laughed, and I said, “They do suck.”

With that, like with so many narratives among childhood squads, we decided that fireworks do, in fact, suck.

Forty-two years later, my birthday has made me feel more conflicted each year. I have always been in love with what this country could be. I worked in electoral politics for almost a decade, and I love everything about what people, both liberals and conservatives, have called the promise of America. One person, one vote. A place for everyone, a chance for everyone, and equity at the forefront. Every year, it gets harder to hope that enough of the rest of the country wants that too.

I spent years knocking on doors for campaign after campaign, having voters roll their eyes when I said conservatives were aiming to reverse Roe v. Wade, saying it was settled. People told me to go away. People at door after door told me voting didn’t matter. In my mind, it mattered more than almost anything else.

I’ve always tried to take time on my birthday to go to the beach, to the water, to eat some seafood, and breathe somewhere that I am not usually sitting. One year, I found myself in a bar in a small town with a guy who – by the look of him – couldn’t have been more different than me. It was his birthday too. He saw that I was there with my girlfriend, and we didn’t look like we belonged in this dive bar, but he still asked me if I wanted to do a birthday shot with him. I said yes, absolutely, and let him pick the shot. He chose Fireball Whiskey, and I managed to toast with him and get the shot down without embarrassing myself. It was a nice moment.

Sick with some kind of unidentified illness recently, I went to Urgent Care, then came home feeling great after a round of fluids and IV antibiotics. I told my girlfriend that I wanted to do this regularly; to go in and get serviced like a race car so I could feel this way every day.“You know what that is?” my girlfriend said. “It’s what happens in other countries.”

She’s right about that; other countries are outpacing us on being human. We pride ourselves on freedom, and like Jeff Daniels says in the opening of “The Newsroom,” plenty of countries have freedom. Other countries outpace us when it comes to voting, and we’re always voting against things instead of for them. We’ve been told we can’t have socialized medicine – and why would you want it? You have to wait so long for care. Now, in our country, it takes 3-6 months to get into specialists’ offices and you get to pay extra for the privilege. The list of things that make us special is getting shorter and shorter.

My birthday has always made me feel tied to this country’s foundation in a way other people born on the 4th don’t seem to experience. I mean, we do commiserate a bit. The guy in the bar with the Fireball agreed with me that everyone who is born on a holiday has a collection of things they hear every time their birthday comes up at the doctor’s office, at school, or at the coffee shop. These are ours:

Wow! You were born on the 4th of July? Did you think the fireworks were for you?

Lucky you! You get fireworks for your birthday!

Setting off fireworks of your own is illegal in many parts of my state, but tribes sell them on reservations. Some very nice teenagers came over to us – seeing there were young kids with us – and said they were going to set off some fireworks. I was extremely grateful to have the kids as an easy excuse to leave, so I hightailed it back to the car as quickly as I could. We could hear the booms as we drove away, and I was happy to go home and try to tell my dogs we weren’t under attack. Every year, every firework that explodes feels like a reminder of the broken American promised land, where the crimes are piling up.

Meanwhile, Bruce Springsteen is still selling out stadiums and making everyone on the Jersey Shore proud. Those stadiums packed with fans listening to Bruce’s messages of working-class freedom make me hope that every single one of them will be in the voting booth. This year, on my birthday, I will be at a different beach with my family, hoping to avoid fireworks and trying to keep up with my nieces as they run through the surf.

I think about those Jersey summers and how I was only a part of that squad because of family history. Which brings me to this: I had a boss tell me this year that if I don’t think it’s psychologically safe, or if I don’t think people in the room will understand me, or if I don’t think I am going to win – that I don’t show up.

No boss has ever been that honest with me before, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I didn’t tell my Jersey squad they were a little bit racist. I didn’t tell the teenagers that I left the beach because I hate fireworks. I can code-switch, but I don’t always truly show up. And the more I think about it, the more I think our entire country needs this feedback. We need to do more – to show up. Not just for the people who agree with us, but for everyone.

I don’t have answers. On this birthday, I am going to float out past where I can stand and let the waves crash over me as a constant reminder that the earth will always have a power greater than fireworks, and that we get to live here and appreciate it. Maybe the ocean will give me some ideas.

When people inevitably ask me, I’m going to say no, I never thought the fireworks were for me. As we agreed in the ocean that day, they suck. Every year I want to see them less and less. But if a stranger who shares my birthday wants to celebrate with me, I welcome that. Welcoming strangers is what the holiday should be about.

Happy 250th birthday, United States of America.

And happy birthday to me.

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Hello children, because we all are,

So so many comments and submissions from you all lately – as well as so many of the recent memoirs I read before I stopped reading them while writing my own* - have the same theme. Essentially: “My mom was a narcissist or had some other form of mental illness, generally undiagnosed, that caused her to treat me meanly and/or neglectfully growing up and she still does it.” In messages, notes and stories and in person, you’ve told me about ways that your moms generally dismissed and sometimes competed with you. You’ve said that they didn’t respect your boundaries and that you’ve never felt the type of unconditional mother’s love that you have heard about or seen elsewhere. Eating disorders among these moms seem rampant.

I don't often discern by gender and often won’t categorize by age, but the submissions on this topic have been primarily from women who are in what I think of as that “original Sassy reader age range,” meaning they are now roughly in their 40s and 50s.

I have been devising theories about why it is that mothers of this generation would have these traits in common and wanting to hear about what happened exactly and how it’s impacted you. So as she explains in the intro to her story below, I texted Leslie. (Backstory: Leslie wrote the brilliant and unforgettable series here about discovering her husband's affair and the surprising way she handled it. I mean, I love everything that I publish on AJPT for one reason or another - sometimes love-hate, as in the case of some Unpopular Opinions especially - but if you're going to read one thing on this whole site - though why you would deprive yourself like that is beyond me and live a little! - her affair series is the one not to miss, I swear to you and you'll thank me I'm sure, so check it out right now and come back if you want, because the rest of this isn't going anywhere. If it gives you any indication how revealing and vulnerably exposing the story is, Leslie started out using a pseudonym, but when you all lovingly supported rather than judged in the comments, she revealed her real identity. I love you all when that happens.) I had seen glimpses of this narcissist mom theme in Leslie’s writing and wanted to know if Leslie would tell the story of her own mom experience as part of this apparent (to me) cultural phenomenon. She said yes obviously, because here we are.

What I hope this series (starting today) will do is twofold (and I can’t believe I used the word twofold either): Show off Leslie’s clear and beautiful-always writing and her riveting-always personal stories - this time about her mom. I also hope that it provides a place (that would be the comments below) for you all to say if you've had related experiences. I'm dying to know how widespread this is and dying to know how we can help each other out through it. I did not have this experience with my own mom – not that any mother-daughter relationship isn't without some turmoil – but I sure am hearing it a lot from all of you. I'm wondering if it's because your moms were part of the first generation who were taught to take care of themselves and that being selfish and putting their needs first, over their families even, was not only acceptable but admirable. I think they were the first to widely see getting divorced as an achievement and a positive step toward growth rather than shameful. (I just heard on NPR today that it was with this generation that the majority of divorces began being instigated by the wives - and that women who are now in their 40s and 50s initiate 70% of them.)

Anyway, I'm really curious about all of your relationships with your mothers and let's see how many of you can relate to at least some part of what Leslie so eloquently describes starting here below. I will see you in those comments that I love so much. Thank you for yours in advance!

XO always, Jane

PS I'm going to start writing back next week to all the people who are still in the running for the first AJPT reader-sourced writing and editing position. I apologize for how long it's taking, but I am reading carefully every email from the thousands of you who wrote in and it's so important to me to be respectful of and match the efforts you each put into this. So some of you should start to hear back from me by email soon and if you don't, don't worry because I'm going to do another sweep here after to make sure nothing got lost in the shuffle and my goal is to make sure every single person of the thousands of you who wrote gets some closure on their application one way or the other. If I had been a planner, I would've set up a separate email for this but I don't tend to think that way or take that kind of time when I’m excited. Which is always. On the positive side of that lack of efficiency, I have read many of your applications five times or more and in many cases, I see something great in the third read that I didn't see in the first, so thanks universe for working it out for all of us regardless always.

PPS For those free shirts and free issues of Sassy I mentioned under the subject line in your email and above, look here for the details and get yours. The best way to do that is to upgrade your subscription and get the shirt for free because that's a win win win win all around and helps pay our writers, one of which can be you if you want to send a submission to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com and yeah wow that was a long intro. Sorry, Charlie!

*I realized this past weekend (when I got to spend quality time with so damn many people I love and haven’t seen in ages - including a highlight of making great new friends with the amazing Brandi Carlile - ok that’s my name drop quota fulfilled for this post - check!) that I will be getting the question “How is your memoir coming along?” from every kind and well-mannered and sweet non-egomaniacal person I see until the book is published. It feels similar to my lifelong-anxiety-poking “Have you packed yet?” (when I always want to scream, “Of course not!!! Do you know me?!??”). So I hope to come up with a nice answer I can say to everyone that will be respectful and appreciative and not tell them more than they care to hear - something quick that closes that potential conversation right up. Tell me what you would use in these situations where you’re asked something you don’t want to answer, in order to avoid having a panic attack every time please and thank you!

Shop While We Are Losing Money On These!

NOTE ON THE BUTTON ABOVE: We priced these brand new shirts and then Printify raised their rates so that we are losing money on them now but that’s not your fault so grab yours before we have to raise the dumb prices. I love you and you have great taste!!!!

By Leslie

Last year, while writing about the spectacular implosion of my marriage for Jane’s IHTM column, I wrote briefly about my mother and her abusive behavior on the heels of a phone call in which I had revealed to her my (ex)husband’s affair, which was ongoing at the time.

Several women responded to that piece of my story. Jane then encouraged me to write a separate piece just about my mother, and I agreed, but it’s taken me a minute to get started because I didn’t know where to begin. My marriage story had a clear beginning, middle, and end. This story involves a lifetime of experiences that began in childhood and impacted almost every area of my life.

My story, while certainly not as harrowing as many (I was raised with a certain amount of privilege in an affluent area of Los Angeles), is the story of an empath born to a narcissist with Borderline Personality Disorder who was also anorexia-adjacent.

It is the story of the never-ending struggle to find safety in a landscape filled with emotional landmines and constantly shifting goalposts, and of the many adaptations children must make when they cannot fight or flee the adults responsible for their literal survival. The empath/narcissist relational dynamic is one of the most toxic there is. The head-spinning behavior I was subjected to was sometimes subtle, at other times shockingly overt.

As I write this, my mother is 92 years old. We are currently on speaking terms, but that has not always been the case, as you will see.

My hope is that by telling my story, other women who have had, or are having, similar experiences will feel less alone. I wandered the metaphorical desert for much of my life with more questions than answers, and I carried a lot of shame that was never mine to bear.

DISCLAIMER: Any insights I offer into the mind of someone with NPD and/or BPD come from my own experience, the feedback I received from therapists, and my own research. I am not in any way equipped to give advice or to suggest that any of the actions I took are right for anyone else. I am not an expert, a licensed therapist, or a mental health professional. I can point you towards resources that may be helpful, and I will share a couple of those here, but everyone must negotiate their own journey with the narcissist in a way that makes sense for them, hopefully with the help of a professional specializing in narcissistic abuse.

*************************************************************************************************************

THE STORY

It is Wednesday, March 13, 2024. I am standing on a ladder in my art studio at the Beacon Arts Building in Inglewood, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles. My 400 sq. ft. studio is on the fourth floor of what used to be a storage facility for the Bekins Moving and Storage Company, until some guy who owns several IHOPs all over L.A. bought the building and turned it into creative spaces.

Because this was formerly a storage facility, my studio consists of four concrete walls and no natural light, except for a small opening high on one wall where a square has been cut out of the concrete to accommodate a fan, which provides the only ventilation.

I am currently in the process of dismantling my favorite part of the studio, an entire wall covered in magazine pages, photographs, and various ephemera; a vision board of sorts, the outward representation of my inner world and all the things that move me: nature, fashion, art, words, etc. - me on a wall, essentially - when my phone alerts me to a text.

I am in the throes of packing up my studio, and I am sad about that; post-pandemic, my once steady income stream is not what it used to be, and although I am selling my art, it is not enough to sustain a studio and an apartment in a city that has become increasingly expensive.

Cardboard boxes in varying stages of packed-up-ness, (a term I just invented!) sit open on the floor below me, awaiting paint mediums, brushes, squeeze bottles of Golden acrylic paint, and all manner of art supplies - pieces of my heart relegated to the inside of a box, and then, ironically, a storage facility, until who knows when.

It is a miracle that I am making art at all, because my mother has always been the artist in the family, and although I have always been creative, I never once considered becoming a painter until I was well into my 50s. Making art is my mother’s domain - the place she shines - and to shine as brightly, or, God forbid, brighter than her, comes with potential consequences.

It is an unspoken rule; the message is subliminal, the agreement tacit: to be highly visible, to claim your gifts, to be confident, upsets the ecosystem.

It’s a real mindfuck, because at first, you may receive glowing reviews and compliments about your gifts and talents, especially if they can be perceived as a direct reflection of the narcissist and their gifts; if the narcissist can somehow take credit for your talent and your wins, you may be safe, but even then, the tables are bound to turn at some point; at some point, you will have stepped out of bounds, become too much, too big for your britches, too happy, too (fill in the blank). The storm clouds will gather and swirl above your head, and the narcissist will gaslight you into believing that you alone are responsible for this sudden change in the weather.

I step down from the ladder, retrieve the phone from my work table, and look at the name on the screen.

What.

The actual.

FUCK.

Following a CPTSD diagnosis in 2019, several years of therapy (the talking kind, the somatic kind, and the EMDR kind), and a year of non-stop emotional abuse in 2023, I finally found the courage to go no-contact with my mother. Even after all that therapy, just seeing her name on my phone now sets my nervous system back in a way that surprises me, and is simultaneously all too familiar.

The last nine months have been the most peaceful of my entire life. Whatever misplaced guilt I initially felt about going no-contact with a parent is long gone. My mother is 90 years old, and I am pretty much all she has, having cut most people out of her life, but I can finally, finally look back with clear eyes and the full knowledge that, regardless of her own childhood trauma, there is no excuse for the emotional neglect and abuse I was subjected to.

My mother’s weapons of choice are the pen and the keyboard. She is incapable of having difficult conversations, so uncomfortable in her own skin that she sends scathing letters, emails, and texts that could level a tall building. She is not interested in repair; she is interested in being right and having the last word. Over the years, she has, proudly, on occasion, read me break-up letters she has sent soon-to-be-ex friends, delighting in her own cleverness and her “I showed them!” level of finger-pointing, wearing her smug self-satisfaction as a badge of honor.

Despite being the common denominator in all her relationship challenges, she is never part of the problem; only the victim.

The path to going no-contact with my mother was a long and winding road that began with the death of my stepfather (who I will be referring to simply as “my dad”, or “my father” from here on out) in May of 2014. By the time he passed, he and my mother had been divorced for years, but they had remained mostly friendly, except for those periods when he became the target of her misplaced rage and accusations. I will delve more deeply into their dynamic later, but there was a lot of triangulation, one of my mother’s specialties, wherein I became her confidant and the sounding board for all her righteous indignation and grievances about my father. It was highly inappropriate, and I hated her for it. After he died, she set her sights on me, and the abuse, gaslighting, and stonewalling escalated exponentially. More about that later!

In January of 2014, my dad entered the hospital and remained there for two months after repeated episodes in which his blood pressure would drop suddenly, causing him to pass out; paramedics would be called, but by the time they arrived, he would have stabilized, and he routinely refused to let them take him to the hospital. His private physician could not figure out what was wrong with him or how to stabilize his blood pressure long-term. These episodes began escalating by the end of 2013, and following several more falls within a 3-4 week period in January of 2014, I insisted he surrender to the paramedics. We needed answers.

For the first week or so of those two months, my mother accompanied me to the hospital daily, but she soon became bored with (and annoyed by) my dad’s condition, so she stopped going. She was absolutely incensed that my dad had the nerve to ask her to stop by his house and pick up his newspaper every day (it was on her way), and she quickly decided she was done; to be fair, they weren’t married anymore, so I’m not sure she owed that to him, but she showed no empathy, no compassion, no concern. She stopped asking me about him altogether.

My mother is great at making grand, sweeping gestures and swooping in like Florence Nightingale at the first sign of a crisis, but the minute it becomes clear that ongoing support will be needed, she loses interest and inevitably turns into Nurse Ratched.

My dad returned home after two months to round-the-clock caregivers, but he never quite returned to being his former, vibrant, funny self. In May of 2014, he again ended up in the hospital, this time in the ICU. I had stopped by to see him that morning and knew immediately something wasn’t right. He was seated in his wheelchair, but could barely lift his head to speak to me. Even with what I knew to be his new “normal”, this was deeply concerning, and when his vital signs remained questionable by the afternoon, the paramedics were called, and he went back to the hospital.

As I sat alone in the waiting room of Cedars Sinai Hospital, less than twenty-four hours after my dad was admitted for what would turn out to be the last time, my mother called, not to ask about his condition, or even to see how I was holding up, but to share with me the very exciting plan she had hatched overnight. Her enthusiasm was instantly triggering, her inability to read a room astonishing. I was worried and scared, awaiting any information the doctors could provide as they continued to subject my father’s body to multiple tests, scans, and X-rays.

In a chipper voice, she pitched her idea: She would pay to remodel my dad’s house, then she would live there until she died, and once she was gone, I would inherit a fully remodeled house! My father was still alive, but she was already making big plans for a house that did not belong to her and that my dad had no intention of leaving to her.

It is important to note, for reasons that will become clear later, that she knew before my dad died that he was leaving his house to me. Let’s put a pin in that for now!

I sat, stunned, in the sterile, white, eerily quiet waiting room in the newly constructed ICU wing of Cedars Sinai. It was modern and cold, and I couldn’t help but think that was an odd choice for an already scary place.

Listening to my mother proudly unveil her excellent plan, I could barely keep from yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me right now?!?”

I was in no condition to withstand what would surely be headed my way should I suggest, even slightly, that perhaps her plan was ill-timed and fucking crazy.

“That’s a very generous offer. Maybe we can talk about it later.”

I hated myself in that moment. I had been so well trained to swallow my voice rather than speak the obvious truth; in this case, not just for myself, but for my poor dad, who wasn’t even dead yet. I wanted to explode. I alone was responsible for making decisions on my father’s behalf as he lay in a medically-induced coma, and I was terrified, feeling like a child playing the role of an adult.

My mother didn’t see my father again until the morning he passed, five days later. When it became clear he would not recover, I made the call to pull the plug, and she made one final appearance to say goodbye. Or to make sure he was really dead. I’m pretty sure it was the latter. She appeared unfazed.

Over the course of my lifetime (I am in my 60s), I have seen many therapists, but there are two who were particularly instrumental in helping me walk through my childhood trauma: the first was a gifted somatic therapist I met on Instagram (!) who was the first person to diagnose my CPTSD in 2019, and the second was my EMDR therapist, Bonnie, with whom I began working in 2021. In our initial consultation, Bonnie told me in no uncertain terms that, unlike talk therapy, EMDR therapy comes with an expiration date, and that I would not spend the next several years on her couch, talking endlessly about my childhood; when I was done, I would walk out of her office a free woman, no longer held hostage by my past. She had had so much success using EMDR that she eventually transitioned to using this modality exclusively in her practice.

For the uninitiated: EMDR therapy incorporates bilateral stimulation, using a side-to-side stimulus (in my case, a device called a TheraTapper ™️, which consists of two plastic ‘pods,’ one to be held in each hand, that connect to a small plastic box that causes the pods to vibrate, first in one hand, then the other. There are three small dials you can use to adjust the vibration frequency, duration, and intensity.) This dual attention engages both sides of the brain, similar to the natural processing that happens during REM sleep. The stimulation helps your brain re-link the traumatic memory with adaptive, positive information. The memory loses its emotional charge and becomes just another piece of your past, rather than a recurring trigger.1

After about a year of therapy, Bonnie and I agreed that I was done. In our last session, she admitted to me that at one point during my journey, she wondered whether she would really be able to help me. I’m sorry, what?

In addition to CPTSD, I have also been diagnosed as a HSP, or Highly Sensitive Person, a neurodivergent personality trait characterized by a highly active nervous system. This would surprise everyone I know, because I am a fully present, functioning adult. I am great in social situations, outgoing, and can fit in just about anywhere, but after a lot of socializing, I need a fair amount of downtime to reset my nervous system. HSP’s are finely tuned to non-verbal cues, changes in our environment, and the moods of others; from a young age, I could walk into a room and take everyone’s emotional temperature without even knowing them. I could “feel” them. We feel so deeply that I have to wonder whether that made it harder for me to process and diffuse some of those core memories and traumatic experiences, their residue clinging stubbornly to my psyche.

My memories are not linear. Much of my childhood is a blur. If you were to ask me what year(s) I worked at any particular job, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but I do recall moments and incidents that present themselves like Polaroid pictures frozen in time, or scenes from a movie, including the more upsetting scenes with my mother, like the day in high school when my mother found an (unused) diaphragm in my book bag while I was at my after-school job and wrongfully assumed I was having sex, which I wasn’t; I mean, it would have been the logical assumption, except the only reason I got it was because I had accompanied my best friend to Planned Parenthood so she could get one, because she was going to have sex with her boyfriend and I wanted so badly to be in the club that I decided to get one too. I had no boyfriends in high school, but I did have a situationship with her boyfriend’s best friend, and was eternally hopeful that we would become more. My mother, instead of having the kind of conversation a mother might have with her teenage daughter about that kind of thing, instead wrote me a nasty note and left it on my dresser, then proceeded to give me the cold shoulder, never once offering a conversation or even asking me any questions about it. I never bothered to tell her I was still a virgin because it felt pointless and futile, and she never wanted to hear what I had to say anyway, and I knew how it looked to have the diaphragm in the first place, but also, why the hell was she rummaging through my book bag to begin with?? The boundary violations began so early that I never thought to question them. They just…were.

I worked so hard for so long to unravel the damage and terrible messaging that I had internalized my whole life. I had done the deep work. I no longer needed to feel seen or understood by the woman who had birthed me. I didn’t like her, and I didn’t trust her.

Now standing in my studio, staring at my phone, I have to decide whether to ignore this text or open a door that took me way too many years to become willing to close, despite having been told by more than one therapist that I would be well within my rights to do so, and probably should; in the end, I know that any attempt to ignore her message will only result in non-stop intrusive thoughts and a significant cortisol spike.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, exhale, and open the text.

TO BE CONTINUED… TO FIND OUT WHAT LESLIE’S MOM’S TEXT TO HER SAID AND TO HEAR HOW THIS STORY ENDS, SUBSCRIBE NOW AND WE WILL EMAIL IT TO YOU RIGHT WHEN IT IS PUBLISHED!

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By Jane Pratt

Hi Goobers!

Today is fun because I get to give away free stuff. (It’s also fun because I am on a road trip with my best friend - and I will blame any typos or weirdnesses you encounter here on that distraction. In particular, the first sentence of the next paragraph which any one of you or your children could certainly edit better than I just did.) Here is how the giveaway goes:

Ani (a true creative wizard who I frontal-cortex melded with at our first meeting when she described her hairstyle as”Founding Father” and I read her mind about her favorite tea, favorite color and other less family-friendly – depending on your family – loves) and I designed these new shirts for you. You had been asking for different colors and styles for a while and I was stubbornly sticking with my pink on pink formula. But that all changes today, yeehaw!

And because it is summer and there is global warming… along with new Sassy tshirts in all new color combinations, we are accelerating our global Sassy domination with the release of our first-ever Sassy tank tops. You are welcome, and thanks for the inspiration, Florida reader who never wears sleeves. (Note that next we will be releasing my favorite style so far by far. It is for those of us who do not love to show our arms and do love to hide and also regulate our body temperatures constantly with a zip or a hood up or down. That next release is my favorite most useful style, the hoodie. I can't wait to manufacture them so that I can have one too. Or two.)

Goal: Sassification of this damn country, and the world wherever it’s needed - which is a lot of places currently. So give these shirts away too or do whatever makes you feel good. Make them as ubiquitous as my best friend’s TV show-logo shirts that seem to be on every man, woman, nonbinary, old, young person worldwide (that would be the “Friends” shirt) or at the very least as commonplace as the shirt heralding my other Courtney friend’s husband’s band (that would be “Nirvana”). Make them that prevalent and we will be able to produce massive print runs of a Sassy for today for all of the needy children - and yourselves - AND bribe enough politicians to reinstate Roe v. Wade. Let’s do it!

You can order them right here!!!!

Now this is how to get yours without paying, if you prefer that route: Upgrade from a monthly to an annual subscription (which is a better deal anyway) or switch from annual to lifetime (a true bargain depending on how long you live - start eating your Wheaties now). That way you will get all the goodness of reading even the paywalled juice all over AJPT, plus the joy of commenting and talking to me (I almost just wrote “talking to Jane” third person and thank god I didn’t) AND a brand new shirt of your choice. This offer will be valid until July 5, because who wants any more focus on July 4.

Get your subscription right here!!!!

Either way you get your shirt, tell me what style you chose and why in the comments to qualify to be one of the outstandingly lucky true individuals who will also win a (signed or unsigned - your choice) issue of Sassy. Yes, the good Sassy when I and the original crew were still there, of course. That’s a huge big deal and it’s going to involve me going to the post office, something I am not good at. I’m so not good at it that I bought a whole ton of Mohammed Ali stamps to put on an envelope with a book to send to my mom the other day before realizing there was no way to fit enough stamps on it to cover the mailing cost, so I then pried those off and did it the regular way with a shipping label. While we are talking (or I am) about post offices, here's a maybe slightly more interesting story about me and post offices: After being at Jane magazine for seven years or so, I needed to get a new passport and so my first assistant Karen arranged a car for me to go and pick it up and marked down “Passport Pickup” as an appointment on my calendar. I was so out of touch with regular life at that point that I walked into the post office with three others staff members and had one of them walk up to the counter before me to announce “I have Jane Pratt here for an appointment.” I didn't even realize, until the counter person rolled her eyes and pointed to the passport line, that you just go get in line like everybody else. I had not mailed anything myself in years.

Also, no matter how you get the shirt – by buying it or by upgrading your subscription: My customer service is excellent – as anyone who has received a free shirt from me before can attest (and please do attest in the comments because that will probably help sales). The reason it’s so exemplary is that it’s me on my little laptop manually putting in your address so you get your shirt. I love doing it too. And I love you the most of all!!! Stay Sassy! Or whatever other better phrase makes sense there.

Love, Janey Jane

PS…

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LEAVE A COMMENT ABOUT ANYTHING YOU WANT TO COMMENT ABOUT, SERIOUSLY. BUT ADD YOUR FAVORITE SHIRT STYLE AND COLOR IF YOU WANT ME TO CONSIDER GIVING YOU AN ISSUE OF SASSY TOO. THAT’S IT!

Hello, Weird Ones!

I am aiming to make this intro historically short, because the story that follows it today is meaningful and I don’t want any of my usual bullshit to detract from that. HOWEVER, if you are someone who like me quickly cancels subscriptions when you get the emails that basically serve as a reminder that you signed up for something that you didn’t really want to deal with, I encourage you to wait to cancel until after my next email (other places call it a Newsletter), because in that one I am going to be giving away a TON OF FREE CLOTHES AND SASSY MERCHANDISE that I think you are going to love. Plus it’s free to you subscribers, so even if you don’t love it, who cares. Give it away.

As much as I appreciated the concept of one day becoming the “figurehead” editor that people used to say I was back when I was a 24-year-old punk running Sassy magazine, I then and now still get hyper deeply involved (unhealthily codependently so) in everything I publish. So there is always a story about the story and this one, as you will see in the text exchange between me and Charlie below, made me cry.

I love Charlie’s writing and his honesty and openness and if you get to the end of this piece and its final photo without at least that pre-cry feeling in the back of your throat, let me know how you were raised or what type of therapy you are in. Either way, I am making this post free to everyone and the comments open to all so you can tell me there if you teared up or not. Or anything else you want to say, including Go Knicks!

I love you and I thank you for being part of this emotional place.

xoJane

PS My next email will also contain the exciting FINAL hiring announcement for those of you who are still interested in the writing/editing job here. The candidates narrowed down yourselves from the thousands into the hundreds in the last interview round and you are all still SO GOOD. So I won’t keep you waiting beyond the next one of these non-newsletters, I promise.

Kind of a quiz: Are you Sassy?

By Charlie Connell

My first taste of international soccer was in 1990 when I attended a friendly between the Soviet Union and the United States at Stanford Stadium. A year later, the Soviet Union would be in tatters, but the Reds were dominant that day as they cruised to a 3-1 victory.

I was there with my friend Tim and his dad, a soccer-obsessed man and local coach who would go on to throw a temper tantrum on the field after my team beat them for the Walnut Cup. Like pretty much every other kid who grew up in California in the 1980s, I played soccer growing up, but I never really cared much about the sport from a spectator’s perspective. I mostly liked playing keeper because they let me wear my Hartford Whalers hockey jersey and I didn’t have to run around that much. But sitting in that stadium with 60,000 people, plus a dash of Cold War-fueled sports jingoism, worked its magic on me, and I was hooked.

I may have only been 10 at the time, but I knew on the way home that someday I’d go to a World Cup match. Now here I am at 45 and the World Cup Final is going to be played 6.8 miles from my apartment — that’s practically spitting distance! — and despite being smackdab in the middle of the middle class, I’d have to sell every single one of my possessions to get a single ticket in the upper deck for Norway/Senegal, the cheapest of the matches at Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. When it was announced that the United States would be hosting this year’s tournament, my mind was filled with sepia-toned images of me crashing on couches around the country, before going to a match and screaming for the glory of Ireland (or South Korea, or Ghana, or whoever. But not England. Never England). Instead, I’m left sitting at home, watching the World Cup on TV, the same way I have for every tournament since 1994.

Actually, that’s not true. Eight years ago, I watched 63 of the 64 matches played in Russia. Without accounting for stoppage time (if I were to take the time to explain the intricacies of the clock in soccer, you’d unsubscribe from Another Jane Pratt Thing immediately, and frankly, I wouldn’t blame you), that’s 5,670 minutes of soccer. If we make a tidy little estimate and add some stoppage time to pump that number up a tad, you’ve got four entire days of watching soccer.

It was by far the most engaged I’ve ever been with the event, or really any sporting event, in my entire life. I don’t know if I’ve ever binged a show with this much regularity or dedication. I was locked in, as the kids say (although if I know the phrase, it’s probably cooked by now). And yet, I barely remember anything about it. There isn’t a goal that comes to mind, nor a controversial red card I’m still steamed about. We didn’t even have the traditional dumb-as-hell off-the-field controversy involving the U.S. team because they had the audacity to crash out to Trinidad and f’n Tobago during qualifying, so how the hell is my brain so dysfunctional that I could have watched four days’ worth of soccer with nearly zero memory of it?

It’s all about timing and location. I wasn’t watching all of those games at home, or in a raucous stadium, or at the bar with friends. Over the next month, there will be dozens of different commercials showing enthralled fans experiencing football glory in those places, as well as many others, but I guarantee there won’t be an ad recreating how I watched the tournament — sitting in a green vinyl chair in the ICU unit of Baptist Medical Center in Jacksonville.

My mom had a stroke in late May 2018. I had talked to my mom a few days before. We talked about the usual stuff — my dismal job prospects, the Red Sox, how downhill one of her former favorite restaurants had fallen — as well as the upcoming trip my parents were taking to southern Illinois for a Connell sibling reunion. Sometime between that call and when they were supposed to leave, she had a stroke in the laundry room. My dad was there, and she was able to get to a hospital quickly. By the time I was able to fly in the next day, she had been moved from the local hospital in Fernandina Beach to the aforementioned ICU. I took an Uber straight to the hospital, and when I found the room, my dad had stepped out for a bit. There was a nurse who had me put on a comically small sterile gown over my clothes, then I think they explained a little about how she was doing. But it may as well have been the unintelligible honking made by Charlie Brown’s parents, because all I could focus on was this Charlie’s mom lying unresponsive in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines. There were so many machines.

Those first few hours felt like a firehose of information was spraying me against the wall; it was nearly impossible to make sense of any of it. I had no idea how long it would take for her to recover, if full recovery was even on the table at that point, or how intense the process of recovery would be. As far as I remember things, I truly believed that these were the only considerations that needed to be made. The job was to be there every step of the way — from that very moment to full recovery — and I was ready for it. Absolutely buzzing with purpose, I wanted to pitch in and for a second thought that there was actually something I could do. I have no idea where this idea came from — did I think they would deputize me to become an assistant phlebotomist? The reality is that there was nothing to do but wait.

My mom and I used to spend hours sitting at the kitchen table and talking until the wee hours of the morning. For most of my life, she’d have a Diet Coke and a Salem Ultra Light 100; she finally kicked the habit in her sixties, and I’d have a Diet Coke or a whiskey (also dependent on the era). Why should our traditions have to change just because she’s in bed with a tube down her throat, helping her breathe, and mostly unconscious? So I’d talk to her. A lot. About everything — the Red Sox, my friends, my girlfriend (and, spoiler alert, future wife) Kim, my job search, family, what I was watching. There was a lot to cover, as there always was, but a one-sided conversation can only go on for so long, even with a prodigious bullshitter such as myself.

As the hours became days, it got increasingly harder to fill the time. My dad and I were sleeping in the room; we lived a 45-minute drive away, way too far away in case something changed. For those first few days, my mom’s sickness consumed every minute of our attention. Still, after days of jumping at every beep and memorizing the acceptable range across all the categories on the heart monitor, my brain was on the verge of liquifying without at least a little escape.

Right on cue, Russia opened up the 2018 World Cup with a 5-0 thrashing of Saudi Arabia, and my prayers for a distraction had been answered. The group stage of the World Cup delivered three games per day, spaced out beautifully to give me a bit of respite. Having the games on distracted me from obsessively googling “how bad are strokes” for the 10,000th time, but I could watch them sitting in the green vinyl chair right next to my mom’s bed, staying alert for any change in her status or a doctor’s visit, and free to keep on running my mouth to continue our 37-year-long ongoing conversation. Since the games were in Russia, there was a morning game, a noon game, and a 3 pm game. Just like that, I fell into a routine.

I’d wake up ridiculously early each morning with an x-ray tech shaking me awake and putting a lead blanket on me because the hospital doesn’t just hand out free vasectomies via radiation. I’d stumble down to the cafeteria, get some breakfast and a coffee, then watch the first match. When it was over, I’d give my mom a kiss and head outside to read or walk around. I spent a lot of time sitting next to a metal frog. Once I was refreshed, I’d head back in to spend a few more hours with my mom and watch the noon game. Then, when it was over, my dad and I would go grab lunch (hospitals have remarkably tasty corn dogs, FYI) and be back in time to watch the third match of the day.

Sitting there and watching my mom sleeping while attached to tubes and “wearing the hat” (the term my dad coined for a device with a ton of sensors and wires she had on her head to monitor her brain function) unsurprisingly led to some very dark thoughts. Beyond the pessimism and fear I was trying to build a dam to keep away was that same formidable opponent from before — helplessness.

There was nothing I could do, and while I accepted that, it still tore me to shreds during my idle moments. Watching the World Cup gave my days a structure. Or at the very least, the concepts of a plan for structure. My desire to watch the matches forced me to squeeze other necessary activities around them. Prior to my mom’s stroke, the longest I’d spent a hospital in a single stretch was under 10 hours. Now I was living in a hospital, living out one of my worst nightmares move at a glacial pace. Each day brought just enough good news to keep hope, but never enough to begin crafting an action plan for the unknown “what happens next.” I was living in limbo, and it decimated my ability to be a functioning person. Some days, I’d have three or four meals (while grabbing snacks every time I left the room) simply because the quick sugar rush gave me a feeling besides terror. Then some days I wouldn’t leave the ICU room at all, I’d just stare and think as many positive thoughts as I could; it felt like the only thing I could control. I needed a schedule, and a silly little soccer tournament provided it.

For three 90-minute periods each day, the only whistles were coming from the TV. The only time my blood pressure went up was while yelling about an egregious red card. The only drama I was focused on was the fallout of Spain flaming out to the hosts early in the knockout stages. I cheered for all six Harry Kane goals (COYS), and booed every time a Portuguese player hit the deck faking an injury (there was a lot of booing). All the feelings and concerns I had were washed away, helping me keep my strength for the moments that would call for it.

Every day was a variation of the same. The meals and matches changed, the vigil around my mother remained the same. By the time I had really settled into this routine, it had started to become, not normal, of course, but manageable. Like learning any new skill, the more reps I had, the better I was getting at figuring out how to exist in this new terrain. When the doctors came in to give updates, I wasn’t overwhelmed, I was cool and collected, learning about the condition and understanding the gravity of everything. I still couldn’t do anything, but the helplessness was gone. I had learned that my role was cheerleader. Keeper of the vibes. Czar of positive energy. The outcome wasn’t in my hands, but I could keep on telling her every little thing that came to my mind, just like I always had. Things were still dire, but we were figuring it out.

It had been a little over a month, 36 days if I remember correctly, and updates were few and far between. She wasn’t getting drastically better, but she wasn’t getting worse either. Until, on the Fourth of July, things started moving incredibly quickly. Only hours previously, we had been having discussions about where to move her once we were released from the ICU. We had even joked about how she’d enjoy being so close to a Taco Bell. Then something turned, something changed, and recovery was no longer on the table. My dad and I had to make a decision, the type of decision I had been too afraid to even think about for longer than a split second, let alone discuss in any detail. As much as I had agonized over it, both when it was a mere hypothetical and during the recent days it had loomed over everything, it wasn’t much of a decision. She was ready, there was nothing anybody could do. My dad and I got to spend one more day with her, then say goodbye.

The end came many years too soon, but it went exactly how it should have — with the three of us together.

The days after she passed were hectic in all the ways I had prepared for (throwing a funeral is complicated!), but there were so many tasks I never expected. For starters, Martha had a lot of friends and family to notify, so that was quite a task. A death in the family also creates a tremendous amount of paperwork and navigation of multiple bureaucracies. It helps to have a schedule. A routine. And guess what? The World Cup was still going.

It served as a different sort of distraction now. I rooted a little harder for the players and teams I liked, hoping to piggyback on to some joy when I could really use a taste of it. The green of the pitch glowed from the screen while I looked through photos, the commentary providing the soundtrack as I put together her eulogy. This is almost embarrassing to write out, but continuing to follow that World Cup felt like it was the only part of my life and routine that wasn’t forever altered by her passing.

I’d wake up in a panic each morning, feeling completely untethered. Walking around the house — her house — I felt like an alien who had been stranded on a distant planet and lost all connection with their mothership. Believe it or not, this is an apt metaphor. Mothership was a nickname I’d given her as a child, a name she often shortened to Ship and signed on my Christmas gifts, even in my thirties. I’m a mama’s boy and always have been. Whenever I stood in the kitchen, paralyzed by a recipe that was probably beyond my skill set, I’d call her. Whenever I had to make any decision, personal or professional, I’d call her. She would make her opinion clear, loudly and obviously, in the boisterous way she did for her entire life, but the trick was that she’d do it in a way that let me find my own path to the right decision. Losing her felt like I’d lost my connection to understanding anything in this maddening, bewildering world. It would have been so easy in those early days to just stare at a wall and wallow in sadness and self-pity, then stay in that hole for a very long time. But there were matches to be watched.

Trust me, I know how flippant this comes across, but if I’ve learned anything over the last eight years, it’s that powering through grief takes thousands of little actions. Some have a massive effect — like all the different ways my dad and I supported each other while trying to hold on to some hope over the long month— while others make a smaller mark, but every bit matters. People shouldn’t trivialize the little things that bolster them during trying times, whether it be a trashy reality show or a melodramatic pop song. The 2018 World Cup wasn’t the foundation that got me through that summer; it was the artistic flourish that made it tolerable.

So for the past eight years, I’ve been looking forward to its arrival. More than that, I’ve been excited to experience it without all of the weight around it, so I could fall in love with it as more than just a distraction, almost as a way to thank the very concept of it for keeping me sane. Yet, here we are, the World Cup has begun, and I am forcing myself to give a shit about it.

Every ounce of love and gratitude I have has been strained by this year’s edition being the least affordable and least accessible version of the tournament in history. All of it is tainted by our baby-brained, FIFA Peace Award-winning president’s reign of terror, and the way Gianni Infantino has stolen football from the people to make it a plaything exclusively for the uber-rich. It leaves me incandescent with rage. Absolutely fucking fuming.

Cause here’s the thing — millions of people have stories exactly like this one, all over the world. Losing yourself in fandom can be a vitally important escape from poverty, abuse, uncertainty, stress, or, in my case, grief. That’s a beautiful thing! Events like the World Cup or the Olympics exist to provide this release for people; the powerful see this and have used them as a cudgel to extract every possible dollar from people who will spend whatever it takes to get those warm feelings. Donald Trump doesn’t give a single shit about the World Cup, but he loves the hideous trinket Infantino gave him, and he really loves having the platform to show how powerful he is by denying visas to Somali refs and threatening to send ICE to the stadiums. What sort of host welcomes guests while simultaneously letting them know they aren’t wanted here, and if they step out of line, our secret police will disappear them? It’s disgusting, heartbreaking, and embarrassing.

This summer should have been a celebration. Instead, it feels like we’re inviting the world to come gawk at the open, festering wound growing within our nation, threatening to end it any day now. I don’t have any illusions about how FIFA has handled their business for the last couple of decades, and I know that the last two tournaments were in spots not exactly known for their devotion to democracy (2018 in Russia, 2022 in Qatar), so the rot goes far deeper than our own issues. After those two countries, the U.S. should look like a shining beacon of freedom in comparison. Instead, we’ve put up a velvet rope, telling the world that only those with enough cash and the fortune to have been born in the “good countries” are welcome, and telling the rest of the planet we’ll suffer your presence for a spell, but you better get the hell out once we’re done here.

When I put myself back in that ICU room and think about the matches I watched, the moments I remember aren’t of amazing sporting feats (although Pavard’s strike against Argentina is unforgettable), but of watching the fans. My memories are of the English supporters going full “limbs” in ecstasy after a goal, the intensity of Iceland’s fans performing their thunderclap at their improbable World Cup debut, and the joy of Senegal’s players dancing in celebration. Spending weeks in the hospital was a grueling ordeal, even when my mom was making improvements, the atmosphere was stifling in its bleakness. But on my screen I was watching the best of humanity. In the stands there was a sea of people from different nations, speaking different languages, practicing different religions, and having different politics, but they put all of it aside to watch 22 men kick a ball around for 90 minutes. Such displays of unity are rare and inspirational, god knows they were for me. When my day-to-day was nothing but reminders of our mortality, the fans reminded me why our lives are so precious in the first place. The feeling was infectious. It reminded me that I shouldn’t be focusing on the dwindling number of hours I had left with my mom, but on the hundreds of thousands of hours we spent together.

My sentimentality levels rank in the world’s top percentile, so I’m always on edge during the early summer, knowing that a brief grief spiral may be imminent. Anything from a person wearing a homely outfit (my mom’s favorite topic of discussion) to a friend refusing to put mustard on a hot dog (she didn’t trust people who disliked mustard) can trigger some sadness. But in my research, which consists of the one World Cup played since she died, an admittedly small sample size, watching the matches gave me that same extra dose of serotonin. When the camera pans to red-clad South Korea fans jumping and singing, I get flashes of watching the same fans crying as they celebrated a strike by my favorite player (Son Heung-min) while sitting next to my mom, and I smile. Yes, the World Cup reminds me of a sad time, but it was a sad time I got to spend with my mom. And as anybody who has lost somebody knows, you’d gladly take a million sad times over no times at all.

What I’m worried about going into this year’s edition, is that all of the authoritarian threats, corruption, and pricing out of regular fans will rob the tournament of the unity I found so inspiring. When fans are scared to come to our country, where will the joy that makes it such a glorious spectacle come from? The oligarchs and tech millionaires looking at their phones in the first row? Haha. We know that’s not happening. The spirit will be lost, replaced by a sterile emptiness and more Coke commercials. As a sports fan, this infuriates me. On a personal level, I’m afraid it will tarnish all of the sweet memories of spending those final days with my mom that the World Cup currently triggers. And that’s unforgivable.

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I will get right to it today (you’re welcome, people who don’t love all my usual parentheticals and tangents like this one). I won’t even tell you the story of the gallery opening I went to last night where I changed on the way and must have dropped my bra somewhere so I went without and ran into about 50 amazing people I haven’t seen in ages, hunching over the whole time with my arms crossed way high up like I was 13. Because, who cares about that?

Here’s the update on the writer/editor hiring situation: A few weeks ago, I asked if any of you were interested in working with me here. I was immediately and thoroughly blown away by the number and then the quality and thoughtfulness of your application letters. There are a couple thousand(!!!) of you that I could bring on board right now and be lucky and overjoyed to work with. Since I’m only hiring one person at the moment, what I am going to do is keep the rest of your letters and contact information flagged for when we get to the next round of hiring – which ideally won’t be long if this scheme of mine works and we are able to post more frequently and then afford to bring another person on. And so on.

So if you don’t get the job this time, that just means that you are still wonderful and that I hope to hire you next round. As a way to narrow it down for what is most needed now, if you’re still interested, here’s what I would love for you to do: Forward me your last email again (the one with the highly accurate subject line saying, “I Am A Good Person”) to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com and put a note at the top of it about the extent of your experience working in the Substack CMS. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a note about what you have done that will enable you to hit the ground running on day one or dive right in with me here or whatever metaphor you want to use for us instantaneously productively joyously seamlessly collaborating. And that’s the whole deal. From that, I will get back to you quickly to offer the position.

I love you! And if me saying that creeps you out, absolutely I understand you withdrawing your application. Now check out your horoscope if you are into that. Bee has such an amazing track record of accuracy here and such a unique way of doing these readings that it’s worth looking at yours below to see, I think.

Ok, enough! Talk to you in the comments and via your sweet emails!

xoxooxooxox Jane

PS I think this is the weakest intro I have written here to date. Agree?

PPS What should I do or not do about someone who claims publicly to have worked with us on Sassy magazine from the beginning when that isn’t true? Let it go or call them out? Thanks for your advice, as always!

By The Zine Witch

“I just found out my friend has been mad at me since early Covid and never told me, which means this insane grievance survived the damn sourdough starter, Tiger King, and multiple variants.” My client says this under the fluorescent lights of our nearest occult store parking lot, cigarette trembling between two acrylic nails like a tiny white surrender flag. She laughs after she says it, but her beautiful moon shaped face does not participate. Her face is doing something much older and sadder. It’s frozen in shock. Her jaw looks too tight. There’s a tear she’s trying to hide glossy with humiliation and worry. The specific expression people get when the body has already accepted a truth the personality is still trying to negotiate with politely. I feel heartbroken for her. I know this feeling all too well. I stare out the window of the parking lot and just allow myself the space to listen and show up.

“I didn’t even know there was a problem,” she says. “I thought we were fine.”

I think about the word fine. People use the word fine the way landlords paint over water damage. People use the word fine most of the time when things are certainly not fine.

And apparently they have not been fine for years. I sit there watching her reorganize the entire past in real time. Every memory developing a second meaning, every text message suddenly radioactive around the edges. Every “love you” now sounding dubbed over in a horror film. This is the real violence of a delayed conflict. The realization that two people have been living inside completely different versions of the same relationship while calling it by the same name. I know this all too well being Autistic. People think they are being polite. But, really they are being codependent.

Lately this has been everywhere in my practice. Old arguments resurfacing like bodies in thawing lakes. These tiny misunderstandings that are suddenly swollen with years of interpretation and private narration. People reopening conversations they thought had died quietly in the corner years ago. Someone casually says, “I think I’ve actually been hurt for a long time,” and suddenly an entire timeline curdles in front of you. The past does not stay still after a sentence like that. It rearranges itself immediately. Memory is frighteningly easy to contaminate once emotion enters it retroactively.

As an astrologer, I cannot help noticing the timing underneath the personal story. We are moving into Gemini season while Uranus settles into Gemini, and communication itself feels electrically unstable right now. Gemini governs language, friendship, siblings, transportation, text messages, daily exchanges, interruptions, gossip, short travel, the nervous system, and all the tiny repetitive interactions that quietly determine whether intimacy survives or collapses. Gemini is fast and cerebral. It moves the way thoughts move when somebody has had too much caffeine and suddenly remembers every humiliating thing that has ever happened to them since third grade. Under Gemini energy, the mind starts opening old filing cabinets at three in the morning. Old resentments come back wearing fresh makeup. Conversations you thought ended years ago suddenly begin speaking again inside your body. That pre Mercury retrograde glow.

And the thing about Gemini is that it does not always care whether communication is accurate. It cares that communication is moving. Gemini is the passing thought, the nervous text message, the half-finished interpretation formed before the other person has even completed the sentence. Right now people are responding faster than they are understanding. Tone is arriving before comprehension. Meaning is developing frostbite crossing from one nervous system into another. A sentence leaves one mouth alive and arrives in another already distorted by fear, projection, exhaustion, memory, insecurity, pride, loneliness, or whatever private ghost the listener happened to wake up beside that morning.

I know this feeling intimately because I am autistic and communication has never felt automatic to me. It has always felt assembled carefully by hand, like trying to build stained glass windows while everyone else throws rocks through them. It caused me social anxiety where I stopped participating in friendship entirely for periods of time. A perpetual loneliness of being deeply unfulfilled on an intimate or celebral level. If I let down my guard, if I truly was myself, I was going to upset somebody and end up in the same predicament as my friend. Because most people do not actually know how to repair things. And what I’ve come to realize, is many neurotypicals don’t want friends. They want acquaintances. Low maintenance. They know how to maintain surface contact. They know how to perform likability. They know how to slowly starve a relationship while insisting everything is normal. But repair is slower and uglier than people expect. Repair requires returning to the scene of misunderstanding without turning it into mythology. It requires tolerating the nausea of clarification. A delayed text becomes evidence. A strange tone becomes biography. One badly timed sentence becomes scripture. Most people would rather finalize a relationship internally than risk the vulnerability required to revisit meaning together and repair.

Repair often begins with a question that sounds almost absurdly simple: “Wait. Are we even in the same story right now?” Because sometimes the first step toward healing is discovering that the argument was never about the original moment at all. It was about the meaning each person privately attached to it while the other person had absolutely no idea a second narrative was even being written.

And this is what I keep watching in my practice lately. Communication revealing the actual architecture of relationships. People are childhood wounds driving cars too fast through rainstorms trying desperately to explain themselves before the light changes. Of course we misunderstand each other. The miracle was never going to be perfect communication. The miracle is finding someone willing to come back after the sentence lands wrong.

Gemini season has a way of dragging the conversation back into the room whether you wanted to have it or not. The text you ignored in February. The resentment that calcified during lockdown. The sibling tension that got swallowed for the sake of “keeping the peace.” The friendship that quietly shifted shape three years ago and never fully recovered. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, and Mercury does not let things sit untouched forever. It wants movement. Exchange. Language. Context. It wants to understand what happened, even if the answer is uncomfortable.

Last week I received an email from a friend who thought we were in a fight because I had gone radio silent during my dental surgery. Around the same time, the front desk worker in our building, who had been there for almost forty years, retired, and we were gifted a temporary replacement named Linda. The first thing Linda asked me was whether I believed in miracles, to which I immediately replied, “Absolutely.” I knew right away this was my person. For the next month, Linda and I would sit at the front desk talking for hours at a time, the kind of conversations where time disappears and suddenly you feel like you’ve known someone forever. I found out she had been homeless and living in her car since an accident in 2024, and somewhere between my teeth, my surgeries, and my new friendship with Linda, I forgot everything else. In my time with Linda, she saw me while I was allowed to be myself, even in fear and pain. I felt safe in that and got lost for a month in the Linda bubble. Meanwhile, my friend had convinced herself I was angry at her and had been replaying a conversation from weeks earlier in her head, when I had made a snarky joke about how much I hate Chris Brown and what I think his fans can all do. I felt terrible. Miscommunications are strange like that. Sometimes while you are busy surviving one thing, someone else is quietly building an entirely different story about you in their head.

And this year there is an extra layer to this Gemini mood board because by the end of the month we are already moving into the pre-shadow of a Mercury retrograde. You can feel it before the retrograde officially begins. Conversations start looping. Old arguments resurface with new information attached to them. People misremember timelines. Someone from your past suddenly appears with a completely different version of events than the one you’ve been carrying around in your own head. Gemini energy moves fast, but Mercury retrogrades force us to slow down long enough to actually hear what was said and what was left unsaid.

Gemini also rules the nervous system, transportation, social media, group chats, rumors, neighbors, siblings, and the strange emotional weight carried inside casual conversation. Sometimes healing this season does not look dramatic. Sometimes it is just finally admitting that something bothered you. Sometimes it is realizing you built an entire emotional worldview around one misunderstanding that nobody corrected. Gemini season can expose the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive uncertainty. Mercury retrograde asks whether those stories are still true.

So, Gemini season asks you the question: What conversation have you been rehearsing in your head for years that might finally need to happen out loud? And what part of yourself has been trapped inside silence because you were too afraid of changing the relationship once the truth was spoken?

Because that is the strange thing about Gemini season. It does not just expose communication problems. It exposes the emotional cost of avoidance. The friendships maintained through politeness instead of honesty. The families that communicate through implication instead of directness. The way people convince themselves they are “over it” while their body still reacts every time the topic comes up. Mercury retrogrades are not only about miscommunication. Sometimes they are about finally understanding what the real conversation was underneath all along.

Best Days This Month For Sex…

I am putting the paywall here so that anyone who likes good sex will have to pay or take out a free trial to learn when this month to pursue that. As will anyone who wants to read their individual personalized predictions below - and anyone who wants to ask astrologer Bee questions in the comments about what’s coming up for you specifically. I use this ploy so that Bee and other writers can get paid. Forgive me. - Jane

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Hi Girlies (in all open-minded senses of the word)!

I just got back to New York on the red eye. After extending my 3-day Malibu visit to over 2 weeks, I still wanted to maximize the waking hours that I was with my great friend, so I left on the latest possible flight. You know that syndrome where whenever you have to pee, the urge gets increasingly dire the closer you get to a bathroom (or in my case, a bush - once on a sidestreet off of Beverly Drive before a meeting and another on the shoulder of the PCH -during this trip alone)? Leaving my friend is like that where the need to talk and hug multiplies exponentially as departure time approaches. I was even frustrated when I got to the airport 45 minutes earlier than I needed to, because I could've had that valuable 3/4 of an hour hanging out with my friend instead, but oh well, unpredictable LA traffic.

As a final name drop (not a lifetime final, as it would be ridiculously unrealistic to promise that, but a final name drop from this trip) for those of you who graciously at least lied and said that you like when I do it, here is a still from a video taken by Michael that I can't show because my old pal and I are talking about our children in it and I know it doesn't seem like it, but I actually do have some discretion and boundaries sometimes. Bono came over for pizza after visiting with Sean Penn down the road and I won't go into everything, but we did get to hear some new music from him and from Michael and from his friend Gavin Friday, all of which I can't get out of my head in the best possible way.

And now for something actually pertinent to your lives and even potentially useful: This week I will be debuting our entire line of new merchandise and asking you to pick the item you most want for yourselves that I will then send out to you lucky first responders for free. All you need to do is want it and deserve it, the second requirement of which you’ve already achieved. Below is my phone’s current photos page if you want to start looking around early.

While we are on the topic, winners of my last little giveaway - featuring the first ever Sassy shirts in an appropriate size range (up to 5XL) were Misses Robin and Lizzy! Your shirts are in the mail! Show us how they look when you get them, please!

I'm going to keep this semi-brief today, by popular command (you're welcome Andy and Charlie and everyone else too polite to tell me to shut up) and let you read this I think incredibly moving and spectacularly written story that I am so lucky Sammi sent in. I also hope you will talk more with me and her about it in the comments, because there is a lot to react to and relate to. Please send your own story submissions for the It Happened To Me column (est 1988) to me at jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com. I would love to feature yours also and pay you for it, of course.

Thanks so much for being here with me. It means a lot especially now that my BFF and I are back on separate coasts doing those extended FaceTimes that we leave open for hours while we run errands, pee, brush our teeth, etc etc - in an attempt to replicate living together as we were.

Be good.

Love love love, Janey. (Don’t mind me while I play around with punctuation. Do it too in your comments if you like and then I will know that you actually read this.)

The Originals Are Here!

By Sammi LaBue

On our 18-month anniversary I stood alone in my first love’s unlit driveway. Later that night, instead of our highly-anticipated fondue date, I got a call from El Paso County Jail. Eighteen years old, he’d been arrested for sale and possession of heroin.

At this point in my life, a senior in high school, I was of two worlds — one that centered around Bible study and ministry and another that was experimenting with drinking and drugs. In both, I was yearning for healing.

My dad had died unexpectedly the day after I kissed Cliff for the first time in my Mercury Mountaineer after Youth Group. It was an unexpected kiss, followed by an even more unexpected death.

I hadn’t wanted my first love to be Cliff. Cliff, who was hilarious and cute to me, but not to the other girls on my tennis team who favored the cool Colorado uniform of the moment: Ugg boots, Soffe shorts, Abercrombie and American Eagle everything else. Cliff played drums, not sports, and wore skinny jeans.

But his ineligibility for prom court meant nothing to me. His contrarian behavior gave me the confidence to explore who I really was in a cliquish high school environment that envied Mean Girls in its insistence on following the status quo. He didn’t think my desire to cut off all my hair was weird. He thought it was great. He thought I was a gifted painter. I wasn’t, but because of him I painted more. As a conservatory musician as well as a screamo band drummer, the CDs he burned for me exposed me to a range of music that still speaks to me today. And most of all, he could handle the deep sadness that would often shroud me as a newly fatherless teen.

On our anniversary, I pulled up to his parents’ house like I had countless times in the last year and a half, this time with a sense of mature wonder at our milestone. But something was off. Finding the long driveway empty of cars, the blinds closed in the windows, all the clues Cliff had deftly debunked with excuses over the last few months returned to me. His absences at school, tardiness for our dates, distant or missed phone calls, his car approaching the Starbucks parking lot from a different direction than I thought he was coming from, my Youth Group leader asking if he was OK while I waited at that same Starbucks, the scabs on his cheeks he attributed to picking acne.

Neither Cliff or his parents would pick up the phone. I drove down to the dark end of their cul-de-sac and cried over the same center console I had leaned over to kiss him that first time 18 months ago before my dad died and everything changed. I imagined approaching my mom about this would only cause more pain. It would either make her retreat further or come fighting to my defense, neither of which felt like the response I needed.

All my childhood, like Cliff, Mom appreciated my uniqueness — she took me to get the pixie haircut and drove me to painting classes — while I wondered who she really was. To me she was all the makings of a mom: affection and order and worry. But I knew so little of who she was before me, it was like that was a different person I would never meet. As if as her daughter, I was supposed to accept that she was and would only ever be “Mom.”

She wore parts of her past on her body. Like the long, jagged scar on her thigh, so evident she’d had to tell my sister and I how it happened. In her 20s, she’d gone to bring her carpet layer boyfriend lunch one day and kneeled behind him while he was working to say hello. The carpet knife in his back pocket was so sharp she hadn’t even noticed it had slashed her before she saw the wound.

In Middle School, I’d been given a sex-ed assignment to interview my parents. I sat in front of a bowl of popcorn in the sunroom off of the master suite where we sometimes watched “Trading Spaces” or “Queer Eye” as a family, eager to be told a story about my mom, like the ones about donuts after church and the high price of milk nowadays like my dad had just told in the living room.

But she did not relax into the leather recliner or cuddle up to me on the love seat. Her pacing filled the room with anxious energy. I followed her with my eyes, my schoolwork packet opened to the page labeled “Mother.” Finally, she sat in the armchair looking past me at the black screen of the TV as if to will it on for some distraction.

I started with something I hoped she would enjoy, sliding my pen down the page to the final section on Love. I asked her about the difference between love and lust, her past boyfriends, and what her first image of love was. The questions, admittedly odd for a school assignment, landed on her like spotlights. Fidgeting, she answered the best she could, not sarcastically or incorrectly but swiftly, concisely.

Finally, I asked her how she knew she loved my father. Then she cried, she wept, and eventually mumbled, “He saved me.”

“What?” I asked.

“He saved me, ok?” she responded in a burst. The kind I hadn’t had yet, and so I didn’t understand. A broken dam of emotion. She went to the bathroom to finish crying, my interview cut short.

That night, I laid in bed wondering what it was my dad had saved her from. I knew that as a girl she grew up in an abusive household in Coney Island, that she and her mother and sister escaped him by taking a cross-country train to California when she was only 12, and that marrying my dad felt like a new life to her. But maybe there was more in between than I’d ever thought. I imagined rescue scenes based on what I’d seen in movies. My dad catching her from a long fall, stopping a car headed toward her, building a fire to warm her through the night. He was a good man and strong, but a goof, an indoorsman, and I couldn’t quite see him as this knight in shining armor.

Now, sitting dumbly in my idling car I felt that maybe I was beginning to understand what needing to be saved meant. Since Dad died, Mom’s loving yet coy attitude had become a vacant one, and I didn’t know how to reach her. I used to lie on my dad’s chest to watch TV like he was a life raft. Now I was out to sea. I took to drinking, smoking pot, reading the Bible, and developing an eating disorder — I would try anything in my search for a preserver.

Being with Cliff felt close to salvation. On dates, we walked the smallish network of streets in downtown Colorado Springs taking artsy photos of people and places with my Polaroid camera and an angsty kind of youthful joy. He taught me about dark humor. About how things can be riotously hilarious and absolutely in ruins at the same time. With him, my grief and my future didn’t feel like they would fight forever. The grief would be there, but so would the future.

But after a year of dating, Cliff had turned vacant, too. We had one class together — choir — and I loved to choose a spot on the edge of the alto section so that I could stand next to him at the edge of the tenors. But suddenly he was late or absent. If he did show up, he’d sit moodily on a folding chair, slipping out before the director could confront him. Like always, we still met at the Fruitopia machine between classes to smooch, but he was always tired and started wearing the same hoodie every day, letting his hair grow longer, where he’d taken pride in his outfits before. After a few weeks of questioning, he claimed he’d been diagnosed with long mono. He had an excuse for everything, and I fully believed our love would endure.

My hazards clicked mockingly. Since it was a Saturday, I decided to tell mom the date had ended early and asked if I could spend the night with a friend.

At 4 am my phone buzzed across my best friend’s satin duvet. Unsleeping, in the outfit I had meticulously curated for the anniversary that never was — black in case of fondue splatter, but lace to keep it classy, the little pearl necklace he gave me for our one-year-anniversary adorning it all — I pressed one to accept an inmate’s call, my heart pounding. He’d used his one phone call the night before on his parents and called as soon as he was able. He told me he’d been using heroin for months. Selling to support his addiction. The truth arrived cold and disappointing as a late dish to the table, though at least whole and something to chew on.

When I made it home, I approached my mom with a determined, desperate energy. I fell apart crying, yelling that it wasn’t who he really was and that she couldn’t break us up. I imagined she would do the Mom thing, yell back, forbid me from speaking to him ever again, but instead she spoke to me gently as if from the end of a long tunnel made of her own grief. Was this Mom, I thought, or someone else? She said she was so sorry. So sorry for Cliff. That she would reach out to his mom. That she felt for him.

The next morning, his face was in the newspaper. Just as my mind began to imagine the judgments and whispers my peers would fill the halls with, Mom announced that I could stay home from school as she calmly poured coffee into a thermos for work.

That day I treated my bed as a rescue boat, the only safe place in a roiling adolescence that was trying to break me. I clutched onto my blanket and the darkness it provided imagining what I might try next for salvation. Harder drugs? Emptying my breakfast into the toilet? Another party?

When Mom returned from work she sat on the edge of the bed and said in an even voice that felt like a different version of herself, “I want to tell you something.”

Her relationship with the carpet layer had gone south because of their shared addiction to heroin. Living together for a short time in Montana, supporting their habit had escalated into burglary. They were hiding from the police behind separate bushes when she decided to make a break for it and leave him behind, buying a bus ticket to Los Angeles where she was eventually set up on a blind date with my dad.

I was stunned. Her long, manicured fingers played with the fold in my quilt, her eyes cast down. She was a little ashamed, revealing such a chink in her Mom armor. But what I heard was the story of a hero. Someone who literally ran through the night away from a very bad situation to give herself a shot at life.

I remembered the way she’d blurted those words — he saved me. But now I imagined her before my dad: Young, scared, and sick, leaving someone she loved for a better version of her life, though she had no one to fall back on. “It may not be time yet, but if you really love Cliff, you have to break up with him. He needs to lose it all to start over.”

She opened my blinds letting in the day’s final golden ray of light and left. I had imagined a brawl, a mom commanding her daughter to leave the love of her life. But here we were instead, two people having weathered our own storms, all full of holes, but capable of moving forward despite them.

Because of her honesty, I was better prepared to approach my boyfriend’s addiction with empathy and maturity. I could have begged to stay with him. I could have gone looking for the drug myself to cope and feel closer to him. But when Mom told me that stepping away was the best course of action, I believed her, because she’d shown me all her cards. At 17, a person was easier to listen to than a parent

After the breakup I drove down his driveway one last time. Instead of meeting my weed dealer, I met my mom at Starbucks where she was waiting, right on time. When they called her name, “Linda,” I smiled, knowing her for the first time. A knowing that would blossom and save me over and over again.

Yes, she was still the woman who had made me dinners I was too picky to eat, who I’d taken turns reading “Harry Potter” with in bed, and who drove me to tennis practice. But that person was Mom, not Linda. At my deepest moment of teenage turmoil, I needed them both.

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Hello, still from Malibu!

Whenever I come out here, we end up extending my stay by days and weeks and sometimes three months. Mostly because being with a best friend is the best. And when your other best friend is in town also and can come over for dinner and sake often, come on, what could really be better than that? You tell me (in the comments, as always)!

I moved locations on the property the other night when Ed Sheeran stayed over, if anyone cares for another little drop of a name there. (I am trusting the sincerity of those of you who said you do enjoy my name drops. The rest of you, please please complain in the comments because I'm a little uncomfortable doing it anyway and I am happy to stop if majority rules!) I met Ed when he was here working on his first record. I've seen him in New York many times after that, including one visit where he gave my little Charlotte a two dollar bill that she kept until just the other day when she really needed money and so she spent it. Which is reminiscent of when Michael Jackson (quite possibly my ultimate name drop, though controversial) gave me a cookie with his face on it while we were visiting his special little bakery house at Neverland Ranch and I brought it back to New York and put it in my freezer where it sat for years until one night around 3 am when I had such bad munchies that I ate it. Like mother like daughter. Pragmatism rules. Also, Ed is purely lovely. And in excellent physical shape. He uses the gym here and I most certainly don't.

Here is what I do instead: Lie around and pet dogs and eat and drink and talk a LOT and work a lot too and write back and forth with you guys still constantly and be happy, as evidenced below.

OK, good news for you all, I think, is that we are releasing a new vastly expanded line of merchandise that is all because of your specific requests for what you need:

Florida reader who said you never wear anything with sleeves, we made your tank! Those of you who, like me, said you prefer to be covered up (arms especially - and who like to tweak your skin exposure levels constantly based on your body temps which change all the friggin’ time) - for us we made a zip up hoodie! Plus much much more! I thought I was going to debut them all here today but the amazing Ani, my gorgeous and gorgeous-hearted partner in creative crime, and I are still finalizing, and I didn’t want to wait to post Robin’s excellent story below because it’s fun and I think you will really like it.

So a few short days from now, I will show you the fruits of your and our labor. And to celebrate and thank you for the inspiration, I will be giving away new items to those of you who upgrade your subscriptions or just make an argument for why you deserve something new and great. (I mean, you all deserve that and so much more, but all you will have to do is ask essentially.) Details and explanation to come.

I love you all so so so so so so much! Even more than I love being here in Malibu and that's saying a lot.

Xoxox Jane

On Sale To Make Way For New Merch!

By Robin Wheeler

Please, in an effort to protect me from myself, don’t dare me to do something. At heart I’m still a rough and tumble ten-year-old who spent too much time running the neighborhood with the three older boys who lived next door.

“Hey Robin! Dare you to climb that giant pile of fill dirt!”

Dirt Mountain? Climbed.

“I bet you can’t run 50 circles while pulling a Radio Flyer wagon without falling down!”

Wagon? Circled.

While my abilities have changed, my attitude has not. The best way to get me to do something is to somehow make it forbidden. This is how my quest for the world’s dumbest tramp stamp began in New Orleans, as many dumb quests do, in 2023.

“Robin,” I said. “You are a 50-year-old heavily tattooed woman with a bare lower back. Bet you’re not brave enough to tattoo something really stupid back there that flaunts societal conventions and mocks the concept of mid-century womanhood.”

Let’s back up a bit to how I became one of many heavily-tattooed middle-aged people after generations of tattoos being taboo.

I got my first tattoo on the day Allen Ginsberg died in 1997. Why did I want a tattoo? I thought they were pretty, and I love new experiences. Pissing off people who need to be pissed off was a nice perk, too.

I was 24 and spent five years trying to find the perfect poppy design for my upper left arm. I planned a quarter-sized bright orange single bloom but Spyder, the tattooist preparing to defile my virgin skin, nudged me into expanding it to a fist-sized pair of poppies. For $75 and the time it took to play the soundtrack to David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” I became the most colorful of clichés—a tattooed Gen Xer.

I waited a decade before getting my next tattoo—a quarter-sleeve of violets symbolizing my kid’s birthdate. Violets are the flower for their birthmonth, and the bouquet’s blooms correspond with their birthdate. At the bottom, a clump of black dangly roots to symbolize family.

And so it went for many years as I amassed a curated collection of body art, all flowers assigned to people I cherished and events that shaped my life. My left arm is covered in a sleeve of floral art, those first two poppies still visible just below my shoulder. There’s a Rose of Sharon on my right inner wrist for my favorite character in my favorite novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” and a jar of my grandmother’s gooseberry jam surrounded by the berries and their blossoms on my calf. Two years after having both knees replaced, I had bright bouquets tied with pink and blue ribbons tattooed over the Frankenstein scars.

By the time I turned 50 I was heavily tattooed with no regrets … and no lower back tattoo, which I considered a point of pride. No reviled tramp stamp for me. I had plenty of beautiful, well-planned tattoos that, according to my mother, would be more at home in frames on a gallery wall. To which I replied, “Ew! You wanna frame my skin? That’s SICK!” Even my one silly tattoo, which I call my big dumb Wilco tattoo, took years of planning because if I was going against my better judgement and getting a band tattoo, I wanted to make sure it was on par with my other pieces.

I take my tattoos seriously. Growing up mired in disordered eating that continued as I grew up to be a fat adult, my body art helped me love my body. Which eventually became a body that endured multiple ruptured ovarian cysts, pregnancy, 34 hours of labor with five failed epidurals, an emergency c-section, another drug failure before I was fully stitched, a month-long antibiotic-resistant staph infection in the incision, and a year of postpartum depression and anxiety that came closer to killing me than anything else.

I got my second tattoo not long after that. It took three hours and in the process I discovered that, while the first 20 minutes hurt like I was being set ablaze, after that I felt euphoric, a feeling I rarely experienced elsewhere. It felt good to be in my body.

The beauty of my tattoos gave me a way to learn how to love how my body looked for the first time in my life. The pain gave me a way to work through anguish I’d bottled up for years. Getting tattooed meant feeling the pain, working through it, and feeling wonderful at the end before taking a couple of weeks to heal and nourish the new skin that grew to replace what the tattoo destroyed. In a life with a body that often felt out of control, tattoos gave me a sense of power over a body that had so often betrayed me, and it didn’t hurt anyone in the process.

But what’s the fun in that?

In February, 2023—four months after I turned 50—my best friend Suzie and I went to New Orleans. She’s even more heavily tattooed than me. On the plane she showed me the website for Electric Ladyland, a tattoo shop near our suite in the Marigny neighborhood, just far enough from the French Quarter to deter a bit of the drunk tourist traffic. Suzie planned to get a little souvenir ink if the shop had time for a walk-in.

I had no interest in getting an impulse tattoo. They weren’t my thing. Besides, in a month I would be visiting my favorite artist in Chicago to finish my sleeve. I’d get my fix soon enough. Living vicariously through Suzie was fine with me.

Still, I browsed the portfolios on the shop's website. Among the old school hearts, skulls, and swallows, a blast of candy pink grabbed my attention. And I knew I would't be leaving New Orleans with a bare lower back. Because I had just found exactly what I didn't know I needed.

“Suzie! I need the world’s dumbest tramp stamp!”

And as any bestie worth the title should do, she assured me that this was the greatest idea I’d ever had. [And as any pushy editor worth the title would do, I got wind of a possible addition to this idea from Robin and said she had better do it AND document it all here for you. You are most welcome. - Sleazy Jane]

That night Suzie got her souvenir tattoo while I sat in our suite, eating a muffuletta and thinking about that damned tattoo design. I was joking when I said I needed the world’s dumbest tramp stamp. I cackled every time we talked about it because it sounded so stupid. But I hadn’t put enough thought into it, or pondered the deeper meaning of what putting this tattoo permanently on my lower back would mean.

It would mean I had a bitchin’ time in New Orleans. And someday, maybe, a medical examiner might get a kick out of it.

I stepped away from my thoughtful, curated tattoos and said fuck it. Life is ridiculous. Get that stupid tattoo.

Joel Van Goor, the artist behind the tattoo, has a portfolio filled with colorful vintage cartoon-style designs, like anthropomorphic cocktails, little citrus fruits on knuckles, a voluptuously melty slice of pizza with pepperoni nipples … This man is a genius! His style didn’t necessarily fit my floral tattoos, but it fit something more important—my personality at age 50—in a way I’d never seen from another artist.

My New Orleans impulse souvenir tattoo wasn’t done on a wild Bourbon Street Saturday night. It happened early on a Monday afternoon in the back of FiFi’s Bywater Beauty Parlour. Suzie brought me an iced latte from the neighboring cafe and, in less than two mostly pain-free hours, Joel created the tramp stamp I’d been dreaming of for a whole 48 hours. In orange, not pink, because I love anything that tastes like St. Joseph’s baby aspirin.

It is glorious.

It is ridiculous.

It is all mine.

TO SEE THE WORLD’S DUMBEST TRAMP STAMP, TALK TO ROBIN IN THE COMMENTS ABOUT HOW SHE FEELS ABOUT IT NOW AND BERATE ME FOR PUSHING ROBIN TO DO THIS, SUBSCRIBE HERE! YOU CAN USE THE FREE TRIAL OPTION I JUST ADDED SO YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO PAY ANYTHING….

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I am writing this from paradise. Otherwise known as my best friend Courteney Cox’s Malibu place (I am tempted to call it a compound, but she is humble so let’s just say place). So if I seem a little soft today, it’s because I am. Bitchiness and sarcasm will return as soon as I land back in New York, no doubt, so not to worry - or just skip my posts from here if you really can’t stand this mellowed out version. Being around Court is the best part of everything here and then on top of that, we are in the most gorgeous and delicious environment anyone could conjure up. Ocean, butterflies, everything you could dream of really. This is my heaven.

I hope you spent at least part of this long weekend in your own heavens. (Mine are not all this pristine or glamorous. I have also found heaven as the only audience member in a gritty little San Francisco movie theatre watching a low-budget experimental documentary that no one else I know has seen.) Tell me yours, if you like, as well as whether you experienced it this weekend, in that no-judgment zone that is the AJPT comments below!

Last night here was especially fun because I invited my other best friend, Michael Stipe, over and he brought an old friend and coworker I introduced to Michael way back and haven’t seen in maybe a decade, Spike Jonze. Spike made me laugh so hard by out of the blue (over the best pizza) blurting the name “Dale Lang,” which would only be funny to a handful of people who were around for Spike’s days editing Dirt magazine (son of Sassy). It had me doubled over. I love him.

Another thing you can do in the comments is hate me for the name-dropping. (I’m sure it’s especially tiring when I drop the same damn names over and over again. And especially obnoxious when I refer to someone famous on a barfy one-syllable basis. But remember that most of them weren’t names when I started dropping them.) Or talk about anything you want to there. I will be hanging out comment-ready and especially chatty because it’s been days since I’ve seen you and we have a lot to catch up on.

I still love you!

Mellower Jane

PS Jianna, who wrote today’s featured story about losing her business, is the most patient writer we have had here to date. (Either that or she has been torturing a voodoo doll of me for months.) I won’t even look back at when this story was accepted, but as you all know, I am hiring some help here soon (maybe you! I hope so!). So if you submit your stories - Unpopular Opinions and It Happened To Me pieces are always needed - to me at Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com, it won’t take nearly as long for me to publish yours. Thanks Jianna and I’m happy to publish this while we are both still alive! You’re welcome!

PPS Trendsetters that you glorious larger-size readers are, the red T-shirts I made specifically for you in 4XXL and 5XXL were instantly coveted by people outside that size range. So I’m now making them available for all sizes. BUT I still have one left to give away for free to anyone who wants to claim it in one of the larger sizes, either 4XXL or 5XXL. It’s not that it’s already made and just sitting there. It’s that I made a promise to give two away and I want to honor what I said, so I would love to make it for you if you want it. If you do, say so in the comments please and we will exchange info. Yay!! Free clothes!

PPPS If you haven’t already voted for all of the controversial books you’re interested in reading (and there are prizes involved!), you can still vote now before we close out the ballots and announce the winners next week. So do so if you please, please!

All The Famous People Wear Them

By Jianna Heuer

People never start something thinking about the ending. Marriage, parenting, careers, friendships, anything we build, is all embarked on with hope and an almost delusional sense of capability. We begin with the sense that we can’t fail, which allows us to put in all the grueling hard work to make it something amazing. Which is why when it all falls apart or leaves us or dies, the grief of the loss feels like it could just fucking kill you.

***

Have you fulfilled THE dream? You know the one. Maybe you have never told anyone about it because it is just so dear to you. Perhaps everyone in your life knows that if you could do anything, THIS would be it. Most of us have one, something we would do if we had all the money, time, and energy. Mine was opening a bookstore cafe, and when my husband, Jason, and I moved to Rockaway Beach in Queens, I found the perfect place to do it, and on February 1, 2020, at 10am, the dream became a reality. As Circles by Post Malone played and the sunlight hit Jason’s gold hand-painted lettering that displayed our shop name on the fifteen-foot picture window at the front of the store, I flipped the sign on the door from closed to open for the first time.

The first six weeks of Avoid The Day Bookstore and Cafe’s life were brilliant. The shop was always packed. Families, writers, readers, coffee addicts, and little old ladies drinking chai tea and eating a scone from one of our two local bakeries filled our store with laughter and conversation. We hit every financial benchmark we set. We had put everything into the store, three months of manual labor to get it up and running. We didn’t touch the electric or plumbing for fear of shock or flood, but every other part of the build out was all us. We tore down three drop ceilings, ripped old tile from the walls, painted the floor and walls, installed all the cabinetry and bookshelves, and finally did the most fun part, ordering and organizing all the books. We also did all this while maintaining our careers, me as a psychotherapist and he as a book designer and typography teacher. Those months of creating the store, we knew we were tired but couldn’t feel it; the excitement and anticipation were overpowering.

In those first weeks, we didn’t just succeed financially; it felt like every part of the vision we had for the shop exceeded our expectations. Couples would lie on the window seat and read each other Pablo Neruda’s love poems. As I prepped someone’s coffee behind the bar, I could hear people walking by singing the songs to themselves that were playing from our store’s Spotify mix we painstakingly curated, little snippets of The Violent Femmes, Pink Floyd, and Lizzo softly crooned as they explored the shelves. We got as many compliments about our playlist as our book selection. Kids played in the children’s area in the tent we set up with fairy lights and thick shag rugs, magnetic toys, and books strewn about and they chatted to each other about what happened at school or parents read to them from Goodnight Moon or Madeleine. We imagined them growing up and falling in love at our tables or remembering fondly the safe space we provided them when they were young.

Jason and I embraced our strengths at the store as so many parents do while raising their kids. He is a fantastic host and loves interacting with all sorts of people. I am great at scheduling, setting up events, and organizing. We both love book ordering and chatting with people about music, literature, and art. Somewhere in the process of hosting pop-up bookstore for the two years before we decided to open the storefront, Jason had started to dream with me, realizing many of his skills as a graphic designer and ex-open mic poetry host actually made this an ideal lifestyle for him as well.

A government mandate forced our first unexpected closure on March 22, 2020. COVID-19 had arrived, ending the fantasy we had worked so hard to bring to life. Following the stories about the virus we had already canceled events a few days earlier and started wiping down door knobs, counters, and tables with a sanitizing solution we googled how to make. We thought it would pass in two weeks, like everyone said. We couldn’t even begin to conceive what actually unfolded.

For the first year, we pivoted every which way. Put all 2,056 books online, sold merch, held Instagram author events and puppet shows, re-opened on the street outside of the store, installed a pickup window in our door, bought air purifiers, and spent money we didn’t have on advertising and building a sidewalk cafe.

We had opened the store using all our savings and credit cards, a $50,000 budget we some how managed to stay under, but didn’t have extra, and we weren’t bringing in much. In 2021, once people were vaccinated, things got a bit better, but it never returned to the thriving community space it had been when we began. By 2022, we were working seven days a week between our two jobs and the bookstore, investing our own money to the tune of $1,500 a month just to keep the place afloat. Despite hosting numerous events, such as happy hours and game nights, people weren’t showing up.

At the beginning of May 2022, Jason broke first. “I can’t do it anymore. Sitting in our beautiful empty store day after day is too depressing.”

As Harry Styles’ “As It Was” played on the radio, he wept silently as he spoke. I hadn’t realized how much until I looked at our kitchen table and saw two perfectly round pools of his tears—the size of silver dollars, glistening in the sunlight.

“We said if it ever got miserable, we would stop. Is it time?”

He nodded, “Yes, do you hate me?”

“No, of course not. I love you! I’m burnt out on this, too. I don’t think it will go back to how it was. Let’s figure out how to shut it down.”

I had meant what I said. But it hurt, my knees ached, an affliction I’d had since I was five whenever I was deeply anxious or sad. A big part of me didn’t really want to close. I wanted to give it the five years everyone says it takes to build something like this. I also saw what he did; it wasn’t working, and we couldn’t financially float the store forever. Most of all, I understood that if Jason was calling it, he truly couldn’t do it anymore. We both have this tendency to push ourselves way past our breaking points, which we call being a “work pig.” He must have been feeling this desperation for a long time if he was saying it now.

A perfect mirror of the beginning, the last 6 weeks we spent breaking down what we had built. We sold the convection oven, coffee maker, and blue velvet sofa. Piece by piece, we took apart the custom wood bar we had built ourselves. We were lethargic, weepy, and depressed, crushed beneath the weight of thousands of books we still had to offload and feeling lost about what would come next and how we could recover from such a huge loss. A week before we closed, Jason sent me an article with a startling quote: “Entrepreneurs can feel about their business the same way parents feel about their children. In fact, a team of researchers in Finland took brain scans of entrepreneurs who’d lost a business and compared them to those of parents who’d lost a child. They found the same kind of footprint in both groups. So, when a business fails, the intensity of the grief can be quite full.” This study doesn’t equate the loss of a business with the loss of a child but it does shed light on the pain of grieving something you pour all of your love into in hopes of it growing and thriving and what happens in our brains when it does not. We had put so much care and work into this small business; we conceived it together and could never recreate it.

This was not the first loss we had been through as a couple. In the first year of dating, I attended three funerals with Jason, more than I had been to in my lifetime. My father and I stopped speaking 3 months before our wedding. The year before we opened, his aunt Lynette was hit by a car and killed. The year we started building out Avoid The Day, my 14-year-old niece died. We had mourned together, but this was different, all encompassing, a shroud that covered us in rage and bitterness. People in our lives didn’t understand our grief; it wasn’t like we had lost a person; to them, it was just a business. They still say, “You can open another one, it will be even better.” Instead of telling them it would be too painful to lose something like this again, the disappointment to gutting, we just nod along. Maybe they aren’t wrong. I had only this one dream, now that it is gone. What will I do with myself for the rest of my life if I have nothing to look forward to? The future is bleak when you don’t have something that obsesses you, that you want to put time and energy into building.

It’s been almost four years, and we are still grieving. Sometimes I just get a shooting pain in my head and chest, both at the same time, and double over with the realization that we made this thing that no longer exists. I tear up when I pay another monthly installment on one of the credit cards we maxed out and haven’t paid off yet. I am so proud of us for doing it and trying, not many people do, but it has marred our feelings about our neighborhood. It feels like a betrayal. All those people who had told us for years, “It’s so vital that Rockaway has a bookstore,” didn’t appear as patrons. Going to our old favorite haunts, those we frequented before we dared to follow a dream, without feeling bitter and angry, is hard. They succeeded where we couldn’t.

It’s impossible to forget the messages from people when we announced the closing. A local woman who used to buy a bag of chips for a dollar for the privilege of talking our ears off about her local business wrote, “I’m not surprised.” A guy who had never set foot in the shop DM’d, “Your politics sank you.” His politics had probably contributed to our demise. Still, if opposing Trump and supporting Black Lives Matter does not afford us a space in this community, we probably don’t belong here anyway.

Inside our little bungalow, we still listen to the playlist from the store. It was initially named Avoid The Day Bookstore Mix, but we had to change that, as the pain was too visceral to look at. We still read, Jason makes art, I write, but everything is tinged with hopelessness. When you thought you would grow old doing something with someone, creating community, a center for the arts in a place with nothing like it, how do you manifest a new dream?

With what is happening now, Trump defunding the NEA, all arts organizations under attack, the world burning once again, just like how it was in 2020 when Covid began, perhaps my grief seems nominal or silly. Who cares about a lost dream while people lose their careers, lives, and bodily autonomy?

I care, and I want you to care. Grief, whether for a home, a child, a partner, a friend, or the life you thought you were building, has the same dismal effect on your mental health. The pain is real, and it is lonely. Given the moment society is in now, I fear many more people are about to lose their dreams and experience the suffering Jason and I have been through.

A fellow business owner was one of the few people who sent a message we needed to hear as we closed: “I am sending you love today. I know how it feels. I have done it a few times already :-( Small businesses are an endangered species, and people on the other side, the customers, the ones that rave and tell you how much you mean to them, how cool your spot is, etc, mean well, but they just don’t understand that their ongoing support is needed to make it work. I have been in biz for almost 20 years and the human behavior around mom & pops have changed a lot. I am thankful for your beautiful store and Camilo is your number 1 fan. Sending you guys hugs!” When she would stop by the store we would talk about how none of us can pay the rent with likes. She just got it, and we have never forgotten her kindness in telling us what we had done mattered and how hard it is to let something like this go. It still brings tears to my eyes, both the attunement of her words and the loss itself. For the both of us, for all of us. There were better businesses with more fans and a more extended history of success that threw in the towel before we did. We almost thought we were too small to fail.

Grief changes how you live. You can learn to cope with it, but it’s always there. When we hear about a thriving bookstore or someone comments on the boardwalk about a new business opening, it still feels like a vein being opened with a dull pocket knife.

The people who refused to see my pain and downplayed the death of my business are no longer in my life. Without understanding such a monumental heartbreak, how could I possibly move forward in an authentic and meaningful relationship with them? The ones who remain let me talk about the sadness and anger. We reminisce and celebrate the good bits of once having something incredible. Most of them have lost something precious, too, and we have a shorthand of lamentation between us that allows for a deep understanding of what once enlivened us and what we no longer have. Maybe that’s all one can hope for, a few people who get it and choose to buoy us even in the choppiest times.

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Yesterday I got what I am pretty sure was my first manuscript submission that was completely AI generated. The funny thing is that it is not from someone new to me or AnotherJanePrattThing.com. It is from a repeat contributor. Someone who didn’t write this way in the past. I work a lot on each story for AJPT, as you know because I complain about it and have now gotten you in on the effort to take over some of my editorial duties, thank you thank you and thank you. So in what seems like the AI story, I gave my editorial notes and cuts and changes, as I usually do, but have not mentioned that I am fairly certain it was all AI. Would you say that? And how?

I am also winding down the period where I can accept new applicants for the writing/editing position announced here, so that I can move along and get the help I need from you to be able to publish more frequently and also sleep sometimes. So if you still want to be considered, email me Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com with the subject line “I’m A Good Person.” [Clarification for diligent people – thanks AJoy! – who have already written me about this: I wasn't clear – what else is new? – that if you have already emailed me, no need to email me again. This is just for new people who haven't applied yet. Thank you so much!]

It has felt a little cult-leaderesque - even for ME!! -to receive thousands of emails with that exact same mantra at the top. At the same time, I am glad that you all know what great people you are! And don’t let the number of applicants already make you concerned about your chances, because though I am picking one person in this round, I will certainly be hiring more in the ideally near future, so I will keep all of your wonderfully winning submissions on hand for that.

As always, I am going to go live in the comments now, where I would love to talk to you and where I hope you will answer my question about the etiquette of telling someone they are rudely cheating you and potentially your beloved readers with AI crap, so that I can respond the best way. You all are so good with words.

I love you!

Fellow Good Person, Jane

By The Zine Witch

Get One Before They Sell Out Again

What was going on in your life seven years ago?

What if your life had an algorithm that could unlock the patterns that help you solve life’s biggest problems?

We talk a lot about algorithms now. Algorithms deciding what we see. What we buy. What we think we want. Algorithms shaping attention, desire, and entire timelines of information before we ever consciously choose anything.

We also talk about systems tightening. About technology moving faster than our emotional ability to keep up with it. About the blur between convenience, surveillance, influence, and choice.

And right now, we are in Taurus season.

Which brings everything back into the body. Slowing down and getting back into your sensual body. What you can touch, taste, smell, hear. Into what is real and what actually holds. Taurus shows you what lasts and what collapses under pressure. It strips life down to what can be sustained.

In my work as an astrologer, people come in crisis. That is usually the entry point. Not when life is neat or reflective, but when something has already shifted and they are trying to understand what is happening before it fully lands.

I’ve often thought of my work less as interpretation and more as pattern detection inside real life. Detective work. Veronica Mars energy. Situations where too many layers are active at once and someone needs to see the structure underneath the surface story.

A family court case where someone is trying to understand the behavioral pattern they are dealing with. A celebrity navigating manipulation dynamics while maintaining public life. A musician trying to time an album release so it reaches the right audience. A writer mapping launch timing because visibility follows structure. An artist standing at a threshold where their direction is reorganizing itself. A CEO carrying inherited family dynamics while making decisions that affect entire systems. A mother trying to understand her autistic child without external projections distorting what is actually there.

I’ve also worked with people trying to understand chronic illness patterns, not only as diagnosis but as rhythm. What triggers flare ups. What stabilizes the system. What emotional states precede physical collapse. The body repeats information. It operates in cycles. It has its own logic.

My work lives in pattern recognition under pressure. Timing applied to lived experience. Seeing what is actually happening before language fully catches up.

And I’ve had to learn how to hold my own clarity inside that.

There are moments where naming what is real becomes the most stabilizing action available.

There was a moment with a client where I paused and asked directly if she wanted me to be blunt, even if it hurt.

I could see something forming in the chart suggesting her father may be entering a process of decline. Not certainty. Not fixed fate. A trajectory that required attention in real time.

Those conversations are not symbolic. They are immediate. They require honesty that does not wait for comfort to arrive first.

Inside this work, my own thinking has also changed.

My mind no longer moves in straight lines.

It moves through association, repetition, timing, symbolic linkage, and pattern recognition. Meaning forms in layers instead of sequences. Understanding often arrives before explanation is available.

Witchcraft was part of that shift.

It changed how I understand attention, intention, and symbolism as active forces inside lived experience. What you focus on repeatedly begins to reorganize how experience responds.

It also changed my relationship to power.

I stopped seeing myself as reacting to life and started noticing participation inside it. Not control. Participation. A feedback loop between awareness and outcome.

And that brings me to Uranus moving into Gemini.

This is a shift in how communication, movement, information, and thinking itself operate through everyday life.

My mind already moves in this direction. Ideas branch, reconnect, and form meaning in real time while language is still catching up. Sometimes understanding arrives before articulation. Thinking becomes less like sentences and more like live signal processing.

So the question returns.

What was going on in your life seven years ago?

What patterns were running your life at that time, and what has shifted since then underneath everything you thought was stable? That’s the big question this month for us to collectively ponder.

Best Days for a Date Night or Sex….

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I was thrilled, THRILLED, by how many of you are interested in helping me out with writing and editing here at AJPT. I think there are about 2350 of you so far who could do an outrageously stellar job. Thank you!

I pretty much broke down what it is I need in the comments of the last story. The one key criteria I did not mention yet is trustworthiness. Working with me, you will have access to everything on this site and also my personal stuff. (Since starting Sassy magazine all those years ago, I’ve had little delineation between what’s work and what’s personal - I am sure some of you “creatives” whose own lives are your material can relate.)

I get that it is unwise to announce this in public (though I have less to lose than Kim K. when she posted images of her $4M diamond ring on Instagram that time), but: I am the worst with security and confidentiality and passwords and doorlocks, etc. I keep other people's secrets forever, but I myself have always been a haphazardly open book. (Okay, not completely open yet, as you will see when you read my truly open and actual book, officially announced today via this link you won’t be able to access unless you subscribe but it is a pretty basic announcement and says that the book will be published by Random House(!!!) and titled, duh, It Happened To Me. That’s the book I am working on writing now and thus my need for your help with AJPT.)

I figure staying open and honest and forthcoming - and handing out my phone numbers and credit cards routinely - will all work out in the end. Who wants to spend valuable energy worrying about what might happen if information were to get leaked or even waste time memorizing a new password after decades of the same one. A lot of you may feel differently, but for me it’s called freedom and living life! (Note that there is another iteration of this free-living doctrine that I find self-serving and calculated and do not support: people I know who always park their cars without even taking a moment to pay attention to signs and reason that the amount they pay a year in tickets is a fair cost for the privilege of parking whenever and wherever they please. That’s more rude and entitled. As a therapist once told me in an upbeat tone, at least my quirky behaviors only hurt myself.)

In terms of being so open with all my personal stuff, it is however a slight bummer that I have modeled for a minimum of three completely nude photo shoots over the course of my adult life and not one of them has ever surfaced. I get the hint.

So anyway, the next step for all of you who have expressed interest in the job or who want to now: Ask me any more questions in the comments and then if you still want to apply, send an email to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com with the subject line: I’m A Good Person. (You have to really mean it when you type or dictate it or the email won’t go through.) I will then write you each back with the details I need from you, as well as hours and pay. The plan is to wrap this up quickly because I could use the help yesterday. Like right now when I am in the CMS building posts instead of working on The Book!

I love you and I always love most what you have to say in the comments, so I will look for you there!

Jane

Super Superficial PS: A podcast was just released for which the interviewer - the one-of-a-kind - had done the most incredible research. He was bringing up people and places and experiences my own mom and I had forgotten about. The problem is that I think I look really shitty in it. I taped another podcast with that same night and I look fine there, so I think the problem was me trying to following specific lighting directions rather than winging it as I normally do. A dab of makeup might not have hurt either, but like with updating passwords, I generally can’t be bothered. So be forewarned and watch it here if you want to know more about my past than anyone ever. And you will have to wait until the summer for Rachel’s to see how much more pleasant I can look. I know, exciting!

PPS: Today's Unpopular Opinion, like many of the best ones, has ideas in it that I completely disagree with (starting with the first sentence in the large-font quote that’s pulled out before paragraph two, for example). So you should feel free in the comments to disagree as vehemently as you want to with any or all of it. I would love to hear your best, worst and most mediocre girls’ trip stories too. The one I regret the most was leaving Michael in Sao Paulo on an extremely fun tour with REM to meet up with a bunch of moms of Charlotte’s kindergarten friends for a girls’ trip in the Bahamas at an all-inclusive where the floors were so greasy slippery from the sole cleaning amounting to buckets of some bright blue formula dumped onto them every night and the drinks were the same bright blue and tasted probably the same. I felt it was important to go make those connections for little Charlotte’s sake and I still get that (and am close with at least one of those moms still). But come on, Jane! And that’s the end of that whiny, bougie, privileged girls’ trip story. Tell yours too please!

Put This On And See Who You Attract

By Rosie K.

I’m coming off the heels of a weekend getaway with ten girls. We laughed, we danced, we partied—we had a good time. Why then, did I leave feeling just as doom and gloom as I did when I got there?

We went to the middle of nowhere, Washington state, for a “Girls’ Getaway” over a three-day weekend. We are an eclectic mix of moms, powerhouse business owners, and savvy community leaders who had only known each other six months prior to planning the trip, bonded by a ‘friends of friends’ type of situation. We were very much looking forward to time away from our kids and husbands to relax, reset, and day drink without judgement.

We stayed in a beautiful glass cabin surrounded by mountains with a sauna, hot tub, winery down the street and day spa at our disposal. We hired a chef the second night we were there, who prepared a gorgeous and delicious four-course meal: Classic Caesar Salad, Fusion Chicken Cakes with ginger aioli, Prime Filet Mignon with chimichurri sauce, and a Tahitian Vanilla Créme Brulee with fresh berries for dessert. The meal, while overpriced, could have been the highlight of the trip for me.

The disappointment lay in an entire day wasted walking around an art museum that one of the women (the ring leader) was dying to go to. Not my kind of a Saturday activity on any Saturday, and especially not one on a girls’ trip. It was boring, arduous and depressing, and completely killed my buzz.

Walking around the art gallery felt similar to being in the lunch line behind the popular girls. Everyone had paired off with their respective friend, giggling together like idiots, leaving me to pretend to enjoy myself as they oohed and ahhed over sub-par paintings. I couldn’t have been more annoyed. It made me miss my real friends terribly.

When we got back to the house, the entire vibe was off and it felt like it took forever to get back to vacation mode baseline. When you’re dealing with a group of women with strong personalities, making a suggestion like going hiking (we were in the woods, and the weather was perfection) instead of going to see art felt like it was met with daggers and crickets.

One of the moments that hurt me the most was when they were still up drinking night one and at 11 pm, I said I was heading to bed because I was going to wake up early to do Pilates. That simple statement was met with judgmental stares and eye-rolls, and then one of the women - the ring leader’s bestie and roommate - turned to her and loudly said the nastiest thing so that everyone could hear: “This skinny bitch would wake up to workout. How annoying! Go home!”

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Today's entry is entirely courtesy of the great Charlie, whom you old-timers here likely already know and love. For you who don’t yet, let me suggest the following compendium of Charlie’s Another Jane Pratt Thing artistry. (It might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I am genuinely not. He is an artist as far as I'm concerned - and a humdinger of a guy.)

There are so many to choose from, but here:

Charlie’s experiences with fatphobia affecting his healthcare, fatphobia being something he writes about in a more vulnerable way than I have ever seen from a person of his gender.

A personal favorite of mine he wrote on tax day last year that I think is so powerful about the political issues we are all grappling with and I wonder if you agree.

And the classic “I Shit My Pants At Work,” accompanied by one of the best opening images in my publishing history.

Now For The Fun Job Posting Part:

I have at least 20, maybe more, incredible stories to post here. What I don’t have is enough time myself to build and publish them. (On top of regular AJPT stuff, my book is due in 10 months, which sounds like a long time and is not at all for the way that I like to write and then revise and add and revise and subtract to within an inch of my poor writing’s life. Also, the private stuff I am writing about - and I know a lot of you memoir writers can relate - is difficult to dredge up and relive, so that excavation process can add time. And as I am telling many of my personal stories for the very first time - to anyone in any format - there is no shorthand with which to say them.)

Anyway, enough parenthetical entitled griping over my little humble-braggy problem! What I need is someone willing to help me edit, build and post all these current glorious gems and to work with me on other ones for the future. If you’re into writing, you could do that here too, no problem. I know that whoever you are, we’ll have so much fun together, I will work really collaboratively (maybe more than you would want!), pay fairly and be forever in your debt for helping keep AJPT growing and thriving. If you think that might be you, please let me know in the comments and await further instruction. Thank you in advance!

Last thing, especially for you new subscribers I value so much and thank for managing to hang on this far: Every day is a surprise here and if you don’t care about today’s featured piece, that’s fine and there will be more and different ones coming right after. I also deeply appreciate you letting me barge into your inboxes. I don’t take that access lightly. But since I am currently in, I will be like the person who blurts out during sex and say it to you here: I love you!

And in this case, I really do! I will be back with a story from me in two days and I hope you stick around.

XOJane

Who Doesn't Want This Thing??

By Charlie Connell

For the first 15 minutes of my job interview at Nationwide Video, nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary happened. I answered a bunch of questions about my previous employment, explained why I was excited to work at a video store1 , and I lied profusely about my work ethic. You know, normal job interview nonsense. Then things took a turn I never saw coming2.

“Well, Charlie, I really like everything I’ve heard so far,” the interviewer said to me. “But we aren’t actually hiring for this location…”

“Fuck a duck, what was the point of even bringing me in,” I wanted to scream, but instead I waited for him to finish his sentence.

“...but we are hiring at the Clarendon location. We have a more robust adult section there, so the last question I have for you is, would you be comfortable working in an environment surrounded by adult videos like this?”

Then he held up an oversized box for the film “Black African Gold: Hardcore.” With this being a family-oriented publication, I don’t want to be crass and describe the cover in too much detail. I’m confident you already have some sort of picture in your mind, and no matter what that picture is, I can tell you two things: 1. You’re on the right track, and 2. His manhood is at least 43% larger than what you pictured. But more than the shock of having hardcore porn thrown in my face during a job interview, I remember the serene, yet simultaneously bored, look in the cover model’s eyes. Well, that and the horrifyingly large dong.

I took a second to gather myself and process what had just been the craziest 30 seconds of my young professional life. “Porn’s rad,” I said with a chuckle. “I have no problems with it whatsoever.”

And that was that. I had walked in a slacker looking for the ultimate slacker job, and I walked out as a smut peddler.

A Den of Iniquity

Before we get too far into this, this was a rental video store specializing in porn, not a sex shop with toys, magazines, or spooge booths. I swear that every time I would say I worked at a porn shop, the follow-up question was always about the booths. That’s not to say that there weren’t some disgusting moments (once you reach the end of this you’ll consider this sentence to be Chekov’s Revolting Substance), but aside from the content on the tapes, Nationwide Video looked like any other independent video store in a major city in the early aughts.

In the stereotypical indie store, there would be a large section of movies and then tucked away in the corner, perhaps behind a beaded curtain, would be a small adult section. Nationwide was the exact inverse of that. On the ground floor, we had a small checkout counter and a dozen or so shelves of videos nobody ever glanced at, let alone actually rented. There was a law in Chicago mandating at least 15% of the stock to be non-adult, so once the new releases had grown stale at the other three locations, they were shipped over to the Clarendon branch to rot. We had an entire shelf of “Airheads,” with a full shelf of “The Avengers” (Connery and Uma, not Iron Man and Cap) below it. There was a stairway in the back that led to the Hot-N-Nasty Annex. No, that’s not a flourish of prose; it was the actual name, complete with an honest-to-god neon sign.

As you walked up the stairs, under that gaudy neon, a brand new world rose ahead with each step. Think of it like when they drive into Toontown in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, but instead of Goofy and Bugs, it’s tits and ass. At the top of the stairs, customers were faced with a choice: take a left to the straight section or pull a right and head to the gay section. Or, if you didn’t move it all, you could choose a video from the hilariously minuscule Bi section that served as a sort of demilitarized zone between the two others. And yes, this arrangement was done purely for our own amusement. Across from there was a counter with security monitors, a Coke machine3, and a 10-foot Xenomorph wearing a thong.

Whereas downstairs was cramped, upstairs was as massive as a suburban Blockbuster. There were thousands of VHS tapes. I know what you’re thinking right now — it was the 2000s and the store was still all video tapes? Back in the olden days before you could pull up 10,000 XXX videos within five seconds on your phone, porn was really fucking expensive, even on VHS. We’re talking over $70 (back then!) for a new release, and when things came out on DVD they were even more expensive. It seems backwards since porn tends to be the first industry to latch on to any new technology — it was porn choosing VHS that killed Betamax, afterall — but the prohibitive prices made it so we were very busy renting VHS tapes long after most stores phased them out.

Among all those thousands of tapes, there was a little something for everyone. And quite often that something was a fetish I had never even fathomed could “be a thing,” which is saying something for an urbane sophisticate such as myself. Discovering what bukake is for your job is the kind of thing you wish you could unlearn, but know you never will4. For the first couple of weeks, I made note of every funny video title (“Sistas Gotta Piss 2: Pissin’ In The Fat Lane” will always be the champion) and outrageous premise (“Mister 18 Inch Meets Bridget The Midget”), but soon it all sort of blurred into the background.

Once you get beyond the shock of working in an all-caps PORN SHOP, this was the idyllic hipster video store job. I got to wear whatever I wanted (fraying corduroy shorts and punk band tees). I got to listen to whatever I wanted to (ska when my coworkers would allow, more often punk and metal). I got to spend most of the time reading whatever I wanted (The Onion, The Chicago Reader, and Tolstoy). And if you wanted to have a few small beers during your shift, nobody gave a shit. Most of my coworkers were artsy weirdos like me who had applied to work at the non-porn location, which meant we all had enough in common that everybody was pretty close.

It was a job like any other job. Stocking shelves with copies of “Down The Hatch #8” is really no different than stocking them with cans of soup; annoying customers are annoying customers no matter what they’re buying. But then, out of nowhere, some wild shit would spring up as a brutal reminder that no, this wasn’t a normal job.

At Least We Got Hazard Pay

It was a dreary morning and I was working the counter downstairs. We’d only been open for about 20 minutes, and I was still working on my bagel and coffee when a customer came in and threw four videos onto the counter to return them. I aimed for the one on top of the pile and as I squeezed my fingers to grab it the video case shot out of my hand and on to the floor.

“What the…” For a split second, I was in a daze, unable to connect the dots as to what would make a plastic video case shoot out of my hands like a carp. Then I felt the bile start to rise up my esophagus as the revulsion of the moment struck.

“My hand is covered in fucking lube!5 What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I screamed as I grabbed a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex and shoved them into the arms of the bewildered customer. “Clean up your fucking mess and apologize.”

“They were like that when I rented th…” he tried to stammer out before I managed to find an even higher decibel level to bellow, “Do you see me freaking out?! There is no possible way that tape was put on a shelf in that condition. Do I need to cancel your account?”

“I’d like to see the manager…”

“I am the fucking manager.”

And like that, it was over. He put his head down, red with shame, and moved to the side of the counter to clean the tapes while another customer stepped up to rent his store-maximum six porno films. Officially, we called this a “substance warning,” but that really undersells how dehumanizing it feels to have to serve some asshole who couldn’t even be bothered to wipe the spunk and filth from his hands before running out the door to rent six more and repeat the cycle. Sure, I got to charge him an extra $5 and cow him into an almost sincere apology, but it’s hard not to develop a hatred for someone like that. Which is why I completely lost my shit and went into a panic when my wife and I were standing outside the Lincoln Park Zoo 15 years later when I recognized a customer notorious for substance warnings pulling up to the curb in a pedicab. I never forget my enemies6.

Even though substance warnings were few and far between, eventually they happened to everyone. For me, it was the first time I had any reservations about the job, but then I remembered two very important things: I actually had fun almost every single day (high praise for a retail job) and I was making about $12 an hour. In 2000. That was significantly more than my friends working at sandwich shops and bookstores, and my job was infinitely more chill than any other part-time gig I could find. Hell, when you factor inflation in, I’m not making too much more at my very professional journalism job. Yeah, every once in a while, I had to call the police because a guy was in the corner whacking it to the cover of some Jeff Stryker movie, but every job has its drawbacks.7

A World Without Women

The most peculiar thing about working at Nationwide Video was the complete and total absence of living, breathing human women. Not only were 99% of the customers men — during my four-year term as a smut peddler, the number of female customers I served was in the single digits — but so were all of my coworkers. While I’m pretty sure the policy was never actually written down, especially given the probable illegality of it, we never hired any women. The thinking was often that it was for the woman’s safety, but I always thought it was more for the customers’ comfort. On the rare times a woman was in the store, the customers didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t that they were creeping on them (thankfully), but more like they were dumbstruck by the mere presence of a woman. Imagine the kind of look you’d have on your face if you got off a plane in Hawaii to find yourself surrounded by 15-foot snow drifts; that’s what the customers looked like. Most of the time, they’d lock their eyes on the ground and shuffle out as quickly as possible.

Being surrounded by nudity all day, every day had a few odd side effects. The most notable was how it completely altered how I thought about sexual attraction. Look, I was 20 when I got the gig, and even if I were a Lothario, I still wouldn’t know shit about shit at that age; but as a happily married man in his forties, I can comfortably admit how sheltered and inexperienced I was. It had only been a few years since I would flip back and forth to the Spice channel, hoping that for just a split second the cable box would fail to scramble and maybe, just maybe, I’d get a peek of a nipple. Now I was spending entire shifts where it was impossible to stare straight ahead without seeing two dozen naked men and women in all stages of sexual congress.8 It scrambled my brain. I became completely desensitized to nudity. Remember Nipplegate and all that nonsense after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime show? I was watching when Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunctioned,” I just didn’t process that there was anything strange about it since it was the 683rd nipple I had seen that week.

The flip side of that naughty lil’ coin is that it became incredibly hot to see women fully clothed. And if they had an ankle-length skirt and a heavy cardigan on… va va voooom! From the time I was 13 on, I desperately wanted to know what women looked like nude, but once seeing naked women became just another part of my job, that allure was gone.9 I was still telling people that I bought Playboy for the articles, but this time I wasn’t lying.

Jokes aside, I think that this aspect of working at the porn shop rewired my brain in a healthy way. Lonely, horny teens tend to think about women in some pretty disgusting ways, especially during the late ‘90s/early aughts, and I could see an alternate universe where I ended up becoming a toxic incel. Working in the porn industry (albeit in a tangential way) forced me to really consider all the aspects of it, which killed a lot of the boneheaded machismo nonsense lurking in the corners of my brain. My mind was opened to a lot of concepts I’d rarely considered before, like sex positivity and ethical pornography. Considering that this porn shop was in the Chicago neighborhood known as Boystown, I naturally met a ton of people from the LGBTQ+ community. It’s embarrassing to admit this in 2026, but even as a radically progressive guy in 2001, I still had a few less-than-enlightened ideas gleaned from stereotypes that I probably would have held on to had I not been forced to confront them. When a dude who calls himself Stick Daddy brings you bagels every once in a while, all of that stupid, bigoted bullshit evaporates.

Super Stupid Saturday and Other Adventures in Mischief

What happens when you get a bunch of dudes in their early twenties and throw them into the aforementioned world without women? A lot of really dumb shit, that’s what. This is one of the oldest cliches around, but it’s also true — when women aren’t around, dudes get very creative with our mischief.

On the clock, this usually meant dashing fluorescent light bulbs over each other’s backs on the way to the dumpster or writing pithy notes on a customer’s account page. If you’ve ever been at a video store and seen the clerk stifle a giggle after entering your account number, I can assure you that they are laughing at a note left by a coworker. My favorite instance of this occurred with a customer who had a quite unfortunate name — Robert E. Lee.10 The second his phone number was entered the following note would pop up on the screen:

I gave the customer his change in $5 bills and he rudely ripped them in half and spat on the ground before storming out.

Paid with a $50 while mumbling about how Grant was a worthless drunk with no honor. Real weird.

After checking out he said, “These videos will help my Dixie rise again.”

You get the idea. We spent hours trying to one-up each other with jokes in the notes. So much so that pretty much every store meeting included at least one half-hearted plea for us to use notes for business reasons only. Or at least primarily. These pleas fell on deaf ears.

My favorite little bit of mischief was finding ways to drink on the job without getting found out by the customers. Our bosses didn’t really care as long as we got everything done, but customers couldn’t be trusted to be as cool. So we would rip out pages of Adult Video News — the trade magazine of the porn industry — and wrap our tall boys of Old Style with them. If a customer ever asked what I was drinking, my answer was always “Porn Soda.” This did a great job of fooling the customers, but ended up really irking the bosses since we needed those AVN catalogs for work.

Off the clock, things got drunker and weirder. Every Wednesday the bowling alley down the street did cheap games (If I recall correctly, they started at $.50 and I think were $2 by the time Marigold Bowl shut down. RIP), so we’d get a crew including folks from other stores and show up. We did not consider bowling to be an athletic competition as much as an opportunity to pound Bud heavies in bottles shaped like bowling pins, throw eight-pound balls 84% of the way down the lane in the air, and tackle each other as we were about to throw the ball. Once we wore out our welcome, or when the bar closed, we’d end up at a 24-hour taqueria until the wee hours of the morning.

One of my favorite things we did was Super Stupid Saturdays. A typical one of these involved a couple cases of Old Style, illegal fireworks being shot off a roof in Uptown, and ordering an absurdly large pizza that needed to be put at a diagonal to make it through the door. We loved our dumb hijinks. At one momentous party, one of my coworkers powerbombed another one through a folding table in somebody’s kitchen. But we weren’t total ingrates; we brokered a price for the table before wrecking it. I’m pretty sure I still have a chunk of it in a box somewhere.

There was a lot of insanity over the years, but also a lot of bond-building. Working at a video store, even a Hot-N-Nasty one, involved a ton of downtime. Most days were spent just listening to music and shooting the breeze with my coworkers. There are so many authors, bands, and (mostly not x-rated) films that I first got into thanks to my coworkers. Working alongside a bunch of other artsy college kids opened my mind in a lot of different ways, a thing I’m reminded of every time I put on Jawbreaker’s “Dear You,” reread Solzhenitsyn, or try to explain the revulsion/infatuation I had watching “Gummo.”

It’s been 26 years since I started working there and I still talk to a bunch of my coworkers. I ended up becoming really close friends with a few guys, one of whom moved to Jersey City and kept coming back to Chicago with his buddies from town, many of whom I would become friends with. My first break in media came from one of them, and a few years later, when my relationship ended and I was politely asked to find somewhere else to live, I said fuck it and came to Jersey.

Which brings us to that enormous blizzard we had last February. I had tucked into an edible and was walking around the deserted streets, marveling at the snow and thinking, when a thought hit me with the force of a runaway plow — taking that job at Nationwide Video was the single most consequential decision of my life. It’s certainly more impactful than choosing where I went to college or any of the other jobs I’d go on to accept. Even more so than responding to an OKCupid message from some cute girl in Brooklyn who would eventually become my wife. Taking that job was the butterfly effect moment from which everything I love about my life today became possible. Holy shit. It’s the kind of story I imagine I’d regale my non-existent grandchildren with if the entire narrative didn’t hinge on looking at a gargantuan cock.

Editor-in-Chief was the best professional title I’ve ever had, and getting paid to write will always feel like a gift more than a chore, but the best job I ever had was as a smut peddler.

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Best Gift Ever!

For Starters:

Here's How Not To Meet The Mayor For The First Time

By: Jane

How Not To Meet Your Mayor:

Don't wash your hair because you washed it the day before and even though you did one yoga class and it looks ridiculous down, putting it up so solves that and saves a lot of time that you can spend on Instagram instead of wasting effort "getting ready.” Pull items out of your closet that you haven't worn in decades and put them all together. Be very happy with that outfit.

Don't realize that you are actually going to hang out with him one on one and assume you will just hear him speaking in a big room full of people. Try to bring your half-drunk wineglass into the room with him and have security stop you and tell you you have to leave it out there on a table so you take one sip first. Remember where it is in case you want to take it on your way out.

As you enter the room, overhear other people in the vestibule saying to each other "whatever you do, don't wear red.” The decades old coat you have chosen to wear for the evening is bright, red and big. Thank god spot a big puffy couch just inside the room as you are ushered in and shove your red coat down into a corner of it between the cushions where hopefully neither he nor anyone else will see it.

Decide to tell him “Thank you,” rather than trying to converse about any policies you know nothing about. Say it twice, emphatically, to which he reacts instantaneously and warmly and then replies “That is so sweet,” and gives your arm a nice squeeze.

Ta da.

Other things happened too since we spoke last, but I'm going to save them for the comments. There is also another new piece right here that just went up and talks about friend divorces. Which had me thinking a lot about mine with Natasha Lyonne years ago, partly obviously because she's been so in the news. So I would love to talk about that and reason it out with you and also talk about yours.

As far as today's featured story goes, I've known Anka since the ‘80s and to paint the picture of the life we were all living then, I'm 95% sure the last time I saw her was at a crazy awards show where I was seated two spots away from Madonna and my date was Courtney from The Dandy Warhols, who I was soooo crushed on. She and I have had some fun. Anka has a Substack now too and everything on it is as good as I think this story is so check it out AFTER you read today's piece. I love you all so so much! Talk to you below!

Now without further ado….

Jane

My Brown Eyes Turned Green!

By Anka Radakovich

I was having a lunch date in Los Angeles, where the sun bathed our faces in warmth, as it does there, and everything seemed perfect. My date looked at me and said “You have the most beautiful green eyes.” I said “Thank you,” and I giggled, and said “But I have dark brown eyes.” And he said “No you don’t silly, you have green eyes.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had dark brown eyes. What was he talking about? A WTF moment. I secretly freaked out, and as soon as I got home I looked at my eyes with one of those scary 10X magnifying mirrors that shows everything, and I indeed had green eyes. Why did I not notice this before? What was going on? I immediately called my doctor to ask her why this was happening, and if I am turning into another species, like a reptilian, a green lizard lady.

She laughed, which is always a good sign when your Doctor laughs. She told me “not to worry about it” but to get a blood test in the morning. Omg, was I turning into an Amazonian woman in a 1966 sci-fi movie where I turn green and become a crazed monster who is an insatiable nympho? I took the blood test to find out.

The blood test revealed that I was perfectly healthy, but my cholesterol shot up to an alarming high of 268, and my Doctor immediately put me on 40 mg of Lipitor so the fat in my blood wouldn’t blow out my arteries. The weird thing is that just three months ago I had a blood test and my cholesterol was a perfectly normal 180. I asked the Doctor why my eyes might have suddenly turned green and she told me to “not worry about” it but to go to an eye doctor. Ok, now I’m worried again. Was I going blind?

TO FIND OUT WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING TO ANKA’S EYES AND TO SEE PICTURES OF THEM GREEN, please do a nice thing and subscribe here so she can get paid!

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Hello friends and former friends!

My friend Kat and her friend Jennifer made a movie about friendship breakups that may be right up your alley. All the links you need to watch it are below, along with a q and a they did to explain why they wanted to make this movie in the first place. As you might have guessed, it’s personal.

Enjoy and I will see you in the comments to talk about our friend divorces and anything related. I am having a weird moment on that subject right now with a former friend, Natasha Lyonne, who has been trashing me for a couple of decades over a story I published (and understand in retrospect that I shouldn’t have and have publicly apologized for every time it comes up). Anyway, let’s get into all of our stories below, yes? And let’s talk about what you think of the movie!

I adore you all.

Jane

Your favorite shirt! New color!!!

By Jennifer Zahlit and Kat Belinfante

Friend breakups are brutal; no one wants to have a single girls’ night out when your platonic best friend dumps you. So we made a movie (an 82 minute indie dramedy that we co-wrote, Jennifer directed, and Kat starred in) inspired by the heartbreak of our own friend break ups. While making it, we experienced two other friend breakups, but somehow our friendship emerged stronger.

Kat Belinfante: I think my worst breakup was with Chelsea. We always had so much fun together. My other friend Anne and I ordered her a cake with a print out of all the guys she had made out with for her birthday; we would prank strangers at a bar telling them to shake their butts and pretending we had already met before. The tension began when Anne started dating Chelsea’s roommate, and I chose to remain friends with Anne. Chelsea told Anne to date this man but was secretly (not so secretly) in love with him. Weirdly, she was not a Scorpio, but my lack of loyalty was enough for her to cancel the birthday trip she was planning for me that year and just stop talking to me completely. What was yours?

Jennifer Zahlit: Mine was two years ago. After spending many weeks with her and her family over the holidays, I came home to sense that she was avoiding me. When we finally talked, she said that we had been codependent (we lived in two different states and talked maybe once a week), was feeling self-conscious about a career change (what actor doesn’t think about changing careers every month), and felt like a passenger in her own life (this just made me feel sad). It soon became clear that she couldn’t communicate what was happening with her and didn’t want me to be a part of her life anymore. That was obviously devastating, but it was all of the reminders after that got me: the bit we had about that one friend’s Instagram stories, the French restaurant we would always go to together, the street of her old apartment where I always peek into her old place.

Kat: Yeah, honestly my breakup with my ex-boyfriend was much easier, no offense to him – my mom just told me she saw on Facebook he got married, so he’s fine, but you know that’s the risk when you enter a romantic relationship…it might end. I don’t think anyone enters a friendship thinking those are the stakes.

JZ: There’s not really any space or time given to a friend breakup like there is for a romantic breakup (not that I would know…unless ex situationships count?) But there’s something so deeply personal about a friend breakup. The old adage “it’s not you, it’s me” doesn’t apply because it really is about “you.” How do you move forward from that?

KB: Yeah, where’s the Taylor Swift album about replaying every interaction with your former friend wondering if that was the moment things went past repair?

JZ: Well, there is “Bad Blood.”

KB: So true; I love that song. I have such a vivid memory of forcing my old roommate/ our sound guy to listen to it on repeat driving to set for Friend Divorce.

JZ: Ok segue queen! But wow too real, we really went through it! Looking back on the entire experience of making Friend Divorce, would you have done it if you knew what it would entail?

KB: Absolutely not. I both am so grateful we made it, and also think we’ll still be processing the effects of it for years, not unlike our most painful friend breakups.

JZ: Same. Lol. But I don’t regret it at all. I feel like it changed us as people, friends, and artists.

KB: The fact that we each had a friend breakup while making the film, had the big personnel shakeups we did, went into debt, not to mention but obviously to mention, the death of my dad, and stayed friends is nothing short of a miracle. I think in a lot of ways making this film broke us - not in just a shattering way, which did happen, but it also broke us open. It was one of the hardest things I think we’ll ever do, and there was so much heartache along the way (with friends, with grief, with rejection after rejection from the festivals), but I’m really proud of us for never giving up on it.

JZ: The rejection…sigh. Yes, lots of heartache for sure, but also a lot of highs. I’ll never forget getting an email from one of our creative heros, encouraging us to keep going or the wrap party where we all jumped in the ocean, giddy with celebration and disbelief at making it through. But ultimately, I think we made it through because of our communication. We had a lot of #hardconversations but I feel like we always genuinely wanted to know how the other was feeling and what we could do to support. Even under the weight of debt, of figuring out every new stage, of doing this all on our own, we kept talking.

KB: Yeah, I remember one hard conversation we had on set, where you basically told me to step up as “number one on the call sheet.”

JZ: Gently checked in…

KB: I mean you were right…I was just so nervous to be starring in the film and having flashbacks of a webseries I co-created a few years earlier (a comedian’s rite of passage) where I felt like I was wearing too many different hats, and I felt like it took away from my acting. I really thought about what you said and showed up in a completely different way the next day, which was my character’s big blowout scene with her best friend on set. That day showed me that I could step up in a leadership capacity while still having fun with my friends on set. That and my “fake wedding” were definitely my favorite days because we got to have so many of our friends on set and create all of these micro moments that helped bring the story to life. Plus, I loved seeing myself in a wedding dress (it was a $69 white dress from Lulus but I’ll take it!).

JZ: I’ve been thinking a lot about how scrappy we were in making the film. We called in all of our favors (think getting a location from a friend of a friend of Kat’s fellow yoga teachers, casting two gals that I used to babysit since they were three, etc) to make this happen. We willed it into existence somehow. All of our friends chipped in, whether it was through contributing to our Seed & Spark, getting us free Covid tests from the library, lending us their homes, listening to our five minute voice memo meltdowns…the list goes on. In that way, the film became a manifestation of all of the love and care we have poured into our community that came back to us tenfold. We emailed everyone in the industry we could find an email address for during pre-production, casting, post-production – I’m kind of in awe of how brave we were. But I think it came back to the core of the film; we really believed in the story and could see that it always sparked a conversation with people when we brought it up.

KB: Friend breakups are so brutal. But through this process, we’ve realized it’s a nearly universal experience, and it’s reinforced why we still place such a high value on our friendships in our lives. Even if we decided that neither of us would get “friend married,” friendships will always be a top priority for us.

JZ: Ditto. Love you girlina.

XO

Watch Here!!!!!!

Or Start With The Trailer!

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I had the worst nightmare last night (I know who cares, but hold on because you’re involved). I was sitting on a white couch in the bedroom of the worst person we can think of (you know who I mean - he lives in a House the same color as his dumb couch). That person was talking at me and then leaned over and started kissing me. Thank god my legs worked and I could run out of the room, though the door was heavy. After I woke up, I realized what sparked that horror: I announced yesterday that I had reached an epiphany about starting a print version of Sassy magazine again. I have never wanted to for so many reasons and all of a sudden I saw all the reasons to do it. So we can.

BUT in announcing this, I made a (true) comment about feeling like I’m in some kind of heyday - and that everything seems optimistic and hopeful and easy. I asked if any of you could relate. It’s the sweetest thing how many of you are still responding to that note. But a few smart people made the point that the world is shit right now and that in 2026, no, they do not feel any of those happy vibes. I get that and I think the guilt of not acknowledging that infiltrated my dream - that I had somehow pleased and supported and aligned myself with the gross dude by saying I was so optimistic right now. So I promise you all that I am not letting him off the hook for any of his atrocities and I now know what my real hell feels like. Anyway, I will be writing more here about the process of doing Sassy again and will include you in every step that you want to be part of.

Next up: Whenever I do any public speaking (I am doing three appearances today, because I have been saying yes to everything - which sounded like a good idea at the time and is about to come to an abrupt halt because panic attacks are so derailing), I like the Q&A part best. That’s because I know that at least one person wants to hear what I’m saying. So I’m using the same method with this deep investigative “story” you requested about our time with America’s Next Top Model. I'm not going to try to tell you that this is the most astounding exclusive world-changing scoop I've ever published (because that was last week).

If you’re new here, today’s piece is a little bit of a diversion from the norm (the abnorm norm). I’ll be back in two days with our regularly scheduled programming like your beloved It Happened To Mes and all those extremely messy stories you (and I) love so much. So enough preamble, and here goes, by popular demand…

Also: I love you no matter what.

Jane

PS Here's another great thing: I am extending this giveaway offer because so many of you used it, so if you become a subscriber today, a month of access to all of our best stories ever and all of those coming up in the next month are yours for free free and free! Take advantage of me and that here!

Support Abortion RIghts This Way

By Jane Pratt (but all credit to Eric Nicholson)

Way back in the now-trendy then-vaguely-boring ‘90s-’2000s, shortly after I started Jane magazine, my fashion editor and handful-of-favorite-people person Eric Nicholson walked into my relatively-fancy-in-retrospect – though I didn't appreciate any of it at the time - office to tell me he had been approached about being a judge on some show called America’s Next Top Model with Tyra Banks. It was between him and an editor from Glamour magazine, but they wanted Eric.

Of course I immediately said yes. Because I was in the middle of an intense editing session with another editor over these lost Courtney Love interview tapes that never did materialize, but also because being the publishing partner for ANTM meant that on a (minor) network show every week there would be mention of our still fairly new magazine - thus exposure to a broader audience. Equals more readers. Equals more ads. Etc in the simple days before algorithms.

The trade-off of having to orchestrate and publish a photo shoot with whoever became “America’s Next Top Model” was not an ideal arrangement, because editors like to pick – usually along with a photographer – the models they use in their valuable expensive print pages. They want to carefully choose the models, photographers, clothes, messages, etc., that will do the most for their readers and secondarily advertisers. (Though sometimes the advertiser was the first priority – especially if you got monthly notes like I and many of us did from people like our beloved Giorgio Armani, who went through each new issue and counted the number of editorial credits we gave to Armani versus Versace compared to the advertising pages that both ran in that issue. But that’s another thing.)

Okay, back to Tyra. So Eric did the show while still working his regular job at Jane where I would see him every day and he would come in to my office with stories after taping ANTM. I was so busy with the magazine and I’ve still never had time to watch the show, but over the years people would mention to me that they had seen Jane magazine featured. A lot of times that would be the first thing people would say about the magazine when they approached me. Mission accomplished.

When all the interest in Tyra and ANTM sparked up again - starting with that podcast “Curse of America’s Next Top Model” which I loved because the host was so sassy, and then of course the Netflix documentary that everybody seems to have watched and then the E! series on the same exact topic, which got less attention because it came out last, I guess, but did feature Janice calling Tyra a bitch twice - of course I texted Eric about all of this.

Eric had been asked multiple times by the producers of the E! series to be featured on there. But he’s classy and said no. He was raised in the fashion business at a different time (as everyone now gets from the scenes in Love Story where Carolyn aligns those heels in the Calvin showroom maybe a dozen times in the first episode). This was the same era where I was, as Jane Editor-In-Chief, made to fire someone because she insisted on wearing the wrong lipstick in meetings with our boss. It wasn’t my call, but after the third infraction, even I knew I had to follow through. In any case, Eric has standards, holds his head up high and only does publicity, and work, that he’s proud of. And it’s good work.

[When I was searching for pictures of me at Jane magazine, two things from that era kept coming up: This sort of goofy picture above of me and Mike D attending an event for Food Bank of New York, and this interview from right before I started Jane, which there is zero reason to watch unless you want to.]

Anyway, finally, here’s Eric:

It’s fascinating, but not at all surprising, the amount of attention the show has been getting. I feel for Shandi, and remember her being your favorite. [She was and I was always pushing Eric to make her the winner.]

I truly was focused on my career being a fashion editor at Jane and was happy to do the show to help promote the magazine AND hopefully inject some of the spirit of Jane into the show. Like when they were I remember pushing back on criticism of Yoanna’s body not being thin enough or when some said Shandi was too thin. I had absolutely no contact with any of the models other than the weekly judging. ZERO insight into what was happening at the shoots or the models apartment, etc.

I think the backlash is a testament to how far the culture has grown and that what you/we were doing at Jane did make a difference. [He knows just what to say.]

Though I was a fashion editor at Jane when I appeared on the show for 12 episodes, I approached judging America’s Next Top Model through the lens of choosing the best model overall. After all, it was called America’s Next Top Model, not Jane’s Next Top Model. I understood the assignment.

That said, I was also representing Jane — the magazine and the brand — so I inevitably judged through that perspective as well.

.

Here is my take on some of the standout Cycle 2 Contestants:

Yoanna

She was somewhat of an underdog, and I’ve always loved an underdog — and always will. Her face was striking in a classical way: impossibly symmetrical, with large, wide-set eyes and full lips. Her short, choppy hair felt fresh and fashion-forward.

Her face reminded me of a young Carol Alt — whom, coincidentally, I had the privilege of styling for the launch of xoJane. [Carol was my favorite model when I was a teenager too, and I was so excited we got to photograph her for the xoJane launch.]

Nigel said that Yoanna was flat-chested and looked like a boy, or had a boyish body. I remember saying — though it was edited out — that she was the only contestant I could realistically see being cast in a Marc Jacobs show. At the time, Marc was the hottest designer in the industry and represented a somewhat new take on beauty. He championed models with distinct personalities and often cast his friends in campaigns — Sofia Coppola, Winona Ryder, Lil’ Kim, Kim Gordon (young, old, short, tall, etc).

Yoanna radiated a genuine love of fashion and style. She had that extra special something — a personality that elevated her beyond just a pretty face.

Xiomara

During one judging panel, I said that Xiomara was the only model there who could walk in a Jean Paul Gaultier show — and I still stand by that. She had the height and physical presence of a traditional model, but with an interesting, powerful edge. Gaultier is known for casting memorable, sometimes unconventional faces, and that’s where I saw Xiomara fitting into the fashion world.

This will definitely date me, but about a year after the show ended, I was at the Limelight club in NYC and Xiomara was bartending. She leapt over the bar to give me a huge hug. If you remember, she wore bright blue contact lenses on the show — way over-the-top, obviously fake, and they made her look… bizarre (though, again, very Gaultier).

She told me she had worn them to the auditions, but once filming began, she hadn’t planned on continuing to wear them. According to her, producers insisted she keep them in or risk immediate elimination. How manipulative is that?

I’m sure each contestant has her own story about manipulation — as we saw highlighted in the Netflix special — and I genuinely feel for them. I’m sensitive — Jane can attest to that — and every time a girl was sent home, it saddened me.

Judges

The first judging session went something like this:

A producer tells me which chair is mine behind the judging desk. The lineup is: Nigel, Tyra, me, Janice.

I’m five-foot-six. They are tall. Very tall. Especially in wigs and heels.

I’m chronically early, so of course I’m the first one seated. Janice sits down next, takes one look at me, and announces: “You’re SHORT. Sit up straight! Don’t slump. Get a pillow!”

So I get a pillow. It helps.

Tyra arrives. We clap, we gush, she sits down. She immediately clocks my pillow and asks for one too. Then Nigel and Janice ask for pillows. Before I know it, I’m balancing on three pillows.

That’s how judging began.

Tyra, Janice and Nigel are exactly as striking in person as you’d imagine. Cameras don’t exaggerate them — if anything, they understate.

Tyra

The fashion nerd in me was constantly debating whether to ask her about her true high-fashion era — pre–Sports Illustrated, pre–Victoria’s Secret bombshell mythology.

I was dying to ask:

• What was Karl Lagerfeld really like?

• Was Naomi Campbell actually awful to you?

• Is it true Tina Turner recommended you to Azzedine Alaïa?

• What Alaïa do you still own?

But Tyra was always impeccably professional with me — warm, lighthearted. Cordial. I never quite felt the opening to dive into fashion-history interrogation mode. That may have been her boundary… or just my hesitation.

Nigel

Nigel modeled before becoming a “noted” fashion photographer. I’ll admit — I’d never heard of him, so I didn’t arrive with burning questions. [I remember thinking this was hilarious in the same way that they get Bachelorette contestants to squeal in delight about a country music performer they could not possibly have heard of suddenly joining their date - or Abbie Lee Miller introducing a ‘world-famous’ guest choreographer. I had never heard of Nigel Barker either and had worked in magazines for decades at that point. No offense.]

He was always kind to me, though [says Eric, more diplomatically than me]. And whenever I ran into him and his wife, Crissy, they were genuinely lovely.

Janice

Janice is the one I became closest to.

Her stories are endless — and she tells them freely. You don’t have to ask. But of course, I asked anyway.

“What was Diana Vreeland like?”

Janice told me Vreeland once warned her, “Janice, don’t ever MAR yourself with ink,” when she was considering a tattoo.

“Weren’t you terrified posing with a cheetah for Peter Beard?”

“Did you really fuck Peter Beard?”

“Tell me everything about Irving Penn. And Richard Avedon.”

Four months with Janice could fill a book. One day, maybe. For now, I’ll keep it close.

On the very first day of judging she told me, “Someday you’re going to be a CEO — so act like it. Let me be the bitchy one.”

Honestly? That might have been the most valuable critique I received all season.

I do think Eric was too sensitive for what the show actually was. Don’t get me wrong, he has the snobby seemingly-insensitive fashion side that I adore, but thank God he didn't know about what was all really going on behind the scenes because you could see in his eyes that he was upset even whenever a girl simply got cut. So I can only imagine if he had known what was going on with Shandi for example (filming and exploiting her drunken sex with someone not her boyfriend), he wouldn't have been able to take it. He's a good person. “I feel terrible for Shandi,” he still says.

After talking to me about ANTM - and other gossip we fit in, of course - Eric texted me the post below with this note: “Someone sent me this from Reddit about my judging and I hope this is how I came across on the show and it reminds me that the best advice I could give to anyone who’s trying to succeed at work is super simple ‘don’t be late.’ I tell this to all the new assistants I work with to this day.”

I had my own snobby editor side and I was somewhat bummed when we actually did have to run a feature using the contest winner, not because of Yoanna but because it felt like a promotional shoot more than an editorial choice (as I already whined about above). But of course we were going to follow through. We did an accessories story, which can be a little more utilitarian and less fantastical and aspirational, in the front of the book so that we could run ads adjacent to it and not call as much attention to its aesthetics. We gave it six pages which I think was honorable of us because we could’ve tried to run it at 4 or even 2. The story wasn't something that I promoted on the cover because it would not have helped sales (now with all the notoriety of ANTM maybe, but not then). So it just kind of flew under the radar, as I hoped it would, and that was that and this is what it looked like:

REMINDER THAT IF YOU SUBSCRIBE NOW, YOU GET A FULL MONTH FREE OF ALL ACCESS TO EVERYTHING GOOD HERE!

One of my editors called me after watching Tyra’s interviews on the E! series, saying Tyra reminded her of ME. Wtf?! But here is where I do relate to the situations Tyra was in:

Sometimes you get into a job where you are hosting a show that is exploiting people. This happened to me with my talk show Jane that ran on Fox in the 90s. Your name is on it but you feel like you have no control over who the guests are or how they are prepped, etc etc - especially when it is live TV like my show was most days. I hosted shows where people would stand up and announce that they were pregnant to their mothers or start stripping in front of their dads. But here’s what you can do in that situation: Quit. Which Tyra didn’t do.

Another scenario that has happened to me too: Being made to compromise and release content that is not what you want to be promoting but feeling like you shouldn’t quit because of your staff, who may lose their jobs if you go (this happened to me at both Sassy and Jane magazines, where I stayed longer than I would have because I wanted everyone to keep jobs that I had hired them into). But in Tyra’s case, she fired her whole staff anyway when the show was at that compromised crossroads. So it is hard to relate to what she did or why.

I would love for her to come back with something actually altruistic. That’s my goal for Tyra. I have hope. That doesn’t mean we can’t trash her or anything else about ANTM in the comments because that’s fun.

AND one little addendum that came up when I was telling the Jane staff that I was going to be posting this:

From former Jane magazine editor Josh Lyons (who incidentally is one of at least three former employees to include scenes in their memoirs where they were on drugs in meetings with me and I didn’t know it and thought that I must have been off that day because we weren’t connecting. His awesome book with that in it is Pill Head.):

If you need any additional ANTM Jane content, I was so obsessed with the first season that I somehow convinced you to let me fly to Albuquerque where me and Elyse (3rd runner-up) hosted America’s Next Top Med Student (cuz Elyse was in med school and they kept talking about it on the show) and she judged a bunch of women on how well they could draw my blood.

I also helped write Miss J’s book. And one more ANTM story: Around 2004/2005 I was at a gay bar and got hit on by a guy who told me he’d been a photographer on the currently-airing cycle. We got super wasted and started trading deep dark secrets and his last one right before I bolted was something along the lines of “I only really like young boys. I’ll never act on it because I know how wrong it is, but I can’t help it.” His episode aired maybe a month or two later. Oh and one last random detail and then I swear I’ll stop blowing up your phone: Elyse was dating/living with a member of The Shins at the time, which made the whole experience even more early aughts.

Thanks for the perfect ending, Josh! I forgive you for doing drugs in meetings with me AND taking advantage of our expense accounts for your own follies (which was pretty close to Jane’s Mission Statement anyway). Thanks to the greatest crew of editors, thanks to Yoanna and everyone else involved in that crazy magazine and that crazy ANTM chapter. Josh’s visual proof below…

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For now, I am going to add an extra month on to every paid subscription. (I am also in a really good mood for OTHER reasons, so you all can reap the benefits of my happy-drunk largesse.) I will do this after the weekend so if you are not already a paid subscriber and sign up to subscribe today or tomorrow or Friday or Saturday or even Sunday (April 19 - my wonderful brother Ben’s birthday!), you will get that extra free month on top of whatever subscription tier you choose. (Even for Founding Member/Lifetime subscribers, I will figure out a way to produce an after-life accessible version just for you, in both Heaven and Hell editions - preorder whichever you need in the comments so I can plan accordingly.) And if you were hoping to get out of reading more from me and have been just waiting for your subscription to lapse, then sorry again and you have to suffer through a whole extra month of emails alerting you to stories from me and this unusual crew.

Those of you who have been around AJPT for a while already know today's writer from her take-your-breath-away punch-in-the-gut comments on most every story. I had gathered from these comments that Gina had a bigger story of her own to tell and I felt lucky when she said she wanted to tell it to you here. I love love Gina. She is not afraid to fight for anything she cares about. Which is most things. For this reason, she has often been controversial in the comments (which you know I REALLY love). The one-of-a-kind experience she writes about here will probably make it even clearer why she is the lovable fearless warrior and champion she always is. Go, Gina, go all the way.

As you have probably already surmised from the subject line, this story is intense. So the next promise I will make in this span of three paragraphs is that the feature I send out later this week will be goofy and happy-go-lucky and gossipy and superficial. Yay! And you can just wait for that if you prefer.

If you do choose to read today’s story, first you may want to brace yourselves or take a gummy or do whatever ritual you do before entering into something that might bring up strong reactions. (Speaking of which, if you are ever going into a situation with people you want to protect yourself from, this can help: Physically mimic the motions of putting on a hazmat suit and zipping it all the way up to the top just before entering. That has reduced or eliminated my stress many times - better than a cortisol-reducing supplement I also take. Plus I paid my therapist for it and it’s yours free! If you try it, let me know if it works for you also.)

Then feel free to say something nice and supportive to Gina in the comments, because going through what she has been through is a lot and putting it out there for all of us to read and see is also a lot. I can only imagine. Also, ask her questions! I had a ton of them and still have more. I know the medical aspects of this are complicated and that you may have your own knowledge about and opinions on all of them, which we would also love to hear. As I've said, Gina can take it all on and more! As can I!

OK, that was supposed to be a short intro today for Charlie’s and Andy's sakes and it didn't end up to be. Sorry again, guys!

Sincerely (and I mean that),

Jane

PS Truly last chance to vote for all the controversial books you’re even mildly interested in reading. Lena and Lindy are currently in the lead, but can Keith or Vladimir can catch up?? Next week, I will make the announcement that we will all have to live with, so have your say now!

The Cutest Shirt Ever In The Land

By: Eugenia Mancini Horan

On the day of my appointment, I put on a long skirt, long-sleeve shirt, and jacket in the August heat to cover my frail frame and cancer accessories. We set off, my heart pounding with excitement and tachycardia.

Dressed up? In my head, I thought I looked amazing.

My husband, my mother and I arrived at the cancer center. I could feel eyes on me, but I didn’t let myself think about it. I remembered how I’d gone through that same door just two and a half months earlier. Even though I was even worse now, I was one of the only people smiling.

I wasn’t asking them for help; not this time. Today I knew how to help myself. I just needed a signature. Easy. How could my doctor deny me this treatment that could save my life? That was too ridiculous to waste energy on.

Just like at my first visit, I was completely unaware of how unbelievably sick I looked. I was just over the moon that all the fighting had paid off. I held on. I didn’t give up. I had never believed I was too far gone to get here. I said this woman would fix it, and here I was to be fixed.

But I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly. My Oncologist had no idea that I had obsessively thought about this exact moment since July thirtieth. Imagining this triumph had gotten me through the darkest moments in the ICU, the scariest moments in hospice, and my late-night terrors at home. But she had no idea. This wasn’t the winning of an incredible battle against time, power, and my own body—not to her.

I had turned her into my salvation because, honestly, there was nowhere else to go. I believed the fact that she knew me would save me. She knew I was stubborn, that I was a fighter, and that I wanted to get well. I knew her to be fair, even-tempered, and thorough. She wouldn’t turn me away and sentence me to death. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

I was called back to see her, and within three minutes, all these attributes I recalled seemed the opposite of the doctor that I saw looking at me. I saw it immediately. She did not believe that treatment would save me. She didn’t believe anything could save me.

She only believed my cancer math—those stupid numbers.

I hoped she would see what I had going for me: My mind was on, it was firing, and I was determined to live.

She wasn’t able to see past my frail, useless body.

I used the most important muscles I had—those that enabled me to speak. I plead my case. I outlined and framed my argument, serious as a sermon. I think she was quite surprised to find out I had a mission. It was a word that had never passed between us before. I also think she saw the uncertainty on the faces of my husband Seth and my mother. She spoke to them, and I flinched as she saw the shrugs and uncertainty.

“God damn it,” I thought. “Are they trying to get me killed?”

I didn’t have the luxury of not betting it all. I wouldn’t hear of anything else or look at any other option; I had found my person. I intrinsically knew it was treatment or death, so I’d picked my side and never wavered. There was no other side. I was too sick for chemo. Even if I had been willing to take it, it would certainly have killed me. I had outlived a few death forecasts in order to sit in this room.

She looked at me, her face blank, as if she wanted it to seem like she was considering it.

She said, “No.” …and continued to.

For over thirty minutes we volleyed. Not only did she refuse, but she actively tried to dissuade me from this drug. But I could not be swayed. I was fueled by adrenalin. I had never considered the possibility that she might say no, because it was so obviously black-and-white. She was a doctor. Their duty is to at least attempt to save lives—to do no harm. This seemed like the ultimate harm. I was present and I was fighting. How could it be “too late?” How could I be “too far gone” if I’d gotten my ass into that office to beg?

I didn’t buy her stance that it could be considered cruel to prescribe it to me, likely because it was bullshit. If I died from pneumonitis or colitis, then so be it. But I would be damned if I died from neglect, waiting for cancer to shut down my lungs, from not being brave enough to try… or from her not being brave enough to try.

I had nothing to lose. I started pleading and could not stop. I talked about my deepest desires. I said that I wasn’t done with my life, that I could do this; that I would fight harder, longer, relentlessly. I would live. I didn’t want to leave Seth. I didn’t want to leave my dogs. I couldn’t bear the thought of my mother and father losing their child. How could she stand it? How could she sentence me to death? I didn’t stop. I pulled away from Seth and my mother, both of whom were trying to catch the snot running from my nose. I laid myself bare. I was livid. The past seven months flashed before me, and the memories of my mistreatment lit me on fire. I would not end like this.

I was called back to see her, and within three minutes, all these attributes I recalled seemed the opposite of the doctor that I saw looking at me. I saw it immediately. She did not believe that treatment would save me. She didn’t believe anything could save me.

I was two weeks past my two weeks to live. I was already on borrowed time. Who was she to just say no? I was asking her to prescribe it, not to pay for it herself. I wasn’t asking for heroin or crack. I wasn’t asking for cash or prizes. I was asking for a chance—just ONE chance—to keep my life. I was asking her to do her job, not for her opinion.

I called once again on my philosophical training to assess the situation. How do I best argue for my life? I knew her stance was based, if not on personal bias, then most certainly on the bias of the medical system. If there was a crack in her agreement with the system, I might still have a shot. I could not convince her I would survive. That had been my error. Asking her to believe in me had been a nearly fatal mistake.

So I tried to convince her of the death I thought I deserved.

TO READ THE REST OF GINA’S STORY AND TO SEE PICTURES OF HER NOW, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND THANK YOU SO MUCH.

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Hello, good people!

I love how you operate.

Paid subscribers, I’ll start with you because I worked in publishing back when all subscriptions were paid and all writers were compensated relatively fairly (unless maybe you were writing for Spin or Nylon or The Source at that time). So those of you paying your six dollars a month (or less if you take out a founding subscription) so that we can replicate that model as much as is possible in these AI times, I love you, I thank you deeply and I know exactly who you are. (Paid subscribers who get an email from my janky yahoo account, that is actually non-automated me, just not switching over when I see that you upgraded, to tell you how much I appreciate your support and I mean it.)

If you’re someone who took out the free 7-day trial or the one-time upgrade, hang on before canceling - if you can manage the psychological burden of having something outstanding to do, which is a tough one for me. That’s because there’s stuff coming out this week that’s extra juicy and I wouldn’t want you to have to go to the trouble of subscribing all over again and then unsubscribing yet again - though I'm sincerely impressed with how quickly some of you manage to sign up to read one paywalled story (like currently a lot of this one or this one) and then cancel minutes later. It’s remarkable and I would love to ask about your reading comprehension. Special admiration goes out to endurance athlete Bob, who subscribed and unsubscribed three times in the course of an afternoon yesterday!

The main thing is: If you’re not into this email, I get it and don’t worry because the next couple are worth hanging around for.

And now for some breaking news: NEW SASSY MAGAZINE T-SHIRTS!

Last week, one of you lovelies alerted me that the Best Shirt Ever (“ever” meaning since we sold them in SASSY Magazine starting 38 years ago) was stupidly only available in sizes up to 3XL. Well that’s because the company that makes the shirts only carries pink shirts in those weeny sizes. So my wonderful partner in crime Ani and I went and created what I now think is an even more gorgeous version. It features, as you can see, the glorious color pairing of hot pink on red! I’m producing it exclusively for sizes 4XL and 5XL. In celebration, I will give them away free to two commenters who tell me in the comments below why they want it.

See you in the comments! Unless you’re too busy having your best sex ever or getting your teeth checked (Virgo) or enjoying any of the other incredibly precise predictions from Bee below.

Love love always, Jane

PS If you haven’t already, you can still vote for all of the controversial books you’re interested in reading (and there are prizes involved!). Next week we’ll close it out and announce the exciting and worthy winners.

PPS Today’s horoscope column is unusually free to everyone, which also means that you can get personalized coaching - which is usually for paid subscribers only - from the most amazing and unique astrologer I know right there in the comments. I use her every month personally. And look how great my life is! Okay then.

The Perfect GIft For Anyone Cool

By The Zine Witch

So there I was, in the tragically muted green rotunda hallway gripping my not so gently used bloody tampon in my hands as I furiously walked down the hallway like an actual Terminator towards Karen’s room. I could not take it anymore. This see you next Tuesday had pushed me too far. Too far! Now I’m over the edge. Yeah, I’m Donita Sparks of L7, baby, and you’re on my shit list. And suddenly, I hit my target. I furiously opened the door and threw it. Right to the kisser. Headfirst, full force. Imagine me. The elevator scene from The Shining. The reluctant hero. Let the fucking games begin.

“Residential school looked like a prison. Kids were medicated severely to compliance. Sexual predators roamed the halls. One cop traded cigarettes for young girls’ tits.”

Residential school was a wild, chaotic, absurd place. Valley of the babydolls. For starters, it looked like a prison. Kids were medicated severely to compliance. Fights broke out constantly. Psychological warfare was everywhere. Sexual predators roamed the halls. One cop traded cigarettes for young girls’ tits. I was punished for defending myself. We all were. I was punished for reacting. I was punished for being human. Bullies went free. Adults were absent, negligent, or predatory. Every day was a brutal, absurd test of endurance.

When Judy spent too much time on the pay phone, the girls got together and cut all of her hair off and every individual piece of clothing in her closet into shreds to teach her a lesson. Day, one, the teddy bear that my dead mother’s best friend had given me that I’ve had since the day I was born was torn to shreds. After losing my father, it was a devastating loss, but there were no times for my tears. Like everything else in my life, it had to be dead and buried and move on for my own survival. This was my reality now.

I have always dreamed of writing this experience as a television show. The absurdity, the pure characters, the danger, the chaos is practically a blueprint for dark comedy, horror, and social critique all at once. Every moment highlighted structural issues in ways you could never stage. The system was designed to fail kids like me, to punish difference, to control rather than protect. And yet, somehow, it made me who I am. I learned to meet chaos head-on, to take fire and turn it into survival, and maybe one day into story.

Being autistic, the school system had no idea what to do with me. And like many neurodivergent kids who just needed care and coregulation, I was sent away for most of my late teens. The more I look back, no one questioned why the behavior happened. They were much more focused on controlling it than understanding the root issue. Many of our systems are designed this way. But this is where I ended up.

I really just wanted to be everyone’s friend growing up. With undiagnosed autism, I often ended up alone or worse, bullied for being myself. A lot of of my poor behavior was just a reaction to my environment. I feel like I was a good kid at heart. I tried to be but would often fail. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t keep up. I wasn’t…interested in what was being taught.

And like any kid who had gone thought the tremendous personal hell I grew up in, I had problems. My parents were not present and both died by the time I was 13. I was raised by a stepmother who was slowly descending into madness, so I had to look to my rock gods in the pages of Rolling Stone, Spin, Sassy, Circus, and whatever other magazine I was reading at the time for advice on how to grow up because I sure as hell was doing it alone.

In a place like that, minding your own business was practically an invitation to a nosebleed. Predators could smell hesitation the way sharks smell blood. Judy’s biggest crime was calling her mother too much and they butchered her entire wardrobe. In this world, your shampoo was pissed in. Toothpaste was rubbed on your face while you slept so you woke up with your entire face burning. Anyone could turn on you at any time. And the staff repeatedly told you you’re worthless. I left my body at a certain point.

Every hallway felt like a battleground. You learned to read a room in half a second. Who was about to snap. Who was high on their meds. Who had decided today was the day they were going to make someone else miserable just to feel powerful for ten minutes. The adults floated around like ghosts who had already given up. Sometimes they were negligent. Sometimes they were cruel. Sometimes they were just tired in that hollow way people get when they work inside a broken system too long.

The rules were arbitrary and the punishments were not about safety. They were about control. If you defended yourself you were aggressive. If you reacted you were unstable. If you cried you were manipulative. If you stayed quiet you were suspicious. There was no winning the game because the game itself was rigged.

So kids created their own ecosystem. Alliances formed and collapsed overnight. Rumors traveled faster than light. Some kids hardened into little warlords. Others disappeared into the background and tried to become invisible. Some of us developed a strange dark humor about it all because laughter was one of the only ways to metabolize the insanity of it.

Looking back, it was absurd in the way only institutional life can be absurd. Teenagers navigating violence, hormones, grief, medication, and abandonment all at once. Children trying to survive systems designed to contain them rather than understand them. You learned quickly that survival was not about being the strongest person in the room. It was about being the most adaptable. To turn off all feeling. The most observant. The one who could sense danger before it arrived. A breeding ground for sociopaths.

And sometimes survival meant snapping.

Sometimes it meant gripping a tampon like a tiny weapon of war and marching down a fluorescent hallway with the conviction of a soldier who had finally decided the battle was unavoidable. Karen had gone too far. She had given my diary to another student who took it upon themselves to photocopy and share it all over school. My private poems, my thoughts, fears, prayers…exposed. Now it was war.

I don’t know what came over me. It was like my mind stepped into a new persona in that moment. I became my own hero. Donita Sparks was the Aries singer of the band L7 a group that played with ferocious intensity and absolutely refused to take anyone’s shit. She is perhaps most famous, however, for an infamous moment at a concert when a heckler in the audience pushed her too far. In response, Sparks pulled out a used tampon and hurled it straight at his fucking head, instantly cementing the band’s reputation for fearless, confrontational punk rock. And now, I too was pulling a Donita.

Aries is the god of war. In the Jewish tradition, to celebrate the new year, the first month of the zodiacal new year, we blow an instrument called the shofar, which is made from the ram’s horn. The noise of the shofar is loud, jarring, and can bring a room to pause. Aries energy enters the room with a gust of fury much like the sound of a shofar. Traditionally, the shofar is meant to intimidate the enemy, to declare war, and to call people to assembly. As such, Aries energy bursts in with this energy. Like Donita Sparks. Like me in this moment where I declared The Crimson Uprising.

You see, Aries energy pushes us to the edge where politeness collapses and instinct takes over. It is the moment when the body says enough. Enough humiliation. Enough silence. Enough swallowing anger to keep the peace. Aries is the archetype that grabs the door handle, throws it open, and acts. It is not always graceful. It is not always strategic. Sometimes it looks like chaos. Sometimes it looks like a teenager in a residential hallway launching a tampon like a biological grenade.

But beneath the absurdity is something ancient and sacred. Aries is the force that defends the self when no one else will. It is the spark of life that refuses to be crushed. It is the war cry of the nervous system that has endured too much and finally pushes back. In a world where I was constantly punished for reacting, Aries was the part of me that refused to disappear.

I will not be fucked with, Karen. And I never was by her ever again. Her roommate? Now my best friend. I won the battle and the war. Take that!

Listen, I am a very demure person these days. I would never throw a bloody tampon at anyone except for perhaps the maintenance worker who consistently says misogynistic things to me, though I have reported him at least a half a dozen times, but only has his job because he’s union…… But that’s a complaint for another day. These days we handle our business in a more civilized way: using our big girl voice and asking for what we need directly.

All of this is to say: I’m not telling you to throw a tampon at someone this month. Though maybe you want to. The month awakens that urge to disrupt, to shake things loose, to confront what’s been stagnating. It asks you to call forth the master or hero within yourself, to step into your own authority, to start something new even if it feels reckless or audacious. You may surprise yourself with your own audacity. It’s a time to declare war on old patterns, on fear, on complacency, on anything that’s been quietly controlling you. This is the energy that pushes you to ignite bold ideas, unapologetic self-expression, and fierce independence, even if it scares you a little.

FOR ALL SIGNS:

Best Day for Healing Work or Therapy (your choice!) - April 17

Best Day for Sex or a Deep Conversation (again, your choice) - April 25

To Read Something Else Entirely

AND HERE ARE YOUR INDIVIDUAL HOROSCOPES - ALL FREE THIS TIME:

Astrologers tend to write horoscopes for your rising sign or Ascendent. This is the sign that was rising in the east when you were born. This tends to be the most accurate prediction. However, will need your birth time for that and you can go to various websites to figure out your own particular chart, but I enjoy Astro.com. If you do not know your birth time, feel free to read these for your sun sign, which works also.

Aries & Aries Rising- After weeks of exhaustion, you may be feeling like putting yourself out there more! There might be a little fire in your chest this month telling you to start fresh, take risks, and finally do what makes you feel alive instead of what everyone else expects. Someone close might get dramatic when you stop bending to their whims, and a relationship could reveal who actually gets you versus who’s just along for the ride. This is your moment to claim your space, speak your truth, and sprinkle a little extra sparkle on your own life. The people and opportunities that really belong will show up, and the rest can twiddle their thumbs somewhere else.

Taurus & Taurus Rising- This month is the time to slow down and give yourself a little extra care. You might notice your body and your routines have been running on empty, and it’s time to rest, recharge, and pay attention to what actually supports your health. Small changes to your daily habits sleep, meals, movement can make a huge difference in how you feel. Someone or something in your life may push for more from you than you can give, and that’s your cue to honor your limits. When you prioritize your well-being and protect your energy, everything else falls into place more easily.

Gemini & Gemini Rising- This month is all about what lights you up and who’s cheering you on. You might feel a surge of creative energy or a craving to do things that just make you happy, no explanations needed. At the same time, your friendships and social circles could shake things up, showing you who really has your back and who’s just along for the ride. This is a month to follow your curiosity, make space for fun and self-expression, and invest in connections that actually energize you. When you lean into what excites you and the people who get it, everything else falls into place.

Cancer & Cancer Rising- This cycle feels like the universe is inviting you to play both interior designer and CEO of your life. The full moon in your fourth house shines a spotlight on home, family, and the emotional corners you’ve been avoiding, urging you to tidy up old baggage and create a sanctuary that actually feels like yours. Meanwhile, the new moon in your tenth house whispers, “time to show up,” planting seeds for career moves, public recognition, or a new life direction. It’s a dance between nesting and rising like grounding yourself in what feels secure while stepping into ambitions that finally honor your inner truth. This is the moment to make your personal foundation work as hard as your public persona.

Leo & Leo Rising- You might find yourself needing to speak your truth, share your insights, or release old patterns of thinking that no longer serve you. Siblings, neighbors, or close connections could play a bigger role than usual, bringing either closure or revelation. Emotionally, your mind is where the drama unfolds, so watch for mental overdrive or impulsive communication. This is about stepping into bigger ideas, new philosophies, or long-distance experiences that broaden your worldview. Travel, higher education, spiritual growth, or publishing could all be themes. You’re being asked to take a leap of faith, trust in your curiosity, and set intentions for personal growth that feels adventurous and meaningful. It’s a reset for how you see the world and how the world sees you.

Virgo & Virgo Rising- This month is putting your resources and your sense of security under the microscope. You might notice where you’ve been giving too much of yourself: time, money, or energy and finally decide some of it needs to stay put. Things that feel hidden or off-limits in relationships could surface, showing you who is really loyal and who’s just along for the ride. This is a month to own your worth, set boundaries around what you share, and make space for the people and projects that actually matter. When you honor yourself, everything else falls into place naturally. Oh, and keep an eye on your teeth this month. It’s not a bad time for a dental check up or to pay a little bit more attention to what you’re consuming.

Libra & Libra Rising- Balance, baby. That’s key this month. You may be noticing your own needs more these days. You don’t just need to be loved, you need to be understood. You don’t need work that drains you or people who take without giving. You need space to create, to move, to show up fully as yourself and you need the same from others. But, you also wanna look cute while doing it. This is a month to show off your pizzaz. Someone close might push against your boundaries later in the month, testing whether you’ll shrink or finally say no. A new connection could appear, bold and unpredictable, challenging the way you’ve done relationships so far. Or you may prefer the company this month of sharp people who challenge the old and welcome in the new. This is a month to stop apologizing for taking up space, to speak your truth clearly, and to invest your energy only where it actually matters. The people and opportunities that belong in your life will rise to meet you, and the rest will fade without a fight. This is a good month to start a spicy new connection or commit with your work life. Just make sure to pause, listen closely, and pay attention to what it tells you about your own needs and desires.

Scorpio & Scorpio Rising- This month it’s all about finally shedding the invisible chains of people-pleasing and relationships that lead to your subconscious undoing. You’re seeing the ways you’ve bent yourself into someone else’s mold, the old scripts you’ve followed to keep the peace, and now you’re ready to dissolve them. You’re planting intentions around self-priority, daily habits, your work life, and boundaries, creating a routine and meaningful work that serves you first. This is your villain era: unapologetic, decisive, and fierce in how you take care of yourself and claim your space. There is a need to pay a little bit more attention to your health this month and to rest where and when necessary. Take that oil of oregano or chug that fire cider and be kind to yourself.

Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising- This month brings a strong focus on your inner child and the people you genuinely connect with. Parents may notice their children taking meaningful steps toward self-expression, while others might find themselves stepping into the role of the big sister or brother they once needed. It’s a wonderful time for dating, pleasure, and deepening connections. Some reevaluations around who you connect with may arise, but these shifts will ultimately strengthen your relationships. This is a great time to take a calculated risk towards your goals and the future you envision.

Capricorn & Capricorn Rising- Work life balance is at the core of this month for you. This month is all about finding balance between your progressional ambitions and personal fulfillment, making sure your work aligns with your deeper values. You might feel pulled to make adjustments whether setting boundaries, reprioritizing projects, or reclaiming time for yourself but these changes will help you step into a more authentic and sustainable version of success. There’s an opportunity to clean house, literally or figuratively at this time. Who you are is changing, and with that comes the pillars that create the scaffolding around your life.

Aquarius & Aquarius Rising- You may be questioning your beliefs, long-term goals, or sense of purpose while also noticing the need to communicate more openly and authentically in your daily life. Travel, learning, or exploring new perspectives could inspire breakthroughs, and conversations with others whether casual or deep might reveal exactly what you need to shift to feel more aligned. This is a great time for publishing, broadcasting, or sharing your ideas with the world around you. Connect and use your voice.

Pisces & Pisces Rising- This month is about reclaiming your worth. You are being asked to plant seeds around your self value and financial stability this month while examining the deeper agreements you have made with others. Finances, taxes, debts, these are the areas of concern this month. You may be looking at how much you consume or what it is that you’re consuming. It’s also not a bad time to take care of your teeth and make a dental appointment. By the end of the month you may find yourself standing a little more firmly in the truth that your energy, your time, and your gifts have real value, and that the right exchanges will honor that.

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If you’re new here, WELCOME ABOARD! Thank you so so much for signing up and my gift to you is permission to skip this italicized part from me and scroll right down to today’s featured story. Or skip it all and go straight to the website where you can read more than 500 thrilling articles and their equally thrilling accompanying comments. It’s never dull in there.

Moving on… The story submissions I get here* at AnotherJanePrattThing sure do follow logic-defying trends. If you have been reading AJPT for a while, you may remember when I was getting all those death-related stories and had to put a call-out for some lighter stuff? There was also one point a couple of months ago when I was flooded with It Happened To Me submissions from people in open marriages (like this one that I did run and boy did it get a lot of engagement - and the single most sexually explicit comment on anything I’ve run in my long publishing life - I will tell you where to find that if you want). Another phase involved a slew of dog-related story proposals all within about a week of each other. That was adorable. And then so many eating disorder-related proposals came in all of a sudden, at the opposite time of the year as Eating Disorder Awareness Month too. Well, right now the tide seems to have turned to first-person encounters with celebrities. With a particular bent toward sex with famous musicians. It’s uncanny.

I can count at least four submissions I got recently with that premise (stories that a lot of people probably would have read. Including probably me). These were all different celebrities, by the way. I didn’t publish any of them, for various reasons, even though some were gorgeously written (you know who you are, gorgeous writers) and some have gone on to be published elsewhere.

Mainly, you don’t want to tell a story where the subject doesn’t have the option of telling their side. Or where they don’t want the story exposed at all. Whether they are famous or not. Of course. And even in this story you are about to read as soon as I shut up, we edited out a lot about other women - and a couple of men - who were involved because it didn’t seem right to expose them even while Tara very much wanted to expose Dave - for her reasons which you will see.

I didn’t keep up with the past years’ gossip about Dave Grohl. I’m pretty sure I have met him multiple times over the decades, but I definitely don’t know him. I’ve always liked whatever I’ve known or seen. I also don’t love to perpetuate gossip. And you would think I would’ve learned my lesson about this general topic when a story about a really wonderful musician and sensitive person appeared in the comments section on my old website XOJane - a comment that turned out to be very untrue and very hurtful to the person it was about. I was able to delete it when I was alerted to it by his publicist. (Note to Mark Zuckerberg and every other tech titan hiding behind Section 230 to argue that you are not responsible for third-party content on your platforms: Yes you are and yes you can do much much better.) I still feel terrible about being part of that hurt.

I did also hear (along with I’m sure many of you because it got a fair amount of press attention) that Dave is currently in lots and lots and lots of therapy and I praise him for that and I hope his life and all the lives of all the people involved are better than they were. I’ve done things too. (Thus my memoir, coming in 2027 or so, which would run tens of thousands of pages - in shorthand - if I include all of the shit I’ve done.) Let’s all keep growing.

And if you think my growth should include unpublishing this article, let me know that too. I hope you will talk to me and Tara about her story - and about how you feel about it being aired and the importance of people/women telling their stories like this and how best they do that. And ask Tara all the questions you want, and me too. I want to hear it all.

I love and respect you all tremendously.

Jane

*Send me your stories that you want published to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com, just like Tara and hundreds of others did before you!

Quiz (sort of): How Sassy Are You?

By Tara Dublin

Dave Grohl knew my name before we ever met in 2001.

Yes, the Dave Grohl who’s been on a solo redemption press tour ahead of Foo Fighters releasing their new record on April 24th (two days before my birthday) because of the bombshell revelation that he had fathered a fourth daughter outside of his marriage in August 2024. That news, combined with the firing of drummer Josh Freese without any explanation, had tarnished Dave’s rep as the “Nicest Guy in Rock,” so he’s out there trying to smooth things over before Foo Fighters hit the road again.

At the same time, one of Dave’s most famous exes, Melissa Auf der Maur, has just released her memoir, and I’ve read a brief excerpt that was posted on Facebook. The few details about the beginning of their relationship rang familiar to me.

There was a brief time in the early 2000s when Dave and I were in touch, after he was married, but long before Violet was born. I had an AOL email for him and a cell phone number with a Virginia area code. We never spoke on the phone, and this was before texting. But some of the things that Melissa shared in that excerpt I read were…not original material, shall we say.

I’ve kept secrets about Dave for 25 years while waiting for answers to questions I’ve never been able to ask him. I’m not a vindictive bitch, and there are things I’ll never tell, because I respect him and the relationship he has with his family. Even before I learned about his fourth daughter, I stayed quiet to my own detriment, often misunderstood and called things like “groupie” and “stalker,” when I was only seeking the truth. I don’t want him, I need my poor brain to finally rest after a quarter century of “What if’s” and “Why me’s.”

500+ stories not about Dave are here

It’s been a rough few years for The Grohl, and if you have a forgiving nature, as I do, you might be able to cut him some slack. Dave lost Taylor Hawkins and his mother, Virginia, within four months of each other in 2022. That would fuck anyone up for a good while.

But if Dave Grohl really wants to reclaim his title as the Nicest Guy in Rock, he has to do something bigger than go to therapy or release a new album. He’s got another confession to make. There’s one last component to his redemption arc so he can really stick the landing.

And that component is…

TO KEEP READING AND SEE ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF TARA AND DAVE’S TIMES TOGETHER, AND TO TALK TO TARA ABOUT HER STORY, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE RIGHT HERE. IT COSTS LESS THAN $2 A WEEK AND WE HAVE TO PAY FOR THESE ARTICLES SOMEHOW. THANK YOU!

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