#121. Suddenly, my life feels like 'Sex and The City'

Thoughts on turning 36

The first time I watched an episode of Sex and The City, I was 20 years old on summer break after my sophomore year of college. My sister, who was 23 at the time, had recently graduated and moved from Colorado Springs to Denver, so we lived in the same city again for the first time since childhood. The DVD box set (remember those???) was an eye-catching, monochromatic shade of hot pink, set out on her IKEA coffee table like it was on display. When I said I’d never seen it – I was a deranged Grey’s Anatomy fan at the time – she wasted no time telling me to sit the fuck down and pressed “play.” She was midway through a binge watch already, and suddenly I was along for the ride.

Tomorrow is my 36th birthday, making me the same age Carrie and Charlotte were in season 5. When I watched the show back then, Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte kind of seemed like wise (and fun, messy, cool) older sisters, even though my own sister was still nearly a decade younger than Carrie was when the series started. Now, they’re my peers. They’re me, and my friends, and my sister. They’re you reading this, probably. They’re all of us.

And honestly? This is the first year in a while I think I’ve actually noticed myself aging. I have melasma above my upper lip now, my hip joints are starting to yell at me when I take a walk over a mile or two long, and I don’t get carded nearly as often as I did even a year ago. Hangovers, virtually non-existent until I turned 26, will hang me out to dry for an entire day unless I take one of these. And the strangest aging marker of all? I’m the same age (or older, since I’ve unfortunately always been obsessed with shows set in high school) as almost all of my most beloved fictional characters. That’s a fucking head trip I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. (Guess who was 36 during the first season of Grey’s Anatomy?????)

You’re such a Charlotte, my sister teased in the summer of 2009, my eyes glued to a pair of Carrie’s shoes during my very first episode. Am I? I thought. I’m pretty sure I tried to protest, but my sister (a Miranda) only cackled. I think maybe I was a Charlotte, back then. But Carrie’s life was the one quietly whispering to me, even if I never said that part out loud. Sixteen years later, I don’t feel like I have much in common with Charlotte anymore, except for the part where she’s obsessed with love. Couldn’t change that if I tried.

It gives me stomach pains knowing these two weren’t friends in real life

Season 5 is a short one, only eight episodes long instead of the usual 18 (I binge watched the entire thing again this week in two nights). Carrie lands a book deal for her column, Miranda struggles with life as a working mother, Charlotte navigates dating after divorce, and Samantha gets back together with Richard. Other than Carrie getting a book deal (I’m not quite there yet 🥲), my life at 36 suddenly looks a lot like season 5. I’m trying to sell a book I wrote (and spend my days tapping away at my laptop, writing through the imposter syndrome and tossing out far too many things I couldn’t help but wonder), my sister just got divorced, I’m watching my friends adjust to their new lives as working moms, and I’ve been emotionally supporting a friend I adore through an on-again-off-again relationship rollercoaster.

At some point without me really noticing, the plot of Sex and The City began to mirror my own life, because I guess I finally caught up to it. The series may be very 90s / early 2000s in many ways – there’s a very distinct lack of texting and social media – but it’s more relevant to me now than ever.

It’s funny, though. I always wondered why season 5 is so much shorter than the others. Very unlike Carrie, Sarah Jessica Parker was pregnant with her first baby during filming. There was no good way to work it into the story, like the writers did with Miranda/Cynthia – in my opinion, it would have been a total betrayal of Carrie's character. Carrie Bradshaw has remained childfree by choice in the 27 years she’s been on TV, in a way that’s never felt like her decision was very difficult. Candace Bushnell, the writer who created Carrie (an auto-fictional character), also never had children. If you google her, there’s a ton of articles out there claiming Candace said she regrets not having children, and then there’s this:

The “real” Carrie Bradshaw (in the 90s) 👑

A lot of people think Carrie is the absolute worst, but I don’t. She’s a dreamer and a really loyal friend with a witty sense of humor who absolutely crosses the line and fucks up on occasion. Who doesn’t? She’s messy, she’s driven, she’s self-absorbed sometimes, she’s figuring it out. So am I. Even now that we’re the same age, I still see Carrie as inspirational, for better or for worse. When Alex Cooper asked Sarah Jessica Parker what she liked most about Carrie on Call Her Daddy in June, she said:

“Her kind of candor, her curiosity about sex and sexual politics, which is not like me. I don’t talk about that at all, even with friends. I’ll talk about it globally, but I don’t sit and share intimate details of my life that way. I like that she was sort of circumspect about when she wrote that she had a kind of thing about what happened and how does it relate to the world? How does it relate to other women? And I admired that she was scrappy. You know, she was like a little survivor.

There’s a sentiment sometimes that she’s frustrating or she’s selfish or she makes poor decisions or she doesn’t manage her money well. Yeah, all of that has been true over the course of the last 25 years. But she’s also been hugely loyal, decent, reliable, a really good friend, generous, available, present, comforting, giving herself in big and small ways that are private and public to her and among her friends. Or they say that she’s selfish. And I was like, I can give you 10 ways in which she wasn’t.”

I mean, the part where Carrie dedicates her book to Charlotte? Sobbing.

“That night, I dedicated my baby, my book, to hopeful single women everywhere. And one in particular… my good friend Charlotte, the eternal optimist, who always believes in love.” – Carrie Bradshaw

Tomorrow, I’m celebrating my birthday with friends (and my husband, who is absolutely one of the girls) and a Cosmopolitan on a patio somewhere. But! I have a little treat for paid subscribers hitting your inbox in the morning. ❤️

36 & fabulous

“No, Your Email Doesn’t Find Me Well. Why Everyone is So Tired of Work” by Patricia Grabarek and Katina Sawyer for TIME

Two Industrial-Organizational psychologists did a study on why everyone is so fucking burnt out at work, and they found that good leadership is the most essential ingredient to retaining productive employees who don’t hate their jobs:

The evidence is clear—if organizations want to boost engagement and performance, they need to stop focusing on quick-fix wellness programs and start investing in better leadership. It may seem counterintuitive, but employees aren’t looking for superhero leaders. They want real people—leaders who show up as their true selves, flaws and all.

“Where Writers Go to Be Weird” by Emma Alpern for Vulture

What is Substack, really? This essay describes it as: “part promotional platform, part social-media site, part venue for rambling journal entries,” which is mostly true I guess, but that doesn’t feel quite right to me. Substack is the new blog with a better delivery mechanism, a place to find community, and a haven for people who are burned out on short-form content and trolls on Instagram. (Right??)

But much of what’s popping up on Substack is appealingly specific, the kind of stuff that’s unpublishable elsewhere. “There have been things that I’ve written that then an editor reached out and said, ‘Why didn’t you send that to us?’” says Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and The Late Americans, who began posting regularly in 2021. “And I’m like, ‘Well, there’s no way you’d have wanted a 4,000-word deep dive on the similarities between the West Elm Caleb debacle and Sense and Sensibility. You would not have run that, right? And the reason that you’re reaching out is because I wrote it and people seem to have really liked it or responded to it.”

“Your job used to impress people. That era just ended.” by

Carmen Van Kerckhove

for Pack Light Live Full

This essay has legitimately been haunting me for weeks. It’s long, but the punchline is that “white collar” workers are potentially in for some very deep (psychological) shit in the near future because of AI:

We've built an entire social structure around the idea that "thinking" jobs trump "doing" jobs. That degrees matter more than skills. That working with your mind is inherently more valuable than working with your hands. But what happens when the "thinking" jobs disappear and only the "doing" jobs remain?

Imagine the cognitive dissonance of explaining to your college friends that you left your marketing director job to become a postpartum doula—not because you had some spiritual awakening, but because it pays better and has more job security. Or telling your parents that your MBA is essentially worthless, but your neighbor who became an elevator repair technician just bought a vacation home.

I’m behind on my reading this month (whoops) but that’s okay because I want to direct your attention to the essay “Oprah’s Book Club is beyond redemption” instead. In today’s episode of “we’re living in a capitalist dystopia”:

This year Oprah launched a podcast companion to her sinking book club with a name half-inspired by the first mate on the ill-fated Pequod. It’s called Oprah’s Book Club: Presented by Starbucks. Each podcast will involve a conversation at a Starbucks café, where Oprah “will share a recommended Starbucks beverage pairing that customers can enjoy while discussing the book at their local Starbucks store.”

Oprah’s May selection is Ocean Vuong’s Emperor of Gladness. What drink would go with a novel that opens with its hero standing on a bridge considering suicide? Let the Starbucks website explain it to you:

“We’ve paired Emperor of Gladness with the Iced Brown Sugar Oatmilk Shaken Espresso. Made with Starbucks® Blonde Espresso, cinnamon and brown sugar topped off with oatmilk and ice, this barista-crafted drink is a flavorful match for Vuong’s rich, evocative storytelling and way of balancing grit with tenderness.”

I just… can’t. Is it time for me to boycott Starbucks? Maybe.

ChatGPT is actually making people dumber, and yes, this is a thing we should all be concerned about. Did you hear about the AI-related Duolingo backlash? Or that the birth rate “crisis” may actually be much worse than the UN originally thought?

Also, Mr. Big is alive and well and married in Vermont.

ICYMI, I recorded my only solo episode for the Sheila Heti Summer Slow Read last week called “Will my body never take the hint?” which is a shorter episode if you’re looking for something bite-sized to keep your ears company.

Before I go off into my birthday weekend (it’s going to be v low key), I have a quick question. You all know I’m a book person, but if you aren’t yet aware, I’m just as much of a crazed fan of pop music. This week I wrote a 700-word essay (translation: five short-ish paragraphs) about Kesha’s new album and I don’t know what to do with it!

The Friday issue is lengthy enough as it is (srry) and there’s a hot debate going on in my house right now about what to do with this piece, and any others that would come after it (whenever new mainstream pop albums come out, I guess?) Honestly these essays write themselves because in my fantasy world, I’ve been a pop music critic since before I was born. I just don’t know where to put them.

If you have a moment, I would love your two cents. Trust that this essay (and others that would come after it) has my signature strangeness, plenty of personal anecdotes, a rating out of 10, etc. etc. It’s like a book review, but, ya know. No spoilers and you can partake for free.

***When I say “solo issues” I mean I’d send each album review out as its own newsletter issue to all OPT OUT subscribers on a random schedule as new albums are released into the wild. Making a second newsletter means that you’d have the freedom to opt in or opt out (heh) of album reviews at your leisure.

Am I overreacting about the Oprah/Starbucks thing? Are you still watching Sex and The City or are you over it?