and just like that, I screamed GET AN ABORTION at my laptop

also two other things I'd like to say

I guess I feel like I should send a thing, so here you go.

Oh rite, alcohol is poison.

Saturday evening I accidentally poisoned myself with alcohol. I was cooking dinner and there was some bourbon-y premixed alcohol beverage in the fridge that I poured myself, and since bourbon doesn’t actually read as whiskey to me (it’s supposed to hurt on the way down, folks, not just the next day, that’s the point of whiskey), it went down too fast and then for the next 24 hours it was basically me and the poison, making our peace with one another.

There’s no real lesson here, I was neither trying to hurt myself nor having too much fun, I was just careless. Like that time my friend Jay meant to take an ativan before a job interview and he took an ambien instead, only less amusing results. (still got the job, and yes, that’s a whole story). Anyways, alcohol is poisonous, fine print “drink responsibly”. PS when ppl get high and mighty about ODing or Drugs or Drug Abuse or Addicts, please recall that I accidentally poisoned myself via a commodity purchased at a state liquor store while doing nothing more interesting than figuring out what to do with so much goddamn zucchini for dinner, MERELY because I hadn’t eaten that much that day and I wasn’t paying attention.

No, I’m not arguing that alcohol should be illegal, but rather, the opposite: legalize everything else.

The soft animal of my body really does want to walk in the woods for weeks on end: backpacking update

I went on my first solo backpacking trip last week. I carried everything I needed on my own back (30 pounds, yes, I know that’s a lot, thank you ultralighters and I’m working on making it smaller) and I saw a bear and I got lost and then I got lost again (on a trail I had been on THE PREVIOUS WEEK, LOL, which is a good lesson in how quickly you can get lost in the woods), and coyotes at 9pm sure do sound like they’re coming to tear you limb from limb even though I have never read a headline “Coyotes tear solo woman backpacker limb from limb”. Also bats.

Also an incredible, incredible sunrise, also my strange hunch that I wanted to get into backpacking was correct, I LOVE IT, I felt actual joy up there on that mountain all by myself, which is pretty rare for me.

I haven’t generally made it in life through an orientation to joy, I’ve made it through an orientation to values, because joy has been unreliable to nonexistent, but values are always accessible. Orienting toward values does have a plodding responsibility to it, it’s not exactly the harsh honking of the geese or the soft animal of your body, though, so I’m curious to follow this joy thing a little further.

PS if you got the geese/soft animal references you will enjoy this Welcome To Mary Oliver Garden piece in McSweeney’s. Finally, yes, I did hike in a fingertip length black wedding veil and yes it worked just as well as I thought it would for keeping the mosquitoes off me.

backpacking joy

One last thing about the backpacking: I’m really truly just following the soft animal of my body here. I’m not out to prove something. I have learned that there is such a thing as Fastest Known Time on trails and I don’t care. I don’t need to bag peaks or crush goals. I’m not crushing anything. I’m just entering my #mossbitch era.

I hate-watched And Just Like That S2 and the thing I hated the most was that in the year of our lord 2023 you still cannot say the word abortion on TV.

Okay this isn’t a spoiler because this could literally refer to practically every character on AJLT, but toward the end of S2, which was just as annoying as I thought it might be, what with the little stools for their handbags, Carrie’s unbelievably prudish brand of heterosexuality (she can’t talk about dry pussies? pussies get dry, folks, everyone knows it, that’s why lube is a gift) , etc., but the worst part, the worst, worst worst part was when one of the perimenopausal women with Big Plans accidentally gets knocked up AND the word ABORTION IS NEVER UTTERED. NOT ONCE.

GET AN ABORTION, I yelled, repeatedly, at my laptop, but to no avail. We don’t know that word on teevee, and I guess I understand why since I do get why a corporation might not want to be firebombed or otherwise threatened but then DONT HAVE THE FUCKING STORYLINE AT ALL if you are too wimpy to say a word that would be ringing loudly in the ears of any such ambitious perimenopausal woman who may accidentally have found herself knocked up. I know this because I found myself worried about such a situation last year.

Now, I’m 48, and I have a Mirena, so truthfully I haven’t bled in over 15 years and I have no idea exactly where I am in the fertility spectrum except it’s definitely perimenopause because there’s no other explanation for a woman in her forties suddenly starting to tuck herself into bed with icepacks.

Nevertheless, even in perimenopause it is possible to get knocked up, and since I don’t bleed, how would I know, and last year from a confluence of personal circumstances that are not your business I went through a several week period where I felt fat, my boobs hurt, and I wanted to puke all the time. Gentlepeople, yes, I did take a pregnancy test, because no matter how unlikely a pregnancy was, the possibility that I might discount the idea that I was pregnant and allow it to go on too long until it became a more difficult problem to solve was more awful than feeling ridiculous for thinking I might could possibly get knocked up, yes AT MY AGE.

I was not knocked up, thank the lord, but if I had been, I would have GOTTEN AN ABORTION. I would not have thought twice about it, I would not have hesitated to utter the word, I would not have “had to think about it” I WAS IN NO EARTHLY SHAPE TO HOST A FETUS OR RAISE YET ANOTHER CHILD, so yeah, ABORTION.

And so this ambitious woman, who first of all is bewildered at her pregnancy, second of all is angry at her partner for not having gotten a vasectomy years ago and has apparently just been hoping and praying her way through rawdogging it for that many years (and what is the objection to condoms for adults on this series? Carrie acts positively confused when asked if she kept condoms around, as if the possibility that she might catch gonorrhea from any of the men she fucks is just … unthinkable), this woman is bewildered, she is angry, she is not prepared to go through a pregnancy or have a baby because geez, she had other plans, and yet, when her partner asks her “if we should have that … other conversation” she shuts him down, “no, I couldn’t do that” and this friends is the least believable thing in this unbelievable series, because I don’t know a single woman in remotely that demographic who would just blithely blow off that option and then cry herself to sleep with the question HOWEVER SHALL SHE MANAGE WITH THIS BABEEEE?

It’s not fucking believable, and it’s not believable because there is an explicit media blackout on storylines that show people just… getting an abortion and moving on with their lives, even when that is the most obvious thing that they would do.

It’s infuriating.

What we get instead is a convenient miscarriage. And then, then, the cherry on top, is that after the convenient miscarriage we get the weepy bathroom scene where the woman wails to her partner “DID I KILL THE BABY WITH MY MIND????”

No, lady, you didn’t. But what you could have, and in actual real life almost certainly would have done, is made a single call to your obgyn who, since you live in New York, would have prescribed a medical abortion, i.e. mifepristone (still legal, there’s a stay on that insane judicial ruling), and had some particularly bad cramps, maybe, and then gone on your merry fucking way.

Now, again, I don’t exactly blame HBO here. We can’t expect corporations that have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to give a fuck about our bodily autonomy and showing storylines that actually accurately represent our reality.

I blame the christofascist domestic terrorists and the reign of terror they have inflicted on us for decades, and I blame the judges they purchased, for the fact that the word abortion may not be uttered even on a show that in the same episode has a whole storyline about anal sex and who is putting their dick in whose ass. Don’t get me wrong, I’m here for the anal discourse, but I’m mad as hell that we don’t get the abortion discourse as well.

If you would like to fund my TV show “people going about their lives having abortions in a pretty boring way, and then being perfectly happy about it” you know where to find me. In the meantime, subscribe to Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, every day, and have this excellent t-shirt from AK Press, “Abortion Forever” and pre-order this book about radical abortion care in the 70s, because the 70s are coming back around, my friends, and we best be ready for radically helping one another with our “late periods”.

Okay folks, there you go, this is what you get from me when I have to stop shitposting on twitter because twitter is now x, and I’m underslept because the coyotes were too loud and I’m half-dead because bourbon is too smooth, you get ABORTION RAGE BACKPACKING AMY. Wow I’m getting more and more queer as I age (somewhat like Miranda, check out this tiktok about that).

Oh, I’m taking a class about RAGE. I found this thing on instagram, Night School Bar, and it’s like a reading group but you have a teacher and you actually do the reading, and the class I’m taking right now is about RAGE. It’s pretty rad. Check it out.

do u have work problems? i will listen to you talk about them, for cash.

this is the part where I shill for myself. I still accept money in exchange for offering my bracingly realistic perspective on your software engineering career and management problems. You may find me helpful for cutting through bullshit and laying out the actual options you may have available to you and/or the actual reality with which you are faced or you may simply find me helpful because I deeply understand the tech industry in a way your therapist, who has merely heard of slack, not been slacked at 7:30 am by her CEO who “has a random question for you”, does not.

If you would like someone to listen to you bitch about work and possibly say “that’s not a you problem, that’s systemic racism” or, as the case may call for it “how do you think that person you just characterized as an asshole would characterize you?” or “and what is the outcome you would hope for if you spoke to HR about that?” or “I don’t think you can solve the problem that you have a two-class system on your team with a teambuilding exercise, so maybe just let it go” or “sounds like they might be gunning for your job” — these are all the kinds of things that might and sometimes have come up — I’m your person for that. And, protip: if you have an L&D budget, that might pay for coaching. My coaching is very, very practical, because I have lots of perspective, decades of experience, and absolutely no fucks left to give. so get in touch if you’d like any of that. cheers!

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Lol before I pressed send substack made me put in a subscribe button. Feel free to subscribe. also I like to hear from people, so smash that reply button and ask me about my Mirena. No, Mirena doesn’t sponsor this newsletter, I’m a brand risk on a thousand vectors so no sponsors for me.