I’m moving (the newsletter)! 📦 & things I wish I could tell my cat
Say goodbye to Substack!
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Hi friends!
How are you? Are you keeping yourself warm? As I sit down to write this, it is absolutely pouring in Los Angeles, and my lights have already flickered multiple times, so I’m trying to get my laptop time in now in case the power goes out. If it does go out, I guess I’ll have to just sit and read a book, poor me. My husband Ross just bought me a NSFW minotaur romance novel because he knows I read romance and it was actually very highly recommended on a comedy podcast he’d recently listened to, so I guess if the power goes out, ya girl is going to be reading some minotaur smut in the dark. Let’s all hope it doesn’t come to that.
Last Sunday, he and I had a great high-low culture date at the Americana, a bougie, ridiculous outdoor mall in the suburbs of Los Angeles. We got lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, the kind of enormous, 1600-calorie salads you can only get at a place like that. I got the “Chinese chicken salad” and was surprised they are even still calling it that. I thought there was a wave of renaming food items like that a few years ago to be something like “sesame soy chicken salad” because there is actually nothing authentically Chinese about them? Hire me to be the Cheesecake Factory menu’s sensitivity reader, stat!
Then we went to the movies afterwards and saw Miyazaki’s newest feature, The Boy and the Heron. It was really gorgeous! Full of cute little dudes and weird old ladies with giant heads, just as you’d want it to be. We saw the English dubbed version, and there were some interesting casting choices. Christian Bale, as the titular boy’s father, had the most bizarre accent–was it Boston? Welsh? New York? A mixture of all three? It was very odd to reconcile that strange accent with the Japanese character speaking in the animation. Luckily, his character wasn’t in it that much.
In between lunch and the movie, we had a bit of time to kill, so we walked around Barnes & Noble. I’m embarrassed to say that it’s been ages since I’ve actually wandered around a bookstore. What a pleasure that is! I get most of my books online, through Book of the Month or bookshop.org or the Kindle store, but in doing that, I miss out on inhaling that wonderful bookstore smell, seeing their curated shelves full of recommendations, flipping through the pages of a physical book, reading the cover copy, finding a passage that speaks to me and saying, “yes, this one,” then trying to whittle down the pile of books in my arms to a reasonable number of purchases to bring to the cashier. The best!!!
I ended up getting James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which I’m now a third of the way into, and, damn. It makes me want to be a better writer, one of serious prose. The thing about comedy and humor writing is that you always have to balance any moments of sincerity with a punchline, or people get uneasy. They start to think you might be making fun of them or playing a trick on them, or that you’re otherwise going in a direction they didn’t sign up for. I think David Sedaris is especially skilled with this balancing act. Most of us semi-intellectual clowns are always working on it.
My freshman year at Vassar, I wrote and directed a serious dramatic play that was three hours long, and I always point to that as the turning point when I decided to go into comedy. I haven’t read it in years, but I suppose there had to be some moments in it that were well-written; it was selected by a student theater group for production, after all. But overall, it was way too long and serious. It was called Made to Last, named after a Semisonic song, and it was about two young adult brothers who were formerly in a Hanson-like band together in their youth, and a young woman who forms sort of a love triangle with them. The younger brother dies, and the play flashes back and forth between the present day, when the older brother and the young woman are meeting together in a diner after the funeral, and moments from the past, when the younger brother was still alive.
Looking back on it now, I can clearly see that I was still processing my oldest brother’s untimely death six years prior and a devastating-at-the-time breakup with my high school boyfriend, and OMG, I cannot stop cringing. I’m sure everyone who saw it was like, “Hon, bring this to therapy, not to a black box theater.” That’s not even the worst part–said ex-boyfriend actually showed up at one of the performances and recognized the parts that were about him! I guess the info was in my AIM profile and he decided to drive over from his whole other college to check it out. I didn’t know until he messaged me afterwards that he’d been there. That’s when I learned not to ever write about people with Main Character Syndrome, because they enjoy it too much.
The biggest lesson I took away from directing that play, though, was that it just wasn’t very fun to spend so much time making something so heavy. When you make comedy, you just laugh the whole time, or are holding your breath trying not to so you don’t ruin a scene/take. You discover little magical tweaks that make moments even MORE funny and delightful. You get to play and improvise, and you know right away if a joke is not working, because the absence of laughter is very obvious.
I’m not saying that comedy is easier than drama, though, because I actually think it’s harder. This is something I frequently commiserate about with other comedy screenwriters; we have to do all the same things that drama writers do in terms of plot, structure, character arc, etc., but then we have to be funny on top of that. Sometimes I think it would be so much easier to write a crime procedural or something, and just slap a hard-living middle-aged woman with a drinking problem or a sex addiction at the center of it, instead of trying to build funny yet flawed comedic female characters. I suppose the grass is always greener, though.
Let’s get into some things:
- Some housekeeping: we’re moving to beehiiv! They have some impressive functionality, and one of their co-founders was able to say publicly and unequivocally that Nazis are banned from their platform and they are anti-transphobia. It’s almost like… that’s easy to do? Imagine. I will have completed Like You Know Whatever’s migration by the time the next post goes out. So, heads up, the next newsletter will be coming to you from lizgalvao@mail.beehiiv.com. If you’d like some extra security, you can add that address to your contacts now. I’ll send a short follow-up through Substack to let you know that the newsletter went out, in case you need to hunt for it in your spam folder, and then we shall be done with Substack forevahhh! And as a reminder, you do not have to do anything in order to stay subscribed.
I’ve done a lot of research in the past year on various email newsletter platforms, both in a past professional role and for my personal newsletter, and I’m excited about beehiiv, because they offer some very powerful customization and functionality on the backend. And I’m of course very glad that they seem committed to not platforming hate speech. But to be perfectly honest, at this point, I don’t know that I have full faith in any tech company to operate ethically indefinitely. All we can do as writers is make the best choices available to us at the time, sometimes from very poor options.
I have chosen to stop paying for paid content through Substack, but I likely won’t be unsubscribing from the newsletters I read that are hosted there. I totally understand why a lot of writers with bigger subscriber numbers than mine want to stay at Substack: for one thing, it can cost a lot of money up front to host your newsletter on most of these other platforms, especially if you have several thousand subscribers or more, while Substack has zero upfront costs (they take a commission from your paid subscriptions instead). This meant monthly savings in the thousands of dollars when I was running numbers on relaunching a newsletter with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (not mine, lol).
Beauty writer Arabelle Sicardi recently laid out what it would cost them to leave Substack, and it was the difference between making their rent or not, cutting off their growth by 86% or not. I totally get that, and I’m not judging anyone who chooses to stay. But I will say this: as far as Substack being a problematic platform, I think it’s going to get worse, not better. There’s a pattern here, and a real lack of giving-a-shit amongst the higher-ups. When a company can’t even be shamed into doing the right thing for optics, you really know where their priorities lie. (Also, if you abbreviate their name, it’s literally SS. Come on.)
More transition details: As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I canceled all paid subscriptions last Friday, so if you haven’t gotten your refund yet, please reach out to me at lizgalvao@gmail.com and I’ll investigate. I am not going to be doing paid subscriptions moving forward, it just doesn’t make sense for the kind of writing I want to do. However, I will be encouraging folks who wish to support me and this newsletter financially to hit up my virtual tip jar, via my Venmo or Cash App. Details on that will be in the next newsletter. Thanks as always for your patience and support!
- True Detective: Night Country (HBO/Max). Hey everybody, True Detective is back! Wait, wait, come back! Alright, to be fair, I have not watched this series since we all got burned by season two (although I stand by my belief that Rachel McAdams did good work there under unfortunate circumstances), but the trailer for season four got me. Look, I don’t know why Nic Pizzolatto keeps getting second chances either. HBO just seems to be some sort of fellowship program for untested white dude showrunners. Isn’t it so wonderful to see this well-represented demographic being so lovingly nurtured? Aww!
Can I convince you to give this season a shot if I tell you that: a) Mexican filmmaker Issa Lopéz is the showrunner this time around, NOT Pizzolatto, b) it’s set in a remote town in Alaska during a period with no sunlight, c) Jodie Foster is the protagonist, and d) it’s reminiscent of The Thing meets Wind River? Eh? Eh? Well, listen, at least watch The Thing and Wind River, then, if you haven’t seen them yet. I’ll report back on True Detective when we’re further into the season, but so far, Jodie is wonderful, and I’m hooked.
- From time to time, one of you will say you wish I wrote more about current events, so here’s my take on a suuuper topical social media post from this week:
This kind of post is SO easy to make and I find it so incredibly condescending and insulting. Like, “silly women, worrying about your little movies, don’t you know there’s a war going on?” I don’t know if this person is directly addressing Hillary Clinton and her recent tweet or what, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I think that one’s a lost cause. I just find what-aboutism to be the lowest form of political discourse, and this shit is always pointed at feminists, like we’re too dumb to engage on multiple different levels at once. May December was snubbed, too, but nobody’s yelling at the Charles Melton hive to stay focused on Gaza.
I get that a lot of people feel like they are screaming into a cold and uncaring void right now. But this kind of post serves only to shame, not to actually do anything effective. It’s not like there was information included here on how to actually help women who need these period products. (This organization was the best I could find for that specific mission, but Doctors Without Borders is always a good bet, too.) I’m also annoyed by the pink and blue color job they did on this picture. Like, really? You had to make an image of bombing fit your social media aesthetic? Yikes.
- One of you mentioned in the recent survey that you like hearing about my cat, so I’ll give you a little health update on Zadie. As many of you know, Zadie is our 12 year-old fluffy tuxedo cat who we’re obsessed with. Here’s a picture of her. She was a feral rescue who we adopted at a shelter on Long Island and came to live with us first in Brooklyn, then in Los Angeles, where we live now. She is sweet and clumsy and squeaky and friendly and cuddly, and has become progressively more of those things over the years (she’s laying in my lap purring right now as I type this). We absolutely adore her and she is definitely the #1 girl in this house.
In the past couple years, she’s had a recurring issue with her ears getting a black, waxy build-up in them. It makes her shake her head a lot and causes her discomfort to the point of not eating, which is no bueno, so we had to take her into the vet recently.
One thing about Zadie is that she is TERRIBLE in the car. She cries and howls in her carrier like she’s being horribly persecuted, and she tries to head-butt her way out of it, which is funny in a sad way. You’re only eight pounds, honey, that zipper ain’t moving! When we moved to this neighborhood, we were only in the car for 20 minutes driving over from our old place, and she started freaking out and panting while we were still on Los Feliz Blvd., the poor thing. She’s also peed in her carrier twice while in the car. If you think cat pee smells bad, try being inside a tiny metal box with it. Our vet is really annoying because they always put you on hold forever when you call, and they almost never have same-day appointments, but instead make you sign up as a walk-in and wait, and then they charge you a $70 walk-in fee. But the doctors are really good and thorough, and most importantly, it’s only a three minute drive from our home, which saves Zadie from a lot of suffering (and us, too, frankly).
After they washed out her ears and her bloodwork came back clean, they diagnosed her as having some kind of allergy, and gave us pills to give her and a solution to clean her ears with on a daily basis. The pills were no problem–luckily she LOVES cheese, and is so happy to get it, she doesn’t notice the pill smooshed inside it. But cleaning her ears is not fun. First of all, it’s definitely a two-person job. One person needs to hold her while the other person squirts solution into her ears and then rubs them with a cotton ball. Or, in theory, that’s how it works. What actually happens is that the instant a drop of liquid touches her ear, she shakes her head violently, spraying both of us, and then we have to try again two or three more times.
Throughout this whole wretched process, I just wish we could explain to her what’s going on. While she’s crying in her carrier, I try to speak to her in soothing tones, but I wish I could tell her, “Look, I know this is scary, but it isn’t going to take long, and then you’ll get lots of treats, and I’ll even turn on the space heater for you” (the space heater is her one true love). But no, the only words she understands are “eat,” “treat,” “cheese” (any “ee” sound means food, basically), “come UP,” “OFF,” “paw” (she can high five), and “Zadie.”
Here are some other things I wish I could tell or ask my cat:
“We’re going away for a few days, but we are DEFINITELY coming back! We promise!”
“If you don’t eat your food, we’re going to have to take you to the vet, and you won’t like it.”
“I’m mad about something you did hours ago that I just found out about!!”
“Can I please touch your paws? They’re so squishy and soft!”
“That’s actually not a toy.”
“This is NOT a good time for you to want to hang out in bed with us.”
“If we got another cat, would it ruin your life?”
“I’m so sorry I accidentally kicked you, I didn’t know you were by my feet!”
“Don’t crawl behind the couch, because it’s all dusty and I might squish you.”
“I love you! You’re my favorite cat!” (I do say this to her, like six times a day, but I don’t know if she understands it. 😢)
Okay, that’s about it for this week!
Don’t forget: the next newsletter will be coming to you from lizgalvao@mail.beehiiv.com!
If you’d like to be a real mensch, you can take the 2024 Like You Know Whatever Survey right here.
Until next time—see you on beehiiv!!
Love,
Liz
XOXO