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Sprinting toward the finish line

And crying when you see it. Also: mewing, 'Hot Dads Do Bedtime,' the cover of incompetence, and more in the weekend roundup.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Jul 14

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Printed out some pages and went to the beach.

This week, I wrapped the tenth chapter of the book I’m working on. That brings me to some 50,000 words. I’m ahead of schedule by a month, which is just the way I like it as a deadline-obsessed person. And yet I found myself crying in the shower this morning because I’m getting closer to finishing my book?

I still have four chapters left, and they will probably be some of the hardest to write, and who knows what will happen in edits, so let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here! Still, I was overcome with preemptive grief for the fact that I do not get to write this book forever, which is funny given how much I’ve felt myself sprinting toward the finish line until now.

Insert: parallels to life in general.¹

To the links!

Joy Sullivan writes about hundreds of bad dates with men and asks: “Is equitable partnership ever possible? Will my compassion one day be weaponized against me? Most urgently: What will be left of my heart if I keep on keeping on like this?”

On a related note: Rebecca Woolf writes about a dinner party where she found herself “surrounded by mostly single, successful, confident (and previously married) women ages 35 to 55” and, she says, “not one of them — myself included — was actively dating or in a relationship with a man.”

In the late-to-the-party fashion of an elder millennial I have only now started listening to Chappell Roan, who very much feels in conversation with the hetero laments above. Predictably, I love the joyous and campy sexuality of her songs.

Also very much in conversation with this cultural moment: these “Hot Dads Do Drop Off” and “Hot Dads Do Bedtime” hats.

Also related (SPOILERS AHEAD for anyone who goes so low as to watch Netflix’s The Mole): this season, the undercover saboteur pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes by, in his own words, pretending to be “this bumbling, goofy, average white dad of America.” As a fellow contestant put it, he “played the best ‘useless dad’ in the entire world.” That was his cover. I could write a whole essay about what this says about masculinity, fatherhood, and weaponized incompetence, but I really have to stop writing about Netflix reality-TV shows!

Danyel Smith looks back on working with Sean Combs, as well as her own career as a woman in the music industry:

We wouldn’t have thought of ourselves as ambivalent or numb then, but that’s what we were. A lot of us women wanted our fair shot at winning. There were dues to pay. We paid dearly.

Honored to show up in AnnaGrams’s newsletter for introducing her to the wood-chopping guy on TikTok during our writing retreat. “The world is going to shit, and democracy is crumbling, but somewhere on the internet, a hot dude is taking off his belt because a straight woman told him to on TikTok,” she writes. “America!”

Men are promoting “mewing” on TikTok as a way to (ostensibly) reshape their jaws.

Brandon reacts to Andrea Skinner’s chilling account of how her own mother, Alice Munro, sided with her sexual abuser:...