As an older woman, it’s not so romantic or easy to diagnose. Maybe it’s menopause or just tired-of-this-shit-itis. How can one tell?

1. Taking two hours to cook bacon and eggs for breakfast on a Sunday morning because your kids got you up at 7:30am to make brioche bread french toast from scratch. Yeah, no. You cook the bacon in the oven at 250 degrees because you might burn it. You cook the scrambled eggs on super low heat so you can sit down and close your eyes and dream about a world where someone else does this shit for you. You wish you allowed boxed cereal in the house, but you’re still carb-phobic, although slightly reformed.

2. Sitting awake in silence for hours because listening to Fiona Apple didn’t deliver the emotional release you needed. It hits like the musings of a wealthy white woman, and you are neither white, wealthy, nor in the mood to muse.

3. Reading Kindle Unlimited literotica to feel something and getting distracted by the uninspired descriptions of orgasms — pleasure rocking through, surging release — until you’re so overcome with Red Pen Syndrome that you toss your e-reader down in frustration.

4. Hearing the opening strings of the Mad Men theme song 92 times in a row and wondering if your pain will ever turn into genius.

5. Driving to the supermarket and missing every turn necessary because you’re just trying to focus on the feel of the imitation leather steering wheel in your hands and stop before you run a red light.

6. Coming home from the supermarket with a bag of Honeycrisp apples and 2 packages of pepperoni and asking Alexa how to turn it into dinner for five.

…filed from my kitchen

1. The unofficial female uniform of Gov Ball is a flowy tank, cheek-showing hot pants, and cowboy boots. Frye boots are also acceptable.

Breaking up the monotony: a head scarf here, a fringed maxi skirt there. Think Fleetwood Mac without the cocaine, drama, or passion that made them interesting. With perfectly curated outfits there was of course no obvious public drunkenness, no fights, no heat exhaustion fallouts, no vomiting. Just orderly lines for matcha, roller skating with Verizon, and endless influencer posing and posting. Influencing people, apparently, to be their most boring selves.

2. The official drug of choice: mango flavored nicotine vape juice. Snuck in via the heel of said cowboy boots.

Not weed. Not anything mind altering. Candy flavored vapes, which let me know we have lost the plot on what it means to fight for our right to party. Are we saying the ultimate good time is giving yourself popcorn lung in the least performative way possible? NY festival goers are not okay. Gloria Steinem says depression is just anger turned inward. I’m not diagnosing anyone. But it’s clear therapy is needed.

3. Long Island in the house.

So many Long Islanders taking the train in for a day of fun. The LIRR makes the commute easy. But where did the New Yorkers go this weekend? I don’t believe they were anywhere near there. Even I live in NJ now so I can’t count toward the numbers. Katseye was a huge draw for this suburban day of fun and one of the reasons for the volume of kids. All of which ended up in the VIP section, where bored parents spread out in every available seat with bags and gear to ensure the kids were comfortable, with changes of clothes, snacks, pizza and chicken nuggets everywhere. And $6 waters. I have never felt so cheated. So very unimportant and cheated out of my money.

4. So when are the aliens coming?

This ho-hum festival has me wanting more. Based on TikTok and the mask man on Fox News they feel overdue. Last week the government launched aliens.gov, a website styled with UFO imagery and a teaser video captioned “They walk among us,” which turned out to be an ICE tip line. I am tired of politics. I need ridiculousness not tied to war or attacks on human rights. Something chaotic but also a bop. A song for the summer paired with chaotic performance art. Where is Ja? Take back Gov Ball. Bring back Fyre Fest.

5. Also, did we know that Lorde had more than 1 song?

…from the parking lot at Citifield.

What it sounds like if rocking out with kids is an intentional vibe:

Why are so many online Uncs and Aunties emotionally fragile, performative, and devoid of impulse control? Blame it on lead exposure. Kids born in the late '60s and '70s were at peak exposure to sweet lead paint chips and the intoxicating fumes of leaded gas at the pump. The 7 IQ points we lost may be the exact amount needed to self-regulate. Maybe it’s just as well that we are the smallest generational cohort.

I am skipping the MJ biopic. I already saw Michael become Michael in real time. Between the Broadway shows and the HBO Max doc, we know the good, the bad, and the Bubbles. But what about something MJ-adjacent? What about a biopic for the son and grandson of his mentor, Berry Gordy? Where is the LMFAO biopic? Give me Motown bloodlines, Rick Ross lawsuits, talent agent shenanigans, and royalty heists to the tune of party rock anthems. Add a BuzzBallz collab and I am shufflin' to the theater.

Watching the political rise of Spencer Pratt and his call for a repackaged, Giuliani-era “Broken Windows” policy in LA tells me exactly where the timeline is heading. Twenty-five years from now, he’ll be giving a post-election press conference for that generation’s President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. The venue? Four Seasons Total Landscaping, now a certified historic landmark, sponsored by Gatorade Agriculture.

Jaylen Brown is the new blueprint and we need to figure out how to create more of him. A fantastic athlete, MIT Media Lab fellow, and a guy who was asked to speak at Harvard on educational inequality, he is educated, outspoken, and determined to control his own narrative. The back and forth with media has been click-bait and messy. And while Stephen A. Smith did not fire the first shot, he did ratchet it up to a toxic level. Of course he was born in 1967.

…from my privacy closet.

Bravos and Fine Fares are just training grounds and now bananas are $10 everywhere. Cheap things always have a cost.

Living in a snake den, you never can predict which snake will bite, but suck out the venom anyway and learn not to die.

Is there a gene, hormone, or neural circuit whose job is to push you toward death? Bed rot or roller coaster decapitation all part of the same universal beat.

I am not being opaque to exclude you. I am being hyper-specific to find you. —someone then me

_______________________

…from my bed.

02 I dig “Roommates” by Malcolm Todd. My daughter put me on. I have trained her musical tastes for 13 years and now she is better than any algorithm from Apple or Spotify. It’s the 2026 version of having her change the TV channel for me.

03 It’s an expected trope now that internet personalities will be shit at their day job. EEEE-MAgine expecting activism from artifice. Come for the reads. Not for a roadmap.

04 @_michellelynn has captivated me in a way no other creator has. Her vignettes are a warm hug from my childhood and got me missing summer breaks in Ashland, KY bouncing between Dawson Pool, St. James AME, and Dairy Cheer. Grandma warning me to be back in the house before the street lights came on.

05 I read a TikTok that said “no one ever says ‘yo, throw on that Jermaine Jackson jam.’” I laughed because it is so right. He’s not Michael, but he had that iconic song with Whitney. And I cassette recorded “Do What You Do” off the radio when I was nine. Y’all know the words.

Let me jog your memory:

Filed from my couch. At 10pm

Strength and muscle are the new elite signaling now that GLP-1s have made thinness accessible to anyone. Ozempic will be the unlikely catalyst of an uprising of women who get a taste of physical power and embrace it. Think Linda Hamilton from Terminator 1 to Terminator 2.

Iran's Lego video trolling propaganda strategy and possibly requesting Obama as the new US wartime consigliere makes the claim that reality has become unhinged because of a CERN something or other sound less crazy. TikTok is the new kill zone, trolling as an armamentarium.

Sydney Sweeney in the happy baby pose wearing a diaper and sucking a binky was the most disturbing scene in Euphoria. This latest depiction of female humiliation feels like sanction versus satire. I am disappointed in myself for being addictively entertained by the misery of these characters.

Runway had potential but it’s a little too RuPaul. A Madonna cameo, a Vogue interruption would have been less camp and more intentionally referential. Maybe they asked her. Maybe she declined. She’s on the cover of her new album in a pink see-through veil and purple lingerie. She looks like she has time.

On the end of civilization, specifically

When a sitting president warns that a whole civilization will die tonight, I have questions about the mechanism. Are we talking nuclear? A Mayan calendar situation, but this time powered by technology we got from the hybrid aliens living behind the ice wall in Antarctica? Some kind of super-frequency sonic event ala Havana Syndrome?

Or if it’s America, perhaps we die of apathy. Slow and comfortable and completely unsurprised. The most American ending of all.

On death and reincarnation

When you die, I think that’s it. Lights out. But then maybe you wake up floating in your next mom’s stomach, just hoping this round is a little less exhausting than the last one. The bar is not high. You just want a slightly better draw.

On cruelty as a cultural export

Is selfish, unempathic cruelty a uniquely American trait, or does this profile exist in mass quantities in other countries too? I genuinely want to know. Not to feel better. Just to understand the distribution.

On the sex drive as early warning system

The decline of one’s sex drive is either a harbinger of impending death within the next few years, or the universe clearing the decks so you can focus on one last great effort before you go. I have chosen to interpret mine as the latter. Optimism is a choice.

On the end of the world and extreme sports

If the world ends tonight, I will not be sad that I never skydived. I don’t understand the need for that big of an adrenaline rush. We all did drugs in the 90s. That’s good enough.

On survival TikTok

Watching survival skills TikToks is almost exactly like actually learning survival skills. Except I have retained nothing and am completely unprepared for any emergency. But I have watched approximately 47 videos about building a fire with a stick and river water, so I feel informed.

This has been Uninformed Opinions. Forward it to one person who is also unprepared.

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I am so glad I started taking Zepbound right at the exact moment ana-chic is making a comeback. Seems very aligned with my second puberty.

Dominique Morgan is a national treasure. She is the new Oprah and needs her own show immediately. Netflix make it so. It’s a better idea than Star Search.

Would it be bad to get a lower bleph when my kids still need braces? I mean, shouldn’t I put the oxygen mask on myself first?

I am kind of sad that my kids will never grow up in a world where casual drug use was just a good time and not a potential death sentence. Lenny Bias was a foreshadowing of the future.

Does anyone actually know the rules for U9 girls soccer? Does anyone keep score? Why does each match always end in a tie? I have no answers.

I would like to think that if I had seen pictures of head and neck cancer when I was young I never would have smoked. But I did have lots of sex in the time of AIDS so probably not.

Modern Family was just the movie Parenthood for the 2000s but funnier. I was today years old when I made this connection. I don’t know what to do with it but…think about it.

Are ellipses still triggering people?

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