Hello! I’m reposting this piece as a tip of the hat to Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and the magnificent generations of (all-too-often unsung) women whose work made our lives freer and fuller and better.
How’s everyone doing tonight? It’s great to be here at The Chuckle Patch, D.C.’s second funniest place after the House of Representatives..
I’m the Equal Rights Amendment. Maybe you’ve heard of me — I used to be splashed across magazine covers and the chests of empowered, braless women across the country. I was the life of both parties. I couldn’t walk down a congressional aisle without someone trying to ratify me, if you know what I mean.
Hello. It is June and this is my holiday card. Why? Because I did it last year and now I’m trapped by my own nonsense.
Besides, December is overloaded with holidays and various observances. It is the junk drawer of months. June has capacity for dumb stuff like this new tradition of mine.
Many traditions are just questionable decisions that gain momentum. This is how icebreakers, Elf on the Shelf, and Rob Schneider’s career got started.
We gather here today to squint at the smoldering crater where the first half of 2026 used to be and see if we can identify any remains.
Rest was once again on my 2026 to-do list. Are you familiar with Rest? People always recommend it. “Get some Rest,” as though Rest is something I should pick up next time I’m out running errands. Wonderful. Where is it? Is there a form? Does it come in bulk? Send me the link.
Thus far in 2026, I have acquired no new hobbies. I’d like to thank myself for that. I also did not renovate any part of my house, body, or mind. Nor did I write the Great American Novel (or the Terrible American Novel.) This is either existentialism or executive dysfunction.
Back in April, I accidentally did a squat.
Spring made a brief cameo appearance here in the Midwest before being escorted off the premises by eighty-seven consecutive weather emergencies. There were tornado warnings, air quality alerts, severe thunderstorms, tentative thunderstorms, and at least one day when outside felt like the inside of a crockpot. (Meteorologists are encouraged to fact-check me in their own annual holiday card, which I assume is called “Warm Fronts.” )
Yes, I consult the weather app frequently. I don’t know why. The weather app has never once improved the weather.
Unfortunately, the world is still producing horrific headlines at a rate normally associated with cocaine usage, and we’re still expected to keep up with household chores and careers and Duolingo and figuring out whether consciousness is emergent or fundamental.
Human beings were not designed for this. Human beings were designed to get excited when we spot a delicious non-lethal berry in the wild.
Still, we persist. Perhaps humanity’s greatest tradition is committing to ridiculous things.
From the Office of Glorious Offspring, my children continue their relentless campaign to grow up. I support this in theory, while also distinctly remembering teaching them things like “this is how to use a spoon” and “don’t lick shopping carts” and “that’s not how pants work.” It’s beautiful. I hate it. I am thrilled. I am devastated. I am proud. I am confused. I am excited. I am worried. These are not opposite things.
I am handling this magnificently, obviously.
The dog also persists. His monthly tradition is to shed enough fur to create an emergency backup dog. He is the household’s resident barbarian king, and we love him.
Clearly, love is just deciding that someone’s nonsense and fuzz is worth celebrating.
Surprisingly (and against mounting evidence) I continue to write. Writing is strange because much of it looks exactly like not writing. Then, somehow, words appear. Occasionally I gather with insanely talented and profoundly kind writers, which is fortunate because writers require regular contact with other writers. Left unattended, we wander into the woods and become lichen.
Writing is my nonsense and fuzz.
As is customary in holiday cards, I shall now announce resolutions that have absolutely no chance of surviving until Labor Day. There are but three:
Learn to distinguish between “This is interesting” and “I now own three turnip-specific kitchen gadgets.”
Avoid arguing with fools unless the audience is exceptional.
Be punctual with holiday-related blog posts. I’m already drafting my Arbor Day piece. The jokes do not write themselves.
Traditions are the nonsense we decide to keep. Some are inherited and some are accidental. Few make much sense and most make life better.
And so, I present to you THIS BERRY for your excitement …
…and some thematic music for the rest of your Asteroid Day.
The fact that I managed to read anything in May is clap-worthy. Not that clap. Regular clap. Keep it moving and behave yourself.
It’s been busy, is what I mean. So I, like anyone who read anything in May, deserve some sort of award. Not a major award. Just a tasteful certificate or a tasty pan pizza. Perhaps a small parade. Nothing extravagant, one small horse or large dog dragging me around town in a red wagon. Maybe we can be joined by a tuba player. Or maybe the dog can play the tuba while the horse drags me around. Look, I’ll sort out the logistics and report back.
And yet I ended up with a stack of books so good that I stopped treating reading like a little end-of-day reward and started ignoring actual responsibilities to read. Sorry to anyone who sent me an email, a text, a carrier pigeon, smoke signals, or did a cool semaphore flag routine in my backyard. I thought you were my parade and I was waiting for the tuba-playing dog.
These books were master classes on surviving broken systems. We’ve got intergalactic bureaucracy, Anglo-Saxon blood feuds, London publishing politics, and feminist rage. Basically, four very different ways of telling us that most systems are badly designed, the people running them are usually the least suited to the task, and women disproportionately suffer. Shocking.
This month’s reading was a refreshing reminder that humanity has, across centuries and galaxies, remained remarkably consistent and disappointing. Fertile ground for brilliant storytelling.
Which is all just to say, here are the books I finished this month:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Grendel’s Mother by Susan Signe Morrison
Feminasty by Erin Gibson
A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.
This book is absolutely ridiculous. I am obsessed with it.
Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy explains the universe using a towel, a depressed robot, and several increasingly terrible planning committees. It’s a madcap extravaganza about space, improbability, bureaucracy, bad timing, excellent timing, strange people, and one bewildered Englishman.
You know the story. Big guy. Great hair probably. Sword. Mead hall full of dudes named something like Hrothgar son of Skullthumper, son of Other Skullthumper. Monster attacks. Hero flexes. History gets written by whichever man survives long enough to hire a bard. Classic.
But Susan Signe Morrison’s Grendel’s Mother walks straight into that testosterone-soaked corpse pile, picks up the narrative by its ankle, and drags it screaming into the deep water where it belongs.
This is, technically speaking, a retelling of Beowulf, which is itself a very old story about men hitting things with swords while suffering from what historians professionally refer to as “an absolutely catastrophic inability to process emotions.” Traditionally, the poem’s second monster, Grendel’s mother, is presented as a sort of swamp-adjacent horror woman lurking beneath a lake waiting to avenge her son, which everyone agrees is terribly unreasonable behavior, unlike, say, razing villages or hacking each other apart in ceremonial blood feuds.
Erin Gibson’s Feminasty is a rage-song for the girls carrying keys between their knuckles.
It is sharp, furious, and profane. Thank God. Misogyny is not something women should have to discuss in a soft voice while reassuring everyone nearby that we’re still nice. Fortunately, Gibson has no interest in making patriarchy feel comfortable or palatable. There’s no “Now, to be fair…” or “Not all men” panic disclaimer tucked into the corners.
Set in 1950s London, A Far Cry from Kensington follows Mrs. Hawkins, a wartime widow working in publishing amid cliques, office politics, anonymous letters, fraud, paranoia, terrible writers, love affairs, blackmail, and other sinister and morally ugly behaviors. It is all tea trays and landladies and little typed notes, but underneath the upholstery there are wolves gnawing bones.
Jackie Pick 