30. The Week in Me
I was sick this week. I have no idea what with - an 11pm COVID test on Tuesday presented negative - but I was lightheaded and my stomach was a Geneva violation and the weirdest thing of all, I cried: A lot. I am a Cancer sun, and I rarely cry. I fucking go nut-nut1 inside my own damn head, I write 40 songs in a calendar year about ONE ex-boyfriend and our Sally Rooney novel-ass relationship (to the point where I anonymously mailed him a copy of Normal People once, because again, nut-nut) but I do not cry. I can cry over the normal things one does when one has a soul - the ending of It’s A Wonderful Life, puppies who develop meaningful, warm friendships with ducks - but those are rare for moi. And I never cry over music. I, the “musician,” do not resonate with music enough for tearduct activation. Except this week, I did. And instead of the Italian in me berating any and all tears as weakness, I let it in.
You may be saying “Tara, what on God’s green internet are you talking about? Italians are the culture we LOOK TO for emotion.” And I say, as a muscle-tee wearing, nomenclaturally bevoweled, cut-me-open-and-mozzarella-oozes-out ginny from Hoboken, you’re wrong!
Everyone posits Italians as emotional, but in fact we are only allowed to have four emotional presets:
1. being really good at sex
2. the poetic stoicism of the guy in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” bar who thinks he could be a movie star if he could get out of this place (one of easily my top five favorite lyrics)
3. the christening from the season three premiere of Real Housewives of New Jersey
4. Iron Eyes Cody (who is, deadass, Italian, like this man’s Christian - or really I should say Catholic because obvs - name was Espera Oscar de Corti) shedding that one single tear in the littering commercial
That’s about all we’re allowed. One tear at the thought of nice little tunas getting caught in plastic soda rings. Dr. Melfi only cried that one time on The Sopranos and the “What?!” Tony lobbies her way is the one I heard from my mother’s lips until I drowned those tears in my heart years ago. Artie, my most problematic crush, probably cried, but he’s Artie Bucco and was considered too weak to be whacked. Do you know how embarrassing that is?? You’re also allowed to cry if you’re a man as an almost mating call to women. Never to men, not unless you’re watching footage of the Miracle on Ice.
Despite what you see in the movies we’re raised to conceal-don’t-feel (Elsa: confirmed Italian to me. I mean, look at all of the handflinging that broad does…hello!! Italo!!) unless that feeling is the feeling of your fist through some drywall in a rage of some shape or sort. Funerals aren’t for sobbing; they’re for learning which of your aunts carries the most Xanax in empanadas of tinfoil in her purse to pass around, so we’re all doped up to oblivion and can get through the day. The scene in The Princess Diaries where Mia’s mom tells her to just cry confused me, and made me long for something I never had. I don’t agree with the Jimmy-Durante-steel-tipped-hardnosedness of my people, and I wish I was more comfortable crying. I look at my friend
of who openly talks about her Cancerian crying and I admire it. I deeply admire how much grace she gives her body and mind to be without shame, to produce tears, to sit in the sad. I admire it deeply and maybe this week was a door towards that type of love of self. We’ll see.I also find it interesting that all of my crying was spurned by music, something I look back on most days as a very expensive mistake. An Instagram follower I’ve spoken a scant few words to reached out this week, just to tell me I have a strong voice and that he likes my timbre. I was shocked. I didn’t know, at first, if he meant my writerly voice or my godawful singing tone. He meant my godawful singing tone. Within an hour, I heard from a producer I’ve long been interested in making a song with despite my fervent rejections of ever stepping into a studio again, and we have a meeting set up for Tuesday. I’m shocked. I can’t say I’ll ever release music again but…maybe?
Here’s what I cried over this week:
I’m seeing Bruce on Sunday. I know “Jersey Girl” isn’t in his current setlist, but that is a mistake and as much as I love him, he should fix that. When you hear this song live, with a 50,000-strong chorus full of sixty-two year old women feeling like young girls again and the pop of the fireworks over MetLife…there’s nothing like it. The first time I saw Bruce remains one of the three happiest nights of my life. So yeah, I cried!!! Sue me!!!
I read a poem that mentioned Mahalia Jackson yesterday and then I went to listen to some of her songs because it’s been a minute and then I played her version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone":
This led me to listen to over twenty different renditions of the song. I’m not kidding. That was my Thursday. My new favorite is Shirley Jones and Claramae Turner’s from Carousel, a musical I almost walked out of but you know, I stayed because Renee Fleming did her damn thing in the most recent revival.
This is the one that set me off into violent tears, and then I listened to, again, at least 20 others. My standards have been Brittany Howard and Marcus Mumford but I relished many of yesterday’s discoveries including the versions by Duncan Laurence, Mario Lanza, J.D. Sumner and The Stamps (that final note!?!?!?!), B.J Thomas, the Dropkick Murphys, and Susan Boyle, which led me to this act of emotional snuff:
I had never watched Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent audition. Through cultural osmosis you can conjure Susan with caterpillar brows and a simple church dress onstage, even if you’ve forgotten the song she performed. But wow, what a dynamo. Her flirting with Simon? Insane. I’m so endeared. And her impish grin before she launches into the first note that would change her life:
I cried from the first note through her dance at the end. Piers Morgan comes off as likable in this video. What crackcacaine is in the HTML for this YouTube link?
Last up before the recommendations: I was featured in
’s new “In ___ We Trust” newsletter. Lab/Shul is a wonderful, queer-friendly, God-optional Jewish org that I have recently joined to understand my Jewish lineage and stand tall in my identity during rising American antisemitism. I really love the time I spend in this community and was honored that my contribution was so welcomed:
And now…
To read:
A truly artful dissection of Trump’s mugshot by
:
Everything by
is important and worth reading. One of my favorite things about Zeba is that her depression often mirrors mine, and I am happy to be humbled as she reminds all of us how racism and misogynoir compound this strife:Oh! Another thing that made me cry: this Fleabag fanfic, written as a screenplay across seven staggering, surprising chapters and an alternate ending. I had to grab tissues after one line from Fleabag’s dad, and a perfectly, perfectly “well fuck you, then” made me scream and through my hands up in beatific praise. It is one of the best works of fanfiction I have ever read (especially high praise since there is no sex between the leads) in that is hews so closely to the source material and the additional character shades did not feel like betrayals. They were intriguing, and I would have been happy to have more.
I found this
analysis of Tio Bernie’s potential successors to be well worth the free trial:
This blistering Rolling Stone testimony on the women (mostly of color, natch) who have warned of the impending harms of AI. And this Gizmodo investigation into Geolitica, formerly PredPol, a predictive policing nightmare.
knocked me on my ass with this essay that so mirrored my thoughts from last week: “I still get embarrassed that I don’t have any filters (still, can you imagine?) and that I’m often prone to “oversharing” …I’m accepting, with reticence, that I am an over sharer, even though that title feels loathsome, and gendered. I wonder how much of the embarrassment I feel about myself every day has to do with the shame coded around the art of feelings. As Yvonne Rainier surmises in the title of her memoir, “Feelings are facts.” I don’t think this means they usurp fact, but, rather, feelings themselves are another data point, that provides another perspective, and thus another fact. Yet we rarely prioritize them as such. Isn’t it strange, how little we approach ourselves with curiosity? How little we humanize our own emotions, our own feelings as a fact.”
Trigger warning for a depiction of cruel animal neglect but…holy shit, this piece on loving your inner bait dog from
:
To watch:
Adele seems like such a warm, loving person. I saw this video and, again, CRIED?!? when I saw the tweet underneath this TikTok:
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To listen:
My playlist for the new anthology Surviving Scandoval from
. The playlist will be included in the printed work, so this is my first time getting “published” in print! Yay!!! You can buy a copy at the hyperlink above!Various and Sundry:
A video that might as well be of Lugosi:
Me.
Love you bitches,
TG
Lately I’ve been listening to folklore a lot (partly because August tbh) and the song Betty makes me cry? Like, sob + burning in throat cry? It’s not even a sad song -- just something about the youthful innocence of the lyrics and the cute harmonica just *obliterates* me emotionally
So VERY true about the Italian emotions!