This is Your Friday Open Thread for July 10, 2020

I’m not going to lie to you, these days I feel confused every time I realize it’s Friday again. Does it not feel as though yesterday was Friday, and also that tomorrow could be Friday? What exactly is a “Friday”? Tomorrow is Saturday, allegedly, but what does that mean either? I’m doing… fine, as is evident right here right now. I hope y’all are doing fine, too, or maybe even a little bit better than fine. We can dream, yeah?

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Okay without further ado, here is your Friday Open Thread. A place to hang, chat, reminisce, scheme, ponder, work together, dream, exist. Take care out there, and tell us all about it in the comments.

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Vanessa

Vanessa is a writer, a teacher, and the community editor at Autostraddle. Very hot, very fun, very weird. Find her on twitter and instagram.

Vanessa has written 404 articles for us.

67 Comments

  1. Really worried…I’m one week into when I was supposed to go back to work and so far they’ve had zero hours for me. At this rate if I don’t get laid off I might have to quit anyway and start job-searching, pandemic or no. I don’t know what I’m going to do; due to my mental health there are only certain types of jobs I can do.

  2. HI PALS happy friday! here are my FOT thoughts like in the olden times!

    i think i have to stop my pandemic watch of grey’s anatomy because i’ve started having…surgery nightmares? and they are no good!

    i’m STILL thinking about how good the babysitters club was

    i am feeling really good about my pajamas choice today but i still haven’t figured out if i can walk to the mailbox in my pajamas or if i have to put on shorts and a t-shirt

    my pupper’s summer allergy wheezing has gotten worse and i think i need to take him to the vet but the idea STRESSES me OUT

    love yous! byeeeee

    • Oh no, surgery nightmares sound like no fun!! My cat also does the wheezing thing and I think I need to take her to vet too but the idea ALSO stresses me out, like, I don’t wanna go to a vet right now. Bleh.

    • In England the vets had a fun strategy where you arrive outside, they take your pet away, leave you standing in the car park, and then bring your pet back after 15 minutes with a bag of pills.
      Hint, don’t send a teenager to pick up the pet otherwise your pet will come back a diagnosis of a shrug and ‘okay so it was a word and she said it a few times, and acted like I should know what it was, but I didn’t and it might have began with h but also maybe not’

      Dw after a week of antibiotics our cat was fine.

    • The Baby-sitters Club was such! a delight! for me this week. I then went back and read the random BSC book I found and it was a bit of a slog; I feel like the series did the very best thing, which is capturing the way I *felt* about the books rather than what they actually *said*?

      (I read every single book, including BSC Friends Forever, long after I had “aged out” of them. I did not read all the California Diaries because they were too edgy, bless my younger self’s heart.)

      I think the documentary short The Claudia Kishi Club is now on Netflix as well; I watched it when SXSW put their shorts online and will recommend it as well!

      • oooh! i saw that advertised on netflix and wasn’t sure what it was. i’ll watch it this weekend!!!

        • It’s made up of interviews with several adult Asian American BSC fans (who are all now creative/critical folks) talking about Claudia specifically, and how their childhood experiences and their experiences as readers meshed. With an extended special shout-out to Mimi, of course.

    • So sorry to hear about your pup! My pup had smoke insulation from a campfire this weekend and she sounded like she had pneumonia. She got better on her own after a couple of days but it was terrifying. It’s so important to take them to the vet

  3. Ugh hi I miss kissing my gf… I’m higher risk so we’re still distancing and masking and have been since March and it sucks.

    • Carrie that’s shit!

      I’m also a bit higher risk, and have developed a small foot/ankle tap instead of a goodbye hug. It’s not the same, but it makes me feel connected.

    • Me too! My girlfriend and I have been long distance since the pandemic started. I’ve never wanted to hold and kiss someone so badly.

  4. I just wanted to say that I finally watched Disclosure and it was so good! Also has anyone else been crying A LOT lately? Not only did I cry during Disclosure ~100x but I also cried during a work meeting (it was about health disparities and suicide so kinda reasonable) and also during the first 2 minutes of an instagram video by The Rock.

    • Yes, everything you are saying about crying a lot is very relatable! You are not alone in this. This week I have cried about podcasts, news headlines, and finding mold on my bread.

      • I cried trying to put up a towel bar and not being able to put it where I wanted to because electrical current

    • Omg I have cried more in the last four months than the last four years. I eventually put a limit on once a day because it was just feeding itself, yknow. I’ve cried a lot less since I’ve been able to leave the house to walk, but still very frequent. If anything, I find it kinda a relief to cry at TV, because it’s for a concrete reason and the programme finishes, and it lacks the element of existential doom.

      Anyway, happy weeping, let’s all sit in a salty bath of tears together.

    • Yep. I cry real easy right now. Haven’t seen Disclosure. I’ll get the tissues ready for it.

  5. my gf is going back to work this week and i’m worried for a lot of reasons (and worried that us seeing each other still maybe isn’t the best idea but NOT seeing each other also was horrible. we’re giving it a few weeks to sus out how things are. we live in a state that’s actually handling things well and has free testing so there’s a potential for bi-weekly visits w testing i’m holding out hope for.)

    I’ve been watching Friday Night Lights for the first time and feeling a very specific nostalgia for a small-town Applebee’s.

    I’m pretty sure when/if I ever go back to my office that my dog and cat are going to be truly inconsolable.

    I miss human connection so much and I miss my friends and I miss feeling like I was living a life. I had a really rough patch for about a year prior to the tail-end of 2019 and it felt like i’d JUST gotten my life back on track when…boom, pandemic. possibly forever.

    I wish people would just wear a mask and that our government actually gave a shit about all of us.

    • The Friday Night Lights-triggered Chili’s nostalgia in me sees the Friday Night Lights-triggered Applebee’s nostalgia in you. <3

    • I’ve been watching Friday Night Lights for the first time too! I’ve loved the product placement of Applebee’s curbside pickup 15 years before the pandemic. I also just love Tyra so much.

      I completely understand the feeling of wanting to get your life back on track, and finally feeling like you’re able to, except for the pandemic. What a terrible time

      • Tyra is my fav!!! I love a show about a small town in the early aughts. And a good teen drama.

        • This is honestly one of the first teen dramas that I’ve watched, except for some of Veronica Mars (which I loved, just never finished) — what are some of your other faves?

          • Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, The OC are all ones I’ve enjoyed. Are they always “good”? No. Are they a lot of fun? Yes. (Gossip Girl is one of the greatest shows ever made and I’ll die on that hill.)

  6. I have officially lost my mind and decided that my partner and I should adopt a (senior) dog. I’ve always been the anti-pet one. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Now it’s just a lot of literal stomachaches and waiting for the phone call as we move through the process.

  7. Hello friends
    I have advice from the UK Chancellor that we are all to ‘Eat out to help out’ and that this will help the economy and save jobs. Now I’m not one for capitalism, but I’m sure we all agree that jobs are important. And I think as a group, we may be particularly skilled at this type of activism.
    Let’s go gays, we’ve got this.

  8. This week, I’m stuck in the problem of “I need to go for walks and do my physical therapy exercises more regularly to help manage my fibromyalgia symptoms, but my fibromyalgia symptoms are leaving me too tired/achy to walk and do my physical therapy exercises more regularly…” I’m exhausted :(

    Things keeping me afloat: rewatching AtLA, seeing my sister and her partner for dinner and getting some time with their puppy, talking with friends, flirting with the person I’m flirting with, listening to the Sunstorm podcast, accepting the fact that responding to an email will take me at least 30 minutes and that’s just the pace I can go at right now.

    • Ugh feeling too sick to do the things that will make me feel better in the long run is the most relatable thing. Sending lots of good thoughts <3

      • Oops. Wrong thread.

        I’ve been in similar cycles of not being able to do the things I need to do to get better and it sucks. I hope it eases up for you soon.

  9. Hello internet! Today is my birthday and for the second year in a row I have found out precisely on my birthday that my most recent ex has Big Happy Relationship News — last year it was that my ex was engaged and this year it is that my (rather recent) ex has a new girlfriend. The truly fantastic thing about this is that it made me finally cut off all contact with this year’s most recent ex, which is great because staying in intermittent touch for her was not working out well for me. Here’s to being 34 and hopefully breaking this cycle of Big Ex News next year!

  10. I’m freaking out at the moment because I have to move out of my apartment in five weeks and I still haven’t found a place in Berlin, where I’m moving to, and I really need to finish my PhD thesis but I can’t concentrate because I’m worried about not having anywhere to live.

    Today went slightly better and I ate two meals that weren’t cheese sandwiches, which is a big score (one meal was still a cheese sandwich but you can’t win them all) but it’s pretty tough.

    • Good luck for your flat hunting!!! If it doesn’t work out (but it will!) come to Hamburg: We‘re the better Berlin 😉

      • Thanks! My job is in Berlin so Hamburg isn’t super convenient but otherwise I might be on board :)

  12. How’s everyone’s week going? Wednesday was an interesting day for me as I got my insurance check for my missing bike, a replacement bike in the mail & I paid my taxes for this year. The last part feels very weird as I am normally paying my taxes in March. I am right now eating a snack trying to avoid my feels of being touch starved. Ugh.

    I spent my Sunday exploring new trails I’ve never done. It was nice, but a little to dry & hot.
    “img src=https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/522178434353463303/729096601641156659/2020_0704_141608002.jpg>

    Thank you for viewing & reading my post. Have a positive weekend!

        • Yes, bicycles are wonderful!

          That reminds me…I need to look up the specs for my bicycle’s dynamo hub so that I can try to replace it this summer. Apparently it’s somewhat time consuming because one has to remove all the spokes to get at it, but it’d be great to have the built-in lights working again, after a couple of years using separate, battery-powered lights.

          • I’m hearing dynamo hubs might be in short supply. But, yes that be neat feature to have. May save up to put one on my adventure bike as I have a light that charges via USB & can be used while charing via a battery pack.

  13. Hello my friends!

    This week I committed to adding an evening walk to my daily schedule and I think it’s helped my mood a bit. I’ve been doing a daily morning walk / fake commute since March and it’s truly been a lifeline but I seem to need to leave the house more than once a day now that it’s summer.

    Has anyone else read The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune? It’s a charming, quirky fantasy about a caseworker for magical children who’s sent to evaluate an unusual orphanage / school / home for magical children. Over the course of a month he gradually comes to life and falls for both the children and the man who runs the school. I’m convinced that the actual target audience is queer/ gay Harry Potter fans – not only does it have canonically, on page queer characters in a magical school, it plays with a lot of HP plots and characters.

    I also figured out how to play a board game over zoom with my parents last Saturday and it was truly the best communication we’ve had since the pandemic started.

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