Rupert Baxter knows how to have fun—that much is clear from his Instagram page, which was served up to me by the algorithm gods. Baxter, a New York-based tech worker, is also a burgeoning content creator with biting remarks about everyone and everything in reality television. His “Sherlock Homeboy” videos beckoned me like a siren song. But once I slapped that follow button, I realized Rupert and I were actually brought together by divine intervention and our shared desire to see the return of an iconic restaurant chain.

On an unseasonably hot day this Spring, Rupert posted a video referring to the weather in New York as perfect Blockheads weather, going so far as to tag the chain, asking them to come back to the city. (The owners of Blockheads NYC have not yet responded to my requests for comment. Or for free chips and guac.) In that brief video, I, along with the hundreds who liked or commented, was immediately transported to the summers of yesteryear, when I was young and carefree, and making googly eyes at whoever was sitting across from me at the Blockheads on 81st Street. My Swiss cheese brain has erased whoever that was, but I remember the energy of the night.

“You literally saw people from all walks of life,” Rupert says of the Blockheads location at World Plaza in Midtown Manhattan. “Black, gay, straight—it was the place to be seen. It was outdoors. On perfect weather days, you’re just basking in the sun, cheersing and having a good fucking time with your friends. The vibe was just like, anyone was welcome,” an important factor for Rupert, who is originally from the Midwest and now considers himself a “good transplant.”

”Everyone, anyone, no matter who you were, where you were from, like, could hang out there, be there, feel accepted. There was no pretentiousness there because we were all there for two things: to eat and get drunk.”

The very first Blockheads opened its doors in New York City in 1989, serving up Tex-Mex style food and cheap, oversized margaritas. One of its greatest contributions to the pre-gaming scene in New York was perfecting the bulldog margarita—a margarita and a beer all in one convenient, giant glass. The food was also pretty good if you could still manage to taste it after two bulldogs. (Some of us have always been lightweights.)

Blockheads eventually became a staple. A reliable go-to for after-work drinks and apps. Somewhere to entertain your out-of-town cousins before embarking on a tourist’s journey. A gathering place for friends, and even a place for breakups. “I got broken up with at a Blockheads via email,” Rupert says to my absolute shock and horror. “I’m sitting outside with my friends and a burrito and a margarita, and I remember opening my email and seeing like I’m breaking up with you and here’s all the reasons. Blockheads was part of so many memories.”

Even if you’ve never had the pleasure of sipping a cold drink while baking in the heat at a table in World Plaza, you likely know what it is to have that one special place where the mood is always good, and the atmosphere is one of comfort. The kind of place that now feels like it only exists in 90s sitcoms. Barring any troublesome emails coming through on your Blackberry, starting an evening at a Blockheads was nearly a guarantee of an epic night out.

“We were all so broke back then,” Rupert says, laughing. “But we always knew we could go to Blockheads and have a good time. Even without a lot of money, you were gonna be able to eat, have a drink, and most likely leave a little fucked up.”

But as with many beloved New York restaurants, the height of the COVID pandemic marked the beginning of the end for Blockheads. The final location shuttered its doors in February 2022. The bulldog community wept.

Of course, there have been plenty of other restaurants serving up good drinks and Mexican-inspired cuisine since Blockheads closed, but none have captured that magical something. None have secured that definitive New York summer experience and bottled it into a frozen margarita mix. (Agave comes close but misses out on the broke bitch pricing factor.)

Rupert’s humorous callouts and petition for Blockheads’ return aren’t just about getting back to a brick-and-mortar location. It captures a yearning so many of us have to return to a time of “pre.”

Pre-pandemic.

Pre-Trump.

Pre-Trump second time.

Pre-umpteenth financial crisis of the millennial lifespan.

Pre-loneliness crisis.

Pre-shrinkflation.

Pre-all of the things that have made summer, and every other season, lose some of its shimmer. “You used to be able to go out and only spend like $20 or $30 and get fucked up,” Rupert says, harkening back to a time only elder millennials can recall. “Like, everything used to be so affordable back then. And it’s like I would do anything to go back and have another Blockheads margarita moment.”

But even if Blockheads never returns, its legacy remains. As does the hope that we can recreate what once was—those adventurous summer nights, a sense of community, a place of belonging. All of the things that were once held together by a few good friends, salty tortilla chips, and a fat fuckin’ margarita.

May is my favorite month of the year, for the most silly and obvious reasons. It’s my birthday, my partner’s birthday, Mother’s Day, it’s when the weather starts to get perfect for hiking, and the sun makes a full-fledged return. Although when I started writing this, the tri-state was in the middle of a heatwave, and I got sunburned just going for a walk. A bit more sun than I bargained for there.

It’s also the time of year when I become the most pensive, and you know it’s real because I’ve sprouted two new strands of white hair from all the big thinks I’ve been having. Normally, what kicks off the reflective part of the month is my deceased father’s birthday, which is two days after mine. Every year, I experience the joy and elation of still being alive and eating all the cake I want, only to be swiftly brought down by the absence of someone who should be having the same experience. Grief is weird.

Anyway, here are some of the things I learned the hard way last month that will hopefully pave the way for a more peaceful summer.

Rest is weird

There are so many schools of thought when it comes to rest. The rest as resistance camp, the rest can never be resistance mob, the our ancestors’ greatest dream was rest congregation, the rest when I’m dead contingent, the rest must be earned gang—on and on and on.

Let me tell you something, my grandmother (who is an ancestor, Lord rest her soul) did not dream of rest. She dreamt of clean floors, and that’s why in her waking hours she mopped twice a day. This is the cloth from which I am cut. Do I obsess over my floors? No. But I obsess over other things, and I approach rest with the same mindset that Bryan Johnson approaches drinking water: I need every moment of it to be optimized. Now, is optimizing rest the same as actually getting rest? Absolutely not.

Is lying down while compiling a mental list of everything you’re going to get done when you get up, and the most methodical way to get it done, actually resting? Also no. This may be nothing new to you, but it’s something I’m just now beginning to understand. I have to rest my body and my mind. How? Give me another month I’ll come up with something.

“Weird” is a masking word

This was a gem that my therapist dropped after noticing that whenever she asked how I felt about something, I’d most often say, “It’s weird.” At some point, she finally had to stop me and ask, “What are you actually saying? Name an emotion.”

As it turns out, the word I was covering up was “uncomfortable.” This round of therapy has challenged me in ways I’ve never before experienced, and one thing that keeps coming up is learning to sit in discomfort. Because growth is uncomfortable. Resting without first pushing yourself to the limits of exhaustion to feel that rest is earned is uncomfortable. Ridding yourself of destructive habits and killing your inner people pleaser is uncomfortable. Rediscovering memories that your brain buried for your own safety is uncomfortable. But it’s also necessary. (And, weird! Sorry, Samantha.)

People are who they are

I’ve long been a believer in this idea that if I work hard enough, perform above and beyond, I can get almost anyone to love me. Not like. Love. A lot of people don’t like me, but everyone loves me. Except they don’t! They love what I’m willing to give them.

I can break my back continuing to give every person I meet the version of myself they prefer, or I can just live my fucking life. Because at the end of the day, people are who they are. When they decide to treat me in a way that’s counter to my desire, it doesn’t really have anything to do with me in the same way that my need to influence their behavior isn’t about them. (It’s about me being an unwell woman.) So per my therapist’s advice, I hereby release my attachments to people meeting my expectations, and instead, I allow them to show me who they are, free from my machinations. (Obviously, this is a work in progress, and I will fail a few hundred times, but we’re doing it.)

Value is not subjective

In May, I set a mental quota for myself of projects I would work on and side hustles I would finish. I did not meet a single quota, and as someone who feels like their value is tied to the quantity and quality of their work, that is devastating.

But, here’s the thing. The day after I didn’t meet my goals, the earth kept turning. I was still the same person with the same ideas—with the same inherent value. None of that fluctuates because I take a little longer to finish something than everyone else.

This is such a middle-school thing to learn in your 30’s, but I know I’m not alone in struggling to get away from hustle culture and all of the rotten fruit it’s borne. Our value is constant, friends. We don’t have to prove it with endless work or commitment to the grind. We simply are.

What does success look like for moms? Think about it.

It’s not staying home to raise your children, which summons the ire of men and women everywhere, tossing out labels like tradwife, golddigger, or just a mom as if that’s not the most necessary work people have been doing since the dawn of time.

It’s not working a full-time job, which…summons the ire of men and women everywhere, tossing accusations of negligence and having a child but not raising it yourself because you’d rather climb the corporate ladder.

Success is not bringing your child with you everywhere you go. They won’t remember traveling. Kids don’t belong in restaurants/airplanes/anywhere adults congregate.

But it’s also not taking time for yourself and leaving the kids at home when you want to eat a meal in peace. Now is not the time for going out, just wait until they’re older.

Success is not taking all of these challenges in stride. Ask for help, Mama! It takes a village!

But it’s also not being realistic with yourself and everyone around you, and complaining about how much this absolutely sucks.

Don’t say that. This is what you signed up for!!

That’s a phrase I’ve heard quite a bit in my three short years of motherhood. It’s one of those overused statements, designed to minimize the stress mothers feel around parenting. Tired? Upset? Wondering why your kid just will not fucking listen? Don’t! Because this is what you signed up for.

And yes, we signed up for the sleepless nights, and we signed up for the hardships, but what we didn’t know we were signing up for was a lifetime of failure.

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Being a mom is a lot like baking. Sometimes you don’t know if you’ve done everything right until you get to slice open the finished product and take a look inside. When it comes to raising children, moms don’t have certainty of a job well done until the offspring reaches adulthood and proves themselves to be not a piece of shit. Some of y’alls moms forgot to add the baking soda, and it shows…

But the main roadblock to determining success in motherhood is that, as a society, we don’t actually want mothers to succeed. We want them to constantly be failing. I dare say that we need mothers to fail, else there would be nothing to point to as the root of all problems in therapy. Failure is so desired that entire systems are built around ensuring it. Consider the years of redlining that make it harder for mothers to live in safe neighborhoods with access to healthy food options or even clean fucking air. The economic policies that punish working women who have children and yet somehow don’t actually benefit women who don’t have children (because they’re only meant to benefit cis, white men, regardless of children). The mom-fluencer1 economy that thrives both on praising mothers while putting them in the perfect position to be constantly policed and ridiculed.

Everywhere you turn, a mom is doing something wrong because really, that’s the only thing we’ve been trained to see. Mistakes. Poor parenting choices. Good parenting choices that will later be proven to be poor. We are so obsessed with categorizing the unique and innumerable ways mom can fail that we sort them into mom types like that ugly ass hat in Harry Potter.

Even moms want to see other moms fail because we like to know we’re not alone. Granted, I’m not sitting at home praying for the downfall of my fellow mother, but when a friend texts me to complain that her kid ate a cookie off the floor, I feel a sense of relief. Thank God it’s not just me.

My first major failure came a few weeks into my child’s life (don’t worry, I had many mini-failures before this). My bundle of joy was crying furiously for what felt like hours, and nothing was working. The rocking, the swaddling, the shushing, the nursery rhymes, the oscillating chair, the breast that was perpetually in her mouth—none of it. In a moment of high desperation, my husband warmed up a small bottle of formula, which my precious, exclusively breastfed angel gobbled up like it was the first meal she’d had in days.

I sobbed.

“I was starving her,” I said through tears while my husband prepared a second bottle. I hadn’t been producing enough milk, and this hungry little baby had finally reached her limit of holding out on food.

By the next day, I had signed up for a lactation circle and had watched an ungodly amount of hours of YouTube moms talking about breastfeeding. I even went so far as to buy a new breast pump in the middle of the night, shout out to late-night delivery options. Before I knew it, my breasts, which were once a source of only mild consternation, became a daily reminder of my failure.

That was the emotional side of that situation.

The reality was that regardless of my milk production, my child was eating on the recommended schedule and gaining weight at a healthy pace. She was perfectly fine and had minimal issues digesting the formula once it was introduced. That is success in the early days of motherhood—just keeping this freaking thing alive.

But I couldn’t enjoy it. Instead of relishing in the wins of the newborn phase, I spent months agonizing over my failure to exclusively breastfeed and the hundred other things I was not getting quite right.

Every day since, there’s been some sort of failure. And I am in a failure cycle right now as I battle the demon that is potty training. Every wet diaper is a reminder that I cannot yet do what other mothers have done for millennia.

And for all that failure, mine, yours, your mom’s, your grandma’s, there is only one obvious conclusion.

We are great fucking mothers.

It is a weak person who fails and gives up. But look at us. In the face of constant failure, stereophonic negative feedback, and a system designed to grind us into dust, we are here. We’re doing it. We’re failing and learning and showing up the next day to do it all again. Motherhood is an exercise in failure, and that exercise has made us so incomprehensibly strong that people write books about it. They write poems and sonnets and dissertations and blog posts that try to capture the shock and awe of being a mother. Our failures hold up the world. Our failures make art. And the fact that we continue to show up and do and fight means we’ve failed consistently, gloriously, at giving up. We fail to say die. We fail to be overcome by the darkness. We fail to fail.

So if you happen to be a mom and happen to be coming across this on Mother’s Day, I wish for you two things. The first is that you look at yourself with kindness. You are a person, and you are doing your best, and your best is more than enough.

The second, is a beautiful life with your child filled to the brim with failures.

Heels are not my thing. Never have been, and given my age and declining bone density, probably never will be. But I do admire them from afar, and a person who can walk with confidence in anything over four inches is a sight to behold. People who can walk and dance in pleasers? Deities among mortals.

Pleasers, if you’re…

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I’ve always admired the people for whom writing is a discipline. The ones who can sit at an appointed time and place and just churn out words upon words because tis the time to do so. That has never been me. Even when there were strict deadlines at my real job, I’ve never been able to make myself just sit down and do it.

The way I’ve explained it to people who ask about my process (or those who need to know it because they employ me) is that the page will reveal itself to me. The work tells me what it wants to be and when it wants to arrive. It’s a very precious attitude. Negative connotation. Most of the time, it works; some of the best things I’ve written have come when I stumble onto a thought half blind and figure everything out as I type.

But it’s also a form of self-preservation. To write is to expose yourself, whether that be for an audience of none or an audience of 10,000; it’s leaving small traces of yourself out in the world and hoping whoever finds you also finds your intent. A lot of times, they don’t.

Lately, the pages haven’t been speaking to me. I sit with my laptop and an endless stack of notebooks, and not a single page says this is what I want to be. Bring me to life! I chalk it up to writer’s block. Only this block feels so different.

There’s a card on my desk with a quote from Maya Angelou, “You can’t use up creativity, the more you use the more you have.” I stare at it as if the creativity she mentions will spring forth from the paper and fly into my brain. It hasn’t yet, but any day now, I’m sure.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a creative person. Creatives…I don’t know, create, right? They make things that didn’t exist until they put their hands to the task. They birth something. Words, sentences, they exist. They’re constant. I’m just here rearranging them over and over until something of this world makes sense. What would we call that other than writing? Lingua franca Frankenstein? Etymological feng shui? Lexical Jenga? Actually, that would make a great table game, no one take that.

I stopped writing and started avoiding.

Introspection is much easier when you never do anything with what you’ve discovered—when you never put it anywhere. I stopped writing, and I know the reason why, but to admit it would be to admit there is a solution.

I stopped writing, and now I feel lost.

But I know that I’ve left pieces of myself out there for me to find.

Let’s go hunting.

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The worst question anyone can ask me is, what do you like to do.

I like to watch television. I like to knit while watching television. I like to talk about the television I’ve watched and, even more enjoyable than that, I like to complain about bad television. (I have other hobbies, but who cares?) Most of the stuff I wa…

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Update 3/19/2026: After a video was published online of Taylor Frankie Paul assaulting her ex-boyfriend, ABC announced that her season of The Bachelorette would be canceled. The following was written prior to that announcement.

Way back in 2003, ABC aired the first episode of The Bachelorette, a show where a beautiful, straight, thin, usually white woman gets to pick between dozens of men who look like copy-and-paste versions of each other. The show was, as all things are, very much a product of its time and remains a heteronormative nightmare from which we may never wake.

We can give some credit where credit is due—The Bachelorette made valiant efforts to keep up with the times and correct its original sins. When criticisms about the show’s lack of diversity arose, they brought in Rachel Lindsay, the first Black woman to hand out roses…fourteen years after the show first aired. They were also quick to fire Chris Harrison in 2021 after he defended the racist actions of one of the women who had appeared on the show. But even as The Bachelorette desperately tries to cling to relevance long after the death of water-cooler shows,1 it’s still an uphill battle. Most of that struggle is self-inflicted; the show’s entire premise relies on very tired ideas about love, courtship, and marriage as a woman’s ultimate aspiration in life. It especially hasn’t been able to handle just how media-conscious this newer generation of eligible contestants is because they’ve spent their entire adult lives exposed to reality television.

Enter Taylor Frankie Paul.

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If you’ve never heard of her—although she’s everywhere in the ether this week—Taylor is this year’s Bachelorette and is the star of another reality show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Her claim to fame was exposing her own sex scandal (very Kardashian of her), wherein she claimed that she and her friends were all Mormon swingers. A few well-placed billboards, brand deals, and four seasons of a Hulu series later, Taylor is now Gen Z’s queen of mess (she is technically a millennial, but performs well with the youths).

The current season of SLOMW just ended, and ABC has been ramping up its promotion of Taylor’s season of The Bachelorette, which is supposed to start this weekend, and I simply must know, who in holy father’s name asked for this?

There are a number of reasons why Taylor should not be on another reality show, especially a dating show, considering everything going on with her and her ex-boyfriend. And yes, by everything, I do mean the domestic violence investigation launched earlier this week into a past incident between Taylor and her ex and the clear signs of emotional abuse Taylor has exhibited over the last two years.

But even if we were to pretend for a minute that she was fit to be on another show—which let’s be super clear, emotionally she is not—The Bachelorette makes absolutely no sense. From the format to the types of men that sign up for these things, the show has nothing to offer Taylor or the Gen Z viewers who would tune in just to watch her crash out on a room full of men. It’s wildly irresponsible stunt casting and, in my humble opinion, the final horseman of The Bachelorette apocalypse.

Taylor’s propensity for self destruction has reached new levels and now Bachelorette fans, all twenty of them, are demanding her season be scrapped in light of the domestic violence allegations. (A bit hypocritical considering we saw her involved in a DV incident in season one of SLOMW and everyone chose to look the other way...) This is not to say that Taylor is singlehandedly bringing down a television behemoth, even she hasn’t amassed enough power. But that a room full of producers with fully formed frontal lobes all sat down and agreed that this was a good idea—well now those ill formed chickens are coming home to roost.

If this were any other show, I’d have a little hope that some sort of work around could be find. But as it stands The Bachelorette has been slow to adapt, when it adapts at all. The Taylor of it all aside, the show has gone as far as it can, and rather than drag an enormous franchise to the depths of hell, the respectable thing to do would be to close the doors of the mansion forever.

ABC has already put all of their eggs in the Taylor Frankie Paul basket, and as of this morning has not announced any plans to delay or cut the season. They’d rather show their own ass, using this woman as a meat-shield and airing
what will probably be the most uncomfortable season of television ever than cut their losses and say goodbye.

But hey, at least we’ll all have something to talk about, right? Maybe I’ll go buy myself that water cooler, after all.

For those of you discovering my work for the first time, one important thing to know about me is that I am a very obnoxious women’s sports fan. Like, the type of fan that really believes what happens in women’s sports echoes for eternity, especially when it comes to gender based pay equity. Apart from that, I also just deeply enjoy the excitement of competition and supporting women as they assert their dominance for everyone to see.

So, as I have done for my pals the last few years, I am putting together a bracket challenge for the wonderful readers of Typing Slowly, and if it wasn’t clear already, this is a bracket just for the women’s division.

How does this work?

It’s quite simple, and folks of all basketball engagements are welcome, never-watchers to those of you who worship at the altar of Dawn Staley. This is an inclusive and judgment-free bracket.

Build your bracket

All you have to do is click that blue button above, and it will take you to the NCAA’s official bracket challenge site, where I’ve set up a group called Slow Bracketeers. Follow the prompts to make your picks, and that’s it. Set it and forget it! I’ll keep track of everything, and updates on the challenge will be added to posts going out this month.

Why are we doing this?

A few reasons! Although the women’s collegiate basketball tournament has been around since 1982, women were not allowed to use the “March Madness” branding until 2022, despite the men’s and women’s tournaments happening on similar schedules. That may seem small, but it meant the coverage, excitement, eyeballs, and most importantly, resources were diverted to the men’s tournament, leaving incredibly talented women on an unequal playing field.

Brackets play a large part in that, as they are a tool used to bring in new fans and passive viewers. Perhaps folks aren’t watching men’s college ball faithfully, but they become more invested when they feel like they’re a part of it. That same idea works on the women’s side, and if we want to keep the Everyone Is Watching Women’s Sports movement alive, we have to make ourselves a part of the madness. You don’t need to be nostrils deep in bracketology to participate. I lost a bracket challenge one year to a friend who assembled their bracket based solely on which mascots they preferred. (I swear I’m not still salty about it.)

I’m also setting this up as a way to start fostering a sense of community in the wonderful little group we have here. And nothing says community like a cutthroat competition where I will obsess over points.

What’s in it for you?

The knowledge that by participating, you are showing your support for women athletes and the tireless, largely unpaid work that they do.

And if that’s not enough, there will in fact be a prize at the end.

When all the points are tallied at the end of the month, the winner of this bracket challenge will win a free month of Typing Slowly once the paywall goes up. Yes, I’m sorry the paywall is coming, diapers are expensive.

So let’s have a little fun, shall we?

So naturally, when I got pregnant a few years ago, my goal was not just to maintain my health—it was to succeed at pregnancy. I monitored my weight with the obsession of a Károlyi, I carried around with a giant water bottle, and for probably the first time in my life, I was in the gym every single day. The only thing I wasn’t doing was sleeping. I am a stomach sleeper, and after a certain point in pregnancy, that all went out the window. In the wee hours of the night, surrounded by nothing but pregnancy pillows and my dogs’ snores, I found myself doomscrolling through a mommy message board.

I wasn’t looking for any discussions in particular; I just wanted to read through and get a sense of whether or not what I was experiencing was normal. What I found instead were unfamiliar terms. Target mom, granola mom, Montessori mom, Waldorf mom, craft mom, and the much derided wine mom.

In all the worries I had about being a “success” at pregnancy, I suddenly felt as if I hadn’t devoted enough brain power to choosing which category of mom I would be and following that blueprint. I was just a big loser who thought, I’ll be a mom who loves her child. Foolishness!

Thus began my manic search to find a parenting philosophy that was both aspirational and achievable—the thing that would guide me, if not completely guarantee me, success as a mother. I borrowed a stack of parenting books from the library, but nothing really clicked. Many of them made motherhood sound like a moral imperative or a never-ending science experiment.

So I did the only thing an anxious millennial mom-to-be could: I turned to Instagram. If I couldn’t read my way to perfect motherhood, I would search out a model, someone who was already doing the things that felt like what my highest mommy self would be doing. The Instagram algorithm served up my good mommy guru almost immediately.

Her name was Hailey.

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The first post of Hailey’s I remember encountering was a video of her putting her young child into a bookbag-type contraption without any help and going off on a hike. She was smiling, despite the weight of the bag and the child, and she was, as most Insta-moms are, effortlessly beautiful. Even in the middle of the wilderness. Whatever the internet version is of platonic love at first sight, I felt it in that moment—not for this woman as a person but for the parenting identity she introduced me to: Outdoor Mom.

Outdoor moms, as the name suggests, prioritize getting outside with their children in all weather. Many of them also have a low- or no-screen policy in their homes. Hailey’s presentation of parenting felt approachable because she didn’t dive too deeply into the great screen debates, but rather focused on the practical realities of getting kids outside: gear, affordability, making long-distance travel easier, and letting children explore on their own, however that might look.

I had been hiking for about three years at this point, but I wouldn’t define myself as an outdoorsy person, which is part of what made the outdoor mom persona so appealing: it was a reinvention. I wouldn’t have to worry about that existential crisis many mothers go through after giving birth, where they realize they don’t know who they are anymore—I had already chosen who I would be. My problems were solved. (Again, foolishness!)

I started treating Hailey’s account like it was a curriculum. I got an REI membership, I bought wool base layers for myself and my baby, I got a soft carrier, and most important of all, I got the holy grail of outdoor mom gear: the hiking carrier1.

By the time my baby was born, I had convinced myself that my life as a good mother could not begin while I was still inside. I needed to get this baby outside. My daughter went on her first real hike three months after she was born. At six months, I moved her into her hiking carrier, and we hit various trails across New York and New Jersey. The summer after she turned one, I took her camping (we got rained out, it was not great). I have gone miles and miles with my child strapped to my back, and still I find myself wondering the same thing.

Am I a good mother?

Spending all that time in the forest with nothing but your thoughts and your baby’s various sounds leaves a lot of room for doubt to take hold. I was doing everything, I was following all of the guidelines, I had all of the things, and yet I still felt as if I wasn’t doing enough. I had not somehow warped into an East Coast version of Hailey. I hadn’t ascended to the highest and purest form of motherhood.

Many moms that I’ve spoken to over the years feel this to some degree. They are exhausted from doing everything they can for their child, and they still wonder if it’s enough. We try to comfort each other, celebrate each other, and yet somehow it all rings hollow. We want more for our children and for ourselves. But for the most part, we don’t quite know how to get there.

A few months ago, I took my daughter hiking again and realized she was too heavy for her large carrier. As we sat by a stream—me giving my back a chance to recover, her collecting rocks—I felt a wave of defeat wash over me. I had failed in my mission to be an outdoor mom. How disappointed Hailey would be if she could see me now.

I wish I could tell you that one day I snapped out of it. I wish that I, like Hailey, could offer up some blueprint that would lead you to the highest self you seek. But in all my studying of one woman’s motherhood, I missed her most important message: there is no destination, there is only the hike we’re on right now. And there is no hike more difficult than walking through motherhood.

My daughter and I are not yet outdoor experts. But we love to play and cuddle and read and dance and pick up dirt and yell BIRD whenever we see one. I am so fortunate that this little child loves me regardless of location or what mom label I’m living in. Some days I’m outdoor mom, and other days I’m Paw Patrol mom. My motherhood is expansive and ever shifting. It’s growing just as my child is growing. Is it any good? I still don’t know.

What I do know (now) is that a backpack was never going to guarantee me success. Modeling my choices after a well-intentioned mom in Utah, who openly admits to her own struggles and shortcomings, was not going to ensure that I always had the answer. But it did give me a lifeline that I desperately needed at the time. It gave me moments with my daughter in nature that are irreplaceable. It gave me a sense of strength and accomplishment in a world that is so quick to ignore all the things that moms do.

I’m so glad that I found Hailey, but I am perhaps even more glad that somewhere out on those hiking trails, I found a bit of myself. And there is no failure in that.

Let me start by saying, I love Toy Story, I really do. All three of them. Oh, there are four, you say? No, there aren’t!

Anywho, despite there being only three installments of this franchise, Toy Story 5 is set to release this June and will feature the OG cast of toys, facing off with a new villain, a “lilypad” which appears to be a cross between a LeapFrog learning pad and an iPad. Essentially, it’s a movie about screen devices being antithetical to play.

So like, who asked for this? Well, I know who didn’t ask for this.

Number one: millennials. When Andy went to college in Toy Story 3, it coincided with many of us who grew up with these films either starting our college journeys or just wrapping up our first year. In that movie (decade-old spoiler alert), the toys find a new forever home with Bonnie, an age-appropriate child who loves them and adds them to her collection. That was it. The story was closed. We cried1, we had closure, it was a shared moment of finality. We literally said goodbye to these toys, who were happy in their new home. Future generations probably could have spent the rest of their lives rewatching the big three and been completely content. So unlike the declining birth rate, this new thing cannot be blamed on us.

Number two: parents. Especially the moms who are at the end of their fucking rope, having to hear about the evils of screentime.

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I’ve been a parent for three years now, and in that time, I can’t think of a topic I’ve heard more about than screentime. Childhood diseases, educational development, successful methods to get this kid to take a piss on the toilet—none of that gets more airtime than screens. People go to war over this on message boards. There are apps upon apps to manage screentime for your kids (and your adults). There are toy companies entirely designed to make sure your kid is so entertained that they never even know what a screen is. (Maybe that’s who asked for this movie.)

To some extent, I can understand the need to vilify screens. We live in a low-attention economy, and people need something and someone to blame. The tech boom both ruined and improved our lives in ways that are still unfolding. But what really chaps my ass is when the conversation around screens becomes a test of morals, most often used against mothers.

Too much screentime? You’re not raising your own child. Too little? You’re depriving them. Minimal screentime, but it’s not entirely educational? You may as well stick your baby’s brain in a blender, you miserable woman. I’ve seen people go so far as to say, why bother having children if you’re going to have a screen raise them.

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Listen, the day a screen can get up with my kid at four in the morning and get her the required glass of water and back rub she needs to go back to sleep—that’s the day someone can make the screens raising kids argument. Until then, find something better to say. Better yet! The day I can bring my kid into a restaurant without people groaning or giving the side eye because they think their outing is about to be interrupted—the screen I bring is practically a public service.

There’s also the nostalgia trap that so many people fall into, with this belief that back in the day, kids were constantly outside running feral until the streetlights came on. Okay, sure, let’s pretend there’s truth in that. But do you know what we were doing in between those bouts of ferality? Watching PBS. There’s a reason everyone is so emotionally attached to programs like Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street. Because when we went inside, that’s what was waiting for us. On a screen!

Now, I’m not advocating that we just leave our kids to brainrot in front of the TV or tablet all day. Actively engaging with your child can be fun. But it’s also a job, and like any other job, you need breaks to be able to function at a high level. I used to be so strict about screentime with my child that I had a timer running, and if it went over a certain amount of time for a day, everything had to be shut off until the next day. That was a miserable time. Eventually, I found a balance that worked for my family and my mom-guilt. But getting to this place of self-acceptance, where I stopped counting minutes and punishing myself for every episode of The Wiggles my kid watched, took a lot of work—extra mental load that I really didn’t need. And why? Because so many of the systems around parenting are set up to make it easy to be a “bad” parent and almost impossible to be good2.

The Toy Story franchise doesn’t delve much into the interior world of the parents, so we can assume there isn’t overt parent shaming in the film. But judging from the trailer, where one scene shows Bonnie in a room with an adult, and they're both ignoring each other because they’re on screens, the shame is suggested. Tablets make mom and dad negligent.

Even the suggestion of shame is too much to add to the pile of parents’ emotional labor.

Tablets are not inherently evil. Nor are they the enemy of “real” toys that engage children’s imaginations. Screens have their own role in the same way that dolls, play kitchens, and building blocks do. A screen or lack of screen doesn’t get to determine whether you’re a bad parent or not. Your child gets to determine that in 20 years, when they’re processing their trauma in therapy.

I’m sure the brilliant minds at Pixar are cooking up something wonderful that will make everyone in the theater cry, and this movie will make a ton of money.

But when that beautiful, emotional moment comes, it’ll be happening with a screen. Funny how that all works.

When I was eight years old, my father died unexpectedly, kicking off my perpetual dance with grief. When it first sets in, that kind of loss is a poison, ruining things you once held dear—the movie Grease, the training montage from Mulan, a box of Velveeta mac and cheese. Despite the years that seem to have flown by, those things still hold an emotional weight. They are the relics of a life interrupted.

Almost three years ago, another man in my life died unexpectedly, leaving behind his own relics. The grief of that loss is stuck inside me like a pebble in a shoe. No matter how hard I try to shake it out, to allow it to move through me, it just won’t budge. There have been valiant efforts. I tried a Polar Bear punge, I wrote about it, I bought cakes for his birthday, and ate them in silence. Still, my grief feels immobile. It doesn’t ebb and flow. There are no moments of respite when I can almost forget.

One day, I was in my car, idly pressing skip on a song when Taylor Swift’s “Long Live” came through the speakers. I started sobbing on the highway. The sobbing was so intense I had to turn the music off, and being a devout Swiftie, turning off one of her songs is akin to a crime. I assumed it was a one-off instance. But every time the song has played since, my reaction has been the same.

My friend was certainly not a fan of Taylor Swift, nor did we ever share a moment where that song played. So it struck me as odd to have such a strong reaction. I’m sure there’s something clever to be said here about the power of music, but alas, I’ve never been a music writer.

What I have come to understand, being the C-suite-level griever that I am, is that sometimes when you stop yourself from remembering the people you’ve lost, they find a way to make themselves remembered.

Without digging into the lore or Swiftology of it all, “Long Live,” on its surface, is about a friendship changed by time and success. Again, nothing about that really mirrors the relationship I had with my friend. But when I stopped thinking so much about it and just listened, I heard snippets of my life when he was in it.

I heard all of the fun we had at my engagement party.

The night you danced like you knew our lives
Would never be the same
You held your head like a hero
On a history book page
It was the end of a decade
But the start of an age

I heard all the watch parties and arguments over Game of Thrones.

Long live all the mountains we moved
I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you

And most painfully, I heard a parting request. The sure sign that this song wasn’t just happening, it was someone on the other side reaching out to me in a language I would understand.

Promise me this
That you'll stand by me forever
But if, God forbid, fate should step in
And force us into a goodbye
If you have children someday
When they point to the pictures
Please tell them my name

I like to believe that our loved ones never truly leave us. Maybe they aren’t constantly hovering over us, watching every move we make. But they’re here. They come to us in ways that we can recognize—dreams, butterflies, a toddler wiping down a table with the same focus her great-grandmother once had. They send reassurances that death cannot touch love; it can only create distance.

My daughter never had the chance to meet my friend, the man who would be one of her many loving uncles. There are times when I weep for her, for the people she’ll never meet, the experiences she’ll never have. I weep for the life she might have had if any number of people were still here. I weep mourn for my future self, who will have to figure out how to explain that these people we’ve lost weren’t just people, they were whole worlds.

Perhaps by then there will be another song, a happier one. But until that day, I have these words. I have this pebble in my shoe. And more valuable than that, my dear friend, I have our memories.

Long live you.

Be warned, there are light spoilers ahead for Industry season four.

When Industry first premiered on HBO in 2020, I immediately hated it. So much so that I went to my editor at the time to pitch a piece about how bad a show it was, despite the early praise. Benevolent as she was, she let me lay out the argument, even though she vehemently disagreed.

That post never saw the light of day, and thank goodness, because my argument held about as much water as a thimble. My core issue with the show was that the near-constant sex everyone was having wasn’t doing enough to advance the plot. It felt like we just kept taking break after break to watch these college grads screw each other in new locations. Being a child of Game of Thrones, I had been trained to expect more sexposition from my HBO tentpoles.

I perhaps would have been less crotchety about the meaningless sex scenes if I understood literally anything else that was happening. If you haven’t seen it, Industry follows a group of graduates working their first year at Pierpoint Bank in London. Shenanigans ensue amongst the grads as they fight for permanent positions at Pierpoint, which hinges largely on their performances and relationships with senior staff members. Eventually, Pierpoint implodes, setting two of our grads, now working women, Harper and Yasmin, down wildly different and violent paths. Think, Billions, but all the main characters are in their 20s, and the sun never shines.

Because it’s set in the world of high-end finance, the dialogue is 95% fin-talk. I’m not calling myself dumb or anything, but there’s never been a finance show where I fully understood the money talk between two characters.

Which is why my feeble brain needs the non-finance scenes to be super explanatory. Billions worked because it was less about how they made money and more about what they did with that money—ruin each other’s lives and make endless references to sports and pop culture. Succession made perfect sense because it floated in and out of the world of legacy media, which is where I live. I still remember the Vaulter story arc and how it ended up hitting a little too close to home.

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Industry provided me with nothing familiar to latch on to. None of the characters are particularly likable, the pacing and camera work are designed to make you feel the anxiety of the moment, and I was spending a lot of brain power trying discern what was happening based purely on facial expressions1. It just felt like a lot of work for a show, and if I wanted to work that hard, I’d pick up a book. A normal person would have given up and moved on to more understandable pastures.

But it nagged at me, with every new season, that everyone whose opinions I enjoyed reading held this show in such high regard. What was I missing? Or more accurately, how could I hate from the outside of the club when I couldn’t get in? I binged all of the episodes ahead of the season four premiere and felt like maybe I was getting somewhere. Not to a place of enjoyment, just yet, but to a place of convincing myself that I might have been right all along. I could hate from inside the club, hate with knowledge and authority. Hate with purpose!

All of that changed in episode one, the moment Harper stood in front of that mirror, admiring herself wearing a strap-on. I’ve had a lot of moments of clarity in my life, but I’m quite certain this is the only one that ever involved a strap.

A few minutes before we see Harper in the closet, we see her in bed with her enemy of the season, Halberstram. They are, as you can guess, having sex with Halberstram in the perceived dominant position.2 We get that full visual, false sounds of pleasure, and all. But when Halberstram asks Harper to put on the strap and peg him,3 we don’t get to see the act. We only see Harper put on the strap.

She’s wearing the symbol of power in this situation, but we don’t get to see her wield it.

Not only does this foreshadow the arc of the next few episodes, it also explains Harper’s position in her financial war against Tender, the company that Halberstram owns. She has the power to fuck them, but she doesn’t have everything she needs to do it. Her money penis is still flaccid at this point in the season, and it’s worth noting here that because the financial sector is so toxic and male-dominated, functioning phalluses are really the best metaphor for power. The only reason we have that first sexual encounter between Harper and Halberstram is because, in that moment, he has all of the power and is in the process of gaining more.

The further Harper goes into this mess with Tender, the more powerless she feels, the less time we spend on her sexual relationships. Meanwhile, Halberstram, who believes he is on the rise, gets more sensually charged scenes.

In a show about commodities and the people who trade them, the one commodity that is constantly in their control is sex. We see that played out in Yasmin’s relationship with her husband, Sweetpea’s relationship with men in general, Rishi’s fall from grace, and Kwabena and Eric, who have had minimal sexy screentime and negligible moments where they are the seducers rather than the seduced.

I’m sure the financial-jargon-filled dialogue is great for people who understand what it means to run a short-only fund. But for the rest of us who might need a bit more hand-holding, viewing sex scenes as necessary and not supplemental to the show has actually made it easier to understand, and now that I’m not completely lost, all of the hype makes sense.

Who knew the show that everyone was saying was good, is, in fact, really good?

When I was a teenager, Wisin y Yandel headlined a concert at Madison Square Garden. All of my play cousins had planned to go, and I was intentionally and very uncomfortably not invited to join, even though we were all about the same age and spent every Friday together. The moms got involved, and miraculously, my concert ticket appeared.

But as is always the case with kids, that wasn’t the end of the issue. My attendance was the butt of every joke in the days leading up to the show. It didn’t make sense to them that I attend because, as far as they knew, I didn’t listen to Spanish music, much less understand the language1. I can still recall the embarrassment I felt when one of them pulled out an iPod on the subway and gave me a playlist meant to “teach” me about the music we were going to be hearing for the next two hours.

It certainly came as a surprise to them that, throughout the show, not only was I already familiar with all the songs, I knew how to pronounce the words too.

My identity as a Nuyorican has always been a point of internal strife, and that summer, it played out with an intensity I hadn’t previously experienced in my young life. These kids, who viewed themselves as real Puerto Ricans, had collectively decided that I was a counterfeit—Puerto Rican by association only.

I think about that moment as a formative event of my youth, the first time I knowingly allowed other people to strip away a piece of my identity.

But on February 8, 2026, Bad Bunny gave it all back to me. And thensome.

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Bad Bunny’s halftime performance was, from start to finish, a religious experience. (Even the twerking. David danced too, did he not?) For those 13 minutes, I felt completely alive and in touch with my creator and the incredible creation that is Puerto Rico.

I could trap you here for hours unpacking every single frame, but then neither of us could ever leave.

Each moment, each sound was an ode to the culture at large, spanning time and zip codes. The sugar cane field, the boxers, the extremely New York bodega scene, the piraguero, the random white girl that got invited but no one remembers who brought her, the kid sleeping in the middle of a party!!! Who among us has not been that child? And I know I’m not the only person who screamed and felt the spirit move when he walked out of the casita, and we all heard the opening notes to Dale Don.

There was, however, one moment in particular that just gripped me and hasn’t let go: Ricky Martin singing part of Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii.

Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa

Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya

No, no suelte’ la bandera ni olvide’ el lelolai

Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái

Despite some interpretations of Bad Bunny’s performance being an apolitical love fest, teaching us the values of self-worth and self-belief, these lines hold the entire political weight of the show on their shoulders. (It also served as the intro to arguably his most political number, El Apagón2.)

This is really where the show fully pivoted from a vibrant celebration of his success—you have to be a superstar of a certain caliber to get Lady Gaga to be number two on the call sheet—to the full-throated political statement he’s been weaving into his work for years. His use of the pro-independence flag3, his participation in the movement that ousted Puerto Rican governor Ricky Roselló, and, most obviously, his entire last album—he’s not making music in a vacuum.

We also cannot ignore the visual of Ricky Martin being the man to sing those words. We will probably never know how many parts of himself Ricky had to cut away to have the success that he did in the U.S. This was as much his homecoming as anyone else’s.

Look closely at some of the things he’s naming in this portion: the river, the beach, and a neighborhood. These things are tangible but immovable. American developers can claim a beach or a river on the island, but they can’t physically pick it up and take it anywhere. Those things will always belong to the land, to Mother Borinken. It’s a love note and a rallying call for those on the island fighting the good fight.

It’s also a call to those in the diaspora, and not just the Puerto Rican diaspora.

So many people feel a connection to Bad Bunny’s music because it speaks to a deep part of their souls, the part that is connected to a land outside the United States. It’s a connection that, whether we acknowledge it or not, is unbreakable. Our ancestors built it for us. It can be quieted, but it cannot be taken from you, not by governments, by war, by billionaire developers, and certainly not by asshole teenagers who question your music taste.

I have never been ashamed of my heritage. What I have been is willfully ignorant. Growing up in the Bronx, being Puerto Rican was like being a creature that inhales oxygen—we’re all doing it without a second thought. I always knew I was Puerto Rican, but I didn’t really understand what came with that—the deep pride, the history, and the incredible responsibility. So when other people told me that my disinterest in the Spanish language or Spanish music made me less Puerto Rican, I just accepted it. I put down the lelolai in exchange for a lalala.

It wasn’t until I was a few years older that I became proactive (and by that I mean obnoxiously Latina). Even with that embrace of my culture, though, I still spent years wrestling with my identity, feeling as if I had been borrowing something that was never mine in the first place. But watching that half-time show and feeling so seen, so understood, so part of something bigger—it would be an insult to the lineage that put me on this earth to not claim what has always been mine.

I was sitting in Mr. O’Brien’s 11th-grade religion class when I wrote my first fully realized short story. It was ten handwritten pages (front and back!) of pure wet hot garbage. The story made no narrative sense, had plot holes you could sail a cruise ship through, and just generally sucked. But I was damn proud of it. So proud that I shared it with a classmate who left me notes in the margins. We went back and forth for days, passing a ratty lime green notebook between our desks, adding to the story while poor Mr. O’Brien tried to teach his class. I understood much later that that girl was my first editor.

As horrid as that story was, it filled me with a clear sense of purpose: I was a Writer. Not I was going to be, not I could be—I already was. I was a writer not by trade or craft or education, but by birth. The hubris of youth, right?

Four years of college, five years in film and television, and seven years in digital media later, that conviction weakened. I am a Writer, sure, that’s what it says on my LinkedIn. But I don’t know that anyone has ever considered me a Serious Writer. My body of work is filled with commentary on reality TV, books I’ve enjoyed, and a ton of other nonsense. For much of my career, I’ve always felt that I had to justify why the things I enjoyed writing about were actually important. Soccer, women’s wrestling, emails from CEOs—why does any of it matter? My answer has always been the same. Because it just does.

These small, unserious things are the building blocks of our lives. They are, much like opposable thumbs, part of what makes us human. The shows we watch, the sports we follow or neglect, don’t just form our identity; they determine how we interact with each other. The Housewife you show allegiance to may seem a small thing, but there are enormous ethical and ideological differences in stanning Dorinda or LuAnn or, god forbid, Ramona. I know everything I need to know based on your answer.

Typing Slowly exists for that overconfident 11th grader who was wise enough to know that work does not need to be perfect to be shared. It’s also for the grown woman who is just now understanding that I never needed to be Serious to take myself seriously. The unserious moments that make us think about what we want from ourselves, our peers, and our culture at large are just as valuable, if not more so, as the news of the day. And so are those of us who write about them.

So if you, too, stay up late at night trying to understand what happened on the plane and what it means about you as a person to devote so much brain space to it, then I’ve got one thing to say.

Welcome home.

No, but really, what’s this going to be about??

Okay, this is for my logistical baddies who just need a schedule. As the title suggests, Typing Slowly will not be a daily newsletter because I am both typing and thinking at a slow pace. Trust me, you’ll like it.

Twice a month, you can expect a long read on the goings on in pop culture (I’m cooking something up on Industry as we speak) through a granular, some would say obsessive, lens. These may be recent views or long-held views that I have been dying to share with the world. Either way, all views are my own unless expressly stated otherwise.

Sporadically, I’ll also be writing about parenting my three-year-old daughter through the highs and lows of post-partum anxiety and depression. Because of the very personal nature of these stories, these posts will eventually go behind the paywall. If I’m going to (metaphorically) shake my mom titties on the internet, best believe I’m getting something for it.

When the spirit moves, I’ll also be adding to my secondary column, Who Asked for This?, which looks at things in pop culture that we don’t need and asks the question who the fuck asked for this to exist. My first WAFT will be an absolute delight about the return of [REDACTED], publishing later this month.

I invite you to feel free to share any feedback as we go on this journey together, but please know I value myself and my work enough to hit that block button. So think before you type.

See you soon!

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