The one blot on this otherwise perfect canvas is Team Australia who I’m afraid will be heading to hell when parkour guy’s 8000th uncalled-for backflip inevitably opens up a dimensional portal. They all seem to be good-natured people, but enabling parkour antics + being excessively Australian, per my recent studies, probably land you in the 8th circle, “sowers of discord” level.

These guys are all supposed to be at various crisis points, essentially, but compare Tolstoy’s middle life crisis to theirs. It’s like comparing a dog to a Swiffer. Are vacancy, superficiality, selfishness, and inertia interesting to read about for 450 pages? No, but the first three qualities aren’t the problem. The blurbs are so effusive and insane that I have to assume all responsible parties had never read a book before.

It steams my beans that we’ve got people out here going on an extended tear about how Colleen Hoover is irredeemable dogshit while saying Emily Henry wrote one of their favorite books. I’ve read three Emily Henry books and I remember—maybe—2 things about them in total. They’re like late 90s romcoms without any laughs or star power or fashion. Of course they’re also utterly harmless and inoffensive. No one, if my extremely thin memory of her books serves, is getting hit in an Emily Henry book. No man is going to ejaculate inside a woman without a condom and then walk away without a word, something that happens in Ugly Love. She provides a different product than Colleen Hoover, but that doesn’t mean she’s a better or more moral writer.

Until he reveals some heinous political position or unforgivable moral flaw, I will like Cench. He has good bone structure. This album is kind of a bummer because it’s mostly humorless. (Whither the boy who said “how can I be homophobic? My bitch is gay.”) But I enjoy it anyway. He can’t help being young and ruined by fame. I understand when he talks about having financial insecurity that’s not allayed by wealth and he’s right, it was messed up that he was involved in drug deals as a kid, I don’t mind him saying so. I think he would benefit from platonic friendship with me and vice versa.

I need to talk to you for a minute about this song, which plays at the end of the first half of Jujutsu Kaisen’s first season. In my memory, experiencing these credits sparked the thought that I might be able to get off Wellbutrin. I have no idea how accurate that connection is though the idea itself was sound; I did/I am. But I think it indicates something true about the emotional experience of the sequence. What really hooked me was the line “there’s no time to explain!” That’s probably one of the funniest things you can say in any scenario but especially here. And yet it’s true. There is apparently no time to explain. I had no idea what was going on for the first 5+ episodes of JJK. I still have no idea what’s going on in “Lost in Paradise.”

I finally binged KinnPorsche, a Thai soap opera about mobsters fucking each other and falling in love. There’s one straight couple in a character’s back story but don’t worry, they die. It took me until episode eight or nine—after scenes in which 1) bagged sliced bread is repeatedly brought to people on trays and prominently displayed on tables otherwise full of cooked food, 2) a mafia family throws a black tie gala to unveil their new product: sliced bread, and 3) Kinn and Porsche tease each other sexually with, you guessed it, sliced bread—before it dawned on me: this show is sponsored by sliced bread.