Toast Points for the Week of February 5th

by Nicole Chung · February 5, 2016

Hi Toast, I hope your week was great. Mine could have been better in many respects, but I did just receive a “Cocoa Lovers’ Gift Pack” from Penzey’s and am drinking delicious hot cocoa with a cinnamon stick stirrer right now, so you know, there’s that.

This week I talked with my brilliant friend Linda, former book editor-turned-literary agent, about the Lee & Low Diversity in Publishing Baseline Survey, money, the Big 5 and small presses, and every word she said is PRETTY MUCH GOLD, so read it if you haven’t:

And if you aren’t born into this world, if your dad didn’t ride Metro North every day with an executive editor, and if you don’t make those important connections at universities—and these are all markers of class—then the opportunities to get hired in the first place become few and far between. You have to get creative about breaking those barriers, you have to be ten times as driven to make it work, and you have to want to be there enough to justify all that hard work for $13.50/hour.

It wouldn’t occur to so many people in the industry that diversity would be “nice” or necessary, in part because they have only ever known these white-only spaces. The uncomfortable tide of whiteness in publishing is in many ways old-fashioned WASP racism. And it is uncomfortable.

Katelyn Best road-tripped to her great-grandparents’ former homestead near Burns and reflected on the urban/rural divide in parts of the West, and as a former rural-ish Oregonian it really got to me.

Kate Schapira on pregnancy, climate anxiety, and burdens:

Where does this stuff come from, and where does it go? Why do I feel teeth-grinding stabs of anger and call myself names when I move the stove and see how much grime has collected back there, or when I read another article about the rising rate of extinctions? The same response, the same anger! From whom did I receive it, and where can I put it? This feeling of failing, of responsibility, of haste, is not rational, nor is it personal. It’s in the air. It’s in the water.

I want to get pregnant because I want to have a baby, and I want to have a baby because I want to have a child, to be a parent, to share the world. But given what I know about the world I have to share, this may be a bad reason. Why make another hostage to fortune? Why create another drain, another weight, on ecosystems strained by creatures like me?

Super loved all of Maddie Howard’s ideas for Kind-Hearted Reality Shows, ESPECIALLY:

Screen Shot 2016-02-04 at 4.34.27 PM

Everything Lesbians Fight About, in Haiku

AYN RAND’s FIREFLY

Don’t miss Denece Mohammed’s gorgeous words on straddling the gap between the Trini English of her home and the “proper English” she learned at school.

“Sometimes we just need check in with ourselves and get some ‘me’ time. Even if it means abandoning my watchpost at the west wall for a few hours just to curl up with a good book and some strong tea, so be it. After all, I’m not much use keeping a lookout for Them if I’m not fully rested and recharged.”

FINALLY, I just want you all to remember that this happened on Monday night, so please get used to acting amazed and impressed anew every time I tell this story (which I may well do on a weekly basis, for as long as we all shall live):

On the 2nd or 3rd question, he lost his train of thought, said, “What was the question again?” and then pointed towards me and said, “Let’s go back to the ‘If John Cho Were Your Boyfriend‘ quotes.”

If John Cho were your boyfriend, he’d be totally cool and not visibly mortified when your friend introduced him at an event using excerpts from your goofy “If John Cho Were Your Boyfriend” piece

I may return next week, I may not; I honestly don’t know what I have left to do on this internet.

johnchorain I’ll just leave you with this.

Nicole Chung is the Managing Editor of The Toast.


30 Comments

    1. nicolescchung +13

      it wasn’t my favorite show ever but it sounds kind of comforting right now.

      RELATED: my tweet with the photo of JC’s autograph still exists, but the picture itself is gone, which makes me wonder if I inadvertently broke some kind of twitter rule about posting autographs/signatures? I didn’t get a warning or anything, the pic is just gone! Such are my issues that I feel guilty over maybe breaking a rule without realizing.

      ETA I deleted the whole tweet because I’m scared of The Man.

        1. nicolescchung +8

          I actually asked A LAWYER who writes a lot about tech/twitter and they said it doesn’t violate any rule they know of, and that if I’d been reported/done something wrong Twitter would have let me know in a big obvious way. So. I think it’s just a weird glitch!

          1. nicolescchung +15

            I can’t stop thinking about this; I would feel so much better if there were someone I could apologize to

          2. dakimel +13

            I entirely sympathize with your worries. They’re baseless, you’re okay, it was just a glitch, and in the near future John Cho & Daniel Henney are going to put on muscle tees and arm wrestle over who loves you more. And it’ll be filmed in multi-cam so you don’t miss any angles. At the end they’ll blow you simultaneous kisses.

          3. nicolescchung +8

            Mel, hello, write my whole life with just this kind of attention to detail please.

            I’m bummed we can’t all look at it together anymore, though!

    1. nicolescchung +17

      Me too! My aunt is obsessed and sends me gift packs a couple times a year.

      We’re going to be running a piece about Penzey’s soon, not sure on the exact date.

    3. gripyfish +8

      I discovered recently that if you sign up for the Penzey’s mailing list, they periodically send you coupons for free spices. It is the best thing.

    1. dakimel +5

      I’m a few hundred miles from you, which doesn’t stop me from being aggravated by the people in beads blocking my way when I’m trying to get groceries or whatever.

      I wish you strong ear plugs and a garden that bounces back quickly.

      1. beaucoup1314 +5

        Thank you. I have ever been thankful that I do not live on a parade route. In my neighborhood we get people who are here for the festival and don’t know how to handle it. We have 2 Mardi Gras Indian troops here. It’s fun to watch them strut down the street from the porch in the morning. The older I get the less I like crowds, so I skip the parades. I’ve seen them since I was a child.

    2. swords-and-spindles +2

      My part of Germany has its own Mardi Gras, which means terrible music and drunk people on the trains. It’s hateful. I’m fully set to not leave the house until Tuesday, listening to Iron Maiden as loud as possible.

      1. beaucoup1314 +1

        Claustrophobia. The customer in Munich actually told me that in your (German?) carnival that the whole city didn’t shut down. All I could to reply to her was ‘perhaps we take a more Southern approach.’ People like that leave me puzzled. Excess is excess. Walk if you want to, don’t if you don’t. However, my city shuts down for this. I cannot change that. Tuesday is the gras. Mardi.

        1. swords-and-spindles

          Yeah, in Munich (I used to live there!) it’s not that great of a thing, they save all their energy for Oktoberfest. 🙂 The thing that bugs me about carnival here (around Mainz) is that a lot of people simply won’t accept it if you say “no thanks”. They take it as a personal insult if you’re not interested in what they think is fun.

    3. hey_smalls +1

      I have a friend who wants to go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans next year and I’m kind of “ehhh” about it. It doesn’t really sound like a great time. Am I wrong though?

  5. OiSunshine +5

    I thought “I’ve Learned the Beauty of Living Life Fully” would be a parody of a certain kind of article in a way that was amusing but hardly groundbreaking, and then it promptly went bonkers.

    I love it.

    Also, congratulations on hitting the internet zeitgeist again.

  6. Nikki

    Mel, hello, write my whole life with just this kind of attention to detail please.

    I'm bummed we can't all look at it together anymore, though!

  7. mandarinmarie +4

    I have been thinking about the John Cho thing so much this week and it didn’t even happen to me!