Cruel Compendium #71 ♈️
Stay-at-home girlfriends, problemistas, and eclipse intentions
This newsletter is a day late…but also right on time. 😉
ICYMI, last week I relaunched the newsletter with a new look and intention, and shared highlights from the last five years of CSBC.
Make sure you submit your questions about art, life, and love so I can answer them in my new advice column, Dear Jilla!
Have you all got plans to witness the eclipse on Monday? Austin is in the path of totality, so if the predicted thunderstorms for that day clear, I’ll get to see it! April 8 is also my birthday, so I look forward to doing some real witchy shit that day. Sending extra love to all of my Aries sisters this month. ♈️🌞😎✨
I hope you enjoy the new look of the Compendium! Be sure to click “View entire message” at the end of this email so you can read the whole post in your browser. On to the links!
What Happens to the Stay-at-Home Girlfriend After a Breakup? by Erika W. Smith
The dark side of surrendering financial independence.
Raised in the West Bank, shot in Vermont by Rozina Ali
The beautiful and heartbreaking story of three friends who grew up together in Palestine then came to the United States for a college education — only to be shot down on the streets of Vermont while wearing kaffiyehs.
In Line at St. Brigid by Jay Bulger and Paula Aceves
Unhoused migrants trapped in the maze of US immigration processes tell their stories of surviving in New York City.
The families still separated at the border by the Trump administration by Piper French
The devastating story of the 2,000 children who are still not reunited with their families years after they were separated as part of Trump’s “zero-tolerance policy.” I ache when I think of the trauma these families have gone through and the impossible choices they’ve had to make — when they had any choices at all.
Jasmin Paris Becomes First Woman to Complete Extreme Barkley Race by Emmett Lindner
I’ve never heard of this “extreme footrace that requires participants in rural Tennessee to navigate 100 miles of rugged terrain in no more than 60 hours.” They have to memorize the race route and climb twice the elevation of Mount Everest!
In 2019, Ms. Paris, an ultrarunner and veterinarian, became the first woman to win the Montane Spine Race, a 268-mile ultramarathon in the United Kingdom. She broke the previous course record by 12 hours despite stopping at checkpoints to pump breast milk for her newborn.
Books lately
I inhaled This American Ex-Wife by lyz, my 7th book of 2024. Lenz shares the story of her troubled marriage, in which she never had an equal partner, and her divorce, after which she finds the freedom and peace she didn’t know she could have.
I also finally finished Devotions, a large collection of Mary Oliver’s exquisite poems about nature (my 8th book of 2024).
I’m working my way through Cody Cook-Parrott’s book How to Not Always Be Working and have been asking myself the important questions:
What is my work?
What is not my work?
Try it! You might be surprised by what clarity you find there.
Bits and bobs about freelance writing.
Pitch emails sent in 2024: 6
Pitches accepted: 3
New clients: 2
Average monthly income for Q1: $6,008
To be fair, I committed to not pitching in Q1 (but still did now and then). The three pitches accepted were all from a single email pitching upcoming Austin event coverage. I look forward to pitching more in Q2 once my podcast goes live — that’s my focus for April.
Here’s an encouraging read on small steps and daily habits by Nicole Zhu. “Take the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.”
I love Libby Connolly’s transparent and gorgeous Year in Review.
UK newspapers and the Union of National Journalists agreed to payment within 30 days of commissioning an article as of April 1st. Cheers!
Pitch alert for Palestinian writers h/t Foreign Bodies: A database of editors specifically looking to work with Palestinian writers.
I recently took Cody Cook-Parrott’s Skillshare class, Success on Substack: Craft a Subscription Newsletter Worth Reading. It was super helpful in organizing my thoughts around bringing this newsletter into 2024. I highly recommend so much of Cody’s work. If you’re thinking of starting a newsletter or rebranding your own, I can’t recommend it enough. Try Skillshare free for 30 days + 40% off with my referral code.
Causes I care about, and actions you can take to help.
Many family members of Palestinians are crowd-sourcing money to evacuate their loved ones to safety; it costs $5,000 per person to legally cross the only open border through an Egyptian tourism company. One of the families featured in this NPR story is Reem Zaid’s, who has still only raised £21,000 of their £125,000 goal (about $150,000 USD) to evacuate 25 family members. I donated; you can contribute here.
h/t Mary Gaitskill’s postAustinite Sera Bonds, a Jewish humanitarian health worker who lived and worked in the Middle East for years, shared her moving full remarks to the Austin Commission for Women ahead of a vote for a ceasefire resolution. (The resolution later passed.)
Austinites: You can sign the petition or email City Council members to ask City Council members to adopt a ceasefire resolution.
Visit ceasefiretoday.com for helpful links to email your Congress members, sign petitions, find a protest near you, and more.
🇮🇪 I once again binged all of Derry Girls this week. It’s one of the only shows that makes me LOL. I laughed particularly hard when a character describes Braveheart as “that drag queen that saves Scotland.”
💿 I saw Problemista and really liked it. It’s strange and full of delight, just like everything Julio Torres does, and explores the absurdity of immigration laws that directly exclude the poor (or even just people who don’t have $5,000 in savings, which is most people). Plus, it shares some of Torres’ true story of coming to New York City from El Salvador and working dozens of odd jobs to get by. Here’s the video Torres and his friends made to help him raise the funds he needed for immigration expenses in 2015.
🐮 After some very early hot days in February, Austin had a near-perfect March. Feeling so grateful for the gorgeous spring we’ve had in my adopted state.
🎶 I’ve been reveling in all 27 tracks of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter.” (Obviously.) It pairs perfectly with this top-down-on-the-convertible weather.
💩 Everything you ever wanted to know about getting a colonoscopy by
🌙 Maya Land’s collage art is seriously inspiring me to create my own Tarot deck
📒 How to keep your hobby from becoming a job — a free zine!
🎬 The full screenplay of Past Lives by Celine Song
🪦 Saltburn dirt pudding. Anatomically correct!
👩🏽❤️💋👨🏽 Sharing the burden of birth control
🍺 Unfortunately this was me in high school
🧽 Always invite me to the Spongebob rave where I will dance like Spongebob
📕 Finding interesting stuff at your mom’s house
Support for the week ahead from your higher self.
What can I call in during the eclipse?
Six of Pentacles
Giving and receiving, flow, prosperity
This spring, what is blooming within you? Or what do you most wish to invite in, for a season or a lifetime?
Chani Nicholas says April 8’s eclipse is “a flash point for shake-ups, surprises, and synchronicities” that “rallies our bravest selves to the forefront.”
Summon your bravest self. What is it that she wants? What would you reach for if you were not afraid of failing?
Let that be your intention.
Eclipse season Tarot spread:
Happy early birthday. :).
Thank you for putting all this together 😍 and have a HAPPY BIRTHDAY 🎈