Here's my confession: Paying ten bucks to do background checks on coworkers sounds fun as hell
A reader writes:
I started a new position recently and was promoted quickly to a management position. Great, I have a long supervisory background, looking forward to helping in a wider capacity.
One of my direct reports is a very conscientious and ambitious young man named “Scott” who I have found pleasant to work with.
Last week, during a normal conversation about a project, Scott brought up that he had done a background search on me and then asked me about an arrest on my record — an insurance snafu that led to a driver’s license snafu and when I was pulled over for a normal traffic stop in a rather conservative county, I spent a night in lock-up. Which was both humiliating and illuminating.
This is not immediately googleable. I gave it a try myself after he brought it up, and some of the specificity of the details he used leads me to believe he went to one of the publicly available background report sites and paid the nominal fee to obtain a detailed report.
His question was framed as that he “had been doing some research and wanted to clarify what happened in X state, because it wasn’t clear if it (the arrest) was in X or Y state.” I lived in Y state more recently, but there’s nothing easily found that links the two without paying for it.
In the moment, I answered truthfully that these items were from more than a decade ago and were the result of a particular set of circumstances. I then excused myself from the conversation and returned to my office.
The longer I think about it, the more weirded out I am. Scott would like to advance and I feel like a follow-up conversation is definitely warranted, but I’m struggling with an approach aside from “hey, you super violated a boundary for me and that will go over like a ton of bricks if you do it with future managers.”
To be fair, this is an overtly aggressive office culture and asking to explain your professional background in a fair amount of detail to coworkers/employees is par for the course. But while I understand having a background check run by the company during the hiring process, I’d like to keep my personal background personal.
(And while I’m not wild about discussing this embarrassing incident, my reaction was more of a “how and why did you obtain this information?” than a deep, dark secret that I’m worried might come to light.)
How do I let go of my weirded-out feeling and how do I best address this in a follow-up conversation?
WHAT?
You are being way more chill about this than I would be.
It’s an incredible overstep to run a paid background check on your new manager — but what’s really weird here is that he thought he somehow had standing to (a) make it clear to you that he did this and (b) ask you to clarify what he found.
The way he asked you about this sounds like he genuinely thought it was appropriate. He was “doing some research and wanted to clarify what happened”?? Because he didn’t feel he had sufficient details? About something that’s none of his business whatsoever?
Have you seen anything else weird about his judgment? Because this is such a bizarre thing for him to approach you with that I’ve got to think there’s a bigger issue with him. Maybe it’s just incredible naivete — but regardless of what’s at the root, this is just wildly inappropriate and I suspect it’s part of some broader pattern.
And as you note, it’s not that this is a deep, dark secret. It’s just that it’s personal and spectacularly irrelevant to anything he would ever have cause to “research.”
So I don’t think you need to let go of your weirded-out feeling. Your weirded-out feeling is warranted and appropriate.
I would say this to him: “I was taken aback last week when you asked me about a traffic incident in my background. Frankly, I was too taken aback to address it in the moment, but I’m not clear on why you were undertaking that kind of background search on me in the first place — and especially on why you decided to inquire with me about it.” And then, depending on his answer, you could say, “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn’t realize you violated a work boundary here. But I want to make sure that going forward you know that this was inappropriate, everyone you work with deserves privacy, and this is not something you should do again to anyone here.”
And I’d keep a very close eye on his judgment after this, especially around interpersonal stuff — and be prepared to swiftly shut down anything else inappropriate.
I'm 15 minutes in and this is RIVETING!!! Watch at least to the 2 minute mark. But also watch the whole thing because it gets real fucked up.
Eggs are an extremely versatile food. They taste great alone, make super sauces (including the much maligned mayonnaise, which I love), and can dress up leftovers into a whole other meal — just put an egg on it.
In this video, Bon Appétit editor Amiel Stanek explores almost 60 different ways to cook an egg, from over easy to coddled to grilled to something called “blowtorched egg” (not great). Be sure to catch the Rollie egg cooker in action at ~20:50…yucko. In general, the classic cooking methods beat newer techniques in terms of taste, texture, and convenience.
jdbk has been shitting his whole butt out for 3 days but is still riding 100 miles each day
We got off to a later start than planned. Although not mentioned explicitly in Patrick’s last post, we still had lingering GI illnesses that acutely worsened overnight, hitting me and Justin a second time. I had to leave dinner early, and, when it became apparent that I was becoming very sick, Patrick recommend azithromycin, which I started. Patrick had packed a wide variety of medications for the trip, which was now coming in handy.
In the morning, Patrick was feeling fine so he ran errands, first to the market for more water, juice, and toilet paper (we had run out!), then the pharmacy, where he talked (actually mimed) his way into a new supply of azithromycin. Before he could leave, the pharmacist insisted that he take probiotics, oral rehydration solution, and Paracetamol. Justin woke up feverish, so Motrin and Paracetamol helped, but it was becoming apparent that he was getting worse, so Justin started antibiotics too. From what Patrick could hear through the relatively thin bathroom door, we (especially I) were losing lots of fluids, so he supervised us as we drank the rehydration solution. We also ate bananas and melon and slowly came back to life.
We left our dystopian apartment complex
and were on the road a little after 8. We thought we would cross the border and take stock of how we felt once in Croatia. It was nice to be outside. The cool morning breeze, as we cycled, helped evaporate the sweat from the fevers. We were quickly at the border and things seemed to be OK. We had a 90-mile ride with 8000 total feet of climbing ahead, but, as you can see, nothing too terrible.
We hadn’t been able to fill our tires for a few days and we all felt that our tire pressures were getting low, so we planned to stop at a gas station in the morning.
Although we had purchased an adaptor for the gas station air pumps while in Greece, it didn’t work in Croatia. While stopped, we saw a market across the street and thought it would be a good place to get breakfast. While riding across the United States, we did breakfasts very well. Every small town had a diner, and we were able to get eggs, pancakes, coffee, and ham almost every day. This is not the case in the Balkans. There seem to be no restaurants open early and certainly nothing like a diner. Also, markets are often just convenience stores, as was the one this morning, and this our breakfast.
It was at this point that we noticed Justin was not looking good, but he assured us he was fine to ride. We continued on until there was a scenic overview in the town of Gradac and pulled off the road for pictures as the pressure of the blog was weighting on me. Usually Justin is good for pictures from the road, but as he was not feeling well, I could see he was not taking any.
The view here and the views the entire day were spectacular. We had granite peaks to our right and the Adriatic with the islands of Hvar and Baci in the distance.
After taking this picture, Justin took a turn for the worse, apologized to us, and told us he was too sick to ride. He did not look good and none of us could imagine him riding another 60 miles to Split. We biked a little bit until we saw what appeared to be a bus station across from a gas station. The gas station attendant spoke English and said the bus to Split should be coming soon. We bought more drinks and waited at the bus station. While waiting, Justin also tried to hitchhike, although we thought it would be unlikely with a bike, and no one responded. When the bus finally came, it was cash only and they did not accept euros, which we had, but wanted Croatian Kuna. We tried to be persuasive and the driver relented, but when we tried to put the bike under the bus, there was not enough room on either side. The luggage compartment closed, the door closed, and the bus pulled away.
Feeling defeated, we regrouped. By this time, Justin felt slightly better and we set our sights on Makarska, 40 km further along, where there would be direct buses to Split. Justin was game to try. Dave continued to lead in a slow but steady pace, and the miles began to click by.
Despite the group’s illnesses, the cycling today was unanimously excellent. There were great climbs of only a modest grade with a terrific payback on the downhills. The roads curved, gently hugging the sides of the mountains, and very often you could see the road many miles in the distance, often across a bay, which gave us confidence in our speeds.
When we reached Makarska, Justin was feeling a little better and we were hungry, but to better control what we ate, we bought lunch from a supermarket as we had done almost everyday on S2B. We bought sliced turkey and Swiss with a loaf of bread for sandwiches, oranges, chocolate milk, and chocolate soy milk. We were able to use a table at the adjoining bar that seemed part of the supermarket. The idea of this seemed strange, but we saw an older man enter the store, buy lettuce and then sit down, drink a beer, and smoke a cigarette before heading home.
After lunch, we only had about 40 miles to go and at a restrained pace, Justin felt he could do it.
We took one more break half way to replenish fluids and was talked into what we were told all Croatians drink, Cedevita.
Even though it was basically Kool-aid with the sheen of healthiness (Fresh Dose of 9 Vitamins!), we each had two and were happy for the fluids.
Dave led us into Split, where we were accompanied by some kids on bikes doing tricks.
When we finally made it to the apartment (beautiful choice, Command Central!), I would never have believed that the four of us would have completed the 92 miles together today, all arriving on our own power, but we did.
We all showered. Justin went immediately to bed, and Dave, Patrick, and I went to explore the old city before dinner. Split is gorgeous, famous for Diocletian’s Palace, erected by the Roman emperor in the 4th century.
We walked along the Riva, which was bustling.
The architecture was so beautiful that Dave and Patrick couldn’t help trying to take the perfect shot.
We brought back pizza for Justin as well as food for the morning (Siggi’s yogurt!) and got ready for bed.
Reflecting on the day, it was the length of the ride, less than a century, and the gentle climbs, no greater that a few hundred feet, that made us able to complete it, despite not being at our best.
Okay, so I assume everyone has checked Equifax for their free $125... but Greta checked the MA Treasurer's website and found that I was owed $585 from Blue Cross Blue Shield (!?!)
I just filled out the form and got an email in like 3 minutes saying a check was on the way.
Every state has one of these, so check all your residencies. My sister and brother-in-law picked up 5 or 6 checks averaging $25, so YMMV.
Robby, you're on this MA one for "insurance proceeds."
It’s nothing new for people who built tools to later have remorse when seeing those tools abused. Sometimes that remorse is world-historical, like with many of the scientists whose work led to the atom bomb. Sometimes, it’s something less than that, like the guy who built the retweet button for Twitter.
In the retweet button’s case, this guy is named Chris Wetherell. He’s also responsible for leading the team that built Google Reader. This is usually posed as an irony: the guy who built a thing that’s now loathed and everywhere (the retweet) also built the thing that’s beloved after its death. But to me, it’s not so ironic.
See, what Wetherell did in both cases was less invent something from whole cloth than adapt a user behavior (manual retweets and RSS readers) into part of a corporate product. In both case, the corporate versions of each were so successful that they crowded out the original forms of user behavior. The retweet got lucrative but ugly, the RSS reader enabled all new kinds of connections, but grew costly. The retweet lived and Reader died, but the underlying pattern was the same; once it was handed over to the corporation, everyone lost control.
And I think you can argue that there’s a parallel here too with the atom bomb folks. Few of them were upset that the structure of the universe works the way their theories predicted. What terrified them was putting the tremendous power inherent in the structure of the universe at the behest of the state.
This is the builder’s remorse. Not that you invented a thing, not that the consequences were unforeseen. It’s that you gave the thing to a power structure where things were overwhelmingly likely to end in ruin. You gave the power to people who don’t care about what you claim to care about. And that problem, because of the nature and structure of money and power, is extremely hard to avoid.
For any of you who know JdBK, he's biking from Athens to Amsterdam right now and this is his blog.
We didn’t get to bed until 1:00 am last night but set our alarms for 6:10 am today, trying to balance enough sleep with an early start as the temperature was to reach the mid 90s and we had about 100 miles to cover. Although we felt we had sorted nearly everything, there were still a few last-minute decisions: “Should we bring the extra sunscreen?” and a few firsts that would quickly become routine, such as strapping our seat packs to the bike. Whatever we brought today, we would likely have for the next three weeks, and when we finally closed the door at 7:30 am, everything else stayed. Our hosts were happy to dispose of our bike boxes and packing materials.
Getting out of Athens was very easy. We quickly found the correct route out and were pleasantly surprised with the quality of the road surfaces, as we would the entire day. Just outside of Athens, we had a small mishap. Dave’s front derailleur was not working, and he was trapped in the small chain ring. This might be OK on a day with lots of climbs but today’s route was relatively flat. We pulled over and were able to make the repair.
A little further along, the road approached the water, so we stopped to ceremoniously dip our rear wheels in the Aegean.
The plan is in three weeks to dip our front wheels in the North Sea when we get to Amsterdam. We did the same 5 years ago first with the Pacific then the Atlantic 4 weeks later.
The plan was for lunch in Corinth, which would be about halfway. The first part of the day was cycling with the Aegean to the left, and after Corinth, we would be cycling with the Gulf of Corinth, an inlet of the Ionian Sea, to the right. As we crossed the isthmus connecting the two, we rode past the spectacular Corinth Canal.
We ate lunch at Number 1, the fifth best place to eat on TripAdvisor but the closest of the top 10 to the street corner where we stopped to check. At lunch a couple who noticed our matching jerseys engaged us in conversation. They were amazed at our ambition, and the husband expressed a strong interest in joining us had he been training. A third man overheard our conversation, and asked to take our picture. On our way out of the city we lined up our bikes and took our picture with Pegasus.
The afternoon was very, very hot. No breeze other than what we generated riding, and little shade as the road was mostly on the coast, and temperatures in the mid-90s. At one point when we stopped at a red light, the lack of a breeze and the reflected heat from the asphalt made the heat index acutely rise. Feeling this heat and the potential danger, the two emergency medicine physicians advised running the light to stay cool but were overruled by the political scientist who felt we should follow the law at least on the first day.
We took three breaks in the afternoon, two to escape the heat and one when I had a flat of my rear wheel tire, only four miles out from our destination.
After a speedy repair, we were quickly at the Panorama Hotel in Diakopto. Despite the heat, the final 20 miles had been along a coastal two-lane road on the edge of mountains as they entered the sea, reminiscent of the Pacific Coast Highway in California.
This is the view from our hotel looking back at the road that brought us in.
We went for a swim, took turns showering, and enjoyed the views from our room before having dinner in the hotel restaurant.
It’s 10 pm. Patrick and Dave are asleep (neither were able to sleep the night before we left due to their ER shifts), and Justin is tinkering with our route for tomorrow. This was our last booked hotel, so my sister Gail has offered to find us a place in Menidi for tomorrow.
Here is our route on Strava. If anyone is on Strava and wants to see more details, follow one of us.
The man, a former New York Giants player who worked at the recovery center Vice President Mike Pence was going to visit this month, was expected to greet Mr. Pence at the airport.
The payoff of this video is through the roof for me.
Watch, listen, and learn as pianist and composer Nahre Sol plays what you might think of as a very simple song, Happy Birthday, in 16 increasing levels of complexity. She starts out using a single finger and ends by playing an original composition that seemingly requires 12 or 13 fingers to play. This gave me, a musical dunce, a tiny glimpse into what a composer does.
This is me when I tweet mad shit talking about Lisa and I forget she follows me
A reader writes:
I have a work colleague we’ll call J. We I sit next to each other and have been friendly the entire time we worked together. She has told me about things in her personal life and I’ve shared the same type of stuff with her.
A couple days ago, J showed me something she’d re-blogged (some animated gif that we both thought was funny), and I happened to notice the URL of her blog. I looked up her blog and started reading it; I didn’t think I was being out of line since she’d showed me the page already.
Then I found a very recent post where she made fun of me for starting a juice cleanse. I was hurt, but I was even more hurt to find that her followers were urging her on to create a blog devoted to my “ridiculousness.” Apparently she posts about me on her blog a lot (12 posts in the past three weeks) and the things she writes are very unkind.
I’m at a loss as to what to do. I know that the best option is to let this go, back away from the “friendship” gracefully and not read the blog again. But the extent to which she has posted about me is pretty startling. Worst of all, she’s recently posted a conversation we had about our boss, who had to go home for medical reasons. J kept insisting it was because of prescription drug overdose, and I tried to stop the conversation by saying “I think it’s a medical issue” (basically, saying it’s private and using my tone to indicate I didn’t want to talk about it). But now it’s on this blog, and it looks like I was participating in gossip.
It’s not difficult to find her blog at all, and based on personal information she shares, it’s not difficult to identify her or the (small) company that we both work for. Aside from my own anger and hurt over what I’ve found, the things she posts about could be potentially embarrassing for our employer.
At a minimum, I’d really like her to take the post about our boss down, but I don’t know how to broach this topic without blowing things up radically. It’s possible, but not super likely, that I could have stumbled upon the blog through other means. Do you have any suggestions about how to tackle this diplomatically? Am I being unreasonably sensitive about things she posted in her personal blog (that was probably never meant for me to see)?
I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
okay we need to have some sort of fun bit we all collectively do when people start dropping out, like a little theme song like Randy Rainbow did for the republicans in 2016
Our first Campaign Deathwatch of the 2020 race is officially underway, as Politico reports John Hickenlooper's campaign is in very sad shape. But what about already-kinda-gone Howard Schultz, you ask? Ah, but you have to actually run before your campaign can expire, and Schultz never formally took the step beyond "exploring," so there. Dickendongler, on t'other hand, appears to have blowed up on the launch pad before he ever got any traction, and now all his sweet green icing's flowing down, to coin a phrase.
According to "a source familiar with the situation," Dirkendiegler's senior staff "urged him last month" (!!!) to gracefully bow out and either run for the US Senate or do something useful with his time, says Politico. The whole effort got beat up on with the ugly stick, it seems:
The source said that the campaign only has about 13,000 donors, making it almost impossible to qualify for the next round of presidential debates in the fall. The campaign also only raised just over $1 million in the second quarter — about what he raised in the first 48 hours of his candidacy — and will likely run out of money completely in about a month.
At least five staffers have left or are leaving Hickenlooper's struggling operation, including his campaign manager, communications director, digital director and finance director. Hickenlooper named a new campaign manager on Monday night.
Obviously, Barkenbooper blames the departed and departing staffers. On MSNBC Tuesday, he told Craig Melvin, "We thought it was time to make a change [...] You know, these campaigns are long, hard campaigns and you don't always get it right with the first team."
Thank goodness he was able to offer a convincing reason for his failure to catch fire: Since he's just a regular feller, he has to be far more careful about making promises than those fancy big-name progressives and their policy proposals, you see.
"I'm not going to get into it until we pull the numbers together," he added. "But the bottom line is for a small campaign like us … it's harder to raise money because we're not promising free health care or, you know, to forgive free tuition for everyone, forgive student debt."
Dude. You aren't going to pay for those programs out of your campaign funds. That would be illegal! There is literally no connection between being a "small campaign" and running on a platform that aims at using the power of government to make people's lives better. But yes, we suppose an Eat Your Broccoli platform may turn out to be less popular.
While Frippenfooper's numbers were good enough for last week's debate and for the upcoming debate in July, which has the same cutoff, making the debates after that will be tougher.
[His] prospects for making the fall debates — candidates must have 130,000 donors and hit 2 percent in four qualifying polls — were dicier. The latest CNN poll released Monday shows Hickenlooper with just 1 percent support.
Linkyloofah's performance in the first debate didn't help a lot either.
With two dozen candidates running, Hickenlooper has struggled to break out from the bottom of the pack. He spoke for just five minutes in Thursday's debate, only getting more airtime than political outsiders Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson and California Rep. Eric Swalwell.
As yr Editrix noted, at least Williamson used her very limited time to make an impression, some of it actually good, like the Central America stuff. Frankly, we're surprised about Torchwell, who seemed to talk more than that -- guess shouting "millennial!" a bunch of times didn't take as long as it felt.
Unfortunately, LisaLoopner has so far "resisted calls to run for Senate," even though Chuck Schumer and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, chair of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, have tried to recruit him. And now that other Colorado Dems have announced runs against Republican Cory Gardner, SiftinSouper would have to make it through a primary if he does jump into the Senate race. HE SHOULD DO THAT ANYWAY. If he does, we might even stop calling him silly names.
Also, here's the saddest two sentences in the whole damn Politico piece:
Lauren Hitt, Hickenlooper's outgoing communications director, told POLITICO on Monday that campaign manager Brad Komar and finance director Dan Sorenson are no longer with the campaign.
"I will also be transitioning out over the next few weeks," she said.
Add your own "turn the lights out as you leave" joke here, and now it is your OPEN THREAD.
Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations. Please send us money so we can keep making up goofy names for people who just want to be taken seriously. We are monsters that way.
Almost everything I cook begins the same way: Take out a head of garlic, separate the cloves, and begin peeling, trimming, and chopping. From there, ninety-five percent of the time, its job is to help accentuate the flavors of something else: vegetables, seafood, tofu, beans, pasta. Garlic is a key ingredient in the flavor bases for most world cuisines, and yet few people treat it as anything more than a spice, or an aromatic. That should change. Every recipe this week will destroy your breath and create a difficult predicament for your loved ones, who will be simultaneously impressed by your cooking and very turned off by your aromatics.
There are two main types of garlic: hard-neck and soft-neck. Hard-neck can typically only be found at farmers markets; like its name suggests, it has a long, hard stem, and is very expensive. It has fewer, but larger, cloves, and also has a slightly more intense, complex flavor. Soft-neck garlic is more common, more inexpensive, and more mild in flavor. Honestly, I tend to buy hard-neck garlic once in the springtime and think “huh tastes like garlic” and then go back to not spending like four dollars for a single head of garlic. (Oh, and there’s black garlic, which is a fermented garlic. It’s tasty but not a raw ingredient so we will ignore it today. Garlic scapes are the young necks of the hard-neck garlic variety, but they won’t be available for another few months so we’ll set them aside for another day.)
You should buy garlic by the head, which is the name for the entire bulb of garlic. The head contains several cloves, each wrapped in several layers of unbelievably irritating papery skin. When buying, give them a squeeze: the cloves should have no give at all, should be very firm and hard and have no brown spots on them. If they’re soft, they’ve gone bad. In terms of size, if you get a head with large cloves, you’ll be doing less peeling to get the same amount of garlic by weight.
I think people sometimes avoid garlic (and maybe cooking altogether!) because preparing it is sort of a pain. Here’s how to do it (garlic, anyway): Grab an entire head of garlic and hold it in both hands over the trash can. Using your thumbs, push the skin from the stem downwards; lots of the drier outer layers should fly off into the garbage. When it seems like you’ve gotten all the skin off that will come off by that method, break the head into cloves.
Place a clove flat-side down on a cutting board. Place the broad, flat side of a knife on the top of the clove, and smack it with the heel of your hand to lightly crush the clove. You don’t want to smash it to bits; the goal is to keep the clove roughly clove-shaped, but to crush it enough that the rest of the skin will easily slip off. Then trim off the root end, and it’s ready to use. (You can skip buying the pre-peeled cloves of garlic that come in plastic containers in the produce chiller at the grocery store; I think they taste a little artificial and stale. That said, that tub has its uses.)
If you’re mincing garlic, use a knife. Do not use a garlic press. Do NOT use a garlic press. They are all garbage, even the good ones. They squeeze all the juice out of the clove of garlic, which is just lost flavor, and there’s a huge amount of waste in the vast majority of presses; you know how you squeeze a garlic press and there’s, like, two-thirds of the clove left behind in the chamber? That’s real garlic that you’re wasting. Use a knife. If you think your knife skills are so bad that it takes forever to mince garlic, here’s a solution: Keep using the god damn knife until you’re good with it. You eat food three, maybe four times a day. Why do you think being good with a knife is a skill that you don’t need?
Anyway. Garlic is extremely strong in its raw form, spicy and aggressive, which has its uses, but they are few, to be honest. The longer you cook garlic, the more mild it becomes, and long and slow cooking turns garlic into a mild enough flavor that it can be the star of the show. Here are some recipes for that!
This is one of those times when buying pre-peeled garlic is fine; you’re using so much garlic that I can’t in good conscience demand that anyone actually peel them all. (I mean, I could, but.) Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. In a small baking tray—a Pyrex is perfect for this—toss in about forty-five or fifty cloves of garlic (I know!) and cover in olive oil. This will take a lot of olive oil. That’s okay. Put it in the oven and roast until the cloves are completely soft, about forty-five minutes. Using a spider, strain out the garlic cloves, reserving the oil; that oil is GOLD, you will use some of it later in this recipe but the rest of it you should keep in a bottle for pouring over pastas or breads or pretty much anything else.
Slice your bread into crouton-sized cubes. Throw them in a big bowl and drizzle some garlic oil over them while tossing. Then lay them out on a baking sheet, making sure they have space between them, and put them in the oven at 350 for maybe twenty minutes, until crispy and croutoned.
In a large soup pot or dutch oven over low heat, pour in a touch of the garlic oil and saute a chopped leek and a pinch of chile flakes. When soft, add in all your roasted garlic and pour in enough chicken stock to cover. Heat for a little while to let the flavors meld, then blend; an immersion blender is best for this. Throw in a couple bay leaves, cover, and cook for another thirty minutes or so. Season to taste with salt and a squeeze of lemon.
Poach an egg or two.
To serve: Pick out the bay leaves and discard. Pour soup into a bowl. Top with a poached egg, some chopped chives, and some croutons. (Note: some people add heavy cream to this. I do not. Fuck heavy cream. Some other people thicken it with a raw beaten egg in the style of an avgolemono. I have never tried this but it seems like a good idea. If you try it, let me know how it goes.)
Garlic Chips
Shopping list: Garlic, olive oil, salt if you’re a heathen and don’t have any salt?
Peel a whole mess of garlic. Like a whole head’s worth. Slice off the root end and then slice them into thin circles (or ovals, I guess? Garlic isn’t a perfect cylinder). Put a pan over low heat and pour in a bunch of olive oil. Toss in all the garlic slices and watch them VERY. CAREFULLY. They will burn quickly. When they’re golden brown and a little crispy, they’re done. Remove (reserving the oil, which, again, is delicious) and let them drain on a paper towel for a minute or two. Use them pretty much anywhere you’d use croutons or bacon bits or dried chile flakes: in salads or popcorn, on soups or pizza or meats, if you eat meats, why not.
Very Good Spicy Garlic Bread
Shopping list: Garlic, aluminum foil, olive oil, butter, a baguette, fresh serrano or jalapeño chile, dried oregano
First step: roast some garlic. Pre-heat your oven to 350. Take a whole head of garlic and slice off the stem. This is hard to explain? Like, you want to slice off the top of each clove of garlic but keep all the cloves attached to the root end. It should look like this. Tear off a square of aluminum foil and set the head of garlic right in the middle of it. Then kind of gather up the foil around the garlic, making a little container for it. When it looks like this, pour in a glug of olive oil over the cut side, then continue to gather up the excess foil and completely encase the garlic. (I usually finish with a nice twist of the foil on top, like a replacement stem for the garlic that can also be used as a handle.) Stick the garlic right on the oven rack, don’t bother with a tray. Roast for about forty-five minutes or until soft.
When it’s done, each individual clove of garlic will be, like, encased in its oily little paper shell. Pop each of them out, and put in a bowl with some room-temp butter; the garlic to butter ratio should be about 3:2. Mash the butter and garlic together and sprinkle in some dried oregano, forming a kind of gross-looking paste.
Slice your baguette in half length-wise. I mean, slice it however you want. I don’t really care. I do it lengthwise. Spread your roasted-garlic butter on it like you’d spread cream cheese on a bagel. Chop up your chile, discarding the seeds, really finely, and sprinkle some chiles over the top. Sprinkle some salt over the top too. Bake at 400 degrees for maybe ten minutes, until the bread is crispy and your house smells incredible. Top with garlic chips, if desired.
I won’t argue that it’s not a pain to prepare garlic, even if you are an asshole who cooks fairly often and insists as a result that he has some kind of expertise on the subject. It’s kind of a pain. But, like, it’s garlic? It’s so delicious that even if it was harder to prepare than it is, I’d keep doubling and tripling the amount of garlic every recipe calls for. And so it is worth the toxic deathbreath to embrace garlic and make it the star of the show. But maybe wait until you’re very comfortable with your significant other before whipping out a garlic soup.
What can we do with a boss who urinates in a cup in his office and then dumps it in the kitchen sink even when we (all women) are sitting there eating lunch?
We are certain of what is in the cup because it smells, is yellow, and it sits right on his credenza in plain view. He’s even left it outside the office, forgetting to empty it.
A few weeks ago I was washing my lunch dishes and he dumped it right on top of my stuff. I was pretty much in shock, I just couldn’t believe it.
Is there something wrong here that I’m not getting? He’s the owner, the boss, in his 70’s, and very respected, but I don’t understand this. No one knows what to say. We feel that if we said something, he would deny it and since he’s the boss, who knows what would happen. Is there any way to approach this? The only other males in the office are related to him. Someone did mention it to one of them, but nothing has changed.
I think this might be one of the grossest letters I’ve ever received, and that’ssayingsomething. I very much want to believe it’s not true, but I’ve been writing this site long enough to know that people are gross and weird beyond imagination.
You must say something. There is no world where it is acceptable for your boss to pour a container of his urine on your lunch dishes, even if said dishes are in the process of being washed. There is also no world where it is acceptable for your boss to pour his urine down the kitchen sink, carry it in a cup throughout your hallways, or leave it sitting in a container outside his office door. And there is definitely no world where it is acceptable for your boss to take out his penis at his desk, which he must be doing.
Your boss is like those long-haul truckers who pee in a bottle while they’re driving, except that he’s not in a truck, he has access to a bathroom, and other people are around. I would love to know why he can’t get up and take himself to the bathroom when the need strikes. Is he so busy that the Jones account cannot possibly wait two minutes until he’s back and he’s peeing at his desk so that work doesn’t lose seconds of his valuable time? And then, when he dumps it, why the kitchen instead of, you know, the toilet?
Or is your boss perhaps a non-human primate who doesn’t fully understand the concept of bathroom space versus eating space versus public space? (If so, that’s awesome that he’s been taught to use a cup, but he is probably not cut out for office life.)
Anyway, you must say something. It’s kind of mind-boggling that no one has said anything yet, but sometimes when someone is doing something so far outside the social contract, bystanders are paralyzed into silence because people just aren’t prepared for that level of weirdness.
I think you’re looking for some delicate way of raising this, but there isn’t one. So the next time any of you spot him carrying his own pee into the kitchen, just say something. Say, “Eeew, what is that? Don’t bring that in the kitchen!” Say, “You cannot pour that down the sink — people wash dishes in there.” Say, “What did you just pour on top of my dishes?” Say, “Is that a cup of urine? That’s disgusting — you need to deal with that in the bathroom.”
If he denies it, you can say, “What is that then?” and “Can you dispose of it in the bathroom anyway? It’s gross.”
All of you need to say this stuff, every time. Right now he’s getting away with it because everyone is too shocked to respond. Let yourself have the natural response. Say it, say it loudly, say it each and every time. Hell, meet with him as a group if you want and have the most awkward group meeting ever. Or ask whoever most has his ear in the office to have that meeting for you. But don’t just keep silently letting it happen.
You wrote in your letter that you’re worried about confronting him since “who knows what will happen” since he’s the boss. I assume you mean you’re worried about getting fired (and not, say, that he’ll start peeing in your office or in the reception area), but I think that’s really unlikely.
You can make as big a deal as you want about this because it’s over-the-top disgusting.
Through a field experiment at a seafood-processing plant, I examine how working alongside friends affects employee productivity and how this effect is heterogeneous with respect to an employee’s personality. This paper presents two main findings. First, worker productivity declines when a friend is close enough to socialize with. Second, workers who are higher on the conscientiousness scale show smaller productivity declines when working alongside a friend. Estimates suggest that a median worker is willing to pay 4.5 percent of her wage to work next to friends.
My close, personal internet friend, Nicole Cliffe of The Toast (RIP), wrote abut Alanis Morissette and it's terrific. Take a nice warm chamomile bath in imagining what it's like to hang out with Alanis in a villa for a couple hours.
I met with Alanis Morissette on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019, in a beautiful villa she periodically rents for meetings. (A man showed up part way through our interview, believing he was entitled to the space at the current time, and I got to see Alanis smoothly disabuse him of that notion.)
I was early, as I always am, and I was grateful for the opportunity to have 10 minutes or so to just breathe deeply and down a bottle of water. When SELF offered me the opportunity to profile Alanis, I screamed into the phone. The prospect of meeting and interviewing Alanis Morissette—the Alanis Morissette—was overwhelming to me. I wanted to do something physical to prepare myself for Alanis, like a sacrifice, so I stopped eating sugar for the month and a half between that call and our interview. This was not something I told Alanis, or even considered telling Alanis, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
I wanted something from her, I told my friends. I wanted her to look at the color of my tongue and hand me an oil or a tincture, or to touch my forehead and call me blessed. She did ask to hold my hands so she could examine my rings, and that was enough; there will be days in my life when that will propel me through preparing my taxes, or fixing my toilet. I knew that there was no chance of me being an objective journalist in our time together. I knew that I would have protected her with my body if the aforementioned man had pushed his way into the room. I knew I would tell her I too had left Canada at the age of 19, that Jagged Little Pill was my first cassette tape, and that I had three children, while she sat there beatifically gestating her own third. The question was: Would this word-vomit emerge from me the minute she sat down, or would it ooze out at odd moments? (The first, mainly.)
She accepted these offerings with grace. Alanis does everything with grace. When later in the interview she had to get up to pee, being extremely pregnant, she said so with grace. Alanis can say “I’m so sorry, I REALLY have to pee” like another person would say, “The white smoke indicates that a new pontiff has been elected by the cardinals.”
Alanis is deliberate in her movements and careful with her words, and she locks onto her conversation partner. I talked too much, which I had expected going in, but blessedly we did click, thanks to having some things in common: We’re both self-professed over-communicators, a little bit woo-y, and very emotional. And we’re both big fans of talking about childbirth, as you’ll learn in a moment.
This is the point in the profile in which a heterosexual man would devote two paragraphs to describing the female celebrity’s physical appearance. I will tell you this: She was a glowing angel, ripe with new life. “Ripe” is a cliché, but Alanis could have materialized a perfectly ripe pear in her hand and gently tossed it to me. She was wearing no makeup. That’s all you need to know.
Let’s talk about the story of Alanis Morissette. To Canadians, she’s “Alanis,” and always will be. Alanis was born in 1974 in Ottawa, our nation’s windy and generally unpleasant capital (hate-mail me as much as you want, it’s terrible there). She started working at the age of 10, as an ensemble member of the very strange and very wonderful You Can’t Do That On Television, where as part of her job she would be doused with slime. Think of it as The Mickey Mouse Club, but if Tim Burton were in charge.
Alanis recorded her first song when she was 10, and then released her solo dance-pop album, Alanis, in 1991, at 17, cowriting every track. It went platinum. In 1992 she took home the Juno, the Canadian equivalent to a Grammy award, for Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year. She toured with Vanilla Ice. Her second album, Now Is The Time, was a commercial disappointment, but signaled that Alanis was starting to chafe a bit with her image in Canada: She was experimenting with more complicated lyrics, trying out ballads. There are many, many artists who are exceptionally famous in Canada because of being Canadian, and in part because of the CanCon regulations that require our radio and TV stations contain a certain percentage of content created by Canadians in our programming. Some of these artists never meaningfully pop in the United States (The Tragically Hip, for example) and some of them manage to cross over (Alanis). But the Alanis we had in Canada was never your Alanis Morissette. Alanis was...both Olsen twins in one body. She was our Tiffany, (and more frequently referred to as our Debbie Gibson) but much more. She was Robin Sparkles. She was a tiny dynamo with wild dark hair and a mezzo-soprano voice you couldn’t possibly overlook.
Your Alanis Morissette, the Alanis Morissette who has one hand in her pocket and would go down on you in a theater, is an American. Her American career has been wildly successful, as Jagged Little Pill (which sold 16 million copies in the United States, 33 million total) was followed up in 1998 by Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and her performance on MTV Unplugged in 1999. Her (totally baller) album Under Rug Swept dropped in 2002, topping the Canadian charts and selling a million copies in the United States.
I won’t list all the work she’s done between then and now (in addition to several subsequent albums, you may remember her as God in the 1999 Kevin Smith movie Dogma, or as the woman who confirmed Carrie Bradshaw’s heterosexuality on Sex and the City, or for her work on Weeds), other than to say she has maintained a level of production consistent with studio stars in the era of Louis B. Mayer’s MGM. For Alanis, a lot of it stems from being a workhorse from such a young age. “I always remember working my ass off 24 hours a day and looking out and seeing the kids playing in the backyard and thinking, Well, I can't do that right now,” she said.
Steph Wilson. Wardrobe styling by Kirby Marzac. Hair by Dimitri Giannetos at The Wall Group. Makeup by Kayleen McAdams at Starworks. Manicure by Whitney Gibson at Tomlinson. On Alanis: Dress by Issey Miyake.
Alanis and her husband, Mario “Souleye” Treadway, have an eight-year-old son, Ever Imre Morissette-Treadway, and a daughter just on the cusp of turning three, Onyx Solace Morissette-Treadway.
(I deliberately and carefully waited for Alanis to mention her husband by name, not knowing whether he goes by Mario or Souleye with his loved ones. Blessedly, Alanis swiftly referenced Souleye, and that was that.)
Becoming a mother was not the easiest journey for her. “Between Ever and Onyx there were some false starts,” she said. “I always wanted to have three kids, and then I've had some challenges and some miscarriages so I just didn't think it was possible.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. We as a society have only recently (so recently!) begun to be more open to discussing miscarriages and reproductive struggles in general, and so it still comes as a shock to hear someone offer you the softest part of their heart to hold in this way. In a follow-up e-mail, she expanded on her feelings about her pregnancy losses: “I [...] felt so much grief and fear. I chased and prayed for pregnancy and learned so much about my body and biochemistry and immunity and gynecology through the process. It was a torturous learning and loss-filled and persevering process.”
Being somewhat of a planner, Alanis was determined to take the reins. “I had done tentacles of investigation on everything, from hormones to physicality, every rabbit hole one could go down to chase answers,” she told me. “I have different doctors who laugh at the thickness of my files. So, for me I've tried every different version from heavily self-medicating, to formal allopathic medications, to now.”
“I'm also an over-preparer for those things,” I told her. “I always get that dreaded question, in the first meeting: Do you have a medical background?, at which point I have to be like ‘No, I just want to know.’ I want to know things, I'm curious.”
“I think there are certain archetypal creatures—sounds like you're one of them—who are really research-based and just want to be as informed as possible,” Alanis said. “I'm a systems thinker, I love leadership, I love collaboration, I love every role in a system being at the top of their game. And it used to be really uncool to be an over-communicator, and now it is a boon for people and they are so appreciative with the level of accountability and the speed with which feedback is given, or answers, or responsivity. So now what people used to shame is something that people appreciate, which is the best part of evolution I guess.”
In her follow-up e-mail, she suggested that this multipronged research- and information-based approach to understanding her body ultimately paid off: “When I [...] chased my health in a different way, from multiple angles—[including, among other things] extensive consistent blood work monitoring to trauma recovery work to multiple doctor and midwife appointments to many tests and surgeries and investigations, things shifted,” she wrote. And then after all that, thanks to a combination of luck and resources, Alanis found herself pregnant at 44, having had doubts that she would get to this point, but ready to get back on that particular merry-go-round.
Pregnancy is a big fucking deal. In a very real sense, her pregnancy at the age of 44 (now 45) is why I sat in that villa talking to her. Every single one of us on this planet is the result of a successful pregnancy, but it’s still an experience you cannot explain until you’ve been through it. Ask someone about their colonoscopy (probably do not do this) and you’ll get a clear answer. Ask someone about their pregnancy, and you’ll feel like you’re overstepping, and they’ll be hard-pressed to know where to begin, or how to communicate it.
Pregnancy can change your body, forever. I think we’re getting better as a society at acknowledging the physical nonsense: Your feet may get bigger and flatter, you may never again be able to laugh without peeing a little, you may grow way more hair and then it may fall out into your bathtub drain and through your fingers over the course of your first month after giving birth. What’s harder to talk about is the shit it can dredge out of your heart. “It's this whole chemistry of emotions,” Alanis said. “Hormones and chemicals that are just coursing through your body. It [can] be triggering, or flashbacking, or re-traumatizing.”
Some of the body changes also turn back the clock. I have a metal rod and some screws in my left leg, and during each of my pregnancies, by the second half of my second trimester, I was acutely aware of them, as though the accident had occurred the week before, and not 10 years prior. I relayed this to Alanis, and she understood. “There are so many ways pregnancy can affect you,” she said. “I was ready for the ride. My first two pregnancies have been gradually becoming more proprioceptive, more attuned to the subtleties that are going on [in my body].” Subtleties like the feeling that her sacrum is a little off, or suspecting when she may need some extra Vitamin D.
Which brought us to the topic of how her children made that transition from being inside her body to outside of it. Our obvious shared delight when I brought it up made it clear to us that we were each in the presence of a true birth-story fan, the kind of person who will sit on a park bench with a stranger and clasp hands and say things like, “Were you progressing? Did they try to up your pitocin? Did they offer to pop your bag of waters?” while listening with genuine intensity and love.
We agreed that giving birth is sublime, which is not necessarily fun or good but perhaps more along the lines of knowing that you are alive, which is a horror to some and a benefit to others.
There’s a beautiful essay by Zadie Smith that seeks to parse the difference between pleasure and joy, that (in my opinion at least) starts to give voice to the profundity of this. I obviously told Alanis she had to read it instantly, at once. “Great,” she said, nodding, and wrote it down in a little notebook with a pencil, which brought me the sort of pleasure one usually only sees when a friend is actively watching your favorite show for the first time and making sounds of delight as they do so.
Alanis, who after all is a lyricist, unsurprisingly loves anytime a person is trying to articulate the ineffable: “It's so fun trying to name the nameless like this impossible task, and it's so fun to chase it,” she said.
Steph Wilson. Wardrobe styling by Kirby Marzac. Hair by Dimitri Giannetos at The Wall Group. Makeup by Kayleen McAdams at Starworks. Manicure by Whitney Gibson at Tomlinson. On Alanis: Top by Paco Rabanne. Jeans by Levis. Earrings by Leigh Miller.
She gave birth to her first two children at home. For Ever’s entrance into the world, she says the birth lasted 36 hours in total, with 12 hours of intensity. I nodded knowingly, having personally followed up 24 hours of labor with three and a half hours of pushing (which is...too much pushing). The intensity.
“Oh, yeah, when you’re fully in the shit,” I said.
“Yeah, sometimes literally,” she said.
“People tell you that but you don’t really believe it until it’s happening to you,” I said.
“And you don’t care,” she said.
“Not even the tiniest bit.”
It was both completely weird and yet utterly normal to be discussing profusely and carelessly defecating all over a birthing bed with Alanis Morissette.
Onyx was late, Alanis said, so she did the Castor Oil Thing, which is an unproven and somewhat last-ditch method used to induce labor that may or may not result in success. For those of you not familiar with the Castor Oil Thing, you chug castor oil, a thick and gross substance, usually mixed with orange juice.
Essentially you may shit everything out of your body, and sometimes the baby comes along for the ride (it does increase the risk of your baby aspirating meconium, among other concerns, so, you know, consult your physician first.). “It’s a very interesting little 24 hours that you can't get back,” Alanis said. Although she would not necessarily recommend it to others, she believes it did the trick for her personally. Her water broke at 12:17 a.m. and Onyx was born at 1:21 a.m.
A one-hour labor sounds like a dream, especially to anyone who knows how wildly painful the usually long process can be, but the reality is that a shorter labor may mean that you don’t get the relative luxury of easing your way into those rapid-fire final contractions. At the beginning of the average labor, you may have six, eight, 10 or so minutes to prepare for a short-ish amount of agony (think 10 or 20 seconds) before the whole cycle starts again. By the end, right when it’s time to start pushing, you might only have 30 seconds (or less!) of relief between minute-long (or longer!) contractions. That’s when (in my experience) you can lose your ability to stay on top of the pain and your ability to handle it psychologically.
In Alanis’s case, she said she couldn’t do so with either birth, and as her midwife and doula advised her to “get on top of the wave!” Alanis said she was literally begging, “HOW DO I? How the fuck do I do it?”
YOU get on the wave, I silently yelled at her midwife and doula! Be more useful! Alanis is in pain and confusion!
“When you had Onyx,” I asked, “was Ever present? Because people make very different choices around that with home birth.”
“No,” Alanis said, “He’s a highly sensitive person. [...] It wouldn't be okay with him no matter how much I prepared him. He's such an empath too, and I'm an empath with him so…”
“You can't be managing his emotions, you can't do anything except the work,” I said.
“Exactly,” Alanis said.
Alanis said Onyx’s birth was a blur, but the worst kind of blur, in that Alanis, herself, the person giving birth, could not blur out or disassociate, she had to be actively moving to help with the pain, and then pushing. “The irretrievably Canadian part of me,” she said, thought she was going to be silent during the process (“How the fuck do I do it???” notwithstanding), but to this, Onyx said, “Ha!”
Pushing solo had never been the plan. But then her midwife was delayed, and Alanis had to simultaneously manage her husband and also help him manage her.
“When I had a millisecond of reprieve, I would have to blurt, ‘Open the door!’ or ‘You’ve got to open the door between these next two contractions because they’re going to be coming, and the door’s locked and we’re going to probably be busy,’” she said. Logistics had to be accomplished, the wave had to be ignored, and Souleye still had to go unlock the damn door so the midwife could join them.
And yet, while things got increasingly scary, Alanis felt like she somehow weirdly, beautifully, became her own doula.
“I felt I was the coach,” she said. She spoke to herself like a coach would, reassuring words like "she's coming, you don't have to manipulate anything, the next contraction she's coming out, I guarantee it.”
And then, when all else failed and the terror took over, Souleye was able to get on the phone with the midwife and repeat her words to Alanis. "Hearing his voice was so beautiful," she says, “hearing him say okay, breathe in.” And then there was Onyx.
(Mutual tears. Birth.)
Alanis has previously been open about her experiences with postpartum depression, but I wanted to really get at not just the two bouts she had already fought, but also her plan for tackling it when she gives birth again in a few months.
“Not singularly relying on myself to diagnose myself is key,” she said. “Because the first time around I waited.”
And she did. She waited a long time. She waited because her entire life had prepared her to muscle through and remain superhigh functioning while grappling with a new kind of depression that wasn’t the on-and-off depression she’s been processing much of her life.
I’ve had friends for whom their postpartum illness manifested as anxiety, as a failure to bond, as an inability to allow anyone else to bond with the baby, and more rarely, the desire to harm the baby. Too many people associate PPD uniquely with the latter and dismiss the other manifestations of the illness, allowing it to dig in deeper.
For Alanis, it manifested as a familiar heaviness. “For me I would just wake up and feel like I was covered in tar and it wasn't the first time I'd experienced depression so I just thought Oh, well, this feels familiar, I'm depressed, I think,” she said. “And then simultaneously, my personal history of depression where it was so normalized for me to be in the quicksand, as I call it, or in the tar. It does feel like tar, like everything feels heavy.”
In an instance of truly disastrous timing, Alanis was starting to tour while still in the grips of her struggles post-Ever, which she thought would help snap her out of it, but of course did no such thing. “Often what had pulled me out of my depression pre-family was service,” she said. Service, for Alanis, is performing and feeling connection with her audience (when we later e-mailed her to clarify, she said, “Service for me has been through my songs…offering comfort, empathy, validation, support, information, assurance [...] with an eye toward healing and a return to wholeness”). “So I would just think, Oh I'm just going to go out into the world and serve and then I'm going to feel better, but that didn't do it. And then I had my various forms of self-medicating [that also didn’t help]. So, creativity’s not doing it, tequila's not doing it...and I even sang about it.” During this time a staple of singing through it was “Would not Come,” the lyrics of which (“If I keep my mouth shut the boat will not have to be rocked / If I am vulnerable I will be trampled upon”) symbolically scream I’m in crisis! But don’t ask meabout it.
Alanis muscled through for a year and four months that first time, before reaching out to a doctor and asking “if I stick this out, will it get better?” Hearing “no, honey, the opposite” was enough to unlock her.
“The second time, though, you still waited,” I said. “How long?”
“Four months. I know!” Alanis said. “And now this time I'm going to wait four minutes. I have said to my friends, I want you to not necessarily go by the words I'm saying and as best as I can, I'll try to be honest, but I can't personally rely on the degree of honesty if I reference the last two experiences. I snowed a lot of them as I was snowing myself [the last two times].” This time, she’s lined up seven people to watch and wait and push through her demurrals and distractions, including her physician and midwife.
Steph Wilson. Wardrobe styling by Kirby Marzac. Hair by Dimitri Giannetos at The Wall Group. Makeup by Kayleen McAdams at Starworks. Manicure by Whitney Gibson at Tomlinson. On Alanis: Shirt by Matthew Adams Dolan. Bra and panties by Jonesy.
As you are no doubt aware, what (in a best case scenario) happens after bearing a child is signing a few pieces of paper, and then being left with a brand-new human being, with far less guidance than had you just picked up a mutt at the Humane Society. And if you felt yourself pushed back into the past, or triggered or renewed by the process of pregnancy, parenting a child makes all of that look like a picnic in the park with strawberries and cream. Either you are filled with a sudden appreciation for the ways in which your parents did their best with the resources they had, or you’re filled with a sense of shock that someone who loved you as much as you love your baby could have screwed it up so badly. Sometimes a little of both.
Then sometimes you add a second or a third child into the mix, and whatever you’ve told yourself about your parenting turns out to be nonsense. Your first child is a great sleeper not because you were a Good Mom, but because your first child was just a good sleeper. Your first two children get along well not because you set them up for success; they just like each other, and if you bring in a third, the whole system may fall apart. Your new career as an unpaid litigator who also needs to remember dentist appointments is not without its stressors.
Somewhat surprisingly, Alanis took to the challenge of raising two children with both joy and familiarity.
“Yes, there's constant negotiation,” Alanis said. “I live for collaboration and negotiation. Our whole philosophy is win-win or there's no deal. Or it's win-win or we're not done. Souleye, Onyx, Ever, and I—all four of us win. And that takes a minute.”
She said this, and I believe it because she said it, but I also do not believe it is possible in my life—maybe it is in yours? Keep the faith. Maybe we can all win. That doesn’t have to mean becoming a person who thrives on negotiation and conflict, but it’s so easy to focus on the one child who is right now in this moment causing or experiencing a problem. Alanis spoke of her family as a four-person unit, any conflict resolution requiring full buy-in. She said it can take seven minutes to accomplish, but I’ve certainly waited seven minutes just for a toddler to stop crying and explain he’s upset because he knocked over his milk.
There’s also the added layer of being a parent after having experienced some amount of trauma in your life. Trauma, handled or unhandled, or in the process of being handled, is a thread you can trace through my entire conversation with Alanis, and we touched on how it informs her parenting when she casually mentioned her “four boundaries,” which I needed to know more about immediately.
“I talk about this with my kids a lot, the four boundaries being: You can't tell me what I'm thinking, you can't tell me what I'm feeling, you can't fucking touch my body/you can't do anything with my body, and don't touch my stuff,” Alanis told me.
“Holy shit,” I said. I mean, what else is there? I found myself imagining if I could, or should, incorporate that into my own parenting, or whether I should have spent more time developing an ethos of parenting in the first place, instead of just trying to solve problems as new ones constantly roll down the conveyor belt, like Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory.
“And those are the main ones,” Alanis said. “Literally if ever there's a little moment between Onyx and Ever I'll just go ‘which of the four was it?’ You can't slap her, you can't grab his things.”
Alanis also said that she tries to parent her children with their empathy and sensitivity front of mind. “It’s a lot of oh sweetheart, yes your heart is broken for that person and that person's going to be okay,” she said. “And I’m so grateful for those moments because I get to notice and I get to support my children in a way that sometimes I wasn't, just because I was in a different generation. Those weren't conversations being had 44 years ago.”
What I really wanted to ask, what I want to ask every parent I know, is about the transition from being not-a-parent to being a parent. For ages after my eldest was born, I could say “I have a daughter,” and mean it and own it, but it took much, much longer to think of myself as a mother, with all the baggage that comes along with the title.
Alanis said she related to this experience, to a degree. “I myself am slightly dissociated around claiming that archetypal role [of mother],” she said. “I still have moments where it feels like it’s not dawning on me that I’m a mother. But when I look at them, I just think I'm so responsible for you.”
The pace of motherhood, which obviously varies tremendously in those early months, isn’t easy but it is...simple. Feed, clean, hold. And that can hit you hard, it can make you feel incredibly inadequate about all the things you’re not accomplishing (showering, laundry, not eating over the sink, etc.) “The days are long and the months are short,” as older parents love to tell you, translates in your day-to-day life as a sometimes blissful, sometimes agonizing slowdown of whatever your life looked like before.
“Oh, it does slow you down—chemically, circumstantially, financially, in your marriage, in your career,” Alanis agreed, reflecting on her own experiences with caring for newborns. “I think a lot of women who had one way of life, myself included, and [having a baby created] a complete sea change overnight.”
A common thing people look forward to—staring at their rather blobby, useless babies—is the day when they will begin to be able to teach them about the world, the lessons we’ve learned, the knowledge to impart. Not just the classics: “Why is the sky blue? Where does bacon come from?” but “Where was I before I was here? And “Will you be with me forever?”
We imagine too that these deep conversations will take place at the correct time and place, instead of the reality: You’re unloading the dishwasher, the cat has just puked on the carpet, you’re trying to get the baby into a car seat. In an ideal world, in a dream world, you would have the ability to carve out for each child an opportunity to feel so safe and present with you, and free of all other activities, and let that space become an organic home for the Big Stuff (obviously much easier for affluent, white parents to achieve, as is so much of what we talked about.)
For Ever and Alanis, the connection that makes space for the big questions is being outside together. “The other day he said, ‘Mom, can we go for a three-hour walk?’” Alanis said. “So we were two hours in and he asked how long we had been walking and talking. And when I said it had been two hours, he said, ‘Okay, so we have another hour.’ I can't even believe it. It's my dream.”
And thus, we come to Souleye, who as a partner has helped build a life with Alanis in which such a dream can be realized. “He's an incredibly modern man, so he has never had an issue with being married to an alpha woman, God bless him,” Alanis said. “His mom held down two full-time jobs, his dad stayed home. So there's nothing unfamiliar about [our situation for him].”
What he does focus on, and what Alanis focuses on, is the concept of provisioning. “Provisioning,” a word I had never before heard in my life before our conversation, is simply a variation on what it means to provide, in a way designed to strip our ideas of how fathers are conditioned to provide for their families, which usually means financially. What does your partner need that isn’t money? Can you read your partner well enough to know what you need to provide for them before they have to ask for it?
“In our situation, the currency of provision just looks different,” Alanis said. Souleye’s method of provisioning changes by the day, by the hour. “It might look like: Actually, just, if you don't mind, I'm going to verbally ventilate for three hours, that's a huge provision. He's with the kids right now, that's a huge provision. Especially around pregnancy, if I need something at any given time, if at 4 p.m. I need probiotics he's like ‘I'll be right back.’ So that's amazing.”
It’s so damn healthy, I thought, for a heterosexual man to be able to move past the stereotype of who should be the breadwinner and into “how can I provide what my partner needs?,” and I said as much to Alanis. Which, of course, led us to the question of Modern Society.
Alanis, still fresh off praising Souleye, made the closest thing to a frown I had yet seen from her and said, “It's one thing to say there's paternity leave for men, but the statistics are such that men are still not contributing on an admin level. And so we're interestingly dissecting that right now, which is no small thing because it's personal but also cultural, it's existential, it's evolutionary. We have to take in history.”
(I may have yelled “YES” at this point.)
“The mental load!” I said, thinking of the mothers in my life (and myself) whose male partners may believe with all their souls that they are doing their fair share, but don’t know when their kids are due for their next well-child visit, or if it’s Wear Pajamas to School Day, or who scroll blissfully past classroom e-mails asking for parental volunteers.
“Yes,” Alanis said. “The mental and the home load and the admin load and the emotional load, and whether we need to be there at 3:10 p.m. or 3:20 p.m.”
Souleye, who by Alanis’s standards, is crushing it at the game of egalitarian parenting, also has to be aware of and process her particular needs as a “highly-sensitive person.” He’s the one who will wade into the crowd of people at the restaurant to pick up the takeout order while she waits in the car. The question for me, of course, was how to live Alanis’s life as a mom, a wife, and a public figure when she needs to reset.
“Extroverts restore, in theory, with people, and introverts restore alone—so for me, one of the biggest questions with me having two or three kids, was where is that solitude? How and where?” Alanis said. “For me, it's just about getting really creative, and maybe it's a hotel room here or bathroom stall here. Making sure there's doors that go out behind our house so there's a little area with a little gazebo here...whatever I need to do to create this. It’s not anyone else’s job to be responsible for my temperament. Maybe pin-drop silence right now is the key. Or it might be hey, being pure presence with my daughter right now is the key. Or right now crying is the key. Fucking binge-watching a TV show is key.”
(This is when I told her to watch Fleabag, and she wrote that down too.)
We do have to talk a little about the uniqueness of Alanis’s experience, here, and the pointlessness of feeling like she’s effortlessly juggling balls while we’re looking for them under the bed. Alanis is clearly a woman of means; she has a partner who has the time and flexibility to devote to filling in the gaps that she cannot. There are very few people who would think a year and four months of postpartum depression sounds great, but there are millions of Americans who have to be back at work within six weeks of giving birth.
The Cut recently published an essay challenging a recent uptick in mothering memoirs by white, mostly affluent women, who have greater freedom to throw away the rules and take three-hour walks with their children without wondering who’s preparing dinner and if he can finish it before his swing shift starts. This doesn’t make anything Alanis does or says less interesting, but there are, among her many challenges, the kind of privileges that allow her to bypass a large cross-section of the problems that face the majority of American mothers: She’s not pumping in a bathroom with a broken lock, she’s not food-insecure, and she’s not raising her children without a partner, or with a partner who’s failing to pull their weight. If only we could all face our hardships within this context.
Steph Wilson. Wardrobe styling by Kirby Marzac. Hair by Dimitri Giannetos at The Wall Group. Makeup by Kayleen McAdams at Starworks. Manicure by Whitney Gibson at Tomlinson. On Alanis: Top by Christopher Kane. Top worn underneath by Babaton. Jeans by J Brand.
There was a question I both wanted and didn’t want to ask Alanis from the moment I got the call offering me the interview. It’s about the lead single off her 2002 album “Under Rug Swept,” which is set up as a conversation between an underage Alanis and an unnamed older man with whom she believed, at the time, she was in a “relationship,” a situation as familiar to women (and many men) as the feeling of sliding into your most comfortable pair of shoes.
The man’s lines in the song, delivered by Alanis with the withering scorn they deserve, are a master class in grooming a minor:
If it weren't for your maturity none of this would have happenedIf you weren't so wise beyond your years I would've been able to control myselfIf it weren't for my attention you wouldn't have been successful and
If it weren't for me you would never have amounted to very much
Just make sure you don't tell on me especially to members of your familyWe best keep this to ourselves and not tell any members of our inner posseI wish I could tell the world 'cause you're such a pretty thing when you're done up properly
I might want to marry you one day if you watch that weight and keep your firm body
So I took a deep breath, and said, “When we were talking about early patterns, it occurred to me how extraordinary it is that you put out “Hands Clean” almost exactly [15] years before [the larger] #MeToo [conversation] happened.”
I was fully prepared for an “I’m done talking about this,” or a polite “no comment” and instead was bowled over by Alanis’s reaction, which was to lean in and engage.
“How lovely that you know that,” she said, and I felt a surge of relief that I hadn’t upset her, and a wave of sadness too, that her life experiences had led her to have to answer this question at all. “I was just talking about 'Hands Clean' yesterday and how some people know what that song's about and other people just don't know? Just singing along and I'm like...that's the story of rape, basically,” she said.
It’s not a surprise that people groove out to “Hands Clean” without focusing on the lyrics. Alanis stars in the video, and in stark juxtaposition to the events described, it’s...fun? The version of Alanis we’re treated to on-screen is confident, healed, healthy, above it all, knowing she holds this man’s fate in her hands, and delivered with the powerful energy that allowed many fans to think of this incident as a mild downer in her life, not the cataclysmic reality it actually represented.
“I think about that disparity too,” Alanis said. “I remember having brought that song, the juncture at the time of okay let's shoot a video for this, and a lot of people weighing in going it would be great if we did this, and this element...what about a little karaoke? And I'm laughing...”
Because it’s an opportunity to awkwardly laugh about it all, I offered.
“Right, or be charmed, or distracted,” she said. “And I'm aware [that] some people listen to music as a relationship, as a conversation, as a dialogue. And then other people listen to music as a way of escape or rest or entertainment. And I've never been opposed to either version, I myself can't listen to song lyrics and [pay attention to anything else.]”
The song, for me, had been a grenade, I told her. I remember listening to it on loop with my friend Meg while tooling around Kingston, Ontario, when I was home from college for Christmas, hitting all the Tim Hortons we could before her curfew while she smoked cigarettes and I picked at a cruller. It made me rethink all my crushes, my platonic relationships with older men who would occasionally cross the line, and the power of my sexuality, as well as its price.
“It was a grenade for you,” Alanis said, “because you were listening. [But] it wasn't a grenade for some. And the people who were addressing it at the time, they weren't being very supportive. Still now, women are sort of being supported. It—and I—were just straight-up ignored at best. Vilified and shamed and victimized and victim-attacked at worst. There were moments where around the #MeToo era where people would say, Why are people waiting so long to speak up? And I was like really? But then also I lovingly reminded a couple of them oh, but you do remember me saying something 15 years ago, right? Word for word about this and do you remember what happened during that time?”
I told Alanis we were hitting enough trauma notes today that we didn’t need to get into the stuff with her business manager unless she wanted to. For those who are unfamiliar with the case in question, Alanis’s former business manager confessed to stealing almost $5 million from her (and to having embezzled from several other clients as well.) In 2017, he was sentenced to six years in prison.
“Yes,” she said, “and that experience was just one of many, unfortunately. So for me that was just another version of the same dynamic.”
All I could think of was Alanis’s four boundaries and the through line from being a vulnerable girl in the music industry, taken advantage of by someone whose name she has still never given up (the lyric “I’ve more than honored your request for silence” makes me grind my teeth). How of all the boundaries, “you can’t tell me what I’m thinking” is actually the most hard-won realization.
Alanis said it took a long time to come to terms with what she had experienced. “I remember forever I just kept saying, But I was participating, I was…, to my therapists,” she said. What first started to snap her out of that narrative was seeing girls at the age she had been on the street, and having a moment of extreme cognitive dissonance.
“I mean, I am there now,” Alanis said, “And now that I'm a mom: Are you fucking kidding me?”
Steph Wilson. Wardrobe styling by Kirby Marzac. Hair by Dimitri Giannetos at The Wall Group. Makeup by Kayleen McAdams at Starworks. Manicure by Whitney Gibson at Tomlinson. On Alanis: Top by Christopher Kane. Top worn underneath by Babaton. Jeans by J Brand.
Alanis moved to the United States on the heels of her second, more lyrical, more ballad-y, more Alanis Morissette solo album. Had she consciously chosen to leave Canada, knowing that this would be it?
“Oh yes, I made [that choice],” Alanis said, as confidently as she had said anything so far. “I made it when I was 19 and I had preconceived notions placed on me in Canada with my music. I was also writing with someone at the time who would pull out the calculator and be like hey Alanis, I know you wrote the chorus for that song but I'd say that's worth .07% of the song.” The pop princess wanted to write songs that might not rhyme, and she wanted her due.
“My perception at the time, whether it was flawed or not, was that if I moved to America it would be a clean slate,” Alanis said. “And then, sure enough, that was the case and I remember saying to myself ‘I'm not going to stop until this record is exactly to the T what I want it to be.’ And that's what ‘Jagged Little Pill’ was. And a lot of people in Canada thought this can't be true, this can't be possible.”
“There was so much ‘Glen Ballard has created this thing’ in our public discourse,” I said, referring to the perception that Alanis had her album basically crafted for her by an American Svengali, the wildly talented and experienced producer she cowrote “Jagged Little Pill” with. The perception was that our pop princess had been sexualized and pushed into an alt-queen we didn’t know or recognize. We’d bought the album (and oh, boy, did Canadians buy the album), but she wasn’t ours anymore. She wasn’t “Alanis.”
Alanis—although she’s been clear that she thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with Ballard— immediately lit UP at the idea of Ballard having made her album.”The patriarchy talking!” she said, practically spitting it out.
The “Jagged Little Pill” conversation has gotten a shot in the ass recently due to a Jezebel piece by Tracy Clark-Flory about relistening to it as an adult and discovering that, for her, “what had once felt enlivening and validating now felt grating and corny.” The internet, predictably, had collectively lost their minds over the article, but it had the effect of many, many thirty- and forty-something women digging it out and pressing play, and realizing it's still one of the greatest debut albums ever made.
I began texting and calling friends (Canadians and Americans) and asking them about their “Jagged Little Pill” experiences. For some, it had precipitated necessary breakups. Others said they applied for jobs they had thought or been told were too much of a reach. It helped other people come out of the closet, others to gain the ability to move from a series of high-conflict relationships into healthy ones without assuming it was boring.
And you know what? A few of us went down on guys in theaters. All of which, of course, came out of my mouth as, “and it still fuckin’ slaps.”
“That's what we're experiencing with the musical too,” Alanis said, referring to the musical, Jagged Little Pill, inspired by her album, now coming to Broadway in November. “I'm just like how is this possible that something I wrote when I was 19, I can still stand behind it now?”
Steph Wilson. Wardrobe styling by Kirby Marzac. Hair by Dimitri Giannetos at The Wall Group. Makeup by Kayleen McAdams at Starworks. Manicure by Whitney Gibson at Tomlinson. On Alanis: Shirt by Matthew Adams Dolan. Bra and panties by Jonesy.
Nicole Cliffe is a parenting advice columnist for Slate, and has written for Vulture, ELLE, The Guardian, and Christianity Today. She lives in Utah with her husband and three children.
Seth Meyers went day drinking with Rihanna at NYC’s Jane Hotel and had quite a date in which multiple shots, beers, and drinks were consumed.
The date started out with Meyers making Rihanna a series of drinks based on her songs called the “Rumbrella”, “Diamonds in the Rye”, “We Found Veuve in a Hostess Place” (a twinkie in champagne), and “Bitch Better Have My Bunny” (tequila in hollow chocolate rabbits).
Meyers and Rihanna then played an outfit guessing game, offered each other advice on careers and marriage, and then Rihanna made Seth up with Fenty beauty products, and sang her own songs to her.
