Among the celebrities lending their voices to the movement for Black lives, John Boyega has stood out. Not just because he’s put his body on the front lines at protests and because he’s shut down Twitter trolls with delightful wit, but because—in our house—he is Finn. You know: the ex-Stormtrooper stolen from his family and raised as FN-2187. When he refuses to kill for the First Order, he defects and eventually joins the Resistance. It’s not the subtlest metaphor, and I’m not the first to say “Yes, this guy! The guy who took off his blood-smeared Stormtrooper helmet and refused to be a cop for the last gasp of the Empire!” But at this moment in history, I am especially grateful for how much Dash, at age 5.5, adores him. Before schools closed in March, I had never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through, although AK, Dash’s other mom, flew her toy Millennium Falcon around her childhood living room and, as a forty-something adult, has been known to read Star Wars fan ficti
1. cirque love Since starting gymnastics at age five—or at least since reading Geek Love in college—I’ve wanted to run away and join the circus. Actually, the problem was that I wanted to join the circus but I didn’t want to run away. How fortunate, then, that AK found out about Cirque School , where you can lea rn the trapeze arts without ever leaving L.A. She gave me a class for my birthday, which I finally redeemed last night (after reading up on it, I decided it sounded kind of hardcore, and that I needed to build up some flexibility and upper body strength before going—I’m not sure that happened, but a month passed, I was a little closer to reuniting with my left splits and I was itching to take the class). The classes are held at Absolution L.A. , a small West Hollywood studio walled with honey-colored wood and stocked with pilates machines, trapezes, a climbing wall, red vinyl chairs and other items of expensive-looking fu rn iture. It reminded me, I told AK later,
Back in the day, whenever a woman ran for office, some dude would fret about what would happen when she got her period (now we’ve found both more nuanced and more blatantly hateful ways to take swings at women running for office). The idea being that there were only two ways of being in this world: cerebral, level-headed Enlightenment machine or crazy, Medusa-haired PMS monster. Me on Thursday. I haven’t gotten my period in almost five years*, but if this week was any indication, my moods are still going strong. I will never be a level-headed Enlightenment machine—as mythical a creature as Medusa anyway—and, because of the way I was raised, I’ll probably never see that as completely fine. Even though it is. I am thinking of the time I told our couples therapist I was hesitant to take anti-depressants because I didn’t want to put chemicals in my body. She said, “There are already chemicals in your body. You get to choose whether you want to flood your body with cortisol or Z
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sweet, huh?