bucatini
Happy Inauguration Day! I want to start out by saying I truly had no idea the Hilaria Baldwin stuff would blow up as spectacularly as it did when I wrote my last post, but I’m so glad that it did.
However, that feels like it was ten years ago and we’ve lived through about 5000 other Twitter dramas over the past few weeks, let alone an actual riot in the city I live in, one that made it pretty hard for me to be productive.
So I figured this newsletter could just be a list of all the things I’ve been reading and thinking about over the past few weeks when I did not end up writing as often as I would’ve liked to.
1) Grub Street: What the Hole Is Going On? The very real, totally bizarre bucatini shortage of 2020, by Rachel Handler
This article on bucatini is legitimately the best piece of investigative writing I’ve read in a long time, and I highly suggest you all read every word of it. I don’t even know what to quote from this article because all of it is great.
I, a pasta lover, had shamefully never heard of bucatini? I blame this on the fact that I only really buy chickpea pasta in grocery stores because I eat it way too often and this makes me feel slightly less guilty. But after reading this article, I became obsessed with this quest to find this magical pasta.
So I went on a tour of grocery stores in DC. No luck with Giant, Streets, or Yes! Organic Market. Tried an Italian shop, also no luck. And nothing at Whole Foods at all. Finally, after about 2 weeks of this, I lucked out at yet another Italian grocery store in my neighborhood!
That night, I told my friend Jenna about this quest, and the next day she…went and found some at Harris Teeter, making me feel like…this:
Anyways, both Jenna and I have subsequently cooked our bucatini and can report back that it is pretty normal pasta, though I’d definitely buy it again if it ever reappears in any of my normal supermarkets.
2) The Explicit Potential Break-Up Song or How Ashley Convinced Me To Get A TikTok
I’ve been a casual fan of Aly & AJ’s Potential Breakup Song for years, so when they released an explicit version a few weeks ago I was like cool this is a big mood I love that we can now scream, “IT WAS MY BIRTHDAY, MY FUCKING BIRTHDAY” whenever we want to.
And then I started talking to my friend Ashley and was shocked to learn that all of this came about because these moms did a viral TikTok to Potential Break-Up Song and then Aly & AJ got involved and many TikToks later they graced us with an explicit version.
And this…broke me. Because I clearly like to know everything there is to know about everything. And it made me realize that I won’t if I don’t have a TikTok. So I have one now and am happy to report that I spend most of my time watching people rate Taylor Swift songs. BUT I am happy to report that it’s led me to another pop culture revelation which is…
3) Olivia Rodrigo & Joshua Bassett DRAMA
So I religiously listen to my New Music Friday every week because I want to hear any new thing that exists ever. So when Olivia Rodrigo’s drivers license came on, I was like oh, cool song, and smashed that like button.
I’ll preface this by saying I had never heard of Olivia Rodrigo before, mostly because I have not watched the Gen-Z version of High School Musical.
But then I logged onto TikTok that night and my Taylor Swift videos were overwhelmed by people freaking the fuck out about the drama behind these lyrics. TLDR: Olivia’s singing about her HSM co-star Joshua Bassett who is and is now dating Sabrina Carpenter (the “older blonde girl” called out in this song, and the only person here I had actually ever heard of before). And suddenly I became extremely invested and now I’m obsessed with this song where without TikTok I might not have even listened to it more than once?
Not a joke, this is me, a 28 year old suddenly obsessed with the lives of these literal teenagers.
Anyways. Welcome to a look inside my brain over the past few weeks! Moral of the story: eat some bucatini and get a TikTok.