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Happy Friday! Today I crossed off an item on my 2022 to-do list by donating blood for the first time (I plan to become a regular donor, and urge you to consider it as well, especially since the whole country is in short supply these days.) Hope everyone is feeling well, and if you aren’t, I hope you will be soon. Here are a few links you might enjoy:
OMG: Chinese woman stuck in lockdown with blind date:
“I’m getting quite old, so my parents arranged more than 10 blind dates for me,” she said in this post. She wrote that her fifth date had said “he was good at cooking, and invited me to his house so he could cook a meal”.
However, during the meal, she discovered that her date’s community had gone into swift lockdown due to cases of Covid-19, and ended up being unable to leave his house for several days.
Ms Wang told media on Sunday that she had been stuck for four days at her date’s house, and that the situation was “not ideal”.”
My Daughter’s Married Boyfriend Shouldn’t Join Us on Vacation, Right?
I could not imagine doing this, but kudos to making it work for the kids’ sake: Our Kinder, Gentler, Nobody-Moves-Out Divorce
Millennial pink and Gen Z yellow captured their generation’s economic struggles. Now it’s purple’s turn.
Did you watch “The Lost Daughter”? I tried to but found it really super boring and only made it through the first half before I bailed. I did appreciate, however, the focus on mom rage, which is something I felt for, like, the first 9 1/2 years of my motherhood experience. I know a lot of folks really enjoyed the movie, or, like me, didn’t really like it but related to the idea that being a mom is hard, and so you might like this think piece: The Perpetual Rage of Motherhood
Why Making Friends in Midlife Is So Hard
And if you’ve already got the friends: We Should All Be Doing Friendship Check-Ins Right Now
And, if you missed it, this comment on the “Plantation Wedding” post from earlier this week.
Next month we’re (hopefully!) taking a family vacation to Grand Cayman. It will be our first trip out of the country in nearly ten years! Now that the kids are older and so much easier to travel with, we’re taking small steps towards bigger international trips we’ve been planning in the back of our minds for a while. We were supposed to start with a trip to Mexico for Drew’s 50th in April 2020, but… well, you know what happened in April 2020. Then we decided to wait until the kids were fully vaccinated before we attempted to leave the country, and by then flying to Mexico during the kids’ winter break next month was out of our budget (nearly $1000 per person for roundtrip flights!), so I searched for flights from NYC to every island in the Caribbean, determined to be somewhere warm for a few days in the middle of February, and I finally found reasonably-priced tickets to Grand Cayman.
“You’re going to have serious sticker shock when you get there,” my friend who visits pretty regularly said to me when I asked her for any tips. “It’s REALLY expensive.” Oops. But, still, the idea of cocktails on the beach, the sun warming my skin for a few days, wearing my cute new caftan over my swimsuit all week – it’s honestly what’s getting me through this freezing cold, Omicron-wild winter we’re having in the Northeast, and I need something to get me through.
I’m also planning a girls’ weekend to Asheville, NC in March, and I found the cutest Airbnb that I keep looking at pictures of. And in late June, as soon as the kids are out of school, I want to take the family to a national park for some hiking and nature appreciation. Maybe Glacier in Montana? If anyone has tips or suggestions, let me know! If I can keep distracting myself with vacation fantasies (and movies and books and I just started playing Wordle), maybe I just might make it ’til April and maybe, hopefully – oh, please, please, please – we’ll be on the other side of *all of this* and we can enjoy the spring we all deserve.
What about you? Do you have anything you’re distracting yourself with right now to get through winter? Is it working??
Illustration by Tomi Um for NYTimes
The NYTimes magazine advice column published the following letter, which made me wonder how you all would react in a similar position:
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My fiancé and I are getting married and he (plus our future children) will be taking my name. His parents are so upset over this that they are not coming to our wedding. We had a pretty good relationship with them before this and I am honestly shocked at the reaction. What do I do? — What’s In A Name?
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