Thursday Thirteen #425

Farewell to a friend. With the last episode of And Just Like That, Sarah Jessica Parker is hanging up her stilettos and saying farewell to her famous alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw. I've seen every SJP iteration of Carrie,* which includes six seasons of Sex and the City, two movies, and now three seasons of And Just Like That. While I really couldn't stand AJLT, I stuck with it because I'm so fond of Carrie. And so, I devote this TT to my imaginary friend.

1. She was born Caroline Marie Bradshaw. My guess for her year of birth is 1965, same as SJP. 

2. We never learn where Carrie was from,* we just know it was a small town. Only a small town girl could fall in love with the city like Carrie did. (I know. I love Chicago like she loves NYC.)  

3. New York is so central to Carrie that two different companies offer Sex and City site tours. 

4. When we first meet Carrie, she writes a weekly column for a New York paper called "Sex and the City." It becomes so popular that her column is advertised on the side of a bus. She parlays her following and augments her salary by occasionally writing for Vogue.

5. When, at Vogue, she is asked by a colleague about her childhood, she confesses her father abandoned her and her mom when she was 5 years old. I think that explains so much about her relationships with men.

6. Collections of her columns were published in book form. The first one was optioned for a movie to star Matthew McConaughey (who played himself in the Hollywood episode), yet no film was ever made. I liked that, because it happens all the time.

7. When she smokes, she smokes Marlboro Lights. She has quit smoking several times throughout the series.

8. At the beginning of the show, she often ordered cosmopolitans – and for that I will forever be grateful because they are delicious. She drank less and less as the seasons wore on, as we tend to when we move from our 30s to our 40s and beyond. 

9. Her passion has always been fashion. While she is drawn to designers (the show made Manolo Blahnik a household name), she is proud of her thrift finds. 

10. She does not wear scrunchies. (IYKYK.)

11. Her best friends were Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha. I loved how involved they were in one another's lives. As her lover-then-husband said, "You girls are the loves of her life. Any guy would be lucky to come in fourth." 

12. Which doesn't mean she couldn't be self centered. One of the things I loved about the (original) series is that Carrie could be very human in her failings. (Like when she seemed to expect Charlotte to loan her money, or when she sent her boyfriend to Miranda's apartment in response to Miranda call for help.) 

13. In season 4, she put a name to my evenings: SSB (Secret Single Behavior). SSB is what we enjoy doing when we're home alone and confident no one is watching. Carrie liked to take sleeve after sleeve of saltines, spread jelly on each cracker, and eat them while standing in her kitchen, reading Vogue. Charlotte confessed to examining her pores in a magnifying mirror, Miranda slathered lotion on her hands, put gloves on, and watched The Home Shopping Network. I will not tell you mine. 

Please join us for THURSDAY THIRTEEN. Click here to play along, and to see other interesting compilations of 13 things.

 

 

 *There was a prequel called The Carrie Diaries, but I haven't seen it.

August Happiness Challenge – Day 20

My 2025 Happiness Icon

Today's happiness: A good day at work.

•  First I helped a man choose a card for his 49th wedding anniversary ("You Are the One Decision I've Never Second Guessed"). How sweet is that! Then ...

•  I showed her a young woman my favorite pen and told her I used it to write campaign postcards. "Gotta save Democracy," I smiled. She opened her bag and took out a copy of The Bill of Rights! 20-something and she carries the Bill of Rights in her purse. She gave me hope.

  

Happy August Happiness Challenge!

 

Each day in August you are to post about something that makes *you* happy. Pretty simple. And, it doesn't even have to be every day if you don't want it to be. It's a great way to remind ourselves that there are positive things going on in our lives, our communities, and the world.

 

Photo by Ayşegül Baykal on Unsplash

 

WWW.WEDNESDAY

 

WWW. WEDNESDAY asks three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here. 

PS I no longer participate in WWW.WEDNESDAY via that link because her blog won't accept Blogger comments. I mention this only to save you the frustration I experienced trying to link up.

1. What are you currently reading? JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil. Terenzio – John's personal assistant – teamed up with People magazine correspondent McNeil to collect and edit reminiscences from people who knew him throughout his life. While the book was done with Caroline Kennedy's knowledge, it does not benefit from her participation. Maybe that's just as well. We're encountering John and his singular life the way his classmates and coworkers did.

 

As I write this post, I just finished Collegiate School with John. He spent the school year in NYC and holidays at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis or on the Christina, Aristotle Onassis' luxury yacht, in Greece. While terms like "compound" and "yacht" were not bandied about by my friends growing up, it was not unusual among his classmates. He went to school with Manhattan's elite, the children of movie stars and Broadway glitterati, network executives and captains of industry. 

 

Instead it was his ridiculous level of fame that defined him and made him stand out. Take, for example, fire drills. Every schools has them, right? At Collegiate, all the kids, including John, practiced filing out of the building. But every once in a while, during a drill, Secret Service agents would pull John out of line and spirit him away in a car. His classmates understood that, on those days, the fire drill was really the response to a bomb threat or assassination attempt aimed at John. Your whole school evacuated because of you! I can't imagine how isolating, how embarrassing, that must be for a boy between the ages of 8 and 13. I think only Princes William and Harry could relate to this. 

2. What did you recently finish reading? Contents Under Pressure by Edna Buchanan. Reporter Britt Montero works the crime beat on a major Miami newspaper. She's really good at her job, and uncovers one of the city's biggest stories when a retired football player and local hero dies after a run-in with the police. D. Wayne Hudson was black, the cops were white and Cuban. There are charges of police brutality and a high-profile trial with dangerous ramifications. 

It's an interestingly crafted book. I enjoyed going along with Britt as she peeled back the layers of cover up and corruption. When what happened to D. Wayne goes to the courts, I was about 75% done. The pace slowed and I very nearly DNF'd the book. I mean, all these pages just to cover off on Britt's love life? Yawn. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't. There's a sudden plot twist and some genuinely harrowing shit goes down. I admit it: Edna Buchanan shocked me.

3. What will you read next? I don't know.

 

  

 

 

August Happiness Challenge – Day 19

My 2025 Happiness Icon

Today's happiness: BOTH games of the double header! My Cubs took two from the Milwaukee Brewers, the best team in baseball. Their All Star Break slump has ended in style, and I'm going to sleep happy.

  

Happy August Happiness Challenge!

 

Each day in August you are to post about something that makes *you* happy. Pretty simple. And, it doesn't even have to be every day if you don't want it to be. It's a great way to remind ourselves that there are positive things going on in our lives, our communities, and the world.

 

Photo by Ayşegül Baykal on Unsplash

 

Working it through

Are you as sick of reading about my grief as I am of feeling it? I spent some time discussing it with my shrink today and she thinks I'm doing as well as can be expected, and my impatience is a good thing – it means I'm inching my way through it. She warned me, though, about "toxic positivity." That I shouldn't work too hard to put a good face on my feelings, because that's not real and it won't help my healing.

One thing that's helped me get a grip on the grief is putting it in perspective, examining the "why" behind it. It's bothered me that my mourning for Henry and John has been greater than my grief over losing my mom. Somehow that doesn't seem right, does it? I mean, they were my dearest friends but she was my mother. What did this say about me?

Nothing. It says nothing.

Part of what got me through losing my mom was having Henry and John. Henry met my mother and they got along so well. John had already lost his own mother and knew just what to say. 

And they weren't just my friends, they were the brothers I chose. If my mom was here today, she'd help me through losing Henry and John. But she's not. 

So I don't have Henry. I don't have John. I don't have my mom and my oldest friend is too chaotic and absorbed with her own stuff to be any help. I'm facing this with no ballast. So of course I'm struggling.

Understanding this helps.  

Now I just want the pain to be over already!