Happy Fri-yay
Or as I call it, my favorite day of the week!
Five Things About Fridays
My husband and I have been getting breakfast out together on Friday mornings since we were dating in the late 1990s. I forget how it started but it quickly became our weekly default date, so we’d see each other at least once a week if not more often. I don’t like cooking and going out for breakfast always feels like such a treat. It is a treat! We became regulars at a couple of Cambridge diners when we still lived in Boston and these days we eat out in the spring and summer and get it to go when it’s cold out. Like now!
I don’t exercise on Fridays so I get to my writing desk a little earlier and I’m happiest when can get to my desk and pull out a notebook and work on whatever, and on Fridays I just feel like I have a little more in the way of the luxury of time. The day feels lighter somehow, longer.
We’ve been doing pizza dinner on Fridays since we started living together in 2002. Used to be, there was a TV station that played 3 or 4 episodes of Star Trek on Friday nights so “Friday Night Bonus Treks and Pizza” became a thing. Now we have a show that we stream along with dinner, one episode per week or so. Currently it’s The Blacklist. We should be finished in about 20 years.
Friday feels like the sweatshirt day of the week, like that nap you can’t quite wake up from. Friday feels hopeful, the weekend and its delights just a few hours away. When I was still at my last out-of-the-house bookstore job I’d feel that anticipation all the way home- stumble off the subway after a long day, fall into comfy clothes and face plant into that pizza.
Recently Fridays have become piano lesson day, another weekly special occasion and reason to love Fridays. If I had to pick a great day to be extra creative, find little ways to be nice to myself and plump my metaphorical pillows, it would be Friday.
Facebook and Meta and All That
So I’m sure many of you have heard about the new policies at Meta that are affecting Facebook, Instagram and Threads. I know a lot of people have decided to quit one or all of the apps under Meta’s umbrella because of the recent changes in their policies on fact-checking and auto-following of political figures. A lot of people rely on them for community, organizing and derive real benefit from them. Some of us have to use them for work. (As a writer trying to submit work, Instagram is really valuable to me for hearing about submission calls and making contact with litmags that are not on Chill Subs or other outlets yet.) And some of us just want to stay for our own reasons.
You can also employ some other low-key strategies to make your footprint smaller, cut back on the data you offer up and avoid scammers. Some suggestions:
Pull back from public groups. Every time I leave a comment on a public group these days I get a message from a scammer. It’s annoying and invasive.
Don’t “like” big businesses, retail outlets, celebrity pages or pages for movies, TV and music. Audit your likes and follows. Remove some of them unless you have a good reason for keeping it. Use your likes and follows for local businesses to help boost their profiles.
Audit your friends list. Make sure you know the people who are on it. If there’s someone you don’t know or don’t remember adding, unfriend them. Unfriend celebrity accounts; most celebs use Pages that you “like” or “follow” and many of the celeb accounts that you’ve “Friended” are fakes. Even the ones that aren’t, you’re giving your personal info to strangers because it’s the celeb’s publicists most likely running the page.
If you are a public figure with a public Page, audit the people following you if you have time. If anyone fits the profile of a textbook scammer, unfriend them so they don’t have access your list of names.
Set your personal profile to “friends only” and limit who can send you friend requests by selecting “friends of friends” only. This doesn’t matter for the marketing data as far as I know but it will cut down the number of scam accounts that can send you friend requests.
Personally I have no intention of quitting Facebook or Insta but I did shut down Threads because I pretty much never use it. As much as we depend on these utilities, it can help to remember they are ephemeral. Use them to build your offline communities, something no one can take away from you.
TV and Movies
It’s been pretty slow. Netflix offered me the chance to be in some preview club they have going on and I previewed a really terrible movie last weekend that I can probably not tell you the title of. Which is too bad because it would be fun to tell you more. I was chatting with a buddy of mine the other day about how much fun bad reviews can be to write, and hopefully to read too.
We got a Crunchyroll subscription about a month ago and I’m pretty stuck on Princess Knight, a foundational series that came out in 1967 in Japan.
It’s about Sapphire, a princess in the kingdom of Silverland who was born with both a girl’s and boy’s heart. She lives as a boy because girls can’t inherit the throne and over time has become comfortable with that identity. It’s trippy and weird and I kind of love it. It was originally a manga published in three volumes between 1953 and 1956. The author, Osamu Tezuka, was one of the founders of the manga form and was influenced heavily by Walt Disney as you can kind of tell from his style of illustration. But that’s where the resemblance ends. Tezuka was also the author of the 8-volume manga series Buddha; reading that was a mountain-top experience for me and I can’t recommend it enough.
Keanu Reeves is Not In Love With You, by Becky Holmes
I picked Becky Holmes’ book up a few months ago, because like most of you I have been approached many times by online scammers and I wanted to learn more about what’s going on out there. I’ve been “friended” by obviously-fraudulent celebrity accounts and many widowers-who-are-surgeons-and-Navy-SEALs-who-live-on-houseboats-in-the-Middle-East. They all have names like David James and James David and Christopher John. They are all gorgeous and covered in giant watches. And with the magic of a reverse-image search, you can get a sense of how many names each one has.
I also like true-crime and humor and this book ticks all the boxes.
There are some laughs here, and some pretty sad stories, including one page I basically skimmed with graphic violence related to a particular gang of scammers based in Nigeria. I learned a lot too, about the psychology behind scamming and the ways that scammers exploit pretty common vulnerabilities for cash. It’s depressing, and it makes me want to be extra-vigilant about who I talk to online. (Right after I posted about this book on Bluesky I was friended by two textbook scam accounts. Like, textbook.) For the most part, as long as you’re not shy about using blocks, you should be fine, but it’s amazing how embedded in certain parts of the global economy this stuff is.
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I publish twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays.