Hi Guys,

I’ve sent your ballots to you, fill them out and drop them in the mail. Here’s a quick note how I’ll be voting and why. You’ll probably change a few things, you’re both much more progressive than I am. It’s okay. We still love you. Unless you vote for Kanye, then we’re cutting you off.

The ballot is in three sections, so are my recommendations:
Los Angeles
Los Angeles County
California

LA Community College District Seat 1:

Andra Hoffman. She is competent and mindful and she’s fought for LGBTQ rights, no one will be better. …

The German Consulate is under construction. Not the Consulate itself, but the building. Oh, and the boulevard it sits on.

I wouldn’t have known that this building housed a consulate — that behind inexpensive and uninteresting doors I would be standing on German soil. Yet, after a three-year process my brother, son, and I found ourselves, three American Jews, sitting in strikingly ordinary lobby chairs as a slender blonde woman handed each of us an Einbürgerungsurkunde, a certificate of naturalization.

I’m very American. My children are American. We speak English in our home and listen to German only when prefaced with der Kinder. We learned pieces of German, Yiddish, and Polish this way. We also learned to curse because we rode in cars with our family, most notably one uncle who might have gotten himself into more trouble had anyone but I understood the filth leaving his mouth. …

Each day presents a new nightmare in 2020. From shelter at home to layoffs, politics that defy description, and a seemingly endless stream of black Americans being battered and killed by the police as citizens capture them on video.

Covid and American policing have tag teamed 2020 to leave us feeling isolated, unprotected, ill, fearful, and furious. Each feeling is completely legitimate, and as they swirl we are unkind to each other on a good day, and intolerant on a bad one.

2020 is one disaster after another and there’s no way to put a happy face on it, but I’m still going to dig deep and find a few things that I’m keeping from 2020. …

We have been home for 75 days. The kids are slowly being robbed of their school and summertime experiences, the economy takes my breath away, cities are ablaze, and mercifully I have not awoken from sleep at 2am dreaming that I’m choking on a ventilator for… three nights. For the one-too-many’th time we’re watching the police kill a black man on video. Slowly this time, up close this time. We ooze tension, we try to find moments of normalcy, we try to find bright spots and enjoy them for all we are worth. I am struggling with finding the joys, and appreciate and acknowledge that my friends and neighbors are too. I choose my words carefully. …

Cancel culture has hit Myka and James Stauffer, parents of a young family who rehomed a child they adopted internationally. This isn’t the first, nor will it be the last, time that cancel culture attacks a mother after having cast her as a villain.

I know next to nothing about Myka and James Stauffer, and that’s fine. This is a fill in the blank with [insert parenting influencers here]. Myka and James are a youngish couple with a lot of blonde babies, she wears baylage and beach waves, and he sports a barbered beard. They are exactly who you expect to see on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. …

Mr. G texted:

We are out of milk.

He said we are out of milk, and I wasn’t planning on going to the market. How long can a family survive without milk? Hours, mere hours for the Gotttliebs. There are cookies to dunk, coffee to adjust, and sweets to bake. We need milk.

I am returning a million (three) things to Best Buy when I see the text. Best Buy is around the corner from Smart and Final. I decided that I would stop in should there be no visible lines. There are not, so to the market I go.

I find myself at Smart & Final on a Saturday afternoon, which is not a time where I’d be at Smart & Final, nor anywhere else but my home most weeks. …

Instagram is not my favorite social network, but in this second month of sheltering at home, I find myself enjoying little glimpses into my friend’s days. This way, I miss them less. Mostly though, I realized that each week Bethany Winters shares a list of ten things she’s learned, they range from the mundane, “2. i have become a person who shops according to recipes i plan to make” to the informative, “6. california produces 88% of the nation’s strawberries, employing approximately 40k farm workers for this crop alone”, to the wholly insightful, “2. …

I would like to talk about my weight so that you, my friends and family, can have permission to stop. I know you mean well but, “You’ve lost weight” is only slightly kinder than, “Oh My God you’re skinny.” Which I’m not. But sadly, it’s what I’m hearing a lot of lately. I’m not here to chastise, but to save relationships because this annoys me, and I’m certain that for others it’s a crushing enough experience that they’re avoiding people who previously had been considered friends.

For the record, I have recently lost four pounds.

Without embarrassing anyone, because I understand that folks are trying to be kind, I’d like to explain a few things about weight loss that are true for both men and women. Of course, this is oft-discussed by women, because everyone knows that a woman’s value is in her hip to breast to waist ratio. …