I signed up for journalist Ann Helen Peterson’s newsletter a while ago; each week has a “just trust me” link with no explanation. This week’s link was an essay by Victoria Gannon about working as a contract UX writer in San Francisco. It is wonderful and awful and captures exactly what being an outsider at a mostly male company feels like (see also: Pixar’s “Purl“).

From “The Metrics of Backpacks“:

I am in a foreign country; these are my hosts. I study their dialects and graph their inflections, seeking fluency. I listen as they discuss fishing trips and ways to get their wives to watch science-fiction movies and how annoyed they get when she eats their leftover burrito from the fridge. I offer up pieces of my own life that I think they will like: stories of my boyfriend’s obsessive CD collection, memories of the science-fiction movies my brother made me watch as a child. I too cringed at the green of the Emperor’s blood in Flash Gordon; I also sat in awe when the owl in Clash of the Titans moved its brass wings. But this is belonging by proxy, a male escort at my side; it is never inherent.

There’s a scene in Mad Max: Fury Road when the escaping women watch satellites in the night sky from post-apocalyptic Earth and say, roughly, “Every one of those used to be a show. There was a show for every person.”

I don’t watch a lot of prestige TV but I do read a lot of personal essays on the internet, and there is an essay for every feeling. This is one I found recently and it is beautiful and painful and how we are feeling at the moment. Here If You Need Me: Learning to Be Present While Fighting for Your Father, by Beth Kephart, on Catapult.

When fighting on behalf of someone you love, the fight must end, the love must be the art of being present. I am slow to learn, but I am trying. Pastrami lunches. Riverbank afternoons. Conversations in the shade of village gardens…I feel myself wanting more for him, more for us, more (the wanting hurts) for me.