type click mailbag: i am an advice columnist now (???)

go birds

Wellllllllll it’s mailbag time again. We might as well just go ahead and pencil these in for the first Sunday of every month. That feels right. To me. And I have no editor here and can do whatever I want. The power is thrilling. 

As always:

• Please submit your questions/ideas/rambles by sending a reply to the email you just got in your inbox or by leaving it as a comment below

• This week’s edition is fun because someone asked me for advice like I’m Dear Abby, which is both cool and something I never saw coming

• I really do love hearing from you goofballs because you seem to grasp the vibe of what we’re doing here very well

Let’s dive in. 

FROM LOVE HURTS!

I am in a new and blossoming relationship with a man I love dearly. He is Philly born and raised, and, of course, a huge Eagles fan. Like he’s rewatched the Super Bowl game they won a few years back at family reunions. Him and his family bleed green.

I…am not a sports fan and sports fans should be thankful I know what a touchdown is. Me watching a football game is the equivalent of a dog watching television. Sure, I see moving objects on a screen but that’s as far as it goes. I’d much rather watch an 8-hour Hungarian film than sit through a football game.

I will say my dad is a football fan, however his team is The Team That Shall Not Be Named. In the past, I’ve defaulted to rooting for That Team just because I don’t know anything else, but otherwise I don’t care. 

Anyway, my dad and my boyfriend will be meeting soon for the first time. Both are aware of the other's Team, and I feel like I'm in uncharted territory. I have no idea how to keep the peace while still supporting both. Am I doomed? Is this the football equivalent of Romeo and Juliet? Can these two rivals coexist? 

Any guidance will be appreciated. 

Okay, let’s do this in four parts. I think that’s the easiest way to handle it. 

ONE: I very much appreciate that this woman — who asked to remain anonymous — committed to the bit of not naming the Dallas Cowboys in the email. 

TWO: I love that I am now an advice columnist and I need to turn this into a podcast and brand where I start writing books titled like “How To Be A Boss: 8 Steps Toward A More Powerful Life” where I’m posed on the cover with my arms crossed across my chest defiantly.

THREE: The best way to deal with this kind of thing is probably to lean into it. Make it fun. Have them both over for a game and let them both wear their jerseys and sit between them in a shirt that’s half Eagles and half Cowboys. Some friends of mine from college did this. They were diehard fans of rival teams dating back long before they got together. So every year when their teams faced off they’d get all dressed up and rib each other and have a blast with it. The relationship didn’t work out for other more serious reasons but that part of it worked very well. Might work for you guys, too!

FOUR: Go Birds. 

FROM TYLER!

My friend is having a baby in March and is letting me suggest one tv show for her to watch during her time off work. She loves Gilmore Girls and SVU. I know she's re-watched the entire run of E.R. and she's seen Breaking Bad. Otherwise, most of the big name prestige TV shows would be new to her. I've been trying to decide between suggesting The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. I think The Wire is my pick for best show of all time, and is weirdly re-watchable, but it starts slower than the rest and is kind of a bummer. Mad Men isn't usually held up to the same standard as the others, but I think it might be the most fun (and we live in St. Louis so there's a hometown Jon Hamm connection). Which leads me to The Sopranos, which may be the best of both worlds. What do you think about these three, and if this is too hard, should I go totally off book and suggest Happy Endings or What We Do in the Shadows?

Hmm. A few things here…

It’s always tricky to recommend shows without actually knowing the person you are recommending them to. Especially if it’s a show you really like. Like I think Reservation Dogs is probably the best show made in the last five years but I’m always cautious telling people I know in real life about it because if they try it and don’t dig it like I do I will be DEVASTATED. This could just be a Brian And His Bozo Brain thing but it’s a weirdly vulnerable feeling. My own cousin had surgery recently and asked for recs to watch while she’s laid up and I put more time and effort into the list I gave her than I did for all of my Christmas shopping combined last year. It’s probably very normal. 

That all said, here is my two-pronged reply…

PRONG ONE: I think I would rank the shows you listed as follows for a post-pregnancy binge:

1. The Sopranos — Much weirder and funnier than people remember. The show that kind of started the whole prestige television era. Just a good experience to have in your life, like seeing the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or whatever.

2. Mad Men — A wild ride. Introduced the world to Jon Hamm. Also much funnier than people remember. I recommended this to a woman I know a few years ago and she very noticeably started talking like Joan a little bit over the next few weeks. 

3. The Wire — Undeniably one of the best shows ever made, still true and accurate and moving in every way it was when it first ran, but I don’t know if “our systems are failing and sometimes children get lost in the cracks” is something I would recommend to a person who just had a baby?

PRONG TWO: That said, my go-to recommendations whenever people need a multiseason binge to kill time are 30 Rock and Justified. I don’t think I’ve ever had a complaint. But I trust your judgment here because you know your friend.

FROM MAT!

Where does your awesome/playful/curious attitude come from?  I love following you and reading your stuff because it always seems like it comes from a good place.  Is it work to curate that when posting, or are you like that all the time?

Okay, let me just acknowledge first that this is a sweet thing to say. And to point out that the personality you describe here can be fun in bits online but can occasionally drive my poor real-life friends crazy when they are just trying to watch basketball and I’m next to them like going on a “THERE’S A NEW JARDIANCE LADY WHAT THE HELL” rant that starts during one commercial break and carries straight through until the next commercial break. 

Which, to answer one of your questions, yes, I think I am mostly the same online as in person. A little whinier in person, sure. But I’m a generally happy and friendly goof most of the time. I have my moments where I go the other way. I think we all do. But I’m not the dude slamming on the car horn in the parking lot because someone is hogging the whole lane. Some of that is a lucky roll of the brain chemistry dice but some of it really settled in after my spinal cord injury. I’m generally much less of a prick than I was back before that happened. 

A smart person once told me that people often go one of two ways after some traumatic shit happens: they either get angry at the world for the way their life turned out or they get a kind of calming and peaceful perspective about how just being outside and alive is nice enough to outweigh the dumb little annoying crap. I’m glad I’ve mostly settled into the second thing. Which is not to judge people who teeter into the first thing. Life can be weird and hard, man. It’s a miracle more of us don’t turn into the Joker. 

I’ll close this with a fun little story from yesterday: Between my general friendly and outgoing nature and the thing where I’m in a wheelchair, I get the best customer service you can ever imagine, which we’ve talked about here before. So I went into the Apple Store real quick yesterday before a dinner reservation just to try to hold the new line of phones in my hand to see if the size works. (I do everything with one hand so the massive phones result in a slew of dropsies.) And within five minutes of cruising in, with no appointment and no intent to spend any money, I had three Apple employees around me with four phones in their hands. One of them wanted to ask the manager for help. I think I could’ve gotten Tim Cook on FaceTime if I asked. It was hilarious.

FROM SHANE!

ive been thinking that the best possible event for the dumb new pro bowl would be to put the punter on the 50 yard line, have him punt it, and have two guys try to down the ball as close as possible to the goal line. i would watch this for hours.

am i alone or does that idea rip ass?

Hmm. Yes, this is correct. I would watch that right now. And this is as good a time as any to remind you all of my single best idea: Every sport should do a home run derby and a slam dunk contest. Show me Jason Kelce and Zion Williamson mashing dingers. Show me Ronald Acuña catching alley-oops and JJ Watt doing windmill dunks. I sometimes don’t think the average human grasps what kind of athletic freaks these dudes are. This could help. Yes, I am going to link to the celebrity dunk contest from 1992 again. 

We deserve to have this. We’ve been very good. Some of us. I have been good enough. Most of the time. Sometimes. Just let me have it. 

FROM ERIK!

Inspired by you, I’ve been working on a running list of fake names for a while now. This feels like the appropriate venue to share some of my favorites:

• Chip Ridgely

• Billionaire kitchen supply tycoon T. Spoone Pickens

• Randy Couples

• Corky Pecorino

• Sandy Iago

• The honorable Ron DeVous

• Coleman Yeti

• Margie Robot

• Waylon Schipp

Always a pleasure reading your stuff.

It took me a second to catch the levels at play in “Chip Ridgely” but once I did I broke out into the cheesiest grin. A very good list. I see Sandy Iago running a beach bar on some island. 

Related: A work friend was dealing with a sick cat this week and another coworker typed “good luck with the kitty situation” and I — a nice man, I promise, one who cares about the health of his friend’s pet — got extremely excited and pointed out that Kitty Situation would be a great fake name. 

So let’s go ahead and add that to the proof that I’m basically the same person online as I am in real life, for better and worse.

STUFF I TYPED

— this week’s Rundown opens with a bit about a Ratatouille-adjacent French wine heist (please click to see the awful title I suggested for a potential sequel) and closes with a bit about multiple Mardi Gras cake heists in New Orleans because I am apparently never off-brand for a single second

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— Kimberly Ricci wrote about the new Mr. And Mrs. Smith series, which is fun as hell, sometimes for fart-related reasons

— Robby Kalland interviewed Shannon Sharpe and it was a blast to read

— Vince Mancini interviewed Dolph Lundgren about karate and cocaine among other things

— this is a Very Cool And Fun Article about the Central Park owl — they reached out to Dr. Ruth and Big Bird for a comment, which is awesome — that I think we should all click on and share a lot to encourage more writers and websites to publish more Very Cool And Fun Articles

— a reader named Ryan notified me via a lovely email that there is pepperoni vandalism afoot in New Jersey

— I WAS SERIOUS ABOUT THE JARDIANCE LADY REPLACEMENT AND I AM MAD ABOUT IT FOR REASONS I HAVE NOT YET PLACED

— RIP to the horny crane

— I love that it’s 2024 and we’re still asking the stars of Home Alone how the McAllisters got their money

— Philly Jesus has risen again

— I spent a chunk of early Friday morning looking up what sloths eat for reasons I do not have to explain to any of you

— CANADIAN POLAR BEAR HEIST

— I have been thinking about this picture and text pretty much once an hour — LOOK AT GUS FRING HOOP — since my buddy Martin Rickman brought it to my attention on Thursday morning in the work chat

Okay, that’s it. Please subscribe and email your friends about it.