Did you know that every Sunday, Paid Subscribers of the D-Train receive this super fun Sunday night bonus content? This week I’m sending it out to everyone as an early Christmas present. Subscribe and you can unlock all of the issues you have missed, plus you will receive People Tell Me What To Do every Sunday from now until the end of time. Or until I get bored. Whichever comes first. Merry, merry, ho, ho, ho, and all that jazz.
My friend A.J. Daulerio has this amazing website about recovery, The Small Bow. I love it a lot and have found it to be really helpful, not because I’m generally an alcoholic or an addict, but I feel a certain kinship with anyone who is a fighter. I connect with people most who have been knocked down, but have stood back up. I’m Irish; that’s basically our ethos.
Anyway, many millions of years ago, A.J. used to edit my Week In Craig column for the Black Table. It was a good column because we came at it from a place of nothingness. We didn’t care who it offended, or who it pissed off, or if it made our mothers cry. We just wanted it to be funny.
By my recollection, I never really argued with A.J. about any editorial decisions, at least not seriously. If he told me to do something, I did it. He knew what was funny, and I just wanted to be funny. The only time I remember truly getting into an argument with him was shortly after I started dating my (now) Ex. (Yes, we were together THAT long).
Anyway, A.J. found out that I was dating some dude who we shall call “a reader.” That’s right, I started dating my husband originally because he emailed me that he liked my column. And I fell for it and went out with him and eventually married him. Anyway, when A.J. found this out, he decided to change my tagline on the site to say something like “Amy Blair is a writer who lives in New York City. She’s also fucking some dude who reads this column.” (I forget the wording exactly, but you get the point). Needless to say, I went ballistic. The column went live every Friday at like 6:00 a.m., and I remember calling the other editors of the site at the crack of dawn, just raging at them that my new boyfriend was going to wake up and see it any minute now and THEY HAD TO TAKE IT DOWN. A.J., who made a career out of never taking anything down, pushed back. He said it was funny. He told me to chill the fuck out. I threatened to quit. I don’t think he ever relented, but the other editors probably overrode his decision because before my boyfriend ever woke up it was taken down. I think he changed my tagline to something like “Amy Blair is a writer who lives in New York City. She’s also an uptight fucking cunt.” I was fine with that. My boyfriend never knew what had happened.
I’ve learned a few lessons since then. First, that tagline WAS funny. And it fit perfectly with the content of the column, and the Fuck Everything mentality we were trying to project. If my new relationship was so at odds with everything I was trying to do at the time, perhaps it wasn’t the right place for me to be. Perhaps, if I hadn’t caught what A.J. had written and gotten it taken down so early in the morning, my boyfriend would have read it and blown up and maybe, just maybe, I would have seen then what was there all along.
Here’s what I know now. You can’t edit yourself for someone else. It will never work.
Also, you always have to listen to A.J. Daulerio. A.J. texted me this week and told me to do 10 shoulder taps, 2 inch worms, 10 mountain climbers, 10 hip taps, 2 open pushups each side, 5 burpees, 10 touches, 3 elbow pushups, and 10 foot tap mountain climbers every single day. This is what A.J. says I need to do, daily, and if I stick with it I’ll not only be buff as fuck presumably, but I’ll also start to feel better. Eventually.
Um, I literally don’t even know what he’s talking about. But I started this, and I’m better now than I used to be. We’re getting there.
Inch worms it is.
Love,
Amy Blair