Good Riddance: A Confession and an Update

Formatting fatigue, a swear jar, and an exciting guest announcement for The Short and Sweet.

Me after trying to nicely format a post for the chat every Saturday morning. (Young Woman on her Death Bed, unknown artist, circa 1621)

Happy Saturday, everyone!

Welcome back to our weekly series, Good Riddance, a place to gather and let off some steam in the comments by saying goodbye to something we need to from the week (or weeks) before, whatever that may be.

A little update about the series: Last Saturday, we asked you to vote on if you wanted this series to stay in the chat or move to a traditional post/email, like this one. The numbers are in and the majority of votes were in favor of moving Good Riddance to a weekly post, so that’s what we’ll be doing! (Thanks to all who voted; your feedback continues to help us shape what this community is and we are grateful for it.)

To be honest with you (insert my irritatingly sarcastic husband, David, saying, “Thank you for your honesty, Amber!”) I do have a small confession: I was relieved to see that most of you voted in favor of this move, as I’ve struggled with hosting the series in the chat for some time. Formatting and spacing of any kind in the chat is almost non-existent, and for longer Good Riddance posts that need paragraph breaks, you have to use emojis to inorganically force the break, like Instagram used to make you do on a post caption…fifteen years ago. Commenting is also irritating, as each time you reply, the comment is pushed down to the bottom of the thread, and you have to scroll back up and try to find where you left off. Plus, there are issues with linking to a specific post in a chat thread when sharing to other socials, and you’re unable to access the chat at all on your phone without downloading the app. (The app is great, but not everyone is an app person and we always want GR to be as easily accessible for everyone as it can be.)

On a more personal note, it’s also been difficult for me to load everything together in the chat on a Saturday morning with my eight year old bouncing off the walls (and off me) and our one-year-old Bernedoodle lovingly shoving her toys at me asking to play every five seconds. Now I’ll be able to properly load a piece for you into a post every week and schedule it to go out on Saturday mornings, the way God intended. (I talk to him, obvs, so I know he intended this!) Having the series in a post instead of the chat means I can spend more time talking with you in the comments instead of whispering obscenities at my phone when something won’t configure correctly as my daughter stops swinging from the chandelier just long enough to tell me to put a dollar in the swear jar.

I just want things in life to be a teeny, tiny bit easier, ya know?

In case you haven’t gleaned from this post yet, this week’s let go for me is a bit meta: a good riddance to hosting Good Riddance in the chat. I promise I really do love the chat feature, and we will use it for something meaningful in the future—White Lotus season 3 recap discussions? A place to just scream into the void? Or plan our own coup to the current coup? I’m looking forward to figuring it out together, like we always do, and am really looking forward to hosting this series here in a proper post each week.

Now, what are you letting go of/saying goodbye to/ giving up this week? Share in the comments, and I will be waiting like an anxious lover holding a bouquet of roses (err, a keyboard) so we can all talk ad nauseam about our feelings which is something I LOVE TO DO SO MUCH. (Our Managing Sarcasm Expert, David, can confirm.)

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Mark your calendars: The March edition of The Short and Sweet, our monthly creative and cathartic gathering live over Zoom for paid subscribers, will take place on Thursday, March 20 from 12pm-1pm ET. March is National Women’s Month, yes, but it’s also National Ethics Awareness Month, so I’ve asked my ethically-minded and brilliant friend, journalist, founder of the newsletter The.Ink, and NYT bestselling author of The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas to join us. We’ll talk politics, fighting fascism in America, and what the next steps are. The Zoom link will be emailed to paid subscribers about thirty minutes before the start of the Zoom.