Twitter (never X)

Substack no longer embeds links to Twitter but if you click on each image you’ll be taken to the original post on Twitter and you can follow all these funny people and organizations!

Articles, Newsletters, and Essays

Bluey: The Sign Review by in Searching for Grace. I drew some different conclusions about this 28-minute special but I thoroughly enjoyed Beccy’s take on its controversial ending.

How to Be a Homemaker by in The Catholic Feminist. I cannot say enough good things about this thoughtful essay on how we are all, male and female, called to be homemakers on this earth.

Fasting from Food in a Land of Plenty by Jeanne Whitlock in Christianity Today. I cut down my phone usage during Lent this year since I am still nursing (not a great idea to fast from physical food while also feeding a baby) but the concept of letting go our grip on excess was really helpful to me in thinking about fasting.

What I Thought My Life Would Be Like After Decanting All My Spices Into Mason Jars by Joe Viner in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A good laugh for all of us who have high ambitions for short-lived organizational plans!

Don’t hurry, be happy by . “Hurry can become a way of life for people, a treadmill they can’t get off. This is the way our consumer society is designed to work — we not only want products, we become products, and hustle and hurry become core values.” Jeannie’s writing is always so thought-provoking and this short piece is no exception.

Resisting our ‘new dark age’ by in Religion News Service. A convicting call to action through deliberate inaction, in a manner of speaking.

And I’m delighted to share that I had the honor of winning Best Nonfiction in my undergraduate literary journal, From the Fallout Shelter, this year. Here is a link to Sassafras by yours truly.

Page and Screen

I’ve got some book and movie reviews coming up so we’ll save those for May! For now, I’ll just say I’ve been really enjoying Bunmi Laditan’s humor writing about parenting (just finished The Honest Toddler, which is laugh-out-loud funny and about to start Confessions of a Domestic Failure) and I’m very excited to finally sit down with ’s recent release Till There Was You.

What I Wrote This Month

See above, I guess. I actually did a good bit of writing this month even as I’m wrapping up my spring semester in British literature, but that writing hasn’t been published anywhere just yet. I’ll be back soon with plans for a summer full of reading and writing just for fun, and no schoolwork (insert praise hands emoji) so stay tuned for that. I’d love to hear what you enjoyed most in April! Please leave me a link in the comments!

Until May,

Amy

P.S. Remember, if you’d prefer to only receive my once-or-twice-a-month essays, you’ll need to visit your Substack settings, scroll all the way down to your Subscriptions list, click “Something Funny, Something True,” and uncheck the option for “The Best of the Month.”

Good morning and welcome back to our newest monthly feature, The Best of the Month, in which I share the funniest and most thought-provoking stuff I’ve come across in the last four weeks or so.

If this section of SFST irritates you, feel free to unsubscribe from this section specifically and just receive the regular essays & articles!

Let’s start with tweets. (I will forever call them tweets.)

Tweets

(Remember that you can click the images to go directly to the source.)

And I don’t usually include my own stuff here because that seems very self-serving but I got featured on I Might Be Funny this month so I had to give that a little shout-out.

Articles, Newsletters, and Essays

The Imprudence of ‘Dump Them’ by Clare Coffey in Christianity Today. Technically this is from November 2023 but I read it in February so I’m going to go ahead and share it anyway! “Online pop psychology has a simple solution to every relationship problem. Love and prudence call us to something messier—and better.”

My Child’s Valentine Goody Bags Will Destroy You by Katie Burgess in Frazzled. I’ve been reading Katie’s humor writing for years and this one about parents who do The Mostest really tickled me as I helped my 3-year-old make preschool valentines this year for the first time! “As for the accompanying goody bags, we picked up the cutest wooden puzzles while visiting a Swedish art colony last summer. They transform from Cupids into figurines of famous women in STEM — the Lydia Villa-Komaroff one is nearly impossible to solve, but my baby did it on the first try.”

We Are Your Fancy Coffee Shop - Pretending to Care About the Environment Is What We Do by Eve Schaub in The Belladonna Comedy. This satire of corporate greenwashing actually made me laugh out loud. “Take time to peruse our selection of whole coffee beans carefully picked by people who were very probably adequately compensated and were definitely thinking about endangered species the entire time.”

The Chaotic Loneliness of Parenting by in Knott, A Newsletter. Andrew really nails a feeling I’ve struggled to put into words: the isolation in the midst of noise and mayhem that comes with being a stay-at-home parent. “Sometimes when I’m bouncing on the trampoline for what seems like the fiftieth time in the day, when the sun drops low and the air feels cool, I become untethered. The laughter and screams drift away on the breeze. The sound of the screeching springs recedes. It feels like it’s just me.”

What’s Wrong With Cancel Culture (and What Isn’t) by in Sub-Creations. I always appreciate Amy’s balanced, thoughtful approach to hot topics (even when I don’t agree with her conclusions, I always come away feeling reflective in a new way). “Cancel culture is a major problem, but not because the concept of cancellation exists. If we are unable to distance ourselves from the problematic beliefs of others in some way, we will not be able to protect those principles that are most dear to us. I happen to believe that the only thing holding certain human beings back from committing certain evils is the knowledge that they will face social penalties if they do so, and a world with fewer evils is a better world.”

Housing First Didn’t Fail Us by in Who Is My Neighbor?. Kevin’s analogy of a practical, relatable hygiene problem at a music festival as a type for the bigger and oft-confusing problem of affordable housing is a great one. “The problem wasn’t the system, the organization, the planning, or the rules—even though tinkering with those things and responding to emergent needs allowed for better access and less suffering. The fundamental problem was there just weren’t enough bathrooms.”

If you think I read more essays this month than usual, you’re correct! I’ve been trying to consciously use my time to read more mind-improving content during Lent rather than wasting brain cells on social media, and it’s been a good exercise thus far.

Page and Screen

My husband and I don’t get a ton of time to watch movies together (life with two small kids who don’t sleep much!) but when we do we’ve come up with a method for our forty-five-minute film installment choices. (Watching a whole movie in one evening? What’s that?) We take turns choosing a feature film, with the understanding that the other person has veto power if it’s something they find truly intolerable (I’ve 86'ed a few really bloody war movies and he flat-out refuses to watch The Office), and we have the option of substituting 2-3 TV episodes of equal length to a full movie. This month, I chose Persuasion (1995) and heartily enjoyed its accuracy to the book (after my dismal experience with Netflix’s Persuasion) and the stellar performance of Amanda Root. Rob sat through it. He’s a mensch. ;)

I was a bit skeptical about Rob’s choice of Men of Honor (2000) but I ended up very invested in the mostly-true story of the first black Navy deep-sea diver. (If sailor language is a concern for you, I will note it is rated R for a lot of f-bombs and one rather grisly injury that made me look away.) If you like historically inspired thrillers this is for you!

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng is a novel I’ll be thinking about for a long time. It was a bit heavy-handed on the political dystopia front and the stylistic lack of quotation marks bugged me, but its themes of parental love and the power of storytelling are going to stick with me.

What I Wrote This Month

I did a very detailed breakdown of the pros and cons of writing AND reading articles on both Medium and Substack. It’s available here. It also contains a little announcement that I’m going to say more about in March!

Christmas Decorations, My Mount Everest is my latest essay about parenting. It’s as funny as I could make it, but deals with some very real fears and insecurities too. It does contain one incorrect fact: there are no mouse droppings in our attic. We regret the error. It was included as hyperbolic illustration but it distressed my spouse who does not want people to think we live in squalor, because we do not. Please read accordingly.

I’m reaching my email length limit, so I’d better sign off for now!

Until March,

Amy

P.S. Remember, if you’d prefer to only receive my once-or-twice-a-month essays, you’ll need to visit your Substack settings, scroll all the way down to your Subscriptions list, click “Something Funny, Something True,” and uncheck the option for “The Best of the Month.”

Welcome to a new feature of Something Funny, Something True! Everyone on my subscriber list is getting a copy of this email today, but I don’t want to annoy anyone who doesn’t want to get this type of email regularly. If you’d prefer to only receive my once-or-twice-a-month essays, you’ll need to visit your Substack settings, scroll all the way down to your Subscriptions list, click “Something Funny, Something True,” and uncheck the option for “The Best of the Month.” I tried to set this up so you would have to opt IN to get this but I couldn’t figure it out so I think you will have to just opt OUT. Sorry. :/

Okay, let’s get to it.

Tweets

I used Karen Cherry’s method of linking tweet screenshots to share the images below. If you click on any of them, you will be taken to the original tweet. And no, I’m not savvy or organized enough to do them in chronological order. Scroll, laugh, and be thankful.

Articles, Newsletters, and Essays

On Failing as a Parent by

Shawn Smucker

inThe Courage to Live it. I really enjoy Shawn’s posts on writing and on raising kids, and this one was a lovely tribute to the power of mercy and grace.

I’m Edgar Allan Poe’s Landlord, and He Will Not Be Getting His Security Deposit Back by Amanda Lehr in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Literary humor is my jam. But you knew that.

Housing in Classic Novels Vs. Your Life by Amy Greenlee in Jane Austen’s Wastebasket. More book humor!

Introducing the Escher Premium Diaper by S.M. Strand in Frazzled. This is the perfect send-up of products marketed to exhausted new parents.

Dear Hildegaard by

Rachel Joy Welcher

inDear Hildegaard. I’m very much looking forward to following Rachel’s chronicles of toddler parenting as I’m in the throes of it myself!

Page and Screen

I don’t have any videos to share this month, but maybe I will in the future. I’m not much of a video-watching girl, mostly because I never have my earbuds handy when I feel like watching something, and if I turn on YouTube without earbuds, my three-year-old’s spidey sense goes off.

I’ve been very much enjoying Terry Pratchett’s sci-fi/fantasy novels lately; odd that a blend of two genres I normally don’t prefer would be so very much my cup of tea, but here we are. I’m nearly done with Interesting Times and about to pick up Going Postal.

I listened to an audiobook of Persuasion by Jane Austen this month and really reveled in the experience. It’s true that the older you get, the more you appreciate Austen’s most reflective novel. (I’m older than Anne Elliot now! And have now left all Austen heroines behind in the bloom of youth. Hmmm. Much to think about.) I also watched the Netflix film adaptation of Persuasion, and I Have Thoughts. (They are not amiable.) Coming soon to an inbox near you.

I didn’t read nearly as much in January as I would have liked to, and I aim to fix that in February. Well, I won’t be able to go back and do January over again—but I can use more of my time for reading in the shortest month of the year.

Although if we’re counting the number of times I read aloud Where the Wild Things Are and The Book With No Pictures and How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? then I’m already clearing the top 1% of Goodreads challenges for the year.

Until February,

Amy

P.S. Remember, if you’d prefer to only receive my once-or-twice-a-month essays, you’ll need to visit your Substack settings, scroll all the way down to your Subscriptions list, click “Something Funny, Something True,” and uncheck the option for “The Best of the Month.” I tried to set this up so you would have to opt IN to get this but I couldn’t figure it out so I think you will have to just opt OUT. Sorry. :/