If you’ve been around Carterhaugh for a while, you might remember our “Curiosities” pieces, where we each talk about things that we’re currently reading, listening to, watching, thinking about, and laughing at.

We always love putting them together (and our inboxes indicate that you love reading them) but we are profoundly, disturbingly unable to retain in our brains when we last created one. We were both sure we wrote one in the fall. Nope. It appears our last Curiosities piece was a year ago. What is time?

So hi! Curiosities. Because we’re together in Atlanta this week, we thought we’d do a joint list to give you a peek at what we’re up to right now. 

Sara & Brittany:

What We’re Reading: Sara started off this year by falling down a Gretchen Rubin rabbit hole, and it was so fascinating she sucked Brittany in with her. Rubin’s whole “Four Tendencies” idea was mindblowing to us, basically because we kinda reverse engineered it a few years ago when we were trying to set up work processes that worked for both of us. (How we wish we’d had her book five years ago!) There’s a whole complicated framework, but basically she argues that people tend to fall into four categories with regard to inner and outer expectations – Upholders, Obligers, Questioners, and Rebels. Sara is very firmly an Upholder. She responds to both inner and outer expectations without difficulty. In other words, if she says she’s going to do something, she does it. Brittany, however, is an Obliger, who will readily respond to outer expectations from others but has a very hard time with inner expectations (i.e. stuff she chooses to do for herself). This means that Sara will stick to deadlines and habits and pretty much whatever she agrees to, but Brittany will likely not… unless she tricks herself into believing that she has to because someone else says so, which is challenging when you are your own boss. In the early days of Carterhaugh, this caused some problems! Sara didn’t want to be Brittany’s manager or boss or mom, but Brittany needed her to set deadlines, etc., otherwise they would become internal expectations to her and thus not things she would do. We realized what was happening, had a long talk about it, and started doing things like regular meetings to plan deadlines, co-working sessions with goals where we could body double, a calendar we religiously update, and other things like that. All of which made Carterhaugh SO much more productive, efficient, and fun. It was SURREAL seeing Rubin lay out all our hacks and strategies with no fuss and clear labels. GET OUT OF OUR HEADS, GRETCHEN.

(A quick side note: the one thing we will add to this is that Brittany’s ADHD plays a role in this too. Honestly the various mental health conditions we both have probably do. The different roles that neurodivergance can have in all of this isn’t really part of Rubin’s framework, but we still think it’s super useful!)    

Also Rubin’s first book, The Happiness Project, has given us an interesting Carterhaugh idea that we may explore later this year. Any guesses? 

What We’re Listening To: Taylor Swift, sue us. (Yes we have gone full Swiftie, no we will not be taking questions, yes we are considering writing a Taylor Swift + folklore talk – if you want it, comment below and let us know!) Favorite songs of the moment: “New Romantics,” “The Lakes,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” and “Haunted” (she wrote a country-inflected Gothic metal song and no one told us? We’re HURT.)

But because you already know about Taylor Swift if you are on planet earth, we’d also like to offer our other obsession of the moment: Paris Paloma and her absolute force of a song “LABOUR” (we recommend this “cacophony” version.) We don’t even know how to describe how great it is, but this is our best stab at it: You have been transported to a vaguely medieval village where the peasant women have grown sick of the patriarchy and have simultaneously become witches and suffragettes, and they have decided to organize. And you LOVE IT. 

What We’re Watching: Sara introduced Brittany to the anime Komi Can’t Communicate when we were filming our upcoming Urban Legends series for The Great Courses, and she thought it was really cute, but also we were kinda dead at the time. So, when Sara suggested watching more of it this visit, Brittany was like “sure,” but wasn’t prepared how much she would LOVE it this time around (truly, she should have known – when Sara says “Brittany, you are going to love this,” she has like a 99.99% success rate.) It’s so wildly cute (and relatable) (and full of cats) and absolutely nails the experience of social anxiety in a hilarious and very compassionate way. It’s also frankly uncanny how good it is at depicting that first, incredibly awkward but exciting and butterfly-producing brush with romance. (Content note: queer representation in this is extremely hit or miss. For instance, there’s a nonbinary character that’s part of the central cast, and we love them, but the way they’re introduced is extremely tasteless. On the bright side, they’re excellently voiced by a nonbinary English voice actor! So proceed with caution.)

Brittany also made Sara and Jared watch the Wicked movie, which she had already seen in theaters, because she had THOUGHTS and wanted to share them. Mostly we were all in agreement – the film is beautiful, stunning really, particularly the sets and costumes. The cast could not be more perfect, and they made a lot of really great small choices throughout. One that stands out is the moment where a mosaic of the wizard breaks during Elphaba’s magical loss of control when everyone first arrives at Shiz University. An older mosaic featuring animal professors is revealed behind it – so well done, subtle but powerful.

That said, we also felt like the film had some major issues that were hard to ignore. The most significant problem was the pacing. Almost every single moment in this film is dragged out for a frankly surreal amount of time. It’s especially egregious in the scene where Galinda joins Elphaba in her weird little dance at the Ozdust Ballroom (which, by the way, is like max 30 seconds in the musical if we remember right??), but it’s really a problem throughout. We think the film could have been at least 30 minutes shorter without losing anything if it had been edited better. Some changes/additions made for the film were fine (we liked Elphaba meeting Fiyero first in the woods, for example), but some were incomprehensible. For example, why did they change it so that Elphaba wasn’t originally coming to Shiz with Nessa? That change accomplished nothing and made the “confusion over rooming” and “of course I’ll care for Nessa” lines in “Loathing” not make any sense. And why on earth did they drag out the end of “Defying Gravity”? We did appreciate that it gave Elphaba and Galinda more time to reflect, so that Galinda’s decision NOT to go with her seems more expected rather than “here’s a great song line about how awesome we would be together… JK, I’m not coming.” In the musical it is an admittedly abrupt switch, but the dramatic fall from the building and Dementor-esque swirling around was way too much and detracted rather than adding anything to the finale of part one. 

(We have more thoughts, but this was not meant to be a review of Wicked? We should honestly make a YouTube video or something on this. Do you want to hear us ramble about this? Again, let us know by commenting!)

Something That Made Us Think: “Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution.” published in The New York Times, made both of us tear up. (We’ve attempted to share this link as a gift article, so our hope is that you can read it, even if you don’t have a subscription.) Honestly, it’s hard for us to muster much more about this piece other than “READ IT NOW, GO GO GO” because it is SO very close to home. Let’s put it this way: chronic pain has long been wildly misunderstood, people who experience it deal not only with the grind of physical pain but also frequently with the frustration/ rage of not being believed or helped, and the research is finally starting to change. One of the most moving parts of the article is the section where a man who has suffered from chronic pain for years but experiences a significant change in his symptoms finally finds a doctor willing to do more tests in order to discover that there might indeed be something new going on. It’s a potentially devastating diagnosis, but the man is so relieved that someone finally took him seriously when he said that something had changed after being dismissed over and over again because of his history of pain. If you have chronic pain, we think this might make you feel seen – at least, that’s how it made us feel. And if you don’t, you know someone who does. 

Something That Made Us Laugh: Usually we offer up a meme or something visual for this, but, if we’re being honest, the answer for this one is the poetry writing binge we went on over the weekend.

We’ve been working for years on a collection of fairy-tale sisterhood poetry, and it’s ALMOST DONE. (We keep having to shelve it when we agree to write books about fairylore or write streaming series about vampires or urban legends 🤪)

But after we turned in the latest draft of Fairylore, we tackled the backlog of weird little fragments we’ve been saving up, and it was SO MUCH FUN. We accidentally wrote a demon Cinderella poem? (Look, we’re just saying it’s very suspicious that all those animals did her bidding. And is the fairy godmother even a fairy? Suffice to say, we have questions.) We camped out in our favorite Atlanta coffee shop and wrote poetry and howled with laughter until they kicked us out at closing time. It was amazing. #WildSaturdayNight 

What are you reading, listening to, watching, thinking about, and laughing at lately? Let us know in the comments (and again, also let us know if you want to hear us talk more about Taylor Swift and/or Wicked!)

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