Ali Wong, Fortune Fiemster & the Ultimatum

Also where gay people can't vacation--so you shouldn't either

Over the past few days, my wife and I watched two great comedy specials on Netflix: Ali Wong’s Single Lady and Fortune Fiemster’s Crushing It.

Ali Wong was hysterical and incredibly raunchy, which is definitely part of her charm. I think she recognizes most of us just don’t expect a bespectacled, slight Asian woman to be talking about how she needed to get “dicked down” after her divorce. (Dicked down is her phrase, and much more funny when it’s just thrown casually into conversation than when I put it in quotes.) Wong is so good. I love the unapologetic demands she makes (for example for her lovers to eat her pussy without needing to be told) and how open she is about all the sex she’s been having since her divorce.

Fortune was also funny in a more Midwestern, wholesome way (even though she’s a lesbian, she’s wholesome, trust me, especially if you’ve watched Ali Wong the night before). Fortune talks about discovering, on the way to her gay honeymoon, that being gay in the Southeast Asian country to which she and her bride were traveling, The Maldives, was illegal and punishable by up to eight years in prison—and their layover was in Quatar, where Fortune joked it is even more illegal to be gay. (Renee and I made this same discovery when we almost booked our honeymoon in Jamaica; gayness is illegal on that fun island paradise, too.) Fortune also makes a lot of great jokes about her mom that I found relatable.

I recommend both of these comedy specials, and I thank Renee for encouraging us to watch them instead of another suspense thriller movie or show, which is what I would have picked. I am next hoping to watch the much-lauded Netflix mini-series Beef. Anyone seen it?

Fortune’s terrible honeymoon choice (arranged by a travel agent who knew she was booking a honeymoon for a gay couple!) made me wonder how many countries have laws that punish or kill people for being gay. Too many, is the answer. The good news, first, is that 37 countries recognize same-sex marriage. But here’s the bad news, according to Google: “Many countries have laws that criminalize same-sex relations, including:

• Countries with the death penalty for being gay: Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen

• Countries with laws that criminalize same-sex relations: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Cook Islands, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guinea, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nigeria, Occupied Palestinian territory, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan

• Countries that enforce stoning for being gay: Iran and Nigeria

• Countries where the penalty varies from 10 years in prison to life: 26 UN member states (despite the UN advocating for gay rights since 2011 for all members).”

I know many of you may enjoy international travel, but it would be great if we all boycotted all the nations that have anti-gay laws. Everytime I hear a friend has gone to Jamaica, it makes me sad that they’re spending their money there.

For some relief about how terrible this is, check out this cool video about machines that flick all the green tomatoes out of a massive bunch of tomatoes. This seems like magic to me:

In other news… Yesterday I made five lists the remarkable Suleika Jaouad recommended for year-end reflection/ year-ahead planning:

1) What I’m most proud of from 2024:

• My ongoing, great love affair with my wife (15 years together!)

• Launching this Substack, Paying Attention (and shifting my focus to paying better attention to everything I consume)

• Compiling the first draft of my second poetry collection (and submitting it to a Lit Fox Awards contest)

• Performing amazing caretaking for my possibly undeserving and definitely impossible-to-please mother, even after her suicide attempt

• Writing a poem a day in November and raising $2000 for Center for New Americans.

• Keeping up my daily Yoga with Adriene practice and adding a few sessions a week of working out with Renee’s VR headset on the Supernatural app.

• Asking for and accepting help when I felt overwhelmed. (Thank you, Judy Hyde and Jeff Butera)

• Officiating a beautiful wedding for a young woman I’ve known since she was born and the sweet young man who loves her like crazy.

  

2) What 2024 left me yearning for:

• Political sanity: I cannot believe we elected Donald Trump for a second term when Kamala Harris was such a stellar alternative. (Like, I often literally don’t believe it, but I know that isn’t helpful…)

• Peace. The slaughter (genocide) continues in Gaza and death continues to rain down on Ukraine (and in Russia, where I’m sure mostly innocent young men , including men from North Korea now, are dying because they are just following orders in a society that gives them little choice).

• Relief from my mother’s incessant needs, complaints, anxieties, and sicknesses.

• Better control over my eating (for which I’ve implemented my “no-late-night eating” intention for 2025.

• A closer, more emotionally honest connection with someone whose unexpected rages often leave me open-mouthed and always leave me on guard.

3) What’s causing me anxiety? See above!

4) What resources, skills and practices can I rely on?

• Daily yoga

• My mindfulness practice of noticing my body and breath

• My wife’s unwavering support

• My excellent writing abilities

• Support when needed from friends and writing buddies

5) What are my wildest, most hare-brained ideas?

• Volunteering for Dakin in the year ahead (after lots of years of volunteering with people through foster mothering, Big Sistering, day care for immigrant mothers, board service, and so forth, I want to try helping animals for a while).

• Writing a screenplay based on books I edited last year about the polio epidemic that swept America in the 1950s.

• Polishing my second poetry manuscript and finding it a publisher.

• Going on a Caribbean cruise with my wife! (We are booked on a Virgin Voyages cruise Feb. 23-28 that goes from Miami to Playa del Carmen to Bimini in the Bahamas then back to Miami – our first vacation together since we went to Yellowstone in 2019.) So, so excited for this! Anticipation is the best.

• Prioritizing making art and getting into nature more regularly, even though neither of these activities has any capitalist nor caretaking value.

I found this exercise helpful and, combined with the Pioneer Valley Writer’s Workshop on Creative Intention-Setting led by Joy Baglio last Friday night, I feel I’m all set reflecting on last year and prepping for this one. I’m ready. My takeaway intention from the PVWW workshop, in keeping with my word of the year being MINDFUL, was:

“I will work to be more present. I have the most fun when I am present in my body/ not just in my head. I’m not able to spin out or drown in overwhelm when I’m present. I am able to be more productive when I’m present. I’m present when I sit still and write. Or sit still and read. Or walk in the woods or kayak or sit at the beach. I’m a better friend, wife, daughter, mother, and friend when I am able to be fully present. All I need to do to be more present is take a deep breath and remember where I am and pay attention to what I’m doing.”

Renee and I binge-watched one more show from start to finish in December that I don’t think I’ve mentioned here: The Ultimatum, Season Three. This season was a total mess, and I don’t recommend anyone waste their time. The show gathers together couples who are facing a breakup because one member wants to get married and the other isn’t ready. The same people who host Love Is Blind, Nick and Vanessa Lachay, host this show, as well, with Vanessa reminding viewers every season that she had to give Nick an ultimatum to get him to marry her. (Presumably Vanessa came up with this show idea because her ultimatum worked out so well for her.) On the show, the couples “break up” and pair themselves with someone from one of the other broken-up couples. They all then live in “trial marriages” with this person they just met, then go back to live for three weeks with the person who brought them to the show.

As with Love is Blind, all the women on the show are glamourized to the hilt. They wear evening gowns, heavy makeup, including false eyelashes, high heels, fancy hairdos, plunging neck and backlines, and so forth. Love is definitely not blind on this show, where looks were obviously paramount to whoever did the casting, as we would be hard-pressed to find six couples this good-looking by random mixing. Most of the men were also pretty cute, buff, styled, etc. This is television, so I maybe shouldn’t object to the folks on the show being hot, though it would be nice if some even slightly ordinary-looking people were ever part of the mix.

If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading now.

No, really, unless you want to know the outcome for everyone on the show, do not read further.

OK, if you’re still here: Here’s why this season is not worth your time. In past seasons, couples took their hall pass to its limits and often had a love affair with their new partner for the three weeks they live together in a “trial marriage,” creating lots of interesting drama. This season, not only did no one have sex, but two of the original couples snuck off in the middle of the night and refused to continue with the show. Two couples! Out of six! The show totally fizzled out after this and became tedious to watch.

On a Reddit thread about this season, several people said quitting shouldn’t be allowed, and while I do think the departure of a third of the cast made the show a lot less fun, I don’t see how producers can forbid people from quitting. I assume they are already being offered a strong financial incentive to stick with the show and its ridiculous machinations, so if that payment isn’t enough to keep them, then like any job, they can quit. People doing the casting must have quite a tough time finding couples facing an ultimatum who are incredibly buff and beautiful, but who also need money (or crave fame) badly enough to go on national television to vulnerably talk about their relationship problems.

Of the couples who remained on the show, two of the men were waving red flags the whole time. One, Scotty, had a hair-trigger temper and yelled in a pretty frightening way if anyone upset him. Redditors all think he was abusing his woman, but they are broken up now, so if he was doing that (or even if he was only acting like someone who might beat his wife), good for her for getting out. The other, Nick, brought a woman 12 years his junior whose outfits barely covered her privates, and then became irrationally jealous when she made a connection with one of the other guys on the show. Nick called his girlfriend incessantly and kept banging on her door in the middle of the night, disrupting everything. I think they should take everyone’s cellphones away, as they do on Love is Blind. Then the couples, who aren’t “supposed to” communicate with one another, actually couldn’t communicate with one another, which would have stopped the two couples from running away, since they only did so after secretly chatting once the cameras weren’t on them.

Anywho, I recommend if you really want to see this season, you watch the first one, then skip right to the “proposal” episode (where the men have to present a ring, get down on one knee, etc. – the people making these shows must be really invested in keeping the patriarchy heteronormative and strong). So basically just watch the first episode, the last episode before the reunion, and then watch the reunion. We learned on the reunion show that Nick had been drinking heavily (not that this is a surprise, part of what makes the drama in these shows is that producers give everyone all the liquor they can guzzle) and had checked into a rehab after the show stopped taping.

Why do I watch these silly shows? (I have also been a semi-secret watcher of The Batchelor sometimes.) I think watching couples interact and fight and be loving and raise their voices and be affectionate and so forth provides lots of interesting conversational fodder for the people I watch with: that is not how we behave! Or, aww, look at that couple, they are so supportive of one another. Etc. But really, I have no excuse. Some things are just guilty pleasures. (If you’re looking for a super fun season of The Ultimatum, I recommend this one; it was riveting, and I don’t just think it’s because I’m queer.)

As always, I’m interested in what you’ve been consuming! I set time limits for social media apps on my phone, and they are helping!