1/23: The Friday Five
+ AVOIDANCE ALLEY, a new monthly paid pal perk!
What’s up, swimmers?! It’s still January?!
I’m pulling myself off the grad school discussion boards to bring you the first Friday Five of 2026, which is chock full of book recs, pattern recognition, wisdom from one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, and a vulnerable fandom confession from yours truly!
Let’s get into it…
new in the bee-cosystem
🚀: Introducing a new perk for paid pals - AVOIDANCE ALLEY, a 90-minute virtual co-working space on the final Friday of every month at 10a PST / 1p EST, where we get together to tackle whatever we’ve been putting off! This space is just as much for me as it is for you, so let’s open those envelopes and emails, make those appointments, balance those budgets, unload that dryer, send that text, finish that thing, together. Mark down January 30th, a week from today!
☎️: Catch up with Call Your Coven! It’s never too late to check in with the energies of this month with January 2026: Happy New Year. Then, find out what this kind of forecasting work means to us, how we approach it, as well as how we want you to approach it, in Coven Convo: The Ethics of Prediction!
THE FRIDAY FIVE 🖐️
Here’s what’s gotten me through this wacky week:
My Year with Oscar Wilde — Sometime last year, I walked by the little free library in my neighborhood and was drawn to a copy of The Collected Oscar Wilde. I’m familiar with the iconic queer ancestor, of course, but haven’t read much of his work, so I took it home with me. At the beginning of this year, a 1 collective year and a personal 6 year for me, I zeroed in on the idea of spending the whole year in relationship with one artist—not exclusively, of course, but intimately. Oscar Wilde, whose use of the green carnation as a symbol of homosexuality is depicted on The Magician (1) of The Gay Marseille by Charlie Claire Burgess, was an obvious choice, and while I haven’t started any of Wilde’s official works, the introduction by Angus Fletcher has already set the scene and affirmed my decision to see where this creative relationship goes!
I’ll write more on this endeavor later, but for now, I want to share this quote about Wilde’s favorite creative philosophy, aesthetics, and how he employs humor in his work, which I also share in the upcoming CYC forecast for February 2026:
"Wilde [says] that for human significance to be generated, pleasure and humor give the truest mirror… As in mathematics, formal refinement and beauty of expression imply an underlying truth, the sort of order that inspires us to take good actions, even when life is too complicated. Paradox, riddle, the joke, and humor at many levels will enter the picture here, because these cognitive devices are the mind’s mechanism for simultaneously seeing more than one side to any question. A joke is an instantaneous perception of the doubleness, the doubling, involved in all perceptions that rise to the level of those complex conditions life actually presents to the thinking mind."
Synchronicities — I have a friend who would call our synchronicities by loudly proclaiming, “Carrot!” And while I’m not sure carrot is my preferred nickname for this phenomenon, which was popularized by Carl Jung and “refers to the coming together of two or more events for which a rational explanation does not exist,” I like the idea of a moniker. So I asked in the Discord server if anyone had their own. Then, I wrote about it in Week #3: January 19-25, 2026, saying “The third week of a ten/one year (3+10 = 13, 3+1 = 4) asks us to notice patterns, even though they could turn out to not mean much of anything.”
Week #3: January 19-25, 2026
·Welcome to Week Three. You are here. You are alive. You are loved. Perhaps that chant will prove helpful this week, even if you already know and relish in it.
As I try to always at least consider taking my own advice, I have been tracking my own patterns this week… First, a class I’m taking this quarter on Personality and Psychodynamic Theories, covered Carl Jung this week. My reading for school was literally about synchronicities! Then, I received an email from a beloved editor, asking if I would consider reading and blurbing an upcoming book on Tarot and Jungian theory. Next, I pulled an oracle card after writing about synchronicities in my daily pages, and it said small magic, which feels like the perfect way to describe them, and might be the way I name them in my everyday life…. I think that’s it so far, but it’s been so fun to track this thread throughout the week!
Update to come in this Sunday’s email on Week #4!The Intersection of Art and Care — I’m taking a Field Study class this quarter that’s asking us to engage with spheres of cultural identity by experiencing it them in our incredibly multicultural city of Los Angeles. To further educate myself on different races and ethnicities, I’ve decided to attend various events and expositions by artists of color, and the first one was a conversation called “The Intersection of Art and Care” between curator and choreographer Rashida Bumbray and artist and abolitionist Patrisse Cullors. It was a truly incredible evening and I learned so much! New tabs on my web browser include the Jail Bed Drop Project by JusticeLA, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, and Bridget "Biddy" Mason, to name a few.
(Prentis Hemphill, pictured above on the right, was unable to attend due to a family emergency. The evening began with a collective prayer for them.) To share from the reflection I wrote for class, which is of course filtered through a clinical lens:
"Throughout the evening, Cullors spoke of the need to move away from ‘economies of violence’ and towards ‘economies of care.’ …The health care and mental health systems were named for being profit- and carceral-oriented models, and it illuminated for me how important it is to my ethics and values to provide accessible services as I begin practicing.
Freedom was a huge theme throughout the conversation… [and] Cullors wondered if freedom is even a realistic thing to strive for while living under a deeply carceral culture, and it made me reflect on the concepts of "free association" and "free speech," both of which are vital to the therapeutic space. Rapport and trust are essential to "the working alliance" of an effective therapeutic relationship, and I will have to take into account the barriers that could be in place during initial sessions with clients of color, as I am a white woman, and white people have not historically created spaces for people of color to experience safety or freedom.
It was a true honor and privilege to be in the room, and to hear such cultural wisdom, history, and hope for the future being shared. …this was a beautiful and rich first event that reminded me my place as a human, and a future clinician, is to be a humble listener and creative collaborator."Sports Romances — Okay, so shock of the century, I’ll never be over Heated Rivalry, and thanks to SMUT CLUB BOOK CLUB, I’ll get to read the whole Game Changers series over the course of the next 6 months. After I finished Game Changer (our first meeting is January 31, and you can sign up here), I found myself jones-ing for another, so instead of reading ahead (slash re-reading Heated Rivalry for the bazillionth time), I read another Rachel Reid hockey romance, Time to Shine! It was cute! It had neurodivergent and ace/demi rep! But it wasn’t very explicit because… hockey bros! So then I picked up How You Get the Girl by Anita Kelly, a sapphic basketball romance, which also has neurodivergent and ace/demi rep! But this time, it’s explicit because… women!
Okay, I’m a little biased — I love Anita Kelly. And this is technically the third in a series of interconnected books, coming after Love & Other Disasters (bisexual woman x enby on a cooking competition show) and Something Wild & Wonderful (M/M, meet-cute while hiking the PCT). Why this title doesn’t have an ampersand is a question I have for the publisher… but I’m about halfway through it now and it’s soft, sexy, and employs friendly competition as a certain kind of foreplay, which is super hot to me. I’ll keep you posted, but I have high hopes for a happy ending.
LOOK AT THEIR SWEET FACES AND SEXY TATTOOS AND COZY HOODIES! I LOVE ROMANCE BOOKS. Elle x Julie forever <3The San Jose Sharks — Y’all. This one’s catching me as off guard as it likely is you… I’ve become an accidental fan on one singular hockey team, and it’s Team Teal! Here’s what happened: Hockey romance brainrot resulted in an invitation to see the LA Kings play the SJ Sharks. I accepted because I love a live event and an excuse to wear my new “I’m Coming to the Cottage” sweatshirt. I told my longtime bestie about the upcoming game and she proceeded to tell me about Macklin Celebrini (71) and Will Smith (2), aka the baby sharks, who are best friends on and off the ice. I did get the chance to see Mack play—He scored! The crowd/I went wild!—but Will was still out after being injured in November (which led to Mack’s first on-ice fight…!). He’s since returned and everyone has been super chill about the reunion, including the NHL…
Anyway… the Sharks are playing the Rangers at home tonight, which is a thing I now know, and I will be keeping an eye on the game on my phone while pretending to be a normal person who’s out with friends. Do I care about hockey as a whole? Still no. But do I suddenly care very deeply about my hometown team (I’m from Sacramento, but we very much root for Bay Area sports), all of the wholesome players they have (an older player had a sleepover with the baby sharks after last season and now when they play together, it’s called The Sleepover Line…. please), and the fact that they’re rebuilding their team and will likely be amazing in a few seasons? Yes.
Special interests sure are special interesting!
Happy Friday! Let me know if you love any of the things I love, as well as what’s getting you through your week? This post is free for all, so send to your friend!