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florrickandassociates · 3 years ago

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TGF Thoughts: 5x01- Previously on...

Welcome back!! I’m so excited to be writing one of these again. I think this hiatus has been the longest I’ve gone without new Diane Lockhart content in ten years, and it sure feels like it. A lot of important stuff has happened in the time since TGF season four ended (not concluded—ended). Most notably, CBS All Access became Paramount+ and suddenly started offering a lot of content I care about! I kid. 2020 was quite an eventful year, so I was curious how television’s most topical show was going to take it on. TGF is always forward-looking, but too much happened in 2020 to be ignored. And while I didn’t think TGF would have much to say about the pandemic, it seemed impossible to imagine a season five that pretended it never happened. Going into this premiere, I was expecting that they’d either skip COVID entirely or include very few references, but after seeing this episode, I feel like the writers took the only approach that made sense. And that is why they are the writers, and I'm just some girl on the internet who writes recaps.

Anyway, before I dive into the episode, I should also note that my pandemic boredom spurred me to actually pay $30 to watch this episode early as part of the virtual ATX Festival. Yes, I paid $30 on top of the money I spend every month on Paramount+ for this show. But I write tens of thousands of words about each TGF episode—are my priorities really that surprising? I note this not to brag or even to poke fun at myself, but because watching the episode before I knew a single thing about it (not even the title!) completely changed my viewing experience. I’ve never had an experience like this with TGW or TGF. I’m one to search for critics tweeting cryptically about screeners and refresh sites looking for background extras (haven’t done this in the TGF era, though) and read every single piece of press I can find. For any big episode, I usually know the outline of what to expect going in (I even knew about Will before the episode aired in the US!). Not this one! So, I got to be surprised, and I had to—gasp—formulate my own opinions before I knew what anyone else thought! It was really pleasant, actually. I think the structure of the episode worked extremely well for me because it caught me by surprise... and also because I’m the kind of person who somehow managed to write a college paper about Previously On sequences.

I see Tumblr has made it so that “keep reading” expands the post in your dash instead of opening a new tab. I absolutely hate this. Here is a link to the post you can click instead of the keep reading button!

The ATX stream started mid-sentence, meaning I missed the “Previously On... 2020...” title card and skipped right to Adrian saying “I’m retiring.” It was pretty easy to pick up on the device (the directness of the scenes at the start, their cadence, and their placement in the episode made it clear this was meant to mimic a Previously) but the second title card hit way harder because... well, I had no idea if this was meant to be 2020 or some moment outside of real time until a bit later in the episode.

Man, before I get any farther into this, two things that I don’t know where else to put. First, this episode had to cover so much ground. They had to write out both Adrian and Lucca—more on that later--, figure out how to deal with all of 2020, figure out how to either wrap up or continue all the truncated season 4 plotlines, and set the stage for a new season... in 50 minutes.

Second, just wanna shout out the Kings’ other Paramout+ show, Evil, which you should absolutely be watching even if you hate horror. Evil is a Kings show, so it is unsurprisingly topical (sometimes evil takes the form of racism or misogyny or Scott Rudin) and at times very, very funny. I would be recapping it if Paramount+ weren’t attacking me personally by airing it at the same time as TGF. Ever hear of too much of a good thing, people?! (On that note, I am VERY upset with myself for not having made a Good vs Evil joke about the Good shows and Evil. I didn’t even think about it until Robert King made the joke on Twitter, and it was right fucking there. How did I fail so miserably?!)

So STR Laurie, who wants a 20% downsizing, is still a thing. Noted.

This scene with Landau is the only one in this previously that is actually old footage, right?

Unexpected Margo Martindale! Yay! (Ruth Eastman is a character who is so much more effective on Fight than she was on Wife and I’m quite glad they’ve had her appear on Fight several times. It kind of redeems season seven. Kind of.)

I don’t think the writers intentionally chose for Adrian’s book deal to be with Simon & Schuster because it is the most politically fraught publisher (the number of stories about controversial memoirs they’ve picked up in 2021 alone...) but I kind of like that Adrian’s Road Not Taken involves S&S. My guess is they chose S&S because it is owned by ViacomCBS.

“Years ago, I wanted to create a law firm run entirely by women, but it never worked out. So, why not now?” Diane says to Liz. One of the advantages of having twelve (!!!) seasons of Diane Lockhart is that we’ve seen what she’s talking about. And we’ve seen her put this idea forward multiple times, too. I have my reservations about Diane’s brand of feminism, and I’ll say more about how fraught a Diane/Liz firm would be as the show explores the potential issues there, but on the surface I’m kind of excited about the prospect of a Diane/Liz led firm. Diane has wanted this for ages, Liz is a good partner, and this actually makes sense (unlike the nonsensical Diane/Alicia alliance of late season seven, where the only rationale was “well, Alicia needs to betray Diane in the finale, but they’re not on good terms. So maybe we make them business partners so then the betrayal stings more?”). Plus I fully love that Diane would end up running a firm with Alicia’s law school rival.

(Has TGF mentioned that Liz and Alicia were law school rivals? No. Am I still clinging on to that as a large part of Liz’s character? ABSOLUTELY.)

Julius is on trial for Memo 618 reasons; Diane is defending him. So this is still happening. (There’s more old footage here.)

Do they put these references to one/two party consent in these episodes as a wink at the fans? It has to be intentional. (Please do not ask me what the actual law is on this, this show has thoroughly confused me.)

I knew Cush was filming stuff for TGF, but I didn’t know it was for the premiere. She was just posting about it a few weeks ago, so either they shot a lot of it right before air or she posted a while after filming. Anyway, yay Lucca!

Bianca’s still around. And, TGF gets to shoot New York for New York, since Bianca is there. I do wish TGF could do more location shoots; there’s something about seeing an actual skyline that feels more real.

Bianca wants Lucca, who has never been outside of the country (except to St. Lucia, as Bianca reminds her) to go to London and buy her a resort. It’s supposed to be a three week stay and Bianca’s already arranged childcare. Speaking of children, because of COVID and filming constraints, that’s Cush’s real kid in this scene! You can’t really see him, but I recognized his curly hair from Cush’s Instagram, and the Kings confirmed in an interview.

Adrian wants to write a book about police brutality cases he’s worked on. Ruth very much does not want him to write that book. She wants him to write a book without substance about how white people and black people can work together. He, understandably, has no interest in writing this book. (Also, you can see in the background that Ruth doesn’t think Biden’s odds of winning the Democratic primary are good—there is a big down arrow next to his picture, which definitely dates this scene.)

Oh, David Lee is in this episode. He acts like an asshole towards Marissa when she’s trying to help him.

Marissa, not happy with the lack of respect, calls Lucca for advice “for a friend.” Lucca mentions she’s in London and Marissa does not believe her and keeps going on and on about her frustrations and her new desire to become a lawyer—quickly.

Marissa wanting to become a lawyer because she “hates being talked down to” is not a plot I would’ve expected but it’s also one that makes a lot of sense. I think Marissa’s used to being respected and praised even when she’s doing things that aren’t glamorous, so I see how she’d get very restless when she’s no longer outperforming expectations and is instead taken for granted.

Bells toll in the background on Lucca’s side and Marissa asks where she is. Lucca again notes she’s in London and Marissa still doesn’t believe her.

I’m going to miss Lucca so much, especially since we’ll also be losing a lot of the Millennial Friendship scenes with her. Cush is fantastic (even if she never really got enough to do here) and she plays so well off of the rest of the cast. I even sometimes liked the writing for Maia (who?) when she had scenes with Lucca, Lucca is that good.

Jay wakes up sweating and unable to breathe, so he deliriously calls his father-figure Adrian. This whole scene is shot like something out of Evil and (I’m getting ahead of myself here) this plot is the only thing about this episode I felt was a misstep.

“I think you’re my father,” Jay says to Adrian. Heh, I didn’t catch this line the first time around (maybe subliminally I did, since I just called Adrian his father figure lol) but I love that it is included here. Adrian and Jay’s relationship definitely deserves a goodbye.

Adrian calls an ambulance and also gets to Jay before the ambulance somehow. Adrian notes that Jay might have “this thing from China” and... we’re doing the pandemic, y’all. (Minor nitpick: on March 13th, 2020, when this scene is dated, COVID was not “this thing from China”-- we were all aware of it. March 11th was the day Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they’d tested positive and the NBA shut down and travel was restricted and every single brand that had my email sent me a message about their plans and measures. March 12th was the last time I was in my office, and we’d been getting emails telling us to wash our hands and prepare to work remotely for weeks. I went to San Francisco in mid-late February and distinctly remember deciding to leave a burrito unattended on a table while I washed my hands because I was paranoid about COVID... and then I remember making a specific trip to Walgreens to buy hand sanitizer so that didn’t happen again. My point is, Adrian lives in the same world I do. On March 13th 2020, he would not be treating COVID like it was some new thing he’d vaguely heard of.)

(I am going to nitpick this timeline, but please know that I’m only doing it because I can, not because I think it’s necessarily a bad choice. Lines like this do feel a little forced, but I see the reason for introducing COVID as something new rather than going for the line that’s exactly historically accurate. I also am pretty sure there are references to dates in March/April in s4 of TGF that are now going to be contradicted by this episode, but I truly do not care. The writers get a pass on this one.)

We skip slightly back in time to the beginning of March after the MARCH 13TH title card, or maybe this is supposed to be after March 13th and my own memories are preventing me from believing these face-to-face interactions were happening. Who knows.

Michael Bloomberg is... here, again, I guess? He asks Diane to assist with a Supreme Court case about gun control. I guess it does add some weight to the plot and make the stakes feel higher.

Oh hey, this case is the 7x17 case!!!! Love that continuity.

Diane and Adrian are both at the office late, working, and there is an unnecessary split screen that feels even more unnecessary when you consider that the editing alone was enough to create the parallel.

Diane and Adrian have a nice convo (which I’ll really miss, their dynamic is great and this really feels like a successful partnership) as they wait for the elevator. When the elevator dings, they nearly tumble down into nothingness because... the elevator never came. Apparently this is a reference to an law old show I’ve never seen that killed off a character this way, and it’s meant to be a wink at how they are not going to kill off Adrian.

I do not know why I remember this, but I do: after they killed off Will, a critic (Noel Murray; I just googled to confirm my memory) who didn’t want to spoil things tweeted, “Exactly 23 years and 2 days ago, Rosalind Shays fell down an elevator shaft.” Please tell me why I remember this reference that I didn’t even understand well enough to have tracked down the original tweet in under a minute. (https://twitter.com/NoelMu/status/447942456827326464)

Back on this show, Diane and Adrian share a drink and talk about their wishes. Diane wants to argue in front of the Supreme Court, and Adrian encourages her to speak up. His own near-death experience motivates him to trash the book Ruth has him writing, and Diane trashes the (bad) legal strategy someone else prepared for the Supreme Court.

DIANE IS WEARING JEANS!!!!!! Tbh, I think my favorite part of this episode is how many slice-of-life scenes and settings we get. These are always my favorite moments. I love the satirical and political stuff too, but the character moments are what get me invested enough to write these. (Yes, Diane in jeans constitutes a character moment.)

Diane tells Bloomberg she wants to be involved and advocates for herself. Kurt gets a call on their landline (hahaha) from Adrian.

God, I love Diane and Kurt. Not only is their banter fun, you can just see a different, more relaxed side of Diane in these scenes. Diane tells Kurt she has good news for herself, but bad news for him since she’s arguing for gun control. She asks him to help her prep for court, too.

So this is before Jay is rushed to the hospital, because now we are back at the hospital with Julius, Diane, and Marissa. I do not believe any of these people would be setting foot in a hospital like it’s any other day on March 13th, 2020. But I'm trying not to nitpick.

I get why they chose to give Jay a rather severe case of COVID. I just don’t get literally anything else that follows from the initial shock of Jay having COVID.

I see why the writers chose March 20th (the actual Illinois stay at home order) as the next date for this timeline. I still do not believe that people were in this particular office on that date.

You know what else I don’t believe? That RBL just shut down for two weeks and was like, no work is being done. Did law firms really do this? I can believe it if it’s an excuse to cost-cut, and I know there were massive layoffs, but this seems... really weird???

Why are they setting up a teleconferencing infrastructure (didn’t they have one at LG? In season five?) if they are not planning to do work?

Lol Diane explains what Zoom is, very slowly. She asks everyone to “download a program called Zoom.com” which is one of the first Zoom jokes I’ve chuckled at in a while.

Marissa is not happy to hear that there’s no work for her in a work-remote world (this I believe 100%), so she calls Lucca again with more questions about law school.

Love these NYC and London location shots. Wish they could do that for Chicago.

Lucca asks Bianca to help get Marissa into a law school, fast, and Bianca tells Lucca to use her name... then offers her a job.

Marissa is at the office, alone, boxing up her things, when one of the office phones rings with some dude offering her a spot in a law school class. I guess we are really all-in on this! (Why would Lucca have given a firm phone number not specific to Marissa, though?)

Adrian and his corrupt girlfriend decide to shelter in place together. I still do not understand why he is okay with her being corrupt. I also don’t really understand why they’re going from talking about sheltering-in-place to George Floyd. How did we just skip from late March to late May? Are Adrian and corrupt gf having a conversation about sheltering-in-place two months into sheltering in place?

Okay, I am not doing so good at this no-nitpicking thing. Again, I understand why they need to merge several scenes into one to keep things moving. And I guess they could just be getting around to this conversation.

I’m going to nitpick again, I can’t help myself. How did we just go from a scene of Adrian specifically talking about sheltering in place to a scene of Adrian bursting into a bustling and maskless DNC headquarters room? How!? The only masks in this scene are on TV!! There are like ten people in this scene!

Anyway, more importantly, Adrian tells Ruth off and screams at her that she needs to listen to him instead of acting like she knows the way forward. He is completely right.

Why is travel from London closing down in May 2020? Is it because this scene is supposed to be at a different place in the episode? Liz is asking Lucca to come back home from her three week stay in London (which has now lasted three months but travel is just now closing down), and Lucca’s hesitant to come home.

This is all happening via Zoom, btw. Lucca’s in her hotel, Diane and Adrian are at their respective homes, and Liz is in the office. All of this feels right. There is a chat off to the side of the screen where you can see Adrian and the others discussing how to unmute on Zoom. Very real. Though probably not very real in late May 2020. Feels more like April. I am convinced this scene got spliced in later to help the episode flow because everything in this scene (except the TV footage that definitely was added later) feels like it should be happening in the March section.

Lucca mentions that Bianca offered her a job, and at this point we as viewers know how things are going to go—Lucca's going to end up taking it. Liz types in the Zoom chat that they don’t want to lose Lucca. When Lucca tells them how much Bianca’s offering ($500k/year, go Lucca!), Diane types “Shit.” into the chat. “Shit’s right,” Liz replies. “Yes... What should our counter be?” Diane replies. Lucca is kind enough to point out the messages are not private (again, this feels like March not May) but I think knowing that their reaction to topping $500k is “shit” tells her all she needs to know.

Diane’s background still says that RBL is a division of STR Laurie. Weird how little we are hearing about the overlords except the 20% staff cut.

Liz and Adrian chat and decide the only way to keep Lucca is to make her a partner. Which, yeah, if you’d just made her a partner years ago when you told her she was in the running for partner and then offered it to fucking MAIA, maybe she wouldn’t be considering Bianca’s offer. Lucca is definitely one of RBL’s stars, and I don’t think she’s wrong to feel like they don’t value her enough. They treat her well enough to be upset about losing her, but not well enough to have already made her partner and not well enough to actually give her authority (even though she runs a whole department). I’d be pretty unhappy too. It kind of feels sometimes like they take her for granted, and I don’t know that Lucca is one to feel like she owes a company anything. She’s more of an “I’m out for myself” type.

Madeline and the other partner we’ve seen a few times who isn’t Liz/Diane/Adrian, walk into the office (wearing masks! Which they take off as soon as they enter a room with Liz! Without asking her if she is okay with this! TV logic!) and ask who is replacing Adrian. They think this is a good time to reevaluate having a white name partner of an African American firm, and they are spot on. Liz tries to deflect, noting that Diane is already a name partner and was before Liz even joined, but Madeline and other partner (whose name I really wish they would say so I can stop calling him “other partner”) won’t let up. Their position is that Diane shouldn’t have been made a name partner then—all she did was bring in ChumHum, an account that quickly left the firm. Good point.

“What is this firm if it’s not African American? It’s just another midsized all-service Midwestern law firm, one of 50,” Madeline argues. The other partner says Liz needs to remove Diane and promote two African Americans to name partner. Liz laughs and asks if they mean themselves. Madeline does not—she's concerned about the number of black associates they’re letting go. Liz heads out, but this conversation is very much ongoing.

And I think it’s a very interesting dilemma! There’s a lot of mileage the writers can get out of this, because I don’t think there’s a right answer or a wrong one. It’s all about what Liz decides she wants the future of the firm to be. If Liz chooses Diane, she might be choosing something that works for her personally or that she thinks is a safer financial bet—but she’ll be choosing to work at a firm that can no longer be thought of as a black firm, and she’ll be choosing to move away from her father’s vision for the firm. And since the plot hinges on what Liz will decide rather than what’s objectively the right path forward, there’s a lot of interesting tension there I can’t wait to see.

(My favorite thing about Adrian leaving is that Liz will likely get more to do, especially when it comes to managing the firm. Adrian tends to speak up first, but Liz is more than capable of managing without him and I’m so excited to see what she does when her ex-husband isn’t constantly talking over her.)

Marissa and Lucca video chat with Jay. He’s still in the hospital. One thing that bugs me about how this episode handles COVID is that I never really get the sense that any of the characters are particularly afraid of the virus. Maybe none of them were. But you’d think you’d see a little of that fear, the weird dance of trying to assess others’ comfort levels with masking, etc., in an ep specifically about living through this time. ESPECIALLY since someone they all know and are close to has been hospitalized for MONTHS with this thing! It’s just so weird to go from a scene where people wear masks until they come in contact with other people (when masks matter the most) to a scene of someone in the hospital with COVID.

And now Jay’s weird hallucinations start as his battery dies on the video chat. I really, truly, hated these hallucinations. I was ready to be done with these from the second they started. They’re weirdly shot, they go on for too long, and they feel like the clunkiest parts of Mind’s Eye when Alicia starts having a debate in her mind about atheism mixed with the (far superior) hospital episode of Evil.

I don’t have much to say about these hallucinations except that I hated them a lot. When there’s the reveal that Jay is hallucinating a commerical, I almost came around on the hallucinations because that’s kind of funny and inspired. And then several more hallucinations popped up and they had a round table and Jesus got added to the mix and I was like, nope, this is bad in a very uninteresting way. I reject this.

I feel like the Kings didn’t have much to say about COVID, the actual virus. This episode is definitely more about what the characters’ lives were like during COVID and not the pandemic itself. I think they likely got a lot of their COVID commentary out of their system with their zombie COVID show The Bite (I have not seen The Bite due to it airing on Spectrum On Demand, which I have no way of accessing. Like, I would have to move and then decide to pay for cable in order to watch it.) I also suspect a lot of their commentary on COVID isn’t going to be specific to the virus and is instead going to be about things like mask-wearing and vaccinations becoming political. And, really, that’s just a new variation on talking about polarization... and they’ve been talking about polarization for years.

In fact, they even wrote a whole series about an outbreak of a (space-bug-spread) virus that caused political polarization before Trump was even elected. BrainDead is basically commentary on the pandemic before the pandemic even happened. Soooooo I get why they are more interested in recapping 2020 than in doing a Very Special Episode about themes they’ve been talking about for years. (I still think they would’ve benefitted from at least one character being afraid of getting sick or getting their family sick.)

There is likely some interesting content in these Jay hallucinations. I hate them so much I cannot find it. You know when you’re just on a completely different wavelength than the writers? This is an example of that.

Also I’m not a fan of the shadowy directing. I think this is meant to look cooler than it does.

Have I mentioned yet that I absolutely love the “Previously On” device for this episode? It’s such a fun, propulsive way to get through the slog of 2020. Scenes can be short and to the point, and each scene has to do a lot of lifting to fill in the gaps. I think that leads to scenes that are better constructed and telling on lots of levels—where are people when they’re quarantined? Who’s wearing casual clothes and when? What about this scene defines this character’s life at that moment in time?

Bizarrely, even though this episode is pretty much all plot (this happens! Then that!), I actually found this to be one of the most character-driven episodes TGF has ever done. There’s a lot of story, but most of that story is about how the characters reacted to 2020 rather than overarching plots that will weigh on the rest of the season. This episode covers a lot of ground, but it does it with character moments that resonate.

Now it’s July and Diane’s prepping to argue in front of the Supreme Court. Kurt’s helping her witness prep and it gets a little personal... and that ends up turning Diane on. Good to see McHart hasn’t lost its spark. (Remember how Kurt cheated on Diane in season 7 of Wife? No, me neither, because that never happened.)

Corrupt judge is back. Adrian playfully tries to distract her from work. Then he takes a video call from Liz, who updates him on the conversation she had with John (so that’s his name) and Madeline. I guess that part of May was close to July? Anyway, Adrian isn’t surprised to hear that people are upset at the prospect of Diane being one of two name partners.

Liz is at the office in workout clothes and I love it!

They’re losing 15 black associates (and Adrian and Lucca) and 4 white ones, Liz says. This sounds like a very big problem. (I’d be curious to know what that is as a percentage of the firm and how the racial composition shifts.)

Liz knows it’s not exactly up to her if Diane stays on as name partner (the other partners get a vote, but I think Liz knows she has a lot of sway here). She’s also wondering if Biden could win, and if so, would it be to the firm’s advantage to be black-owned? Interesting.

“Well. If you’re thinking it, then Diane’s thinking it, too,” Adrian says. He’s right. “White guilt. It runs verrrrry deep on that one, huh?” Ha. He is right about that, too. I actually can’t decide which of these interpretations is correct, because it could be either even though they seem contradictory. (1) Is Adrian saying it with a hint of mockery because he knows Diane will fight for her partnership even as she would say she’s a huge supporter of black businesses? (2) Is he saying it because he knows Diane would have enough white guilt to realize what her presence as a partner means and think through the implications? I think it is, somehow, a combination. I’m interested in this line because this whole dilemma (from Diane’s POV) is something that’s very familiar. Diane’s always been an idealist who will betray her ideals for personal gain. That sounds like an attack, but I mean that as neutrally as I possibly can. There are so many examples of this that this is kind of just a character trait of hers at this point. Usually those ideals are about feminism, but this situation seems closely related.

Adrian overhears Corrupt GF talking about Julius, Diane, and Memo 618. You would think she would wait to have this conversation until there is no chance of Adrian overhearing, because if Adrian overhears, he might...

... do exactly what he proceeds to do and hop into a car with Diane to give her a heads up. (I think I’m just going to have to accept that the mask usage rule on this episode is “we use masks to show that the characters would wear them, but we don’t want to have scenes where characters are fully masked because that’s annoying.” If that’s not the rule, then why else would Adrian be masked outside... and then take off his mask as soon as he gets into a confined indoor space with Diane?

Baranski looks ESPECIALLY like Taylor Swift in this scene.

Adrian tells Diane what he knows. He dug deeper after overhearing Charlotte, so he has even more info. “If you tell me, I will use it,” Diane warns. Adrian knows that, so he takes a moment to decide. And he decides that he cares more about Diane and Julius than about his relationship with a corrupt judge.

Diane and Julius are masked in court. Visitor and the judge are not. They use masking in a clever way in this scene: Diane uses being masked to her advantage because it means no one can possibly read her lips, so she can use the info Adrian fed her against Charlotte without any fear of spies. Charlotte, who is unmasked, guards her lips with a folder, as the Visitor watches interestedly.

Diane convinces Charlotte to recuse herself. Charlotte says she’s making a mistake; Diane does not care.

The new judge is, unfortunately, the idiot who doesn’t know anything about the law. Uh oh.

Charlotte decides she’s done sheltering in place with Adrian. He tries to talk through the conflict, but Charlotte says “You made your choice, Adrian. Julius Cain over me.”

“The choice was about right and wrong, Charlotte,” Adrian tries to explain. I mean, yeah, but if you’re dating a judge who has admitted she’s totally corrupt, didn’t right and wrong go out the window a while ago?

Adrian seems to think the other people involved in the events are bad and Charlotte is good. I am not convinced. I don’t think she’s the big bad, but I don’t think she’s good.

Charlotte points out that he invaded her privacy. She is right about that. “You said the choice was between right and wrong. Turning over my emails was the choice,” she said. I get her POV. But also, she is corrupt.

I do not like the way the part of the scene where Adrian physically restrains Charlotte to keep her from leaving is shot. I don’t think this is an abusive scene but I think it should’ve been shot from a little farther back so we could see it’s more like Adrian reaching out in desperation than trying to choke Charlotte. Because it very much looks like he is trying to choke Charlotte.

He tells Charlotte he loves her. She says it’s too late and leaves. “Maybe you won’t be with me. But you keep down this path... you’ll be done, I’m telling you, you’ll be done.”

I think something that I’ve been missing in these interactions is that I didn’t quite realize until this scene that the Adrian/Charlotte dynamic is more interesting than Adrian liking a corrupt judge. I think he truly believes Charlotte is a good person who got caught up in some bad stuff, and that she can bounce back from it. I’ve always seen Charlotte as someone who is corrupt for herself and then ended up going along with the corruption of others, too, so I’ve dismissed her and the relationship. This is the first scene that has felt real to me, and the first scene where she’s felt like more than a caricature. Kind of sad it’s the last she’ll get with Adrian—now I’m actually starting to find her interesting. Notice how in these last few sentences I’ve used her name instead of “Corrupt GF”!

Charlotte says she loved Adrian too, but that’s not enough. Awww.

He can’t really be surprised though, can he?

Now it is August and we get to see Diane and Liz react to the announcement of Kamala Harris as Biden’s VP pick, and I would like to thank the writers for giving me the opportunity to see Diane and Liz react to this. It’s kind of fan-service, but it’s also a nice tie-in to the girl-power theme of the Diane/Liz alliance.

Diane and Liz realize that Adrian’s probably not a good candidate for 2024 if the DNC only wants one black candidate and Harris is the clear front-runner. Liz suggests keeping him on as partner instead, in a way that very much implies this would be her ideal solution. Diane, being Diane, says she was liking the idea of an all-female firm. Liz hesitantly says she was too, and Diane senses the hesitation.

“Let’s look again at which associates to fire. I’m worried we’re losing too many African Americans,” Diane switches the subject. How have they still not made this decision? If any employees know downsizing is coming, and they’ve had months to act on it, assuming there are jobs elsewhere, people would’ve been jumping ship by now.

But that’s not the point of this scene. The point of this scene is that Liz corrects Diane: “Black. You can just say Black people.” Very nice moment underlining the tension. Diane means well, but she’s still acting like a white lady who doesn’t know how to act around black people... and she wants to (and, I guess, already does) run a black firm. Major yikes.

Marissa and Lucca are talking again. Marissa does not want to be in law school—she just wants to be a lawyer. Lucca won’t accept Marissa’s refusal to memorize meaningless rules: “Marissa. I know that you know how to play the game, but you have to pass the bar to get into a position to play the game.” Why does this line make me love Lucca? This line isn’t even anything amazing. It’s just a line that cuts through the bullshit and makes a good point.

Marissa keeps going, insulting all of her peers and teachers, and Lucca figures out how to cut through that, too: she tells Marissa that she’d hire her as a lawyer if she killed someone, but only if Marissa passes the bar. Marissa is instantly intrigued.

“Why are you leaving here? I’ll miss you,” Marissa says.

“Because they won’t pay me what I deserve,” Lucca says in a matter-of-fact tone. “Anyway, I thought they fired you.”

“But they didn’t mean it. It’s like the smoothie place—they kept trying to fire me and I just kept showing up,” Marissa replies. That checks out. (Love the callback!)

Lucca tries to get Marissa to come over to England. Marissa shuts that down as Lucca gets a news alert—and it’s not good news.

Our next date is September 18th, 2020 and I will get my nitpicks out of the way up front! I don’t really know why it is daytime for Lucca when she reads the news, considering it was already the evening in the States when the RBG news broke. And, also, it was Rosh Hashanah, so Marissa probably would not have been sitting in her bedroom studying... she most likely would’ve been with family or friends. OK I’M DONE. FOR NOW.

Diane is getting ready for her arguments in front of the Supreme Court. It’s almost time! She’s in casual clothes but has on a wonderful mask. She’s standing in front of Kurt’s guns to make a point (love that she’s using her video call background to her advantage) and there are several people in her bedroom getting the tech all set up. I have noted before that they only built one set for Diane’s apartment, and it’s just a massive bedroom. Diane choosing to be in front of the guns does a nice job of cutting off my question about why she’d be arguing in front of the Supreme Court from her bedroom rather than the home office she absolutely would have.

Kurt walks in and tries to shake hands... he’s clearly not very COVID paranoid, and Diane seems to be, and... that’s something I might have wanted to see? How was Diane okay with Kurt taking risks that also affected her?

Diane confirms she intentionally chose to stand in front of the guns. That’s when Kurt gets the push notification. He pulls Diane into the bathroom to show her the news. He hands her his phone and Diane’s face falls. She starts tearing up. “2020 just won’t let go,” she says, speaking for us all.

Normally I hate things that are like, we’re going to contrive this so the news hits at the worst possible moment! This works for me, because the Supreme Court plot for Diane feels more like something that exists to be a through line for the episode. It would also be a little hard to work in RBG’s death as a main plot point—and it is definitely important enough to be a main plotpoint—if it didn’t also affect something in the world of the show.

Also, another reason I like this contrivance is that it makes it all the more powerful when Diane says, “It’s over. He gets to nominate someone. Another Kavanaugh! We’ll have a conservative court for the next 20 years. My whole fucking life!” She’s not thinking about how this affects her case (and that case is basically a life-long dream for her). She is thinking about way bigger things, and knowing that her mind goes to the bigger things before the personal with news like this really underlines how big of a deal RBG’s death was.

Diane tells Kurt, “I don’t deserve you. You don’t agree with me.” “I can still feel bad for you,” he responds. He holds her while she cries.

Jay’s hallucination thing is back. Now Karl Marx is here. So is Jesus. I’m so done with this. It’s nice to get a break from writing.

Malcolm X is also on the roundtable and now they’re talking over each other in that way that everyone on this show always does. (RK gave an interview about Evil where he said he likes having the children on that show talk over each other because he grew up in a household like that. I did not need to read that interview to understand that RK likes scenes where people talk over each other.)

If anything happened in those hallucinations, I missed it, because I didn’t pause the episode. Because I do not care about the hallucinations. Because I hate them.

Now it’s November 2020... Diane’s watching election results and rocking back and forth. She tells Kurt he can go watch Fox News in the other room (so they do have more than one room!). He says he’s fine—he thinks Diane needs it more.

“Yes, but Kurt, if you stay, I know this isn’t sensible, but... Trump seems to get more votes whenever you’re sitting on this couch,” Diane tells him. Ha, I relate to this kind of superstition so hard. “Are you serious?” Kurt says. “I am so deathly serious,” Diane responds. “Whenever you’re sitting here, Arizona goes for Trump. Humor me, please. Just go in the other room.”

When Kurt tries to kiss her, she pulls away: “No, no, no. No kiss. If you kiss me, we’ll lose Georgia.” This scene feels so, so real and perfectly captures what it was like (at least for me, though I don’t have a Republican husband or anything) watching election results come in.

“Uh, if you lose, we’ll be fine, right?” Kurt asks. “Kurt, let me just say this. I’m only saying that we won’t be fine so that the universe will grant me a win,” Diane responds. This scene is so fun and so good! It simultaneously captures a relatable mood, adds some levity, gives us a window into Diane’s life, and shows some of the tensions in her marriage?! I want this all the time!

Kurt leaves the room. Diane pours more wine.

Later, with Diane still rocking back and forth with anxiety (just you wait for the several more days this will drag on!), Kurt brings in the champagne. “That was for when Hillary won. I can only drink it if Biden wins,” Diane protests. Did I also refuse to drink any celebratory alcohol until things were absolutely certain? No comment.

“It’s odd you progressives resisted religion. You seem to have a hundred religions to take its place,” Kurt says, speaking on behalf of the writers’ room. (This joke doesn’t get written if the writers don’t believe this and probably even see it in themselves.)

“Go away, Trump. I mean Kurt,” she shoos him away. Have I mentioned yet I love this scene?

“Love me even if you lose?” he jokes (though I do wonder if this isn’t that joking? I think it is, but he keeps saying it!) as Diane gestures at him to get out.

I could do without the joke about Diane’s heart on the TV for a couple reasons. One, it goes on too long. Two, I was very worried something would actually happen to Diane. You’d think that would make the scene feel more tense, but it does not, because it takes me out of the moment.

“Ok, God. You know I don’t believe in you. But I will believe in you if Joe Biden wins. I’m sorry. I know that that’s not what Jesus taught. There’s nothing in the New Testament that says, ‘Believe in me, and I’ll make sure your candidate wins,’ but I need Joe Biden to win. I’m sorry, God, but I just do. I need some faith.” This is a little much but... yeah. Also, is this the first time Diane’s flat out said she’s an atheist? I think it is, though I’ve assumed as much for quite a while.

The next day in court, masks are no longer required if you’re a series regular and votes are still being counted. I remember those days. Marissa thought Diane was checking in on Jay... Diane was not. She was checking on vote counts.

Apparently Jay’s finally being released from the hospital!

Bad news for Julius—the idiot judge finds him guilty of some nonsense charge and sentences him to seven years in prison.

Diane says not to worry, and Julius asks “Why not?” Good point.

Then we have election results! We skip, specifically, to December 14th and the electoral college vote. I’m a little sad we skipped over the huge party that was November 7th, but I get why they’d rather keep things moving along. I think showing November 7th in an uncomplicated way would’ve just been too close to fanservice. But, man, what a day.

Diane, in a red hoodie with leopard print that she somehow manages to still look classy in, is ready to pop champagne. Then she hears that on January 6th, a joint session of Congress will count the electoral votes and there might be a debate. “Nope. If I open it now, something bad will happen,” she reasons. “I’ve waited four years. I can wait another few weeks.”

It’s been almost a year and they’re still somehow negotiating with Lucca, but I understand why they’d space this out across the episode. Otherwise we’d have to say goodbye to Lucca in the first like, 15 mins of the episode and all those scenes would be in a row. I can forgive (and still nitpick) choices like this when the reasoning behind them seems sound.

Adrian says they don’t want to lose Lucca. He, Liz, and Diane are all in the conference room, and they ask Lucca for a yes or no on their latest offer by the end of the call. Diane offers Lucca partner—she'll be the youngest partner in the firm’s history—and she’ll get a $500,000/year salary. Adrian tries to sell her on being part of American history by being part of the firm.

“We are a black firm, Lucca, and we need you,” Liz says with a lot of passion for someone who knows she might very well partner with Diane. Diane looks at Liz with a bit of suspicion at this, wondering if Liz is showing her cards.

Lucca manages to make the wifi malfunction (or she gets very lucky) and uses the disconnection to call Bianca for a counteroffer, even though they said they needed a yes or no on the spot.

“They used George Floyd because they want you for less. They have never appreciated you as much as I do. All those scars, all that time being taken for granted and undervalued has made you a fighter. It’s made you someone I now want,” Bianca tells Lucca. She gives Lucca a counter offer of $1.3 million and the title of CFO. Lucca takes it. Is there really another choice? (If she were concerned about loyalty to the firm and the partnership was what she wanted, she probably would've just taken it.)

(Also, the partners can’t really act like Lucca is making history by being the youngest partner ever when they passed her over for partner two years earlier and offered it to Maia! To MAIA! Who had like three years of work experience! And yes I was fine with Alicia and Cary getting partnership offers with four years but, one, that was a scam, and two, Alicia and Cary actually worked. Oh, I see I still hate Maia with a passion. Back to THIS season...)

Lucca apologetically informs Marissa she’s leaving and the offer was just too good to turn down. I believe it. I also believe Lucca wants that job more. What has loyalty to RBL gotten her? She's someone so talented and good at her job that she just gets job offers from acquaintances all the time (starting with Alicia!). RBL appreciates her, but just enough to appease her while still undervaluing her. I don’t know that I would’ve believed a plot where Lucca actively job hunts, but I definitely believe this.

“Marissa, we don’t have to work together to be friends,” Lucca tells Marissa. I’m going to miss this so much. Why is this the best material Lucca’s gotten in ages?! I think one of the things that makes Lucca such a great character is that you can see why everyone instantly wants her on their team. She’s a fantastic friend (without giving too much of herself), she’s not a pushover, and she is incredibly sharp and able to get to the heart of any situation. I love her and I’m sad we won’t get to see more of her.

(On that bit about friendship—I can’t write about Lucca’s departure without writing about the moment I realized just how great of a character Lucca was. It was in 7x13, when Alicia has her breakdown that’s seven seasons in the making... and Lucca supports her. But the writing, and Cush’s performance, never make it feel like Lucca exists to be a part of Alicia’s story. Lucca seems like her own fully formed person who happens to be supporting Alicia at this moment. I don’t think I can overstate how tough of a task it is to get me to care about the other person in a pivotal Alicia scene, especially when that other person was added to the cast in the final season and many suspected she’d just be a replacement for a different beloved character! Anyway, Lucca’s been great for years, and I’ll miss her.)

Just when I thought I couldn’t hate the hallucinations more, we get a hint that they are going to continue: Jay sees one right after he learns that Marissa’s used her quarantine to start law school and he’s done nothing.

Jay says he carries a gun now and it’s “performative.” I have no idea what that means and Marissa and Lucca don’t seem to, either.

Another thing I like about Lucca’s final scene is that it isn’t rushed. We have time for all that, and also for Lucca to tell Marissa about the time she stole her breakfast sandwich, and for Marissa to react to it, and for Marissa to find Lucca’s Birkin bag, and for Lucca to tell Marissa to keep it, and for Marissa to react to that, and for Lucca to sappily say “think of me when you use it,” and for Marissa to nonsensically reply, “you think of me when I use it,” and there’s still a little bit more of the scene after that!

Marissa’s silly line makes Lucca tear up. “God, I’m gonna miss you guys,” she says. “I’m gonna miss this. You make me smile. I didn’t smile much before you guys.” Awwwwwww. This is also so true to character! Her friendship with Alicia aside, Lucca’s definitely said before she’s not one to have friends (which is hilarious because she is, as I've said like 100 times, a fantastic friend and also just like, the coolest person??? Who wouldn’t want to be HER friend?!).

She says she has to go because she’s getting too emotional and says goodbye. She’s also super sappy and when Marissa says, “you were the best,” she responds that they were the best TOGETHER! Awwwwwww.

What a nice, fitting goodbye for Lucca. There’s no bad blood or fireworks—she just makes a change like a lot of people do. I’d like to think she’ll still be friends with Marissa and Jay after this. I don’t want too many Lucca references in future episodes, but I would really like it if we see Marissa and Jay update each other on the latest from Lucca, or if a scene begins with Marissa closing out an Instagram post from Lucca of her kid, or something. I wouldn’t want clues about what Lucca’s up to, but I’d love to see that she’s still a part of Marissa and Jay’s lives.

Now it is January 6th. Liz, Adrian, and Diane sit on the floor of the mostly empty office, watching TV coverage and drinking. It’s so relaxed it’s almost surreal, and it, like many other moments in this episode, feels like a slice of life. Everyone’s dressed casually and no one is worried about appearances or looking like the boss.

“God, have you ever seen anything like it. It’s so fucked,” Diane says. Adrian’s more optimistic—the courts rejected most of the challenges to election results! “System worked,” he says. “Yay.” Liz says in response. She’s not as optimistic as he is.

“Liz. Liz. Sometimes when things work out, there is no parade. There’s no congratulations, but I’ll tell you this: We live to fight another day,” he explains to her even though she makes a good point that a system just barely hanging on doesn’t bode well for the future. (She doesn’t say all this, but that’s a very loaded, “Yay.”)

“Yeah? Then why are you leaving the law?” Liz asks. Diane seconds to the question.

Adrian announces he’s still retiring—and he’s moving to Atlanta. He wants to go to the south to help “create and consolidate political power.” He’s excited to start over and inspired by Georgia going blue. This is a very nice exit for Adrian. I fully believe that he’s interested in political organizing, that he’d be good at it, and that he’s ready for a change. I don’t think he’s always the most progressive person (of the three in this scene, Liz is absolutely the most progressive one, though Diane probably thinks she is!), but I absolutely think he thinks of himself as an activist and I believe that if he’s going to step away from the law, he’d do so to make a move like this.

Adrian—and Lucca, but especially Adrian—probably both got better exits thanks to the events of 2020. If Adrian had just left to be groomed by the DNC, that would’ve been a predictable and boring ending for him. His candidacy would, obviously, go nowhere, and the whole thing felt weird from the minute it was introduced. But this? Adrian being energized—like so many others were—by the ways the world changed in 2020 and using his already announced departure from the firm and recent breakup as a chance to start over and make change? This is great!

Adrian asks Liz and Diane what’s next for them. Liz says that she thinks the Biden admin will be better for black businesses. Adrian asks if they’re replacing him, and Diane says, “I think the big question is, are you replacing me?” She’s smart. I like how this scene goes from friendly to tense very fast, with everyone kind of testing the waters. Adrian tries to force the conversation, Liz opens with something vague yet pointed, and Diane speaks what’s previously been unspoken.

Liz says it’s not her intention to push Diane out. “I can’t change the color of my skin,” Diane replies. “I know,” Liz laughs. Audra’s delivery is fantastic on that line.

“Hey, I’m gonna fight for my partnership,” Diane says. “I know,” Liz says. The tone of this scene is so different from previous partnership drama on these shows and I’m excited about it. This is just a bunch of adults talking about business decisions with each other and treating each other as equals?? It's not backstabbing?? Or drama?? No one is hiding things?? It’s refreshing and I hope this plot stays like this. We’ve done so much partnership drama that I think drama that stems from a real, pressing question that has no easy answers and isn’t anyone’s fault is going to be much more fruitful for the show.

Adrian heads out—ah, I see now this scene is set in his empty office and this is why they are on the floor—and gets a nice last moment with Diane. And then they give him a last moment with Liz, which I knew they would but was still glad to see.

Liz asks if he knows what he’s doing—he says he’s not sure.

Adrian asks if Liz knows where she stands regarding Diane. “It’s going to be interesting,” Liz says. I don’t think she’s decided what she’s going to do yet.

It wouldn’t be an Adrian and Liz scene if Adrian didn’t have some unsolicited advice. “Diane’s a terrific lawyer, but this firm belongs to you. Your dad built it. He did, Liz. Despite all his faults. You got to run this place the way you want. This is a black firm. And after today, the world needs black firms. You got me?” He tells Liz. He makes it seem like Liz gets the choice and then tells her what to do. She says, “I got it,” signaling she understood him but not that she necessarily agrees.

I cannot wait to see what Liz does next!!!!!!! About this but just in general!!!!! Without Adrian there giving her constant advice I feel like she can grow so much and the show will have to give her more to do!!! I think Adrian, for all his many wonderful qualities and all he brought to the show, can suck all the air out of a room with his charisma, and Liz usually ends up suffering as a result. She’s such a capable lawyer in her own right, but Adrian has a way of making it always seem like he’s right—even in arguments she wins. I’m excited to see Liz lead (or stumble at leadership; she is fairly new to management) without Adrian’s direct influence.

Liz walks Adrian out and it’s cute. They run into Marissa and Jay. “Everybody fun is leaving,” Marissa notes. Liz is minorly offended, but playfully. Heh.

Adrian asks Jay how he’s doing; Jay says he’s a long-hauler but he’s doing okay. I like that they included that moment in Adrian’s goodbye sequence. It’s a very little thing, but it underlines that Adrian cares about Jay.

Then Liz interrupts to note that Trump pardoned a lot of convicted and corrupt Republican officials....... including Julius.

Everyone celebrates, but especially Diane and Marissa. Diane lets out her wonderful laugh and then we, finally, get to the credits. Because now that the previouslies are over, it’s time for the real show.

The credits are absolutely delightful, btw. I was a little worried some of the kittens would blow up, though! Once I relaxed and realized what they were up to—literal puppies and kittens because Biden won—I couldn’t get enough of these credits. They work so well because they accurately capture the way I (and all of these characters, except maybe Julius and Kurt) feel about the election results, but it’s so exaggerated that you know the kittens and puppies aren’t a realistic representation of our new reality. They’re just too good to be true, but you may as well enjoy them for a minute. I’m sure we’ll be back to exploding vases next week.

What a great episode! My timeline nitpicks and whatever they’re trying to do with Jay aside, I was blown away by how well the writers managed to move on from season 4, tie up loose ends, and write out two main characters. And they did it all while making me revisit the events of 2020, a year I don’t think many of us want to spend much time thinking about! This episode was enjoyable, fun, emotional, and clever. I don’t know what to expect from the rest of the season, but I’m definitely excited about the show in a way I haven’t really been in quite some time.

This season’s naming convention seems to be titles that end with ... and only have the first word capitalized. I want to see more.

Season FIVE? There have already been as many TGF seasons as there were TGW seasons prior to Hitting the Fan?! Time flies.

Please writers: No topical episodes this year-- no pee tape, no Melania divorce, no Epstein. None of that business.

Sorry if I repeated myself here. I never proofread these things, and I wrote half of this on Saturday and half of it today (Wednesday) and the days in between were an absolute blur so I cannot remember if I said the same things about this episode twice.

#the good fight #tgfthoughts

16 notes · View notes

matamisin · 6 years ago

Note

Consider: Mina is a genuinely happy and positive person, but everyone has bad days (especially people who have been thru trauma, like seeing your loved ones regularly beaten to a bloody pulp). The thing is that Mina just. Refuses to show that trauma has actually been effecting her. She starts suppressing negative reactions to situations bc she wants to "stay strong." Beginning of the year? She cried when they got rescued from USJ. End of the year? "Lmao guess we survived another one! Ha! Ha! :)"

oh my god like millennial humor?? if yeah then lmao mina please

if not ahhh Mina baby you have feelings too that you gotta tend to!\

Alright- All (or at least all the angst headcanons I received) are answered below the cut! Please be careful, there are some, well angsty things in there!

TW: Eating Disorder, Gore/ Graphic Depictions, Homophobia, Depression, Suicidal Tendencies/ Self harm mention, Death, Possible spoilers to those not caught up with the BNHA manga- Please ask to tag if I missed any!

(looking at all these warnings made me realize omfg YALL DID NOT HOLD BACK IM CRYING ASK AND THOU SHALT RECEIVETH I SUPPOSE)

a-single-eyelash asked:

Denki accidentally hurt someone as a kid, say a sibling or good friend, with his quirk. It made him hate his work, until he saw a hero with a similar work to his. This is what made him think that not only is his quirk cool, but also that he can become a hero. Well until, he hurt Sero. His boyfriend, got electrocuted by him on the battlefield. (Sorry this is an idea I’ve had for a fic)

O H

BRUH THAT HIT ME LIKE A TRAIN COMING OUT FROM BEHIND THE BUSHES I THOUHGT THERE WAS GONNA BE A HAPPY ENDING THIS IS STILL GOOD THO

anonymous asked:

Bakugou is still sad, Sero is suicidal (Read to may fics about it man), Kami is legitimately afraid he’ll disappoint his parents, Tsu feels to normal, Kiri feeeeeelsss way to useless, and idk maybe Aoyama feels ignored. My own angsty headcanons.

Ah, yeah I can see how those can play into those characters!

anonymous asked:

Sero’s fight or flight response with a villains ice-like quirk (if your for that headcanon) OR Sero overwhelming his quirk trying to rescue a goddamn building of people

OH YA I AM FOR THAT

Also NO STOP HAVE I GOT SOMETHING IN STORE ABOUT COLLAPSING BUILIDINGS

anonymous asked:

Ashido + Bakugou bond over their quirks being destructive and not really knowing how to use them to actually *help* people

oh wow, I’ve never actually seen it that way.

But how about this: while they vent to each other about how their quirks can’t help people, the other is like, full on giving them descriptions of how their quirks actually CAN but they just never realized and they’re opening each other’s eyes while having their own insecurities knocked down

anonymous asked:

Omg your angst au is so angsty it’s beautiful

AH thank you haha!

anonymous asked:

Angsty headcannon boi- Sero was bullied in middle school for having wonky teeth and actually had braces. Which is why he has such a pearly white smile now. Sero was the last in his class to get his quirk and when he did he was laughed at because it was a ‘useless quirk’

n O ANON IM SOB

IM CRYING LEAVE HIM ALONE ILL SQUARE UP WITH THOSE BULLIES

anonymous asked:

Angst head cannon. Sero flinches whenever kirishima hardens. Sero’s parents are majorly homophobic and are actually quite strict. So whenever sero isn’t with bakusquad he tries to revise but it doesn’t work and he’s scared to ask for help.

Aw, man that’s heart wrenching to have parents so unsupportive- I feel it :( He’s just in a constant worry state whenever they’re around

anonymous asked:

If you’re still accepting the angst hcs… i think kaminari gets like really overcharged whenever there’s a storm and since they moved to the dorms there’s nowhere for him to release all the excess energy. So he just kinda hides away in his room in pain.

Aw, that’s terrible!

I dunno.. I feel like that one day when someone finds out during a storm, they’ll like, ask the teachers about “where someone could discharge a lot of energy askingforafriend” and they immediately know who they’re talking about and they’ll ask Powerloader and Mei and others in their department to build something for him to discharge all the excess AND be able to utilize it somehow :0 just a thought!

anonymous asked:

My headcannons: Sero is anorexic Bakugou has PTSD Kaminari has depression Kirishima had self-esteem issues Ashido is perfect (canon)

Oh that last part- she is, she is *clap**clap*

Though.. I will say that just because the others are haunted by those- it doesn’t make them less perfect. It’s their struggles that they learn to cope with and grow from, and it makes them, well, them. Not a definition of perfect can define that :’)

(sorry just speaking from my thoughts cause these hit close to home ahhh)

anonymous asked:

Lmao i sent a lot sorry if their not the best but hopefully some heart strings will be pulled

NONSENSE ANON ALL MY HEART STRINGS WERE PLUCKED BY ALL THESE AND NOW ITS YALLS TURN

transcandydemon asked:

Todocanon; todoroki has constant nightmares of the boiling water incident and of his father hurting him or his mom which causes him to not get as much sleep ie his calm attitude and how he’s not quick to get into conversations because of exhaustion

oh ya, such a traumatic past is def something that could still be haunting him in his dreams :’( but when the others notice, they’ll make sure to check up on him and try to find ways to help reduce nightmares or at least comfort him whenever they’re in his dreams

anonymous asked:

Deku head canon : deku is super jealous of kirishimas and bakugoa relationship since hes been trying to get close to kacchan for years and kirishima managed to do it within days

D’: He probably would feel that- jealousy’s very strong! But ah, in my personal opinion, i think he’d feel that, but after time learns that maybe it was best that he stopped dwelling on it and moves on, and learns to accept and be happy that he and Bakugou could at least be acquaintances that could eventually work well :’)

anonymous asked:

Denki headcanon: where he wants to be as close to bakugo as kirishima is and he tries so damn hard but takes bakugos insults to heart and he really does get torn up and upset about it(ex: the sports festival scene )

Oh wait which scene? Dunce face or?? :0 but yeah, I feel like he’d take it to heart at times. (but my bakukami heart tells me to say that when Baku realizes he gives him a good ass pep talk and beings hold back on his insults, or reassures Denki)

anonymous asked:

Bakugou could have PTSD and nightmares

Oh same headcanon! :’D Ah, but poor Bakugou. I’m sure the others would take it into mind and be aware of it and help him subtly so as to not provoke him, :’(

violetsare-tblue asked:

Bakugo: because of his inferiority complex, feels like he needs to prove himself over and over or he’ll be just the victim again Iida: his left arm is completely numb. He isn’t paralyzed and he can move it. He just can’t feel anything in his hand or arm. Makes holding hands with someone feel empty and useless Sero: he is so scared of being worthless as a hero and a person. He doesn’t want to be left behind by his classmates so he overworks himself and comes to school with random bruises

Oh mmhmm, I definitely see the Bakugou one! Especially after what he said during his fight with Deku, it def shows :(

Aw, Iida probably still looks back at his actions back in the Stain arc and regrets the errors of his ways. Luckily, I’m sure he’ll find someone who helps him through it and reminds him that mistakes don’t define him :’)

:’( Serooo MAKING ME CRY

casua-aria asked:

I have this Sero headcanon where he was the disposable (like how when tape dispensers run out and become disposable) friend in groups throughout his childhood, but now that he goes to UA, he has true caring friends that would never do that to him.

D: !!

That’s so sad- he must have thought his quirk was just life taunting him for being “disposable” hence the tape quirk :( but heck yeah, once he meets the students of UA he definitely begins to see that he wasn’t the problem in the past, but rather those that he was “friends” with!

anonymous asked:

Sero remembering very clearly all the pain that happened when his arm got cut off, maybe being a little scared of Kirishima for a few days after he first wakes up? Idk

OH YEAH THAT ONE HURTS

Like maybe.. once he’s able to respond again, he flinches and has an anxiety attack when he sees Kirishima because the sight of him just sends a flood of the memory to play in his head OOF

anonymous asked:

A personal favorite that nobody’s really thought of: a villain cuts off one finger from each of Ochako’s hands so she can’t use her quirk

OH MAN THATS BRUTAL OMG

That’s so dark!! I feel like a villain would do that should they get a hold of her and, mm maybe wanna rile up someone close to her to lure them in

meptoonzart asked:

Kirishima traitor

b R U H ID CRY MY EYES OUT IF HORI MADE HIM THE TRAITOR

Anonymous said:

I have a lot of angsty headcanons about Kaminari specifically so I’ll just spam you with those. He attracts electricity, so he often gets struck by lightning and has almost died from it twice. Kaminari knows people think he’s the traitor and it eats him up inside every day. He’s been ‘propositioned’ by quite a few creeps because he’s pretty and his quirk is, well, what it is. He has nightmares a lot and it causes power outages, he’s terrified his classmates will hate him for it.(1/?(Idk2maybe)

Sero got into a fight with someone after the sports festival, because how the hell did he make it into UA’S hero course, and Kaminari happens to be with him and he actively threatens the dude who started the fight with his quirk. No one bullies his friends. His overuse of his quirk is slowly killing him, he hasn’t told anyone that it’s destroying his brain. Bakugo reminds him of living in an abusive household but he doesn’t know how to say it so he laughs it off.(2/?(Okaymaybe4wearegettingthere)

Kirishima and Sero are the first to find out about both the frying brain and the abusive household, and Sero asks Kaminari if he wants to go try something. Kaminari says sure and Sero reserves a training ground for them, and Sero swings around with Kaminari and he hopes it works for Kami the same way it does for him. Sero is smiling because he doesn’t know what else to do, but swinging through the air helps him feel better and free. It helps. But there’s always, always the anxiety (¾)

the anxiety of ‘Maybe today is the day I fall’, but he doesn’t realize that Kaminari is helping him stay grounded. He won’t fall. Not when he gets to see Kaminari fuller of life than he’s ever been. They land on one of the buildings in ground Beta, and laugh like idiots as it starts to rain. Kaminari’s dying, Sero is a mess, and they just sit there for hours, past the end of their reservation, talking through their anxieties. Kaminari is scared to die. Sero is scared to lose him. (Okay1more4/5)

Sero promises Kaminari he’ll be there, he’ll do everything he can to help keep him alive as long as possible, and he asks Kaminari how long he has from his last estimate. Kaminari laughs, starting to cry. Six years. Sero tells the Bakusquad, and they promise him that they’ll be there when the time comes. Not villains or Dadzawa could stop them, and finally it does. For only being a hero for three years, he’s made history for kids who have terminal illnesses (ranoutofspacedammit)

And the drawbacks of quirks come more into light. Kaminari may not be a great student or hero, but he brought hope to a lot of people, and everyone will miss him. They can’t hear thunder crack without thinking of him, can’t see the golden sunrise without thinking of his smile. Can’t even bear to look at the classic lit section in a bookstore. He saved people and raised awareness, but he wrecked their hearts as well. (Somehow this turned into a near-fic I’m so sorry Hope you’re doing well(Done))

ANON OMG THANK YOU FOR THIS BASICALLY FIC IM CRYING THERES SO MUCH I DONT EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START CRYING

iamnootthedabmast-r said:

Heard you want some angsty headcannons- so Kaminari tends to stay up due to his quirk and he likes to stay in the dormitory lobby, so he just sits on the couch on his phone or just sits there in the dark- but this leads to him finding some secretive angsty stuff about other people in the dormitory for ex; Bakugou comes downstairs and just starts cooking cause he has terrible night terrors and Kaminari just quietly witnesses as Bakugou cries silently while he eats. (Part 1)

(Part 2) the next morning Kaminari kind of wants to try ask or comfort him but feels rude and awkward so he also kind of struggles with the knowledge of knowing that everyone in his class is a little to a lot of broken. So yeah, sorry if it’s a little confusing- in awkward when it comes to writing what I want to write…

DUUDE THIS IS SUCH A SAD CONCEPT IF YOU WRITE IT I WILL LEGITERALLY PERISH ON SPOT

Anonymous said:

May we… suggest directly… angsty oneshots? Please feel free to ignore this if you preferred hcs

(lmao sorry, im not caught up with the manga or anime to know what the first part is referrring to :’D) but ah yeah I’ve seen that headcanon, not too sure how to feel, but it’s out there!

#tw eating disorder #tw gore #tw graphic depictions #tw homophobia #tw depression #tw suicidal tendencies #tw self harm #tw death mention #bnha spoilers #long post #ask to tag #ahh i wont tag much else of bn/ha so it doesnt gloom up the tags!#all i want for christmas is queue

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years ago

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THE WEEKEND WARRIOR 4/2/21: GODZILLA VS. KONG, THE UNHOLY, OXFORD FILM FESTIVAL

I’m really not sure how I feel about doing the Weekend Warrior at quite the level I was doing last year. Even though the box office is slowly coming back, it’s still very frustrating to write about, and honestly, the Disney announcement last week about all the movies being delayed or dumped to Disney+ kinda brought me down. It just tells me that many studios are giving up on theatrical just as people have gotten so used to watching stuff at home, they don’t care about going out and being in rooms with other people, especially strangers. I guess I can understand that, but all the negativity that pervaded the narrative in 2020 is finally doing its damage as theaters reopen and some may have trouble even filling 25% capacity for some movies.

Then again, I’ve just come back from a weekend at the Oxford Film Festival, which became one of the first American film festivals to go in-person, although it is doing a bit of a hybrid in-person with virtual, so locals and a few out-of-of-towners (mainly me) were able to see all of this year’s great programming at one of the outdoor (and then indoor due to weather) venues. I was on the feature doc jury and got to see 11 terrific documentaries, some of which hopefully will get distribution and get out there, but why wait? While most of the movies are geoblocked to the United States (and some to Mississippi), there’s so much great programming to check out over the next month, and you can do so via OxFilm’s virtual cinema, which includes many great features and shorts. As far as the juries, I can highly recommend the Jury Prize winners, In a DIfferent Key, a fantastic film about autism directed by Caren Zucker & John Donvan, and the runner-up, Patrick O’Connor’s Look Away, Look Away, an amazing bi-partisan look at the fight to keep the Confederate-created flag of MIssissippi or change it, depending on your side of the fight. It’s a doc that really needs to be seen in other parts of the country. (Unfortunately, those are both geoblocked to Mississippi, as is Chelsea Christie’s Bleeding Audio, which tells the tragic story of the rise and fall of San Francisco’s The Matches and won for Music Documentary.) There are movies available everywhere in the United States though, and you can check out the full line-up of movies here.

Anyway, OxFilm gives me hope that there’s a future for theatrical moviegoing and as far as the box office, that hope comes in the form of the first holiday weekend since NYC and L.A. reopened as the Good Friday day off for most schools and Easter Monday that continues the vacation for others might persuade people to check out what’s happening in theaters, and fortunately, it’s a movie that’s so easy to market based on the fact that it has two of the biggest movie monsters facing off for the first time since 1963.

That’s right -- opening on Wednesday is the anticipated GODZILLA VS. KING KONG, starring… well, does it really matter who it stars other than Zilla and Kong? Probably not. The fourth movie in the Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. Monsterverse takes the star of 2017’s Kong: Skull Island ($168 million at domestic box office) and pits him against the title character of 2014’s Godzilla ($200 million) and 2019’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters ($110.5 million). MInd you, I just include those domestic grosses for reference, because even if we take into account that scary dip from Godzilla and its direct sequel, it won’t really matter when you take into consideration a little thing called…. COVID! We’ve already seen movies gross more than $50 million since everything shutdown

I already reviewed this over at Below the Line, so I don’t have much more to say in that regard. It’s good if you like giant monster fights but isn’t much beyond its amazing monster battles, which is why I won’t even mention the actors that appear in it or any of the characters.

Godzilla vs. Kong is probably going to be the widest release since COVID hit with 2,600 theaters on Wednesday and then expanded to 3,000 on Friday when Regal reopens many (but not all) of its theaters. While I expect it to do fine on Weds and Thursday, making probably $4 or 5 million, it should really explode on Good Friday, which should allow it to make somewhere between $18 and 20 million over the three-day holiday weekend, so let’s say $25 to 26 million before Monday.

Also opening theatrically, this one on Friday is the Screen Gems horror movie THE UNHOLY from Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures, the directorial debut by Evan Spiliotopoulos (writer of Disney’s mega-blockbuster Beauty and the Beast live action movie and the Rock’s Hercules ), who adapted the story from James Herbert’s novel “Shrine.” The movie stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as disgrace journalist Gerry Fenn who is trying to get stories for a supernatural tabloid when he comes upon a deaf teenager named Alice (Cricket Brown) seemingly praying at an oak tree in a rural community in Massachusetts. When she seemingly gets her hearing back and is able to talk, word quickly spreads that she’s able to communicate with a benevolent Virgin Mary-like spirit that gives her the powers to heal. Since this is a horror movie, you can probably guess that things quickly get ugly and scary. THe movie also stars the wonderful Katie Aselton as a local doctor, who doesn’t do very many doctor-y things.

Before we get to my review -- and I’ll blame the review embargo on it for this week’s column being so late -- let’s talk about the movie’s box office potential, because religious horror-thrillers have quite a significant draw over a certain audience going straight back to the ‘70s with movies like The Exorcist and The Omen (the latter one of my all-time favorites) and The Unholy does dip into the toe of both of those. It’s been a long since there’s been one of those which might make this a draw for audiences into theaters, especially over Easter weekend -- that may be meant as irony -- but there’s also a little movie called Godzilla vs. Kong, which is just way more of a draw even with it being on HBO Max, but also because it’s likely to get better reviews. I’m not sure how many theaters Sony is getting this into, but I expect it’s somewhere around 2,000 or so, and that might be enough for the movie to make around $4 to 5 million this weekend, but probably VERY frontloaded to Friday.

Now let’s get to that review…

The Unholy begins with a flashback scene to “February 31, 1845” with a scene right out of the Salem Witch Trials of a woman being mutilated and strung up to a tree. This plays a very important role in a story that involves a fairly ludicrous premise that mostly involves Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character finding something called a Kern Baby, essentially a porcelain doll wrapped in chains that he decides to smash in order to create a fake supernatural story about how smashing the doll causes crops to fail. In fact, smashing it releases the spirit of the woman we saw in that opening scene possessing a deaf teen girl named Alice who starts to heal everyone in her rural community, while also releasing the evil that had that woman’s spirit bound into the doll in the first place.

There isn’t that much more to say about the plot to a stupid horror premise so full of religious hokum as more characters get involved with trying to figure out if Alice is actually healing people or not. This includes the benevolent local priest Father Hagan, played by William Sadler, and a Bishop (really) played by Cary Elwes, who is using such a bizarre accent, kind of like a cross between the Bronx and a heavy Irish brogue, that it’s impossible to take his character very seriously.

Just knowing what studio garbage Spiliotopoulos has written did not make me very hopeful for his directorial debut, which is just all over the place in terms of tone and pacing, dragging at times and then throwing the type of cheap jump scares and schlocky CG horror creatures at the viewer with very little of it actually being very scary. " (The creature version of "Mary" just looks silly.) Besides being highly derivative, ripping off almost every religious horror movie, both bad and good, some aspects of the movie are so laughably bad that it’s hard to take much of it seriously. Worst of all, it ends with just a really horrible climax that reverses any good will the movie might have created with the casual young horror fans that usually like this thing. Honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s another one of those unrare “F” CinemaScores we see whenever a studio horror film doesn’t bother matching up to the quality of something like The Witch or Hereditary. Horror fans definitely want more than the usual these days, and The Unholy just seems like a lazy waste of time.

A movie that I’ve been looking forward to seeing and just haven't had time to watch is Emma Seligman’s SHIVA BABY (Utopia) that stars Rachel Sennott as 20-something Danielle who runs into her sugar daddy (Danny Deferrari) at a shiva with his wife (Dianna Agron) and their baby, as well as her parents (Fred Melamed and Pollyw Draper) and Molly Gordon as Danielle’s ex-girlfriend. It’s actually playing at the newly reopened Quad Cinema, so who knows? Actually I did watch Shiva Baby and was kind of disappointed. It seemed very twee and precious, and Sennott's character seems like the type of spoiled Millennial white girl that I hate in indie movies like this. I also just didn't find it particularly funny. Oh, well.

Streaming Friday on Netflix is Ricky Staub’s CONCRETE COWBOY, starring Idris Elba, Caleb McLaughlin and Lorraine Toussiant with McLaughlin being a teenager who moves in with his estranged father (Elba) in North Philadelphia where he learns about his passion for urban horseback riding.

Opening in New York (at the Angelika and Village East) on Friday and in L.A.and other cities on April 9 is the Oscar-nominated International Feature THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN (Samuel Goldwyn Films), written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, and starring Yahya Mahyni, Dea Liane, Koen De Bouw and Monica Bellucci. Tunisia’s submission is the story of Sam Ali, a Syrian who leaves his country for Lebanon to escape the war with hopes of travelling to Europe to be with the love of his life. To fulfill that dream, he allows his back to be tattooed by a contemporary artist that actually brings more trouble to the poor young man.

Hulu will debut the doc WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (Hulu), which I still haven’t gotten around to watching but seems like an interesting subject for a doc.

A little closer to home at the still-closed Metrograph, they’re playing Claire Dennis’ 2004 film L’Intrus through April 8, and on Friday will open Sky Hopinka’s experimental debut maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (Grasshopper Films) which follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier as they wander around the Pacific Northwest, mostly speaking in the Chinuk Wawa language. The latter is free to digital members ($5/month, $50 a year!) and $12 for non-members�� pretty easy decision there, huh? Ms. Dennis’ film is also available to members.

Not only that, but New York’s Film Forum is also reopening this Friday with the double feature of Almodovar’s remastered Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and his new short The Human Voice, starring Tilda Swinton; the fantastic doc The Truffle Hunters; as well as his Fellini’s masterful Oscar winner La Strada (Janus Films, 1954), starring Anthony Queen and the wonderful Giulietta Masina! (That’s what I’ll be seeing this Sunday!) On top of that, Film Forum will continue its fantastic Virtual Cinema programming, which will launch Eric Roehmer’s A Tale of Winter (1992) this Friday with Roehmer’s A Tale of Summer (1996) joining the Virtual Cinema starting Friday April 9.

Got exciting news that Film at Lincoln Center will be reopening on April 16, but this week, they’ll be launching the latest edition of Neighboring Scenes, its annual series of Latin American films done in conjunction with Cinema Tropical. It’s 10 films that you can watch with an all-access pass for the low price of $80, and it usually has some good movies in the program.

A couple others out this week, including Funny Face and Every Breath You Take (Vertical), which I don’t even have time to look up what they’re about. Sorry!

That’s it for this week. Next week, Neil Burger’s sci-fi coming-of-age thriller, VOYAGERS, will hit theaters.

#the weekend warrior #godzillavskong #theunholy #movies #reviews #streaming #shivababy

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easyfoodnetwork · 5 years ago

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This Passover Is Not Like Other Passovers

A Passover Seder table | Shutterstock

The coronavirus pandemic will drastically reshape the holiday that, by definition, is about families coming together

On the afternoon before their Passover Seder last spring, Liz Alpern and Shira Kline’s Brooklyn garden apartment was crowded with furniture that the couple had gathered for the evening ahead. A giant bowl of mole sat out on the counter, while in the fridge, packets of lamb stew meat were Jenga-stacked next to containers of homemade gefilte fish. Kline and Alpern, who co-owns the artisan Jewish food company the Gefilteria, had been planning the event for months. Invitations had been sent out seven weeks in advance, and 27 people would be joining them that evening. It was the first time, says Alpern, that “all of these different sides of these families were in the same place.”

That Seder was a success. And so this year, the plan was to go even bigger, with 28 people. But in late March, two weeks before the holiday, Kline and Alpern were still sorting out their Passover plans. “I think there’s this part of me, maybe unrealistically, that thinks that there will be some solution in which some of us can be together in person,” Alpern said at the time. “Whether that’s being in a giant room together [where] we’re six feet apart or whether that’s doing something outside.”

Alpern and Kline weren’t alone in the uncertainty of their last-minute planning. This year, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to interrupt every aspect of daily life, Jews across the country are scrambling to remake tradition in time for Passover Seder, an elaborate dinner hosted on the first and — outside of Israel — second nights of the holiday, which this year begins on April 8. The ritual, which is sometimes referred to as Jewish Thanksgiving, is often cited as the most widely observed Jewish custom. During the meal, the story of the Exodus is retold, freedom is celebrated, and a matzo-fueled feast is served to the family and friends, both Jewish and not, who gather around the dinner table.

“By definition, Passover is about family coming together,” Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen co-owner Evan Bloom says. “The thing that makes this crisis and this Passover unique is that despite needing to come together, we can’t.”

That is particularly true for traditionally observant Jews, who abstain from using electricity during part of the holiday and thus won’t have the option to celebrate together virtually. But less traditionally observant Jews are using Zoom and other platforms to connect with loved ones in different cities and neighbors across the hall. Passover kits have been hawked online by the likes of Wise Sons, Oh! Nuts, and Chabad, and made by parents to be shipped to their offspring. Some people are rewriting their Passover menus, swapping traditional large-format dishes like brisket for simpler recipes and even takeout.

For Francine Cohen, the Seder meal will take the form of a socially distant potluck with a handful of neighbors in her Upper West Side Manhattan apartment building. One neighbor is handling the matzo ball soup, and another a green vegetable, while Cohen herself will prepare her grandmother’s brisket with apricots and prunes. The dishes will be portioned, packed up, and left at each neighbor’s doorstep on the morning of the meal. In the evening, everyone will sit down and connect for a Seder on Zoom.

The plans for the building’s Seders, which will likely take place both nights, were hatched in late March when a 60-something neighbor told Cohen she was craving human connection. With this arrangement, Cohen explains, “neighbors will not be without a way to celebrate Passover with other humans.”

Justin Feldstein says that his family’s plan for a Zoom Seder means that he doesn’t have an excuse not to show up. In recent years, Feldstein, who grew up on Long Island and now lives in Boston with his fiancée, hasn’t been able to get back to Long Island to attend his family’s mid-week celebration, which is overseen by his 90-year-old grandmother. But even though Zoom means their attendance is certain, their menu remains a question: While New York-based family members will receive care packages of matzo ball soup, stuffed cabbage rolls, and mandlebread that Feldstein’s grandmother made and froze before the pandemic hit the U.S., Feldstein himself lives out of the delivery range. After asking himself what an “appropriate” meal would be for the occasion, he settled on Chinese food. “At least there’s no leavened bread that I know of,” he says. “And I’ll stay away from moo shoo pancakes.”

In keeping with tradition, the family’s dinner will include a discussion of the 10 plagues, a central part of Seder. This year, it will have a timely spin. During a phone call with his grandmother, Feldstein recalls that she said, “Now we just have two plagues: the first being Trump and the second being the virus.”

In 2020, the script for a modernized, darkly humorous Passover text seems to write itself. Consider the case of Gal Beckerman, a New York Times Book Review editor who flew to Southern California with his wife and kids in order to be closer to his parents and sister. Their 14-day quarantine at a house next door to Beckerman’s parents is scheduled to end on the eve of Passover. “It’s a weird serendipity,” Beckerman says. “We’ve joked that it’s not just the freedom of the Jews from slavery, it’s our freedom from this house that we’ve been stuck in.” When the quarantine ends, they will walk next door for a family Seder.

Back in Brooklyn, Celia Muller, a media lawyer, has found that the Passover holiday tradition and her Jewish heritage have offered a sense of grounding during the pandemic. In recent weeks, she’s been “thinking about the fact that if it weren’t for a whole ton of perseverance from the time of Exodus down till now... I would not be here,” she says. “I’m drawing on that strength of the past. So to me, it became really important to have Seder.”

Muller is planning to host a second-night Zoom Seder where she will use a card deck version of the Haggadah, the book that guides the evening’s festivities. In her emails to attendees (full disclosure: myself included), she attached cards for each guest and wrote, “The Haggadah we’re using explicitly contemplates a soup/salad break, so definitely have some nosh on hand even if you don’t go for matzo ball soup.” She offered snack suggestions including gefilte fish—“(shhh some of us like it)”—and links to a few recipe possibilities for the meal.

Muller also reminded her friends of the elements of the Seder plate, which sits at the center of the Seder ritual. An edible guide to the evening’s retelling of the story of the Exodus, it includes an egg, a roasted lamb shank, bitter herbs, and a sweet paste made from fruit and nuts called charoset, along with other edible symbols. For participants who can’t or don’t want to track down the items, Muller says, “I will make sure that I have everything and everyone can participate symbolically.”

And for those who don’t relish the prospect of trying to source Passover ingredients, there is the Passover kit. In New York, La Newyorkina owner Fany Gerson has been selling Mexican Passover meals whose options include Mexican-style gefilte fish and matzo ball soup, roasted carrots with harissa, brisket tamales, and flourless chocolate chipotle cake. Over in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wise Sons is selling kits with “everything you need on the Passover [Seder] plate but the plate,” Bloom says. They include candlesticks and a full meal including brisket, matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, and chopped liver; the Haggadah that Wise Sons uses at its annual Seder at the Contemporary Jewish Museum will be available for free online.

Passover kits also ensure that Seder hosts won’t miss any of the essentials, particularly matzo, which was rumored to be sold out weeks before the holiday. “Retailers were calling, frantic, three weeks ago — everything got wiped out,” says Aaron Gross, the owner of Streit’s, a 95-year-old matzo manufacturer that produces some 2 million boxes of matzo each Passover from its factory outside of New York City. But now, he adds, some of those retailers are calling and saying they no longer need those orders.

Even without a shortage of matzo, some are planning to make their own. Before California’s shelter-in-place order went into effect, Vicky Zeamer, a design researcher in San Francisco, tried to find yeast but found that stores were already sold out. She recalls thinking, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to make bread without yeast?” And then she realized that bread without leavening is the definition of matzo. “Between [the lack of yeast] and the plague, it’s feeling too much like Passover,” she quips. Although Zeamer isn’t planning on joining a Seder, she may watch the 1995 cartoon episode “A Rugrats Passover,” which is considered a childhood touchpoint for many millennial Jews.

Across the country in Brooklyn, Alpern and Kline are also planning to bake matzo. A week before the start of Passover, the couple had settled on hosting a Seder using the platform Seder2020. They’ve invited a large group of family ��and a few of my friends who couldn’t have fit in my house,” Alpern says. This year, there will still be a big Seder and a busy kitchen, but the living room won’t be full of furniture. Instead, it will be crowded with voices, beamed in from Passover tables near and far.

Devra Ferst is a Brooklyn-based food and travel writer. Follow her on Instagram @dferst.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/39IdiJm https://ift.tt/3e1Stf9

A Passover Seder table | Shutterstock

The coronavirus pandemic will drastically reshape the holiday that, by definition, is about families coming together

Across the country in Brooklyn, Alpern and Kline are also planning to bake matzo. A week before the start of Passover, the couple had settled on hosting a Seder using the platform Seder2020. They’ve invited a large group of family “and a few of my friends who couldn’t have fit in my house,” Alpern says. This year, there will still be a big Seder and a busy kitchen, but the living room won’t be full of furniture. Instead, it will be crowded with voices, beamed in from Passover tables near and far.

Devra Ferst is a Brooklyn-based food and travel writer. Follow her on Instagram @dferst.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/39IdiJm via Blogger https://ift.tt/2Rho7vt

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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yoursongpodcast · 8 years ago

Audio

For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #79, songwriter Marian Call talked about her song 'Oregon Trail', which is from her album 'Standing Stones'.

youtube

Wikipedia has articles about the actual historical Oregon Trail, as well as the 1970s/1980s education game 'The Oregon Trail'. The idea of the 'Oregon Trail Generation' was described in a 2015 article named 'The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before and After Mainstream Tech' by Anna Garvey in Social Media Week.

I also recommend an essay that Marian Call wrote about her song 'Standing Stones', which is the song that follows 'Oregon Trail' on the Standing Stones album.

In our discussion, I made reference to Marian Call's interview on 'Make Me Smart', which you can hear on the Marketplace website.

More information about Marian Call and her music can be found on her website, where you can also find out about any upcoming shows. You can get her music on Bandcamp, as well as most other places where music is sold. She is also on twitter, facebook, and Patreon.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on Apple Podcasts - rate and review us!

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Episode Transcript:

[BEGINNING OF 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

And we set out in the springtime with our bindles and our boots, And we reveled in our poverty, abandoning our roots. A brand new path, adventurers, All lonely, bold, and brave, Breaking free and making do, And telling tales of how we'd save ourselves.

JACOB: Hello and welcome to Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today, I'm talking to Marian Call, and the song she'll be talking about is named 'Oregon Trail'. So, where would you like to start, Marian?

MARIAN: This is part of a record called 'Standing Stones,' and, in that record, one of the things I'm interested in looking at is the stories we tell ourselves. Like, the myths that we have about who we are, and the myths of, you know, Western culture, myths of America. And this is one of those myths, the Oregon Trail, right? It's about being stron,g and independent, and adventurous, and setting out on your own, and conquering the landscape, and finding a place for yourself -- You know, all the things that we -- All things we want to do, in sort of our individualist society. It's about self actualization, and about claiming a space in the world, and that myth is so important to us. But I've been thinking a lot about how it doesn't necessarily hold up, either to our experience, or to a good model. Like, it might seem exciting to think of being a pioneer, and going out, and, you know, finding your own way in the world, but the more you actually read about what it would have been like back then, about (a) how horrid it was; (b) about the myths that the pioneers were often being sold about "Free land out west!" when, of course, that land was already occupied, and about the idea that it was our destiny to command and control the landscape and to have, you know, a country from sea to sea. That was not a given; that was a something that we decided, and then we made it real. And that may or may not have been a decision that sat well with everyone who was affected by it. Part of why I wanted to write about this was that it is one of our founding mythologies, you know? It's a real historic event, but it's also a mythos that is larger than this one event, and that's why I wanted to tackle it, and both honor it, and dismantle it, at the same time. [laughs] You know, every now and then, those think pieces come along about generations, and what millennials are doing, and what Gen X is doing, and everything like that, and I was part of this cohort -- and a lot of my friends were, too -- that fell kind of between Generation X and Y and millennials --

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: -- and we never got a name, but I still feel like our experience is kind of fundamentally different, and we're too young to be Generation X, but definitely too old to have a similar experience to millennials, in a lot of ways. And I read several articles in which some scholars and demographers argue for the existence of a Generation Oregon Trail, which is kind of a small cohort. I think it's like 1976 to 1987, or something like that -- or 1986.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: And that describes the generation of people who started school -- like, started, you know, their first few years of school -- without networked computing, but, by the time they completed school, the Internet was fully fledged and running. And so, like, kids after us grew up typing from the time they were, you know, very, very small. They don't remember before computers in the home, and before computers in school, to do all their tasks. In fact they stopped needing to even offer keyboarding classes in a lot of schools. They didn't teach typing anymore, because the kids would just arrive at school already knowing how to type.

JACOB: Mmm.

MARIAN: And that was not true for my group! We had to go through hours and hours of typing classes, Mavis Beacon and all the rest. So this song is about the peculiar life of that particular generation. I think this cohort of people is really cool, and inspiring, and interesting, and innovative, and has made a lot of cool things, but at the same time, there's a little a little bit of a sense of opportunity drying up, in a lot of ways, and I wanted to write something about that, and I thought the Oregon Trail was a perfect allegory for it. It describes the name of the generation because of that video game we all played, and it also describes a sort of a modern look back at that journey, that has been mythologized as one of the cornerstones of the American story, you know? Did you play Oregon Trail when you were young.

JACOB: Oh yes!

MARIAN: I did, too. Several different generations of it, too, from the, like, big floppy disk, to the little floppy disk, to the hard drive version, to the -- Apparently, someone told me there was an Oregon Trail 2, and, like, an Amazon Trail, and they kind of did a couple of spin offs and sequels, which surprised me. I hadn't heard of those, but --

JACOB: Yeah, I had no idea.

MARIAN: Yeah. Hundreds of people have gotten in touch with me, to tell me, like, how this hit a nostalgia spot for them. So, yeah. I'm kind of revising that history in this song. Like, it starts out really great. It's, you know, 'We set out adventurous --'

[BEGINNING OF 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

MARIAN: And then we gradually realised that it wasn't just us. It was everyone else.

['OREGON TRAIL' CONTINUES:]

'Til everybody else we knew Had started on the journey too. Then we were not phenomenal, no, we were not phenomenal. We never were phenomenal, Just part of our whole generation's vague instinctive mass migration. We were not exceptional, no we were not exceptional. We never were exceptional. We were longing longing longing though, And true. We were dreaming that the world was dreaming too.

MARIAN: And maybe we were being brave and individual, and making our own choices, but maybe we were also just part of this kind of global phenomenon that we couldn't really control.

[AN INSTRUMENTAL PART OF 'OREGON TRAIL' CONTINUES BRIEFLY.]

MARIAN: The opening sense of possibility that we had, as young people, when the Internet was new, was very much hit by, you know, two different bubble bursts. First, the Silicon Valley, and kind of that portion of the economy -- realizing, no, the internet doesn't do everything, and it doesn't change everything. It does some things, but not all of them. And then the housing bubble burst -- that, no, we can't all own a home on the income that we have. No, we're never going to pay off our student loans. No, we're never going to get out of credit card debt.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: No, we're never going to stop moving around the country. I think the number of times a person my age has changed cities is just, like, astounding now. it's really -- it's so different from the generation before. This is also part of a song cycle, and this is kind of in the middle beginning of it, so there's some resolution that answers this song a little bit later in the album. This is in the 'What are we doing?' stage at the late beginning on the record. I wanted it to start feeling like a very wholesome folk song, like -- I'm working on a folk festival this weekend, and I wanted it to sound just like a good old classic tune, you know? Maybe a little more complicated words, but the same chords, and the same feel, as, you know, a Willie Nelson kind of song.

JACOB: And the harmonies, too.

MARIAN: Yeah, the harmonies, exactly, are very straight at the beginning.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

Surrendering exceptional to lighten up the load, We woke up ...

[SONG CONTINUES PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND.]

MARIAN: But the deeper into the song you get, the more your perspective shifts, sort of. I think of it as, like, a moment when the sky opens, and suddenly you realize that the world is so much bigger than you thought.

['OREGON TRAIL CONTINUES:]

And the World Was all a road ...

MARIAN: And that occurs in the middle of the song, and we have this big, kind of -- We have a big, and sort of shocking, key change. It's not the way you would usually change keys from A to E by way of a C major chord, which is not in either key, but it's -- That's the pivot between those two worlds. And it's meant to feel this grand opening into a much larger universe.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

We bought some land out west, Though nowhere seemed to feel like home. And digging in the yard we found somebody else's bones. The moment that the shovel hit, We bowed before the things we should have known.

MARIAN: Gradually, our speaker realizes that they thought they were going out into empty space to make a name for themselves, and, in fact, they were going out into someone else's space. And that doesn't feel very good.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

Of course we're not the first ones here. We never were the first ones here. Just part of our whole generation's Childish frontier re-creation.

[SONG CONTINUES PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND.]

MARIAN: But if you don't do that, then there's not enough food, there's not enough security. It's a little bit of a story of getting lost along the way growing up.

['OREGON TRAIL CONTINUES:]

... adventurers We were longing longing longing and so lost We were barely what we needed, and it cost.

MARIAN: And it reminds me of a lot of friends my age. I do have some friends my age who are married and have, you know, houses, and kids, and things. But, you know, coming on 40, it's not nearly as many of us as we thought, right? And a lot of us are not housed, or are moving around the country all the time, you know, not settling in one city, or we're not -- we're divorcing and remarrying, or not settling into a family structure, getting old enough to be like: "Well, I guess I'm not having kids, then," without it really being ever a voluntary choice. I think that's one of those surprises that hits you along the trail, and that's what this song is about. [laughs] After we transition to E, then I start adding chords that are more modern -- chords that were not in the original, sort of, lexicon of vintage country music.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

... the first ones here. Just part of our whole generation's Childish frontier re-creation. We were not adventurers. No, we were not adventurers. We never were adventurers! We were longing longing longing ...

MARIAN: So I started adding, like, a flat seven chord, a D major chord, and I start adding minor IV chords, and it gets, basically, just messier and messier. It's like the chord progression sort of starts to disintegrate. And, at the end, the harmonies get weirder, and weirder, and weirder, and then the harmonies kind of fall apart, too. And the two backing voices kind of abandon the main voice, and wander off on their own, and get lost.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

No, we have not found shelter yet. We've eaten what we meant to plant, And the twelve ages of man are circling hungry overhead -- And grandmother would disapprove. We will make no more miles today.

MARIAN: It's really -- it's fun. It's like the oxen have run away. [both laugh] Yeah.

JACOB: Yeah.

MARIAN: It's actually a reference to a videogame, too. There's a lot of videogames in this song, not just Oregon Trail. I got hooked on 'Don't Starve', which is a ridiculous -- [chuckles] It's just, it's a very silly videogame. It's a survival game --

JACOB: Uh-huh.

MARIAN: -- and I played way too much of it in the year that I was writing this record, and it informed a lot of my thinking about just, like, what it really does take to survive. When you eat the seeds that you were supposed to put in the ground, you know, you survive another day, but you've jeopardized your future, and that's very much, you know, me and my other, kind of like, late 30s friends, having to spend our savings, or still being in debt, without any sort of assets. And it's not meant to be too hopeless, but it is meant to be, like, a moment of clarity, that I set out on this journey, and realizing we're not as far as we thought we were, and we haven't found anywhere to stop and plant.

JACOB: And it says, "The 12 ages of man are circling hungry overhead."

MARIAN: Uh-huh. And I have 11 songs that are divided by those 12 ages of man.

JACOB: Ah.

MARIAN: Yeah. I really worked on the structure of this one, because I like the idea of -- The 12 Ages of Man is sort of a late medieval pre-Renaissance Western European idea that, if a person lived all 12 ages of man, they could get to be 72. So there were 12 ages, and they were six years each, and they corresponded to, like, the months of the year, and they corresponded to the seasons, and to the horoscope, and to a map of the body, and everything. They sort of connected all these things that weren't necessarily connected. But I liked that idea, and so I have these 11 songs that are about different stages of life, and this one is very much the, like, getting out of college, and then realizing that it's not as easy as you thought, you know? [laughs]

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: Late 20s/early 30s. You've accomplished so much, and you've been set on this grand trajectory, and then you get out there in the world, and you're like, "Oh! Hang on!" it's kind of a letdown. But there's more to come in the story.

JACOB: You were talking about this in terms of it being part of a song cycle, so: What comes before this, and what comes after it?

MARIAN: What comes before this, is a song about about childhood, about being young, exuberant, and feeling like you can fill up your whole world, or like the world cannot contain you. It's a song called 'No Paper'. The original working title was 'Lauds', which is the name of the prayer for that hour of the day, that corresponds to the Twelve Ages of Man, that corresponds to all this big structure that I was kind of plugging into, from early, like, Renaissance literature. [laughs] You can leave that out, if you want.

[EXCERPT FROM 'NO PAPER' PLAYS:]

There is no paper big enough for what I'm going to draw today.

MARIAN: It's a crazy rhythm jam, actually, with very little melody, but it has, like, a horn section, and some really wild harmonies, and just insane electric guitar. It's a very, like, expressive, creative, kind of Jackson Pollock-y song, about being young, and feeling full of possibility. It's also about protests, and protest sign,s and marching. The line is "There is no paper big enough for what I'm going to draw today." And it's just -- There's nothing that can contain me, or that can contain my message, and, you know, that feels very youthful to me. Both about, like, little kids, before they learn that -- Before they learn that art is supposed to look a certain way, and they're just like scribbling filling up the whole page, and, like, just the energy that people have, like, in college, when they're learning everything, and excited, and have a lot of passion, and so: Yeah. It's kind of a younger age.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

We never were adventurers. We were longing longing longing and so lost.

MARIAN: And then, we transition to this song, which is a little bit, like, "Well, we thought we were going to go out into the world and conquer it, and then we had another think, after we got out there."

JACOB: Mm hmm.

MARIAN: And the song after it is the title track. It's called 'Standing Stones.'

[BEGINNING OF 'STANDING STONES' PLAYS:]

We drew nine lines from east to west We drew nine from north to south And we stitched our names in concrete veins Through miles and miles and miles of ground

MARIAN: It sort of reconciles that. It's about how our impulse to build things, and make things, and design, and scratch, and leave our mark, and change the environment -- how that impulse is really universal -- we all have it -- and also how it's impermanent. Like, it's going to pass away, but that doesn't matter, because it's just what we do, and that's beautiful. It's really, it's a validation of humanity, in the middle of acknowledging that we have a finite span, so, yep! And then it goes on, kind of more into, like, middle age, and then midlife crisis, of course, and then into a kind of acceptance. Some of the other songs on this record are much, much less complex. This one's through composed. Like, the chords don't necessarily repeat, and the lyrics don't repeat very much. But, yeah, it does reward repeat listening. It's definitely a journey. And hopefully catchy, too. Like, people will be leaving humming it, even though they can't remember any other words because they don't repeat!

JACOB: Have you played this song out?

MARIAN: Yeah, we play it out, and it's hard to communicate that groove change --

JACOB: Mmm.

MARIAN: -- So I just kind of have to do without it. But that's part of why I was so excited to put it on a record, too, and have it sound different on the record. I like doing it out. I wish -- I would love -- I would just die to do it with a trio --

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: -- you know, so we could sing all the harmonies. But that's, again, the joy of getting to record it! There's a video for it, that I really am proud of. Pat Race made an Oregon Trail style video of it, and, as it happened, somehow someone pinged the son of the man who created Oregon Trail -- one of the two men who created Oregon Trail. And he emailed me, and then his dad e-mailed me! So I got a message from the creator of Oregon Trail, which was great! [laughs]

JACOB: Wow, that's awesome! What did they say?

MARIAN: They really liked it! That was -- that made me happy! I was shocked and surprised. His name is Don Rawitsch, and he got in touch just to say that he was honored by the tribute, and that he thought it was interesting. Says, "Thanks for the tribute to the pioneers, and the game I co-invented 45 years ago."

JACOB: Wow.

MARIAN: And I can't believe it was 45 years ago, because I experienced it more like 33 years ago.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: But yeah. [laughs]

JACOB: Yeah, that video is great. I watched -- Like, I started watching it, and then I kind of had it on in the background, and I thought it was just the actual game, and then I went back and looked at it, and I was, like, "Wait a minute!" One of the things is a cellphone charger, and --

MARIAN: Yep, yep, yep, there's --

JACOB: -- and you come across this pile of skulls, I think, right around where the modulation occurs.

MARIAN: Yeah. It takes some twists. We were hoping, actually, that, at the beginning, people would think it was just kind of a GIF that repeats, you know, and doesn't really go anywhere.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: But, gradually, it kind of gets wilder, and wilder, and takes you out of our safe little sweet country song beginning.

JACOB: I think that this idea is one that I stole from Kai Ryssdal, because I listened to your interview -- or, I didn't know if it was an interview, per se -- but when you were on "Make Me Smart" --

MARIAN: That was fun. [chuckles]

JACOB: -- but he kind of asked you about, you know, being in Alaska, and kind of engaging in this sort of pioneering spirit that's involved in living up there.

MARIAN: Well, I think the connection is very much that, if ever there were a place where that American mythos is embodied, it's Alaska, for sure. There's there's some very bold, strong, self-reliant, competent people up here, you know? You can love them or hate them, but people kind of assume that you can split your own wood, and maybe fly a plane, and it's weirdly, like, one of the most and least sexist places I've ever been.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: The most, because we have really difficult rates of abuse, and things like that, here, because there's a lot of substance issues. But it's also the least, in that people -- People here very much assume that I run my own business. They don't think I'm arm candy when I go to a party, right?

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: We've had women politicians at a higher rate than a lot of other states. We have tons of women business owners. And if you're out at a cabin, people won't flinch when they give you a tough job. They won't be surprised if you pick up something heavy to carry it, you know? It's just very -- It's nice! I like it! I like the presumption of my competence, even if I'm not always competent. [both laugh] But the funny thing is, up here in the land of the most independent people anywhere, is where I find that people are very, very clear on the fact that we're not independent. None of us are independent. We all rely on each other, and we're all connected in really concrete ways, like, you know, so and so does this job, and so and so does that job, and, in a tiny town, they're the only people who do it. We need them, and we rely on them, so we have to take care of them. I know people who have literally gone out into the woods, to their own property, to clear logs, use those logs to turn them into a cabin, live in that cabin in the summertime, you know, and have just cut every board themselves, right? But those people are the ones who are the most aware that if they, you know, if they slip up and hurt themselves, and they don't have a friend, then they're screwed. You know, if they don't have help -- if they don't have everyone else to come over and assist at the crucial moment -- then their house is not going to get put up. You can't do it yourself, in this -- The kind of twofold lesson here is, you can be as independent as you want, but you can't do it yourself, and especially when nature is really a factor, the way it is here. And I really like that. So that's what -- that's kind of what this whole record is about, is, you can you can be as independent and strong as you like, but we still need each other. Alaska has had a huge influence on this record. [laughs] It's like embracing it, and at the same time unmasking, the pioneering spirit, as being a lot more complicated, and a lot less pure, and not at all what we dreamed it was.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: It doesn't look how we thought, in the movies. [chuckles] In the video game.

JACOB: Right. So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

MARIAN: You can hear more of my music -- I have ten albums now, and then a few singles -- at bandcamp.com/mariancall. So just look me up on bandcamp, you can find me on YouTube, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me at a Facebook page, and you can find me on Patreon, now. That's new. The new album is just on Bandcamp, as of right now. It should be up in a lot of other locations very shortly. You know iTunes, and Spotify, and all that.

JACOB: Great. And I'll put links to all of that. I put together a blog post --

MARIAN: Oh, excellent. Thank you!

JACOB: -- for each episode, so I'll put links to that, and that blog is at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com [spells it]. So my name is Jacob Haller, and I have a website at JacobHaller.com. You can find all my music there, or on bandcamp, and links to my other podcasts and projects, and, as I mentioned, there's a Tumblr blog for the show notes at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com. And there's also a Web site for the podcast at tellmeaboutyoursong.com. You can write interview us on iTunes, or Stitcher, or any of those places, and I would love it if you did that -- or just tell a friend. If you think they would enjoy this episode, send them a link. So, with all that said, we're going to go out and listen to the song we've been talking about: 'Oregon Trail' by Marion Call, from her album 'Standing Stones'. Thanks for listening.

['OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS IN FULL. YOU CAN FIND THE FULL LYRICS ON MARIAN CALL'S BANDCAMP PAGE.]

JACOB: So where would you like to start, Marion?

MARIAN: [laughs] Um...

JACOB: See? I warned you, and it still is totally --

MARIAN: Oh, you -- you were serious about that! Yeah.

#Marian Call #The Oregon Trail #Oregon Trail #Alaska #jwgh #Tell Me About Your Song #TMAYS #songwriting #interview #podcast #music

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davidoespailla · 6 years ago

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Where 20-Somethings Actually Buy Homes: The 10 Hottest Cities for Young Millennials

iStock; realtor.com

As much as pigeonholing millennials has become widely accepted sport (Selfie sticks! Avocado toast! Gross entitlement!), you can’t really squeeze the ginormous mass of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 into one eco-friendly, sustainably produced basket. Maybe two baskets. There are the older ones in their 30s who graduated straight into the hellscape of the Great Recession, and then the youngsters in their 20s who caught a break and got out of school when the economy was booming again.

It’s no surprise then, that when it comes to home buying, the older half tends to be jaded and a bit battle-scarred, while the younger group is more optimistic.

But here’s the thing: While millennials have been the biggest chunk of U.S. home buyers already for a few years, we’re about to see the younger half hit the housing market en masse. The biggest years for millennial births were between 1989 and 1993, and over the next five years those folks will all be hitting their 30s—the core first-time home-buying years. This group will help determine where the next “hot” markets are and what the most desirable homes of the future will be. Their tastes and preferences will shape the housing market for years to come.

So the realtor.com® data team set out to find the metropolitan areas* with the most home buyers still in their 20s—not just younger millennials, but also the first vestiges of the next demo group, the ominously titled Generation Z.

Get ready for some changes, folks.

“Younger Americans don’t have the baggage of the recession and are better positioned to become home buyers—and reverse some of that narrative that millennials aren’t buyers,” says Jason Dorsey, president of the Austin, TX–based research group Center for Generational Kinetics.

So where are they going? “Cost is still the driving factor” of where they want to settle down, says Dorsey. “They need to be in a place where they think there are enough job opportunities and job security for them to make the commitment to buy a home.”

But they don’t want to go to the middle of nowhere just because it’s cheap. And they aren’t necessarily settling down to accommodate growing families yet, as the median age for a first-time parent was 26 in 2016—up from 23 in 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. They wants jobs and fun. Stability and nightlife. Affordability and culture. And they don’t mind taking on a fixer-upper or a less traditional neighborhood to make it happen,

To figure out where 20- to 29-year-olds are buying the most homes, we calculated where they took out the highest percentage of mortgages in 2018** in the 200 largest metropolitan areas. The ranking was limited to one metro per state to ensure geographic diversity.

So what are the top hot spots for buyers in their 20s?

Best cities for 20-somethings

Claire Widman

1. Evansville, IN

Median list price: $155,000 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29**: 33.2%

Evansville, IN

DenisTangneyJr/iStock

This Midwestern river town is striving to become a place where young folks want to live and hang out on the weekends. The city purchased a private lot downtown with plans to turn it into a park, music venue, and maybe even an ice rink. Events like the Evansville Food Truck Festival, in its third year, and the buzzy Evansville Donut Festival are stemming the flow of 20-somethings to Louisville, two hours east, and Indianapolis, about three hours northeast.

Baked treats aside, the biggest draw here is affordability. Median-priced homes cost about $100,000 less than in those bigger metros.

“These younger buyers are realizing they can get homes they actually own and spend less on a mortgage than they would on rent,” says local real estate agent Trae Dauby of Keller Williams Capital Realty. “Most are locals who were born and raised in the area.”

The city doesn’t have a lot of new condo developments, so many buyers in their 20s are grabbing 100-year-old, single-family homes that need work. The hottest spot for these buyers is just west of downtown along the Ohio River in the 47712 ZIP code. They can score four-bedroom beauties for about $130,000 in neighborhoods such as Poplar Grove and Bunny Grove within the ZIP. About half of those taking out mortgages in this area were under 30.

2. Duluth, MN

Median list price: $178,600 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 32.5%

Park Point, Duluth, MN

LIKE HE/iStock

Located in northern Minnesota and right on the banks of Lake Superior, Duluth attracts outdoorsy folks looking for a low-key lifestyle with lots of fresh air, kayaking, and cross-country skiing.

“We attract a certain younger demographic: the micro-beer-drinking bike rider,” says Jonathan Thornton, managing broker of Coldwell Banker East-West Realty in Duluth. (Nice targeting!)

These days these sudsy cyclists have plenty of options, including Ursa Minor Brewing, opened last fall by a former high school chemistry teacher and his brother and serving signature ales such as Hazy Bastard and Porcupine Pilsner. They’re popular with the college set (21-plus, of course) since the city is home to the University of Minnesota Duluth and its roughly 10,000 students.

Home prices here are much cheaper than in Minneapolis, a two-hour hour drive away. Twenty-somethings are gravitating toward single-family fixer-uppers priced under $100,000 in Lincoln Park, a historic neighborhood right on the lake’s shoreline and where most of the breweries are opening.

3. Clarksville, TN

Median list price: $226,800 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 31.8%

Downtown Clarksville, TN

DenisTangneyJr/iStock

Clarksville is known for Fort Campbell, an Army base that sits just outside of town. For decades young military families have been the top home buyers in town—but recently they’re competing with an influx of 20-somethings priced out of Nashville.

Prices have soared in the Music City to $350,000. So Clarksville, about 45 minutes away, has become an appealing alternative.

“People can find more affordable housing and a lot more house here,” says local real estate agent Valerie Hunter-Kelly of Keller Williams. “Those younger buyers don’t want to deal with the stress of a competitive market, so they come to Clarksville instead.”

Younger buyers are usually looking for three-bed, two-bath, newly constructed houses or remodeled bungalows in the $150,000 to $220,000 range, Hunter-Kelly says. On the weekends they go out in Nashville, or stay in town and maybe tour Old Glory Distilling, a whiskey distillery. (G’head, try the Smooth Shine Moonshine. Straight up, please.)

4. Lafayette, LA

Median list price: $210,100 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 31.7%

Lafayette, LA

DenisTangneyJr/iStock

Young folks looking for a good time have no need to drive the two hours from Lafayette to New Orleans. Known for its Southern charm and cajun eats, this Louisiana city hosts its own Mardi Gras celebration every March complete with elaborate costumes and masked balls.

But it’s all of the good-paying oil jobs in this Gulf Coast community that are the real draw for 20-something residents.

Shocking as it may seem to denizens of East or West Coast cities, it’s common for Lafayette locals to be on their second home before they even hit 30. That’s because two-bedroom, starter homes sell for less than $140,000.

5. Des Moines, IA

Median list price: $288,500 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 31.1%

Des Moines, IA

benkrut/iStock

When it comes to Midwest real estate, Des Moines, which has been grappling with flooding in recent days, is actually on the more expensive side. Places such as Detroit, Indianapolis, and St. Louis all have lower prices. So why are folks under 30 buying in the state capital of Iowa? They’re drawn to good-paying jobs at companies such as Wells Fargo, Nationwide, and Principal Financial and the quaint music and arts scenes.

“We’re getting young workers from Chicago and the East Coast and the West Coast who want the lifestyle of a smaller town,” says Paul Walter, a real estate agent with Re/Max Real Estate Group in Des Moines. The region’s population jumped 13% from 2010 to 2017, with lots of those newcomers being on the younger side.

Many of these buyers are trying to snag condos in the heart of downtown. But if price is an issue, they’re looking at Beaverdale, a quiet suburban neighborhood with lots of renovated homes priced around $200,000.

“A lot of those folks are at the point where they’re tired of renting or living at home with Mom and Dad. They’re eager to get out on their own,” Walter says.

6. Provo, UT

Median list price: $380,000 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 30.4%

Shopping district in Provo, UT

Witold Skrypczak/Getty Images

When 20-somethings buy a home, it’s usually because they’re getting a bargain. That isn’t the case in Provo, the most expensive market on our ranking. Instead Provo offers a booming job market with employers such as Ancestry.com and Brigham Young University, as well as a startup scene that punches above its belt.

Simply put: Folks have more money to spend on homes here. Plus, it’s a little cheaper than Salt Lake City, about 45 minutes north.

Buyers are getting a helping hand from the city, too. Provo offers down payment assistance up to $10,000 for first-timers. Just last month realtor.com named Provo one of the best places in America for folks looking to snag a starter home.

The biggest group of home buyers in their 20s can be found in the 84058 ZIP code, in Orem, in the northern section of the metro. Home to Utah Valley University, the ZIP has more than 40% of buyers under 30.

7. Youngstown, OH

Median list price: $119,300 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 30.2%

Youngstown, OH

DenisTangneyJr/iStock

When the American steel industry started going belly up in the ’70s, Youngstown went down with it. The area hasn’t fully recovered to this day.

Despite revitalization efforts and a drop in crime, the city is still battling persistent poverty with the median household income just under $26,300, according to Census data. In an attempt to stem the brain drain, the city invested in the Youngstown Business Incubator, providing funding and office space to tech and 3D printing companies.

Most of all, the low home prices, even by Rust Belt standards, are an incentive to stick around. Folks can snag three-bedroom homes with front porches for under $60,000.

While many of the most expensive housing markets are seeing home prices fall, median home prices are so low in Youngstown that they had room to jump 12.1% over the past year. That’s by far the largest increase among the places we ranked.

8. Wichita, KS

Median list price: $197,500 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 29.4%

Downtown Wichita, KS

DenisTangneyJr/iStock

Wichita State University grads don’t need to head to the bigger cities to start their careers. The area is home to large employers such as Koch Industries and Cessna. A strong local economy combined with reasonable home prices makes it easier to save up for a first down payment.

There are also plenty of things for 20-somethings to do in the Great Plains college town. Enjoy imbibing? There’s Aero Plains Brewing, where the bar is made out of an old airplane wing, festivals like Autumn & Art, where folks can drink wine while walking through the open-air gallery, and the Midwest Beerfest, where attendees taste craft beers from more than 400 breweries.

Home buyers get a lot for their money as we ranked the city No. 5 for having the most homes over 3,000 square feet.

9. Utica, NY

Median list price: $130,000 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 29.2%

Utica, NY

DenisTangneyJr/iStock

Utica was once known as the Sin City of the East thanks to the strong presence of the mob. But thankfully, the former textile manufacturing town is now better known for low prices than organized crime.

Homes in this upstate New York metro are way cheaper than those in Albany, about 90 minutes east, which carry median list prices of $300,000. And because Utica is so cheap, first-time buyers tend to be young.

Most 20-something homeowners are purchasing three-bed, one-bath homes for $100,000 or less—about a third of the national median home price, says local real estate broker David Paciello of One Realty Partners

“That age group is our bread and butter,” says Paciello.

10. Grand Rapids, MI

Median list price: $286,500 Percentage of mortgages issued to buyers aged 20 to 29: 29.1%

Meijer Gardens and Greenhouse in Grand Rapids, MI

Terryfic3D/iStock

This old former industrial town has transformed into something of a Midwest hipster haven. By design.

“The city made a plan a few years ago to really market itself toward young people. They made improvements to downtown and brought in employment opportunities,” says Trisha Cornelius, a real estate agent with Keller Williams in Grand Rapids. “They built those loft condos downtown … specifically marketed toward younger buyers.”

Those who can’t afford those lofts, which can easily top $350,000, can scoop up cheaper fixer-uppers in up-and-coming neighborhoods like Eastown. The walkable community is filled with cafes and local restaurants populated by the younger set.

And these young buyers are helping to keep the housing market strong here. Indeed, realtor.com projected earlier this year that Grand Rapids would be the second-hottest real estate market in 2019.

* A metropolitan statistical area is a designation that includes the urban core of a city and the surrounding smaller towns and cities.

** This figure is calculated using mortgage data from Optimal Blue, a real estate data firm that specializes in lending records. We excluded mortgages that were refinances or purchases for second homes or investment properties.

Allison Underhill contributed to this report.

The post Where 20-Somethings Actually Buy Homes: The 10 Hottest Cities for Young Millennials appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

Where 20-Somethings Actually Buy Homes: The 10 Hottest Cities for Young Millennials

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samanthasroberts · 7 years ago

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5 Terribly Awkward Attempts To Appeal To Young People

Advertisers are a lot like popular kids in high school: They’re rich, always hanging out with hot people, and devoting every conscious thought to how to look cool. Here are five attempts to market to young people that are high-key LOL epic #fails to the max.

#5. Microsoft Asks Potential Employees To “Get Lit” With Them

If there’s one thing that Microsoft (the creators of Windows NT and Clippy the Helpful Paperclip) makes me think of, it’s partying. At least, that’s what their recruiters want candidates to think. In an effort to get in good with tomorrow’s top talent, they sent out emails to interns in Silicon Valley inviting them to come party the Microsoft way.

The email is addressed to “bae intern,” because “bae” is something this recruiter must have heard their niece use once, and parroting youth-speak is life. It’s an invite to a party which they insist will be exclusive, despite the fact that they invited every intern working in tech whose email they could find. Undoubtedly, Microsoft set some kind of minimum baeness quotient (MBQ) required for entry. Because that’s how you verifiably partayyy!

To make sure they were speaking the young ‘uns language, they hit all the hip keywords that you’d get from a Bing search of “What is cool?”

Sunglasses are the one cool thing that hasn’t excluded itself from Bing.

For those of you who aren’t “woke,” allow me to translate. (I am half woke on my mother’s side.) Microsoft’s “crew” of communications BAs with five-plus years of recruitment experience is throwing this party after Internapalooza, which I can only guess from the name is a travelling intern festival that was very popular in the early ’90s. They promise “hella noms, lots of dranks,” and “the best beats.” That is to say, these Microsoft employees will have food, drinks, and music. They are describing the minimum requirements for a party.

“Oh yeah, we’re running this party in FULL RESOLUTION!”

The real draw, though, is meant to be Yammer beer pong tables. Beer pong is a drinking game popular at frat parties. Yammer is a social network for business. A “Yammer beer pong table,” then, is a place to collaborate with your peers on getting crunk with your peers, smarter, with better analytics and integrated with iOS and Android.

Yep, Microsoft is the fleekest multinational corporation that just DGAF about anything (except its pending antitrust cases) and is always down for a Microsoft Azure and chill. The email concludes with an all-caps, coral-colored, “Hell yes to getting lit on a Monday night.” Of course Microsoft likes to get lit. Where do you think they got the idea for that pipe screensaver?

“OK, hear me out: We have to try again with the Zune.”

#4. Hillary Clinton Asked People To Describe Their Crippling Debt In Emojis

Connecting with America’s youth is vital in presidential elections. Not because their views matter (they don’t vote), but because tweeting at young people is today’s kissing babies: You earn likability with minimal contact with actual young people. All you have to do is tweet halfway intelligently about anything young people care about, and you’re praised for being an adolesceltongue who is both “with it” and “gets it.” Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton should have had a home run on her hands when she tweeted about her $350 billion college affordability plan, but she couldn’t resist tempting the gods of social media.

On paper, the thinking here makes sense. Clinton was unveiling a plan that college students should love: $350 billion in student debt relief. And those college students love emojispeak. So together, these two things should make an irresistible combination, as good as unagi ice cream.

Clinton’s campaign thought the tweet would precipitate a cascade of fire emoji tweets, each more two-hands-praising-emoji than the last. And that’s what might have happened if Clinton had simply said, “How do you feel about your student loan debt? Ready for a change?” If she’d just straightforwardly pandered to them, undergrads would have showered her in creative emojis.

Or if it had been someone with crippling student loan debt expressing themselves in three emojis, the internet would have loved that too. We would have named them the voice of a generation and given them a deal for a young adult novel written completely in dystopian pictographs.

“Mom? What’s 400 more phrases for ‘fuck you’?”

Instead, millionaire political insider Hillary Clinton asking students with paralyzing amounts of debt to describe it in “three emojis or less” came off as further out of touch than George Clooney in Gravity. People responding didn’t need three emojis to express themselves; they made do with just one finger.

Unsurprisingly, Clinton apologized for making light of the very hardships she is working to ease. Even less surprisingly, her campaign keeps making half-informed references to current pop trends, like holding a campaign event at a Pokemon Go gym. Someone please tell her that no matter what happens, she is never to mention Jynx.

#3. The Department Of Health and Human Services Will Debase Itself To Any Degree If People Will Think About Their Health

The Department Of Health and Human Services has the unenviable task of trying to get Americans to take care of themselves. This task is particularly unenviable when it comes to young people, who treat their bodies like they’re going to live forever and then proceed to live basically forever as sickly, overweight, expensive adults perpetually on death’s door.

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Since America needs millions of pounds of cure, HHS has been throwing anything they can think of at this problem. They have infographics, an active YouTube channel, and will shamelessly use anything millennials might recognize to trick them into caring for themselves.

Exhibit A is a post captioned, “Start a conversation with a friend about becoming an #OrganDonor.” It is a picture of a text exchange, apparently between two friends, that begins with “ru an organ donor?” Now, I think becoming an organ donor isn’t a huge sacrifice, for the same reasons I think offering someone your laptop when you’re dead isn’t a huge sacrifice: You’ll be dead, and they’ll probably be worthless by that point anyhow. Still, the text “ru an organ donor” out of the blue would terrify me even coming from the most laidback of my friends.

“Also, wuld ur skin make a qt dress?”

And the post only gets weirder from there. The response is not “Holy shit, is that you outside my window right now?” but rather the equally laidback yet somehow all-business “Yes, u?” Now I don’t know who’s creepier: the friend texting about postmortem plans for no reason, or the friend who does not bat an eye at the question, as though they’ve been expecting it. Then the reply seals the deal: It’s just a smiley face staring back at you with beady eyes. You started this conversation, dude! Why are you not answering this question?

Finally, the response to the smiley face is an ASCII heart, which would normally mean “I love you,” but in this case seems like a literal offer of the cardiac muscle. Thus, in an attempt to appeal to millennials, HHS gave us a vivid picture of a text exchange between two morbid, socially awkward young people. So, Cracked readers.

Exhibit B is an adapted “doge” meme meant to inspire young people to sign up for health care. As usual, it features a very cute Shiba Inu with its inner monologue displayed in pastel comic sans. It’s cute and kind of funny, if you like that sort of thing. The trouble is that the main reason young people don’t sign up for healthcare is that they think they won’t need it. A cute puppy frolicking through the snow and making grammar mistakes doesn’t inspire confidence in the system they’re supposed to buy into for their own good.

“So trust.” “Much effective.”

The ad is just “Hey, they’ll recognize this internet meme!” They might as well have made an ad that says “Know who thinks signing up with us for health insurance is a great idea? LEEEEEROY JENKINS!”

Finally, Exhibit C is an anti-bullying ad. For some reason, though, it appears to be borrowing from the #followmeto project by Instagram user @muradosmann, in which a woman with her back to the camera leads the phtographer by the hand to various exotic destinations all over the world.

Stop bullying, or the girl from The Ring will have to end her vacation early.

This is ironic, because the people from that Instagram account seem like the villains in a John Hughes movie. They’re blond, skinny, beautiful, and rich, so they’re by far the ones most likely to give you a swirlie on the entire internet.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/07/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal-to-young-people/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal-to-young-people/

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adambstingus · 7 years ago

Text

5 Terribly Awkward Attempts To Appeal To Young People

#5. Microsoft Asks Potential Employees To “Get Lit” With Them

To make sure they were speaking the young ‘uns language, they hit all the hip keywords that you’d get from a Bing search of “What is cool?”

Sunglasses are the one cool thing that hasn’t excluded itself from Bing.

“Oh yeah, we’re running this party in FULL RESOLUTION!”

“OK, hear me out: We have to try again with the Zune.”

#4. Hillary Clinton Asked People To Describe Their Crippling Debt In Emojis

“Mom? What’s 400 more phrases for ‘fuck you’?”

#3. The Department Of Health and Human Services Will Debase Itself To Any Degree If People Will Think About Their Health

“Also, wuld ur skin make a qt dress?”

“So trust.” “Much effective.”

Stop bullying, or the girl from The Ring will have to end her vacation early.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/07/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal-to-young-people/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/167246617152

0 notes

jimdsmith34 · 7 years ago

Text

5 Terribly Awkward Attempts To Appeal To Young People

#5. Microsoft Asks Potential Employees To “Get Lit” With Them

To make sure they were speaking the young ‘uns language, they hit all the hip keywords that you’d get from a Bing search of “What is cool?”

Sunglasses are the one cool thing that hasn’t excluded itself from Bing.

“Oh yeah, we’re running this party in FULL RESOLUTION!”

“OK, hear me out: We have to try again with the Zune.”

#4. Hillary Clinton Asked People To Describe Their Crippling Debt In Emojis

“Mom? What’s 400 more phrases for ‘fuck you’?”

#3. The Department Of Health and Human Services Will Debase Itself To Any Degree If People Will Think About Their Health

“Also, wuld ur skin make a qt dress?”

“So trust.” “Much effective.”

Stop bullying, or the girl from The Ring will have to end her vacation early.

source http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/07/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal-to-young-people/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2017/11/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal.html

0 notes

allofbeercom · 7 years ago

Text

5 Terribly Awkward Attempts To Appeal To Young People

#5. Microsoft Asks Potential Employees To “Get Lit” With Them

To make sure they were speaking the young ‘uns language, they hit all the hip keywords that you’d get from a Bing search of “What is cool?”

Sunglasses are the one cool thing that hasn’t excluded itself from Bing.

“Oh yeah, we’re running this party in FULL RESOLUTION!”

“OK, hear me out: We have to try again with the Zune.”

#4. Hillary Clinton Asked People To Describe Their Crippling Debt In Emojis

“Mom? What’s 400 more phrases for ‘fuck you’?”

#3. The Department Of Health and Human Services Will Debase Itself To Any Degree If People Will Think About Their Health

“Also, wuld ur skin make a qt dress?”

“So trust.” “Much effective.”

Stop bullying, or the girl from The Ring will have to end her vacation early.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/07/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal-to-young-people/

0 notes

thommyalladin-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Where Millennials Live Alone-and Where They're Still Crashing With Mom and Dad

PeopleImages/Getty Images; urfinguss/iStock; realtor.com

The kids are not all right-or so the click-bait headlines would lead you to believe. There are countless stories about those flightymillennials who job-hop every year, are crazy-obsessed with their iPhone phablets and shell out too much onInstagrammable avocado toast or kale smoothies to move out of their parents' basements and (gasp!) pay their own rent.

There's more than a hint of truth to thatlast part. About 15% of 25- to 35-year-olds were still crashing with their folks in 2016, according to aPew Research study. And that leaves 85% either cramming into apartments with friends orliving solo.

The young-at-heart data team at realtor.com decided to dig into these numbers. As it turns out, where millennials are living plays a big role in whether theyaremost likely to live alone, as opposed to with their folks. And there's a lot of variationacross the country, we learned.

We definitely see a larger percentage of millennials living at home at an older age than previous generations, says Jason Dorsey, president of the Center for Generational Kinetics, amillennial research firm based in Austin, TX. They hit the Great Recession, so it's taking them longer to financially recover. They had a tough job market from the start. And there's been quite a lot of wage stagnation.

Adding to the generational woes: Millennialshave record amounts of student debt that needs to be paid off. It's yet another factor that has helped push upthe median age offirst-time homeowners to 32 in 2016, according to the National Association of Realtors.

It's more socially acceptable now to delay marriage, kids, and a home, Dorsey says. There's not the expectation that you would have bought your own home by age 30.

So where exactly are millennials living on their own (without roommates or romantic partners)? And where have theyflown backto-or never left-the nest? To figure out it out, realtor.com's data team analyzed 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data on 18- to 34-year-olds in the largest metros. We also added in rental prices for one-bedroom apartments from the rental website Apartment List and realtor.com median home list prices to give you an idea of the local housing markets.

Ready? Let's start with where millennials are most likely to live solo.

Where millennials live alone

Claire Widman for realtor.com

1. Austin, TX

Percentage of millennials living alone: 11.2% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $1,130 Median home list price:$391,900

It's no surprise that millennials are moving en masse to funky Austin, one of the most dynamic metros in the United States. And even if they areliving on their own, don't expect them to be lonely. The city is praised for its great food (hello, breakfast taco!), the arts and tech festival/empire ofSouth by Southwest, as well as its thriving entrepreneurial communities.

What is shocking is howmany of Austin's millennials are making it on just one income. The median price of an apartment is more than $1,000-and it gets higher the closer youget to the city center.

One reason that many millennials can afford Silicon Hills, as the Texas capital is known, is due to the influx of tech startups and other related firms. The alluring combo of higher incomes and a lower cost of living has led many to choose the city over other tech hubs.

More and more young people have higher-salary jobs based out of the [San Francisco] Bay Area, Chicago, or New York, and telecommute from Austin, because of the quality of life, says local real estate brokerMark StrubofStrub Residential. It really is that cool.

2. Omaha, NE

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.4% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$759 Median home list price: $269,700

Yes, Nebraska-you got a problem with that? The city offers affordable rents for those just starting out, and even buying a home is within reach. Plus it boasts thriving arts, restaurant, and indie music scenes. It's home toWarren Buffettand his Berkshire Hathaway company, so we're not exactly talking about the middle of nowhere.

The city even has a decentcoolness quotient. Local indie rock bands like Cursive have produced albums with Saddle Creek Records, a homegrown record label founded in part by Omaha-native Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. The city's craft beer industry is also gaining momentum, hailed by Thrillist as one of the 10 Untapped Beer Cities Poised to Blow Up.

3. Milwaukee, WI

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.4% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$719 Median home list price: $234,700

Plenty of the roughly 27,000 students who attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee stick around after graduation. And why not? Milwaukee offers many of the same amenities as nearby Chicago (about an hour and a half away), and the housing is just a fraction of the price.

For example, a brand-new, 1,200 square-foot apartment in downtown Milwaukee runs $1,500 to $1,700 a month in rent, says local RealtorBetsy Wilson Headof Realty Executives. Those a bit more flush with cash can purchasea home in good shape for $150,000 to $175,000.

Plus, millennials don't need to break the bank to have a good time. Idyllic Lake Michigan supports a large sailing community. The Milwaukee Arts Museum is one of the largest in the country, with nearly 25,000 pieces of art. And there are tons of free activities going on around town.

Every night in summer, [there's a] free concert somewhere, says Wilson Head.

4. Pittsburgh, PA

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.2% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$743 Median home list price: $175,000

Once the prime exemplar of the decline in cities in the Rust Belt, Pittsburgh has made a big comeback in recent years-especially among savvy twentysomethings. They'vehelped propel Steel Town into a new era of prosperity, driven by the growing tech industry and management services.

The city has new art spaces, parks, bike trails, restaurants, bars, and social events, while maintaining the best parts of itsold, industrial vibe. Plenty ofhistoric factories have been renovated into reasonably priced housing with the authentic urban, loft vibe that many millennials adore. House party!

5. Albany, NY

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.1% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$870 Median home list price: $269,900

New York's state capital has embraced the tech industry,attracting companies like IBM and GlobalFoundries. This has helped retain local university graduates and lure millennials from other metros. That influx of young folk has laid the groundwork for a burgeoning cultural scene that has repurposedformerly abandoned industrial districts and launched a downtown renaissance.

The reason why Albany is so attractive is because it's affordable,says local real estate broker Anthony Gucciardo of the Gucciardo Real Estate Group. Three-bedroom, two-bathroom houses rent for about $2,000 a month.

The only people here who are likely tohave roommates are those still in college, he says.

Rounding out the top 10 cities where millennials are most likely to live alone areIndianapolis;Dayton, OH;Cleveland;New Orleans; andKansas City, MO.

Now, ready for home-cooked meals? Let's look at where millennials are most likely to shack up with Mom and Dad.

Where millennials live with parents

Claire Widman for realtor.com

1. McAllen, TX

Percentage of millennials living with parents:51.8% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$620 Median home list price: $189,300

There are two main reasons why millennials stick around their family abodes in McAllen, which sits on the U.S.-Mexico border: They don't make enough money to move out, and even if they could, their families may not want them to. Unlike largercities in the Lone Star State, the area lacks good-paying, professional jobs. That makes it hard to afford to live on one's own.

Plus, many of the city's close-knit families prefer to pool limited resources by living together under one roof, until major life events like marriage or childbirth.

2. Oxnard, CA

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 45.8% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$1,210 Median home list price: $699,000

The sky-high prices in Californiamake it hard for just about everyone, regardless of their age, to make it on just one income. What puts Oxnardon this list is that twentysomethings are simply fleeing because it doesn't have enough high-paying jobs to keep upwith the increasing home prices.

However, this bucolic surf town is within reach of westernLos Angeles-about an hour and a half away by car or train. That means millennials might be able tocommute to the City of Angels a few days a week and then come home to dear old Mom and Dad.

3. El Paso, TX

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 45.6% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$681 Median home list price: $166,700

El Paso has a lot in common with McAllen. It also lies along the U.S.-Mexico border, suffers from a high unemployment rate and slow economic growth, and is seeing home costs rise. And it has a large Mexican-American population that is generally favorable towardchildren living with their parents well into adulthood.

So even though housing is pretty cheap, many local residents still can't afford their own digs. Butmany wouldn't want 'em anyway.

4. Bridgeport, CT

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 45.2% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$1,134* Median home list price: $725,000

Many millennials want to live on their own in coastal Bridgeport, but there aren't enough homes to go around-especially in the right price range.

Because of its close proximity to New York City-about 70 minutes away on an express Metro North train-Bridgeport is a popular commuter hub for those looking to save a few bucks and former city dwellers craving extra space for a family.The downtown is also experiencing a resurgence, especially in the Black Rock neighborhood, with bars, restaurants, and live music venues popping up.

That's led to a big inventory of renters and a small inventory of rentals, says local RealtorGail RobinsonofWilliam Raveis Real Estate.

5. Miami, FL

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 44.8% Medianrent fora one-bedroom apartment:$1,062 Median home list price: $379,500

Millennials are spreading acrossMiami like bronzing oilon sunbathers. The beaches, all-night parties, and jobs have made itthesecond most desirable U.S. metro for millennial home buyers, according to realtor.com.

Even with the influx of young residents, the Magic City has one of the highest percentages of millennials who have yet to fly the coop. Thank the killer rents and rising home values. After college, many South Florida kids head home to continue with graduate studies at nearby universities or enter the job market. But they're often met with entry-level salaries that cannot keep up with the elevatedcost of living.

I have a lot of clients who live with parents and save up little by little until they're ready to buy something, says local RealtorGiovanna Calimano, of Yes Real Estate.

The rest of the top 10 metros where millennials are most likely to live with their parents are Riverside, CA; New York City; North Port, FL; New Haven, CT; and Worcester, MA.

* The average rental price for a one-bedroom apartment in June, according to Rent Jungle.

The post Where Millennials Live Alone-and Where They're Still Crashing With Mom and Dad appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.

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easyfoodnetwork · 5 years ago

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A Passover Seder table | Shutterstock The coronavirus pandemic will drastically reshape the holiday that, by definition, is about families coming together On the afternoon before their Passover Seder last spring, Liz Alpern and Shira Kline’s Brooklyn garden apartment was crowded with furniture that the couple had gathered for the evening ahead. A giant bowl of mole sat out on the counter, while in the fridge, packets of lamb stew meat were Jenga-stacked next to containers of homemade gefilte fish. Kline and Alpern, who co-owns the artisan Jewish food company the Gefilteria, had been planning the event for months. Invitations had been sent out seven weeks in advance, and 27 people would be joining them that evening. It was the first time, says Alpern, that “all of these different sides of these families were in the same place.” That Seder was a success. And so this year, the plan was to go even bigger, with 28 people. But in late March, two weeks before the holiday, Kline and Alpern were still sorting out their Passover plans. “I think there’s this part of me, maybe unrealistically, that thinks that there will be some solution in which some of us can be together in person,” Alpern said at the time. “Whether that’s being in a giant room together [where] we’re six feet apart or whether that’s doing something outside.” Alpern and Kline weren’t alone in the uncertainty of their last-minute planning. This year, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to interrupt every aspect of daily life, Jews across the country are scrambling to remake tradition in time for Passover Seder, an elaborate dinner hosted on the first and — outside of Israel — second nights of the holiday, which this year begins on April 8. The ritual, which is sometimes referred to as Jewish Thanksgiving, is often cited as the most widely observed Jewish custom. During the meal, the story of the Exodus is retold, freedom is celebrated, and a matzo-fueled feast is served to the family and friends, both Jewish and not, who gather around the dinner table. “By definition, Passover is about family coming together,” Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen co-owner Evan Bloom says. “The thing that makes this crisis and this Passover unique is that despite needing to come together, we can’t.” That is particularly true for traditionally observant Jews, who abstain from using electricity during part of the holiday and thus won’t have the option to celebrate together virtually. But less traditionally observant Jews are using Zoom and other platforms to connect with loved ones in different cities and neighbors across the hall. Passover kits have been hawked online by the likes of Wise Sons, Oh! Nuts, and Chabad, and made by parents to be shipped to their offspring. Some people are rewriting their Passover menus, swapping traditional large-format dishes like brisket for simpler recipes and even takeout. For Francine Cohen, the Seder meal will take the form of a socially distant potluck with a handful of neighbors in her Upper West Side Manhattan apartment building. One neighbor is handling the matzo ball soup, and another a green vegetable, while Cohen herself will prepare her grandmother’s brisket with apricots and prunes. The dishes will be portioned, packed up, and left at each neighbor’s doorstep on the morning of the meal. In the evening, everyone will sit down and connect for a Seder on Zoom. The plans for the building’s Seders, which will likely take place both nights, were hatched in late March when a 60-something neighbor told Cohen she was craving human connection. With this arrangement, Cohen explains, “neighbors will not be without a way to celebrate Passover with other humans.” Justin Feldstein says that his family’s plan for a Zoom Seder means that he doesn’t have an excuse not to show up. In recent years, Feldstein, who grew up on Long Island and now lives in Boston with his fiancée, hasn’t been able to get back to Long Island to attend his family’s mid-week celebration, which is overseen by his 90-year-old grandmother. But even though Zoom means their attendance is certain, their menu remains a question: While New York-based family members will receive care packages of matzo ball soup, stuffed cabbage rolls, and mandlebread that Feldstein’s grandmother made and froze before the pandemic hit the U.S., Feldstein himself lives out of the delivery range. After asking himself what an “appropriate” meal would be for the occasion, he settled on Chinese food. “At least there’s no leavened bread that I know of,” he says. “And I’ll stay away from moo shoo pancakes.” In keeping with tradition, the family’s dinner will include a discussion of the 10 plagues, a central part of Seder. This year, it will have a timely spin. During a phone call with his grandmother, Feldstein recalls that she said, “Now we just have two plagues: the first being Trump and the second being the virus.” In 2020, the script for a modernized, darkly humorous Passover text seems to write itself. Consider the case of Gal Beckerman, a New York Times Book Review editor who flew to Southern California with his wife and kids in order to be closer to his parents and sister. Their 14-day quarantine at a house next door to Beckerman’s parents is scheduled to end on the eve of Passover. “It’s a weird serendipity,” Beckerman says. “We’ve joked that it’s not just the freedom of the Jews from slavery, it’s our freedom from this house that we’ve been stuck in.” When the quarantine ends, they will walk next door for a family Seder. Back in Brooklyn, Celia Muller, a media lawyer, has found that the Passover holiday tradition and her Jewish heritage have offered a sense of grounding during the pandemic. In recent weeks, she’s been “thinking about the fact that if it weren’t for a whole ton of perseverance from the time of Exodus down till now... I would not be here,” she says. “I’m drawing on that strength of the past. So to me, it became really important to have Seder.” Muller is planning to host a second-night Zoom Seder where she will use a card deck version of the Haggadah, the book that guides the evening’s festivities. In her emails to attendees (full disclosure: myself included), she attached cards for each guest and wrote, “The Haggadah we’re using explicitly contemplates a soup/salad break, so definitely have some nosh on hand even if you don’t go for matzo ball soup.” She offered snack suggestions including gefilte fish—“(shhh some of us like it)”—and links to a few recipe possibilities for the meal. Muller also reminded her friends of the elements of the Seder plate, which sits at the center of the Seder ritual. An edible guide to the evening’s retelling of the story of the Exodus, it includes an egg, a roasted lamb shank, bitter herbs, and a sweet paste made from fruit and nuts called charoset, along with other edible symbols. For participants who can’t or don’t want to track down the items, Muller says, “I will make sure that I have everything and everyone can participate symbolically.” And for those who don’t relish the prospect of trying to source Passover ingredients, there is the Passover kit. In New York, La Newyorkina owner Fany Gerson has been selling Mexican Passover meals whose options include Mexican-style gefilte fish and matzo ball soup, roasted carrots with harissa, brisket tamales, and flourless chocolate chipotle cake. Over in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wise Sons is selling kits with “everything you need on the Passover [Seder] plate but the plate,” Bloom says. They include candlesticks and a full meal including brisket, matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, and chopped liver; the Haggadah that Wise Sons uses at its annual Seder at the Contemporary Jewish Museum will be available for free online. Passover kits also ensure that Seder hosts won’t miss any of the essentials, particularly matzo, which was rumored to be sold out weeks before the holiday. “Retailers were calling, frantic, three weeks ago — everything got wiped out,” says Aaron Gross, the owner of Streit’s, a 95-year-old matzo manufacturer that produces some 2 million boxes of matzo each Passover from its factory outside of New York City. But now, he adds, some of those retailers are calling and saying they no longer need those orders. Even without a shortage of matzo, some are planning to make their own. Before California’s shelter-in-place order went into effect, Vicky Zeamer, a design researcher in San Francisco, tried to find yeast but found that stores were already sold out. She recalls thinking, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to make bread without yeast?” And then she realized that bread without leavening is the definition of matzo. “Between [the lack of yeast] and the plague, it’s feeling too much like Passover,” she quips. Although Zeamer isn’t planning on joining a Seder, she may watch the 1995 cartoon episode “A Rugrats Passover,” which is considered a childhood touchpoint for many millennial Jews. Across the country in Brooklyn, Alpern and Kline are also planning to bake matzo. A week before the start of Passover, the couple had settled on hosting a Seder using the platform Seder2020. They’ve invited a large group of family “and a few of my friends who couldn’t have fit in my house,” Alpern says. This year, there will still be a big Seder and a busy kitchen, but the living room won’t be full of furniture. Instead, it will be crowded with voices, beamed in from Passover tables near and far. Devra Ferst is a Brooklyn-based food and travel writer. 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gillespialfredoe01806ld · 7 years ago

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Where Millennials Live Alone—and Where They’re Still Crashing With Mom and Dad

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The kids are not all right—or so the click-bait headlines would lead you to believe. There are countless stories about those flighty millennials who job-hop every year, are crazy-obsessed with their iPhone phablets and shell out too much on Instagrammable avocado toast or kale smoothies to move out of their parents’ basements and (gasp!) pay their own rent.

There’s more than a hint of truth to that last part. About 15% of 25- to 35-year-olds were still crashing with their folks in 2016, according to a Pew Research study. And that leaves 85% either cramming into apartments with friends or living solo.

The young-at-heart data team at realtor.com® decided to dig into these numbers. As it turns out, where millennials are living plays a big role in whether they are most likely to live alone, as opposed to with their folks. And there’s a lot of variation across the country, we learned.

“We definitely see a larger percentage of millennials living at home at an older age than previous generations,” says Jason Dorsey, president of the Center for Generational Kinetics, a millennial research firm based in Austin, TX. “They hit the Great Recession, so it’s taking them longer to financially recover. They had a tough job market from the start. And there’s been quite a lot of wage stagnation.”

Adding to the generational woes: Millennials have record amounts of student debt that needs to be paid off. It’s yet another factor that has helped push up the median age of first-time homeowners to 32 in 2016, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

“It’s more socially acceptable now to delay marriage, kids, and a home,” Dorsey says. “There’s not the expectation that you would have bought your own home by age 30.”

So where exactly are millennials living on their own (without roommates or romantic partners)? And where have they flown back to—or never left—the nest? To figure out it out, realtor.com’s data team analyzed 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data on 18- to 34-year-olds in the largest metros. We also added in rental prices for one-bedroom apartments from the rental website Apartment List and realtor.com median home list prices to give you an idea of the local housing markets.

Ready? Let’s start with where millennials are most likely to live solo.

Where millennials live alone

Claire Widman for realtor.com

1. Austin, TX

Percentage of millennials living alone: 11.2% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $1,130 Median home list price: $391,900

It’s no surprise that millennials are moving en masse to funky Austin, one of the most dynamic metros in the United States. And even if they are living on their own, don’t expect them to be lonely. The city is praised for its great food (hello, breakfast taco!), the arts and tech festival/empire of South by Southwest, as well as its thriving entrepreneurial communities.

What is shocking is how many of Austin’s millennials are making it on just one income. The median price of an apartment is more than $1,000—and it gets higher the closer you get to the city center.

“More and more young people have higher-salary jobs based out of the [San Francisco] Bay Area, Chicago, or New York, and telecommute from Austin, because of the quality of life,” says local real estate broker Mark Strub of Strub Residential. “It really is that cool.”

2. Omaha, NE

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.4% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $759 Median home list price: $269,700

Yes, Nebraska—you got a problem with that? The city offers affordable rents for those just starting out, and even buying a home is within reach. Plus it boasts thriving arts, restaurant, and indie music scenes. It’s home to Warren Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway company, so we’re not exactly talking about the middle of nowhere.

The city even has a decent coolness quotient. Local indie rock bands like Cursive have produced albums with Saddle Creek Records, a homegrown record label founded in part by Omaha-native Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. The city’s craft beer industry is also gaining momentum, hailed by Thrillist as one of the “10 Untapped Beer Cities Poised to Blow Up.”

3. Milwaukee, WI

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.4% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $719 Median home list price: $234,700

For example, a brand-new, 1,200 square-foot apartment in downtown Milwaukee runs $1,500 to $1,700 a month in rent, says local Realtor® Betsy Wilson Head of Realty Executives. Those a bit more flush with cash can purchase a home in good shape for $150,000 to $175,000.

Plus, millennials don’t need to break the bank to have a good time. Idyllic Lake Michigan supports a large sailing community. The Milwaukee Arts Museum is one of the largest in the country, with nearly 25,000 pieces of art. And there are tons of free activities going on around town.

“Every night in summer, [there’s a] free concert somewhere,” says Wilson Head.

4. Pittsburgh, PA

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.2% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $743 Median home list price: $175,000

Once the prime exemplar of the decline in cities in the Rust Belt, Pittsburgh has made a big comeback in recent years—especially among savvy twentysomethings. They’ve helped propel Steel Town into a new era of prosperity, driven by the growing tech industry and management services.

The city has new art spaces, parks, bike trails, restaurants, bars, and social events, while maintaining the best parts of its old, industrial vibe. Plenty of historic factories have been renovated into reasonably priced housing with the authentic urban, loft vibe that many millennials adore. House party!

5. Albany, NY

Percentage of millennials living alone: 10.1% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $870 Median home list price: $269,900

New York’s state capital has embraced the tech industry, attracting companies like IBM and GlobalFoundries. This has helped retain local university graduates and lure millennials from other metros. That influx of young folk has laid the groundwork for a burgeoning cultural scene that has repurposed formerly abandoned industrial districts and launched a downtown renaissance.

“The reason why Albany is so attractive is because it’s affordable,” says local real estate broker Anthony Gucciardo of the Gucciardo Real Estate Group. Three-bedroom, two-bathroom houses rent for about $2,000 a month.

“The only people here who are likely to have roommates are those still in college,” he says.

Rounding out the top 10 cities where millennials are most likely to live alone are Indianapolis; Dayton, OH; Cleveland; New Orleans; and Kansas City, MO.

Now, ready for home-cooked meals? Let’s look at where millennials are most likely to shack up with Mom and Dad.

Where millennials live with parents

Claire Widman for realtor.com

1. McAllen, TX

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 51.8% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $620 Median home list price: $189,300

There are two main reasons why millennials stick around their family abodes in McAllen, which sits on the U.S.-Mexico border: They don’t make enough money to move out, and even if they could, their families may not want them to. Unlike larger cities in the Lone Star State, the area lacks good-paying, professional jobs. That makes it hard to afford to live on one’s own.

Plus, many of the city’s close-knit families prefer to pool limited resources by living together under one roof, until major life events like marriage or childbirth.

2. Oxnard, CA

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 45.8% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $1,210 Median home list price: $699,000

The sky-high prices in California make it hard for just about everyone, regardless of their age, to make it on just one income. What puts Oxnard on this list is that twentysomethings are simply fleeing because it doesn’t have enough high-paying jobs to keep up with the increasing home prices.

However, this bucolic surf town is within reach of western Los Angeles—about an hour and a half away by car or train. That means millennials might be able to commute to the City of Angels a few days a week and then come home to dear old Mom and Dad.

3. El Paso, TX

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 45.6% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $681 Median home list price: $166,700

El Paso has a lot in common with McAllen. It also lies along the U.S.-Mexico border, suffers from a high unemployment rate and slow economic growth, and is seeing home costs rise. And it has a large Mexican-American population that is generally favorable toward children living with their parents well into adulthood.

So even though housing is pretty cheap, many local residents still can’t afford their own digs. But many wouldn’t want ’em anyway.

4. Bridgeport, CT

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 45.2% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $1,134* Median home list price: $725,000

Many millennials want to live on their own in coastal Bridgeport, but there aren’t enough homes to go around—especially in the right price range.

Because of its close proximity to New York City—about 70 minutes away on an express Metro North train—Bridgeport is a popular commuter hub for those looking to save a few bucks and former city dwellers craving extra space for a family. The downtown is also experiencing a resurgence, especially in the Black Rock neighborhood, with bars, restaurants, and live music venues popping up.

That’s led to “a big inventory of renters and a small inventory of rentals,” says local Realtor Gail Robinson of William Raveis Real Estate.

5. Miami, FL

Percentage of millennials living with parents: 44.8% Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: $1,062 Median home list price: $379,500

Millennials are spreading across Miami like bronzing oil on sunbathers. The beaches, all-night parties, and jobs have made it the second most desirable U.S. metro for millennial home buyers, according to realtor.com.

Even with the influx of young residents, the Magic City has one of the highest percentages of millennials who have yet to fly the coop. Thank the killer rents and rising home values. After college, many South Florida kids head home to continue with graduate studies at nearby universities or enter the job market. But they’re often met with entry-level salaries that cannot keep up with the elevated cost of living.

“I have a lot of clients who live with parents and save up little by little until they’re ready to buy something,” says local Realtor Giovanna Calimano, of Yes Real Estate.

The rest of the top 10 metros where millennials are most likely to live with their parents are Riverside, CA; New York City; North Port, FL; New Haven, CT; and Worcester, MA.

* The average rental price for a one-bedroom apartment in June, according to Rent Jungle.

The post Where Millennials Live Alone—and Where They’re Still Crashing With Mom and Dad appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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gillespialfredoe01806ld · 7 years ago

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Forever Homes: The 10 Best Places in America to Age in Place

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The math is inescapable: There are about 75 million baby boomers growing a little older every day. They’re the largest generation ever to retire, whenever they get around to it. And following right behind are 65 million Gen-Xers, the oldest of whom are already well into their 50s. (Yikes!) They’re all going to need places to live as they age. But where?

Their children may not have the space, because their grandkids refuse to move out. (Damn millennials!) Housing prices are continuing to rise in desirable areas, making it difficult to downsize on a fixed income. And sending the boomers out on ice floes might seem like an attractive solution—until little Humbert asks where grandpa is going. The ice caps are melting anyway, so room may be limited.

But boomers changed the world—and now they’re changing the concept of getting older, too. They’re popularizing the idea of “aging in place”: buying homes for the long haul, and modifying them as time goes on, so they can continue to live independently for as long as possible. So-called “universal designs” allow such flexibility, and owners are adding bathroom rails, hands-free faucets, and downstairs den-into-bedroom conversions when they need them. And everyone, it seems, is on the prowl for places to live that can fit the bill from middle age all the way to the bitter end. Or darn close to it.

That’s where realtor.com®’s data team comes in. We figured out the best metros for middle-agers who may just be starting to slow down—or, now that the kids are gone, just starting to rev up. “Our current generation of boomers don’t want to do those for-old people things,” says Jana Lynott, senior policy adviser on livable communities for AARP. “We encourage [people to consider] neighborhoods where you can walk to a variety of services you access on a daily basis, like banks, public transportation, shopping, restaurants.”

To determine the best places to age in place, we took the 300 largest metros and evaluated them for affordability and health services, and then made sure these were locations people would really want to spend their golden years. To ensure geographic diversity, we limited the list to one per state. Here are our final criteria:

Number of homes already adapted for seniors, looking at realtor.com listings with keywords like “universal design,” “ground-floor master suite,” “senior-friendly,” and “no-step entry”

Percentage of residents older than 65*

Low cost of living*

Number of home health aides per senior*

Number of hospitals per capita*

Number of senior centers per capita*

Number of singles 55 and up*

Number of sunny days*

Number of golf courses per capita*

One shocker: Florida did not come out on top. Miami—once known as “God’s Waiting Room,” for its preponderance of elderly residents—ranked only as the 113th best U.S. city to age in place. The very worst to age in place is Burlington, VT. But we didn’t make access to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream one of our criteria. Our bad.

Best metros to age in place

Want to know more? Put on the designer spectacles and keep reading.

1. Florence, SC

Median home list price: $165,200

Michael Miller, head of Florence’s Chamber of Commerce, concedes that this city was once known as the “Denture Capital of the World.” But don’t be put off: This has become a lively and diverse place. Since 2010, the city has been hard at work on redeveloping its downtown area, which now boasts an $18 million library and a new art, science, and history museum—just the thing for folks with increasing amounts of time on their hands. The area is also a regional medical hub, with one of the nation’s highest concentrations of hospitals and home health aides. And more than 22,000 of its housing units have been designed or modified to accommodate older residents. This may be why several of local realtor® Laraine Stevens‘ clients in their 50s have relocated to the area from the oh-so-much-more-expensive Northeast. More of her buyers are seeking single-story homes or residences with ground-floor master suites.

“The cost of living is very affordable, and our taxes are lower compared to bigger cities,” says Stevens, of Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. “You have a more temperate climate. You’re not fighting the snow and the blizzards.”

2. Macon, GA

Median home list price: $156,600

Charming Macon, GA

SeanPavonePhoto/iStock

Maybe it’s the Southern hospitality that lands Macon—and other metros below the Mason-Dixon Line—on our list. But the lower expenses and steamier weather probably play an even larger part. Macon is experiencing an economic upswing that has filled once-empty storefronts with restaurants, shops, and even a few upscale markets.

Proximity to Mercer University gives the region a nice cultural boost, and there’s even a thriving museum district that includes the new Tubman Museum, devoted to African-American history.

But most importantly for lonely divorcées and widowers, Macon is one of the best places in the United States for single seniors. Almost half of its residents older than 50 are unattached. Let the hijinks begin!

3. Lake Havasu City, AZ

Median home list price: $254,900

The famous London Bridge in Lake Havasu.

Jerry Moorman/iStock

The metro near the junction of the California, Nevada, and Arizona borders is a tourist-friendly spot known as the home of the original London Bridge—yep, the one in the song, moved from the United Kingdom to Lake Havasu in 1968. But the real attraction here is the 290 days of sun a year, making the place a magnet for spring breakers and older Americans alike. In fact, Lake Havasu City boasts one of the highest percentages of senior citizens in the nation.

“It’s an active community,” says local real estate broker Liz Miller of Keller Williams Arizona Living Realty. She’s seeing more and more California refugees move in due to the year-round recreational activities. “Anything you want to do with water, you can do it here. And right now is an exciting time here.”

4. Vero Beach, FL

Median home list price: $299,500

Aerial view of Vero Beach, FL

CG-Photos/iStock

Finally, Florida shows up on our list.

The Sunshine State has long been a destination for seasonal refugees who trade high taxes and snow (a four-letter word for many older Americans) for no income tax and plenty of rounds at the golf course (which frequently involve more four-letter words). And indeed, Vero Beach’s impressive number of golf courses is what earned it a spot here. The city, located about halfway down the state’s Atlantic coast, has at least 16 golf courses, or one for every 9,500 residents. Plus, about half of its residents are older than 50. Put it all together, and you’ve got one heck of a lot of seniors hitting the links. Better reserve those tee times early. Fore!

5. Texarkana, TX

Median home list price: $159,500

The affordably priced metro, which straddles the border of Texas and Arkansas, has one of the highest percentages of residences adapted for those seeking to age in place. But that doesn’t mean folks here are housebound. Far from it! The city is home to Spring Lake Park, which offers disc golfing, fishing, and a primo walking and biking trail. And the local schools, Texarkana College and Texas A&M-Texarkana, offer a slew of free lectures and programs.

Oh, and there’s a ton of interesting/weird stuff to check out here, too. The Draughon-Moore Ace of Clubs House is a popular museum featuring furnishings going back to the early 1700s. The State Line Post Office is the only federal building in the U.S. that sits between two states. And the Texarkana Municipal Auditorium, site of some of Elvis’ best-known early concerts, is still going strong. Keep it real, Texarkana!

6. Saginaw, MI

Median home list price: $114,400

Looking for a bargain? Move to Saginaw. Those on a fixed income love this area’s low, low home prices. The metro, which was heavily dependent upon the automobile industry, fell on hard times when the American manufacturing economy began its slow collapse in the early 1980s. But it’s been aggressively coming back in recent years.

It now has a thriving downtown arts scene that includes a Japanese cultural center, tea house, and garden. Those seeking a bit more of an escape can explore the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge and participate in the many 5,000-meter runs held there.

The area is also a regional center for health care, boasting one of the highest ratios of home health aides in the U.S.

7. Redding, CA

Median home list price: $317,500

Shasta Lake, a popular location for Redding, CA, residents

4kodiak/iStock

The largest metro in northern California is also the highest-priced on our list. But the cost may be worth it for the most adventurous of boomers. The area is known for its abundance of outdoor recreational opportunities. Whether it’s rafting down the Sacramento River, touring the 300-acre Turtle Bay Exploration Park, or admiring the Sundial Bridge, which stretches across the Sacramento River, Redding has remade itself, from a sleepy logging town to a genuine destination.

Did we mention nearly nine out of 10 days in the California city are sunny? That may be why the region has a reputation as a cyclist’s haven. The League of American Wheelmen began weekly rides in the city way back in 1896.

8. Dothan, AL

Median Home List Price: $156,400

The Dothan area has emerged as the “Peanut Capital of the World” and is the home of a peanut festival that draws 120,000 visitors annually. Good luck beating those bragging rights.

On a slightly more pertinent note, Dothan has also emerged as a regional hub for health care and a way station for snowbirds traveling between the upper Midwest and Florida. It ranks high for its senior-friendly housing stock: More than 5% of its homes, or roughly 20,000 housing units, have been modified or built with aging-in-place features. These include perks like ground-floor master suites, wide hallways and doorways, and wheelchair ramps.

9. Shreveport, LA

Median home list price: $186,700

Tulip lights at Riverfront Park in Shreveport, LA

Beka_C/iStock

You don’t have to be a riverboat gambler to enjoy the Shreveport area. But it might just help pass the time. There are no fewer than a half-dozen casinos in the area, as well as Louisiana Downs, one of only three horse-racing tracks in the state.

Although Shreveport’s biggest employer is Barksdale Air Force Base, the city on the banks of the Red River has emerged as a regional center for health care. Shreveport also boasts the sixth-highest percentage of single people older than 50, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Local Realtor Jessica McGee wanted to give those singles something to do. She helped start up a singles group for locals in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. The group does movie nights, Mardi Gras cruises, and wine tastings. And McGee plans to organize a trip to a local escape room, where participants must find clues to unlock the door to a room and “escape.”

“There are a lot of activities here,” she says. “And you can get way more for your money here than you can in most states.”

10. Hickory, NC

Median home list price: $217,500

This furniture manufacturing hub may not spring immediately to mind when folks are thinking about places to retire. But hey, why not?

The city is a three-time winner of the National Civic League’s “All-American City Award,” an honor bestowed on places that attempt to solve the most important issues in their communities. There’s plenty to do here, including the requisite golf outings, the cool and inviting bars and restaurants, the Zumba classes. But we’ll focus on the awesome Furniture Mart, a sprawling year-round showcase where local artisans show off their craft. And you can buy the stuff! Can 500,000 visitors a year be wrong?

* Data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, GolfNow Course Directory, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The post Forever Homes: The 10 Best Places in America to Age in Place appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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