Your Holiday Card Might Not Contain Enough Gratuitous Nudity

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking about Cheez-Its, the long wait for childbirth, weed, and more.

Your letters:

Josh:

I’m a nearly 50 year old father of three kids between 11-15. My wife and I have been together for more than twenty years. All of this is relevant because it means we have collected an insane amount of people to send holiday cards to: pre-K teachers, colleagues, churchgoers, elementary school teachers. It’s insanity. My wife’s first draft, with fifty pictures, was nearly $1,000! And to get those cards out, I have to wet almost 300 envelopes. What are we doing? How can Holiday cards NOT have self-sealing envelopes? Two days later, I don’t have any taste buds. Please help.

Let’s start off by aiding your poor tongue. Instead of licking envelopes to seal them, rinse a sponge and then thoroughly wring it out. Drag the sponge along the flap, and there you go. The only catch here is that with cheap envelopes (an inevitability with bulk purchases), the glue sometimes won’t stick even after you’ve wetted it. But at least you won’t drop dead from glue poisoning.

We sent out a Christmas card this week. It was the first time we’ve sent one out in years, mostly because my wife and I could never get a decent photo of all five of us. Anytime my wife tries to get the kids to dress nice and pose for a photo, they react like she’s asked them to eat a box of tacks. So every December, we dig through our camera rolls to see if, by chance, there’s some vacation photo or candid of all five of us that can work. Given that my Photos app consists almost entirely of pictures of the dog and screenshots from awful Bret Stephens columns, I’m rarely of use for this exercise.

Every other parent has this same problem. I know because the majority of Christmas cards we get now are collages that Apple auto-generated using separate photos of each family member. There’s Mom kayaking! There’s little Randy sitting on a park bench! And there’s Dad on the golf course, with the rest of his foursome cropped out! This is often the best (and cheapest) card that families can muster, so that’s what comes in the mail. If we ever receive a high-quality Christmas card in the mail, one shot using a professional photographer with all family members present on set, I burn it in effigy. Why don’t you include your BMW in the photo too, Grayson?!

By sheer chance, my wife had a decent photo in her roll to use this Christmas, and it wasn’t even a group selfie taken at a restaurant. It was an actual photo of the five of us, taken by another human. A miracle. The 15-year-old fucking hated how he looked in the photo, but we consider his objection to be collateral damage. Besides, we send these cards to other old people, not to every cute girl he attends high school with. He ain’t losing cred. Meanwhile, my wife and I are now out a solid grand, just like Josh. Card stock inflation is out of control. THANKS A LOT, TRUMP.

Now, for a fun little story. My parents once went on vacation in the Caribbean and bought something at a little French boutique store. The owner of that store put my folks on his mailing list, and sent them an annual Christmas card after that. The photo on the card always had a photo of a tanned, naked woman in an expensive sun hat, shot from behind. The naked woman would be parasailing, or standing on a pier, or lying face down on a pool float. No matter the setup, the woman’s butt was the star of the card. And lemme tell you, her butt had star power. Every time I came home for Christmas, I’d riffle through their stack of Christmas cards to find the butt woman. My parents thought the card was funny. I might have felt more deeply about it than that. More hot French butts on Christmas cards, please.

John:

Do you think San Francisco should take its failing Westfield mall and turn it into one giant cannabis store?

Buddy, the whole planet is about to become one giant cannabis store. I know that certain Republican governors are still tightassed about weed, but all of the corporate donors who tell those governors what to do know easy money when they see it. So it’s only a matter of time before Jeff Bezos becomes the most prolific weed dealer in world history. The legalization of marijuana has been a janky process state by state, and of course all of the bad people are fucking over all of the good people as those processes play out. But weed is still awesome, and you and I are gonna need it more than ever if we hope to get out of this decade with our collective sanity intact. The rise of Trumpism is America is somewhat more explicable when you remember that everyone in this country is on drugs: weed, opioids, anti-depressants, weight loss injections, amphetamines, Real Housewives … all of it.

So expect more of all those drugs soon, no matter how hard RFK Jr. tries to reclassify them as biological weaponry. The mall of the future will have nothing but vape shops, Botox clinics, gun stores, liquor stores, casinos, and a three-story It’Sugar outlet.

29 Sunset:

As someone whose football knowledge functionally stopped in 2015, why didn’t the pistol formation catch on more? It sure seems like the basic proposition is a good one: You’re basically in shotgun so passing footwork is simplified, yet with running backs behind the QB, run plays can be straight ahead or east-west in either direction. And at college and below, it feels like it’s kind of ideal for running all manner of read-options on top of that. What am I missing?

You’ve missed that the pistol has, indeed, caught on more in the NFL. Usage of that formation is up in 2024 compared to seasons prior, with even the Falcons lining up gimpy-ass Kirk Cousins in the pistol, as if he’s peak RG3. Offensive coordinators use the pistol as a way having their cake and eating it, too. The QB gets a better view of the defense, but he still has the RB directly behind him so that he can execute traditional handoffs and play fakes. If you have a mobile QB—i.e. not Kirk Cousins—the pistol establishes that QB as a viable running threat right from the snap, which makes the defense groan and say, “Ugh, another goddamn thing to keep track of.”

That doesn’t mean that it’s a superior formation to any other. If you have good personnel, they’re gonna be able to execute plays capably no matter where the QB lines up. That makes a lot of this shit cosmetic: throwing a new look at the opponent before running the same plays you normally do. NFL coaches are always walking the fine line between fooling the opponent and fooling themselves, but the margin for error at the pro level is so low that you almost have to test out every gimmicky offensive wrinkle you come across. Then a QB like Josh Allen falls into your lap and you can just tell him to go out there and score 40 points.

Kevin:

I show my students Office Space every semester, and one part that always bugs me is when the Bob tells Peter that there’s less of a chance that people fly off the handle if they get laid off/fired on a Friday. There’s no good day to do this, right? SIDE NOTE: I’m getting let go this Friday lmao.

Well first of all, I’m sorry you lost your job, Kevin. That blows. And no, there’s no good day to be laid off. You get laid off on Friday, your weekend is ruined. You get laid off on a Monday … well shit, Mondays were never all that kind to you anyway. There’s no good day to be fired, to be arrested, or to schedule a foot surgery. Everything that sucks will always be an inconvenience.

Office Space was produced in 1999, just as the popular internet was starting to become part of the American workplace experience. This makes the film a product of its time, because companies since its release have innovated countless ways to make the firing process as clean (for them) and as impersonal as they possibly can. When you get fired/laid off now, it’s never your direct boss telling you the news. You find out when you’re suddenly locked out of your company’s Slack, or you get a text from an unidentified number, or an outside consultant delivers the news to you via carrier pigeon. Whatever the higher-ups can do to limit their exposure and erase you from the company record with minimal fuss, they’ll do it.

This, along with the drugs, explains a lot of modern societal decay. Pardon the old-man aside, but growing up in the analog age meant that I was forced to interact directly with people to get what I wanted. If I wanted a pizza, I had to call the restaurant and talk to a teenage idiot manning the phone. If I wanted to hook up with a girl, I had to ask her out on a date (terrifying). If I wanted to bully someone, I had to physically pick them up and hang them on a door hook by their underwear. Not all of these interactions went smoothly, but that’s how you learn to be a social animal. You fuck up a face-to-face exchange, you learn from it, and then you handle the next exchange better. You don’t learn all of this in a straight, upward trajectory. This is because people are messy, so you have to learn how to deal with each person in your life a certain way. No one starts off a master schmoozer. That takes experience.

So what happens when tens of millions of people grow up with that experience reduced to a bare minimum? Well, you get a world where people don’t know how the fuck to talk to one another. Everyone you deal with is just a faceless Seamless driver, or a chatbot, or some stranger on social media whom you’ll never have to meet. You learn nothing from any of these interactions, which makes you a less capable socializer. This is no longer a generational issue. I now use food delivery apps, I’ve put randos on blast on social media, and I’d rather cut my arm off than take a voice call. If I don’t have to deal with another person, I won’t. And you know why? Because dealing with people is fucking hard. So millions of Americans, young and old, have skipped out on doing that work. It shows up in our electoral choices.

There’s no going back from this. Maybe we’ll innovate our way back to a more competently social world one day, but that would require all of us to be on cocaine. Given the national drug regimen I outlined above, it’s not out of the question. But until the 1970s are reborn in front of us, every man remains an island, and every man prefers it that way.

Fuck, that was bleak. Let’s rock.

HALFTIME!

Brian:

What the fuck is the deal with the transfer portal? Who asked for this? I think you can now see tangible evidence that it’s kind of degrading the game. Am I being Grandpa Simpson here? 

All due respect, you are. The old NCAA bylaws forced athletes to sit out a full year if they wanted to transfer. If you’re just a regular old college student, they don’t make you take a gap year before you enroll at your new school. You’re free to go where you please, as you should be. So it makes no sense to deprive athletes of that same freedom, unless you have an ulterior motive.

In the case of college football, there are … oh, let’s say 5,000 ulterior motives at play. Your coach doesn’t want you to bail on them so easily after they just recruited you. Your school doesn’t want one of its most famous students publicly walking out the door. Boosters think they own you, and don’t like you debunking that illusion. The NCAA, to this day, doesn’t like a rash of transfers making college sports look like the mercenary endeavor it is. Most important, everyone at your school wants to keep profiting off of you. All of those factors render transfer restrictions both evil and illogical.

This is why, under threat of legal disembowelment, the NCAA loosened its transfer rules (and, more famously, its NIL restrictions) toward the end of the 2010s. College football players were always employees of their programs; these tweaks just made the relationship more explicit. If that new dynamic makes you uncomfortable, well then get in line with every coach who complains about it to the press every chance he gets. It’s college football. It’s always been a haven of degradation. The only reason people scoff at the advent of the transfer portal is because it’s different from the sport they used to know. The idea of seeing DJ Uiagalelei suck for not one, but three different programs puts a bug up their ass. That’s not the college football you grew up with!

But like I said a couple of weeks ago, the college football that you and I grew up with sucked. And your precious memories mean jack shit to a kid who can make an extra mil by fleeing Norman for U-T. The games don’t appear to be demonstrably worse in quality for all of the churn, and players get to seek their fortunes as they see fit. This is better than it was before, even if it’s jarring to see dudes with nine-year undergraduate playing careers. You’ll get over it, even if Dabo never will.

Dylan:

I am writing this email from the hospital delivery room, where my wife and I are staying for the birth of our child. Don’t worry; I’m not a monster or anything. My wife is taking a nap. It turns out that if you go in to be induced (as my wife is), the drugs they give you can take up to 24 hours to kick in. We’ve just been chilling in a hospital watching TV for hours. To be honest, a lot about pregnancy has been blowing my mind. Has anything really surprised you about pregnancy, labor, and early parenthood?

Oh yeah, the boredom got us, too. My wife had to be induced for the birth of our daughter, who had gotten too comfortable lounging around in the womb. So we drove to the hospital, only to be told that someone had fucked up and not given my wife Cervidil to take the night before being admitted. Expectant mothers can take that drug at home, wait 12 hours for it to get going, and THEN do the manic romcom drive to the hospital. My wife didn’t get that luxury. She was administered the Cervidil on site, and then we pulled an all-nighter in the delivery room waiting for it to take hold. It was so, so boring. My wife would tell you the same thing. We were both sitting there (lying there, in her case), being like Hey, shouldn’t the pregnant lady here be in the midst of excruciatingly painful contractions here?

We were not. We had all the fucking time in the world. I put on an episode of House, which turned out to be a lousy idea. Then I cued up a special delivery room playlist I’d made for the night. This is a typical rookie-dad move, and my wife was like, “Turn that off right now, you idiot.” Then I went outside to buy a sandwich. When I came back, nothing had changed. My wife getting her blood pressure checked counted as significant entertainment. The doctor came in and broke her water for her. Again, this isn’t how it goes in romcoms. In romcoms, Sandy Bullock is walking over to the salad bar when OOPSY DAISY, there’s suddenly a puddle on the floor. Those adorkable moments eluded us throughout the process. Instead, we got a long, torpid wait.

Then the contractions started, and we got even more waiting, occasionally broken up by my wife suffering from wild fits of pain. As she was writhing in agony, I was like Okay, baby’ll come any second now! Wrong. We had to wait all through the morning and early afternoon for my wife’s cervix to reach the fabled 10mm of dilation, and even after that milestone it took forever for the girl to come out. They had to use the forceps and everything. I didn’t look directly at the crowning, because I’m a coward. But I did see blood. SO much blood. There was blood on the fucking wall, like a serial killer had just gone a rampage. I thought one of my wife’s vital organs would spill out along with the afterbirth.

When our daughter finally emerged, she was covered in blood from head to toe. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t a reboot of Ghoulies filmed right in front of me. But that’s a lot of childbirths. First there’s boredom, then pain, then horror. After that, there’s a cleanup denouement and then, after the shock has ebbed, the Holy shit we have a kid feeling.

After we brought our daughter home, my wife—who had to sit on a bag of ice for like a month afterward—and I would go on to re-experience all of those delivery room emotions on a daily basis, only on a smaller scale. More boredom, pain, horror, and then wonder. In that way, the delivery process is a microcosm of what’s to follow. Unless you had a painless childbirth, in which case I want whatever drugs they gave you.

The girl comes home from college for winter break today. Everything about her has been a surprise. I didn’t know she’d grow up to look the way she does and do the things she’s done. Same goes for her two brothers. Nothing can prepare you for this shit because nothing is supposed to. So prepare to be shocked and exhausted in equal measure.

Brian:

I’m writing a book with no expectations it’ll ever get published. I have it outlined, and when I get into a groove writing it, I feel great. But if I take a few days off for any reason (say: family in town for Thanksgiving) it’s hard to get myself to carve out the time again. If I take a week off, it’s nearly impossible; my brain thinks, “eh, you can do this tomorrow.” And then tomorrow it thinks the same thing. When I have external deadlines, I get stuff done, but I’m not great at self-imposed deadlines. Any ideas?

You caught me at the wrong time to ask this question, because I outlined my next novel in painstaking detail earlier this year and then haven’t touched it since. I have good reasons for putting the book off (two day jobs, helping out with my dad before he passed away), but in my brain, I’m still slacking off.

I’m usually better about getting these side projects done, because I set deadlines for myself and then ask other people to hold me to those deadlines. That makes the assignment more external. If I’ve told someone I’ll deliver pages, that puts pressure on me to keep my word. Thanks to the sports calendar, I also have a defined window of time to write those pages (i.e. not during football season). If I let that window pass, then I know I’ll have to kick the can even farther down the road. This is a shit feeling, but it also means that my self-imposed deadline has actual gravity to it. You can do likewise by setting goals for your book, writing them down, and asking friends/family/colleagues to hold you accountable.

Also, don’t worry if you hate what you’ve written. Every writer goes through that. Just push through the self-loathing and get the words down. Give yourself a document, no matter how rough, to work with. Once you have ideas down on paper, more ideas will flow from there. You’ll go from sweating your book to being in the book, and that second feeling is an extremely cool one. When I write a book, I get to visit a whole other world in my head. I never get tired of that.

Email of the week!

Jeff:

I was recently on a road trip for work and was nodding off a bit so I stopped off at a gas station in the middle of nowhere to grab a soda and a snack for the rest of the drive. For some reason, I was in the mood for Cheez-Its, which I don’t eat very often. It’s a perfect road snack though: I know what I’m getting, and they’re not as potentially messy as a bag of chips, which just fall apart and land in the ass crack of your car seat, center console and floor board.

I’m in the snack aisle, and there are, no joke, a dozen different flavors and flavor combos EXCEPT for the original, basic-ass Cheez-Its. It’s not like they were sold out, either. There was no slot for them at all. I thought maybe they would have a special place near the register or at the end of an aisle. Nope. The guy at the register said, “Yeah, we don’t carry those.” How do you carry a dozen shitty versions of Cheez-Its (none of which sounded appetizing) and NOT the original flavor? You’re a gas station in the middle of Bumfuck America. There are certain snack items that should just be required by law to carry, right?

Concur. Although the Grooves version of Cheez-Its are top shelf.