Nothin But F🍪ckin Love Songs Vol 6
click for cookie recipe!
Y'all wanna hear some crazy shit? When I was in college, my friends and I were starting to get into standup comedy. My friend since high school, who we all affectionately call Bones, got me into Lewis Black, who longtime SKOA readers (mostly bots, I assume 🤨) know the subsequent full reference to the annual “nothin but fuckin love songs” playlist series before you today. Another comedian that Bones and our friend group in the Central Florida scene loved and quoted quite heavily around the same time was the incomparable Mitch Hedberg, who people are still loving even over on Bluesky these days.
On our first date, my now partner (who I just moved in with in November 🥰) and I discovered that we both attended the same Mitch Hedberg performance at Orlando Improv. Shortly after learning that he also grew up in Orlando, we were sharing our favorite comedians, when I recounted that during the set of his I saw that a rando heckler bro dude interrupted Hedberg in the middle of his set to call for a specific joke. It made an already great date feel all the more magical and we've been inseparable ever since.
Things that people don't get said enough about recovering from toxic relationships: the most effective way to heal from any hurt caused in connection is to be in a connection with a non (or less)-toxic person and gift your nervous system a better experience than the failed toxic one. You can go to therapy. You can read self-help books. You can get into running, yoga, pilates, or any other nourishing practice for your body of your choosing. You can meditate. You can journal. You can attempt to do it all at 110% like the way daddy capitalism all taught us to approach self-improvement so we could be the best laborer. But it will not free you as much as being in loving connections, period. Love is liberation.
Maya Angelou once said, "I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates, love liberates". After my partner and I moved in together, I caught myself occasionally almost referring to him by my ex's name, even though he didn’t do anything toxic. The situation was just a familiar setting from my previous long term relationship. My ex was emotionally abusive, enough so that a stranger reached out to me unprompted one day in 2021 to essentially ask me if I would participate in a formal canceling of sorts. From what they conveyed, it unfortunately sounded like it was an equally toxic professional relationship. People who have survived emotional abuse in a long term relationship know how difficult it is to articulate the kind of scars left behind by that brand of domestic violence. It seems like it would be easier to be able to point to some concrete external proof to explain your CPTSD symptoms, the trauma feels inadequate.
Shawn and I met in July of 2022. After that serendipitously charged first date, I remember making the decision that I wasn't going to hide any of my weirdness. I was going to ask him to watch Sifl and Olly with me. I made him ask his mom what time he was born so I could do his birth chart. He is the Libra sun, Leo moon, Sagittarius rising to my Aries sun, Virgo moon, Aquarius rising, and he loves that I know what that means even if he doesn't care. He's proud to be in a relationship with someone who identifies as pansexual. He's held me while I shared through sobs so many intimately painful details that fuel my insecurities. It has been equally as terrifying as it's been rewarding. By Christmas of that year, I knew I wanted to live with him, so I gifted him a new set of dishes to replace his chipped bachelor ones, along with a wooden milk crate for his growing record collection. Since we moved in together and I finally emptied my storage unit of four years, I have been showing him how to use my record cleaning brush to keep dust off his vinyl. In short, we are real fuckin cute together.
Oh yeah, I decided to do something different for this year's playlist! 😍 I asked my best friend, Rebecca Carvalho, to collaborate with me. A fellow survivor of her own personal cocktail of childhood trauma and emotionally abusive partnering, it has been one of my greatest joys over the course of this playlist series to witness her heal and open her heart back up to love, before having the most beautiful relationship practically drop directly into her lap. She's been going through it with similar intimacy struggles, but, as she texted recently, her partner won't let her self sabotage their relationship now no matter how hard she tries when her insecurities take the wheel. We don't get to see each other much now that I've moved away from the greater New York area back down south to Raleigh, and we haven't been able to fully celebrate how far we've come in our ability to receive love with [near complete] reckless abandon these days, so I thought getting some grade A cuts. And she sure did! I'm really obsessed with this collection of songs, I think it's got a sweet playfulness to it. Tonight, instead of dining out with the posers, you could stay the fuck home, put on this playlist, and make some cookies tonight so you have plenty of makeout fuel to get you through the weekend all you lovers. In addition to our collaborative sweet sweetie jams, I give to you something especially sweet: my most cherished chocolate chip cookie recipe! Mind you, this recipe requires two eggs, so can give these cookies a fine dining at home vibe depending on how much eggs are going for in your area. Did y'all hear about the egg loosies in NYC? 💀 This is insane!
Anyway, I am am an advocate of ✨little treat culture✨. Telling y'all right now, this is a grade A dopamine hit of a cookie. That "shit that was so good. okay feeling way less insane after shoving one of kibbe's cookies in my face" kind of vibe. These are so insanely good. I have made this recipe so many times I know it by heart, but for the collective's sake, I am going to copy verbatim what is listed in the cookbook it came from, Thomas Keller's ad hoc at home. I am not going to do the recipe blog thing and put the cookie recipe at the bottom of this for you to endure at a later date. Instead, please find that recipe, with accompanying playlist here, which has been added to my weirdo emoji nav system on the site that I might change soon. I love you all so much. Hang in there. You can grab nothin but f🍪ckin love songs vol 6 below.
