Fran Magazine: Issue #68

The "beauty" issue, round two

You’re reading Fran Magazine, a weekly pop culture diary that is also — only one time per year — about beauty and makeup. We did one of these last year and it led to myriad friends texting me about beauty brands, which is what I hope happens again this year. If you are looking for hard-hitting thoughts on The Idol, come back on Sunday.

Fake week

I went back and forth one hundred times (hyperbole) on whether or not to do an issue of the magazine this week. I grow ever-conscious about time taken off, about guest posts, about false expectations established for myself. I suppose this is kind of the trap of the newsletter, of “self-employment,” where you do a lot of work on something but then someone you don’t know at a party or, say, Fourth of July bbq asks your job, and you go, “Um, nothing? Teaching? Sitting around?” This is what an honors program at a public high school might call “selling yourself short,” but it is the only way I know how to deflect a conversation away from my bank account and into something else, which is always a more pleasurable conversation. Would I be so cagey if I had a “cool job” or “employer-paid healthcare”? Probably! In my nascent youth when I had a “cool job,” I hated explaining the ins and outs of what I did, suggesting it mattered, whatever.

The nature of freelance employment is such that I am not afforded the ability to be precious about what days of the week I choose to work, but it also means that if I wanted to randomly take Thursday off, then I will randomly take Thursday off and be like, “no meetings, please!” All of which to say in a long-winded sort of way is that the hot weather and bad air quality puts me in a mean mood and despite all that, I decided to publish this week because there’s always something to consider, or think about, or revisit, in this week’s case, and that being the editor-in-chief of Fran Magazine is not something I take lightly and neither should you.