Hello, I hope everyone had a restful and enjoyable long weekend. As Tom mentioned on Friday, I’m Brandy Jensen and I’m very excited to be Defector’s first-ever guest editor this week.
Let me begin with a small confession, to build trust between us: I don’t know much about sports. I try to maintain a sufficient level of understanding to get the funny tweets about, say, Jokic and his horses, but beyond that I’m generally pretty lost. So, when Tom asked me to sign on this week, I wasn’t immediately certain what I could bring to the table, knowledge-wise. After thinking it over, I realized that while I may not get baseball, my years of writing an advice column about love, and my own rather mixed bag of a personal history with that experience, mean I do understand feverish devotion. I think that gives me something in common with a lot of you readers: I know what it feels like to start something (a relationship; a Mets season) full of wild hope, despite any and all quite reasonable indications that optimism is misplaced. I know what it is to have your hope dashed, slowly or all at once.
So, I’ve decided to bring you some essays around the loose theme of Irrational Attachments: things we adore beyond reason, things we wish others could abandon, things that have shaped us without our active input and possibly against our will. Mostly, though, the essays this week are the result of one of my own most deeply held beliefs: that writing on the internet should be fun to read. I hope you enjoy them.
