WE STARTED WATCHING Gilmore Girls last fall during its 25th anniversary, and are now on the sixth season. It's the ultimate comfort watch for good reason: the show goes down like a warm cup of Xanax. If you have not seen it, it revolves around Lorelei, a single mother, and Rory, her teenage daughter, as they cycle through numerous love interests and have weekly dinners with Lorelei's parents, who are not always easy to get along with. And it is set in a fictional small town in Connecticut called Stars Hollow, the kind of charming little town you visit for a weekend getaway and wonder what it would be like to live there full time. There is much to admire about the show: I think the fifth season may have the wittiest, laugh-out-loud funniest dialogue of any television show I have ever seen. (The sixth season, which we are currently watching, feels off—it was the last season written by the show's original creators, who were in the throes of a contract dispute with the network.)

But the main thing I notice and like about the show is that everybody is always working. Lorelei runs an inn where her best friend Sookie is the cook; Sookie is married to Jackson, the produce distributor; Lorelei's romantic interest, Luke, owns and operates the local diner; Rory writes for her college newspaper; her best friend Lane is a server at Luke's diner; Lane's mother, Mrs. Kim, owns an antique store; Lorelei's wealthy father is an executive for an insurance company, and his wife, Emily, while not gainfully employed, is always busy running some kind of benefit.

Aside from shows set in a workplace, like E.R. or Cheers or Murphy Brown, no other show highlights jobs, especially service jobs, so generously. You frequently see the main characters of Gilmore Girls switch gears from yapping with friends to dealing with patrons, an interaction I don't remember seeing on any other show. Even on Friends, Rachel seemed to have unlimited time to hang out on that wretched couch in the coffee shop where she ostensibly worked. Everyone on Gilmore Girls has a job with a very specific purpose and just enough ambition to do well and succeed in that job. The job somehow provides just enough for people to live well, though not lavishly. No one gets sick and realizes that their health insurance won't fully cover the costs of their treatment. No one aspires to fame or fortune beyond their wildest dreams, and if they do, then they move out of Stars Hollow. (See Jess, one of Rory's boyfriends, a creatively restless soul who ends up in Los Angeles.)

For someone like me, who lately has struggled to decide whether to check the "unemployed" or "self-employed" boxes on certain official forms, I am more obsessed by this aspect of the show than its myriad "will-they-won't-they" plots. What about those of us who never really figured out a career, or who maybe did, and that career was in publishing, and then we witnessed that career dissolve as subscription sales dwindled and advertisers disappeared and AI slowly took over?

If I were smart, I would write a fanfic about the state of Stars Hollow in 2026, and how the Dragonfly Inn was bought by a private equity firm and Lorelei, though rich from the sale, is going crazy with boredom now that she has nothing to do and is trying to get Luke to quit his job and travel the world with her. But Luke, despite growing health issues due to aging while working a job that is extremely demanding physically, doesn't want to sell the diner only to see a franchise take over the space because he has sentimental attachments to the building since it was his father's. Also Rory's back home because she was an editor for the Middle East division of the Washington Post and lost her job in the last round of layoffs, and now Lorelei is trying to get her to go to back to school to become a nurse.

This is a very longwinded way of saying that I need a job. I have begun the process of figuring this whole job thing out; it might be the subject of a newsletter in the distant future. For the moment, I hope you enjoy my Gilmore Girls fanfic.

Michaela has discovered dystopian fiction, so she definitely is our kid. She tore through The Giver and is now on to The Hunger Games.

I'm going to skip recommendations once again due to a tenacious cold that refuses to go away. Viruses abound right now; be careful out there! I'm off to drink some tea.

Love,

Claire