Normal Gossip - S1: You didn't hear this from me

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

After two years where gossip has been hard to find, we decided it was finally time to create a space for the silly, strange, banal gossip we all know and love. This is Normal Gossip, a podcast from Defector Media. Check back here January 5, 2022 for episode 1.

Early on in the pandemic, I feel like I was on the phone all the time, and the only things we had to say to each other were, like, when will this be over, and how can we see each other in the future, and do you get tested regularly in these kind of conversations that we're just going in circles over and over and over again? And then my mom called me at some point, and she told me this story. This girl that we know had gone to this bachelorette party, and for entertainment, all the girls in the group had gotten on four-wheelers and were just, like, zooming around, which, to be honest, sounds fun as hell, except that this girl flipped over the handlebars of

her four-wheeler and lost her thumb, just, like, completely gone. No thumb, can't use her phone, just, like, a huge mess. And I told this story, which is not even that dramatic or that exciting, probably 500 times in the course of two weeks, because it was just something that I could give to my friends. It was some little nugget of absurdity that could make people laugh and give them a little break from everything that's terrible in the world. And I realized that the thing I really needed was gossip, and not the kind of gossip that I was getting in early 2020, which was, like, dangerous gossip about our friends who, like,

weren't behaving very safely or who were engaging in risky behaviors or just, like, traveling. What I wanted was gossip about, like, your co-worker's sister. Wait, what? The kind of stuff that doesn't matter? And it was those conversations that were light and fluffy that I missed the most when I didn't get to see my friends in person. There is a kind of gossip that is necessary because its goal is to disrupt power or to bring truth to light.

And then there is the kind of gossip that is fun and silly, and not about someone being terrible to someone else as much as it is about a bunch of people making very strange decisions. And that's the kind of gossip we're more interested in. I think when you get a piece of really good normal gossip, you feel like a two-liter soda bottle that someone dropped a minto into and shook around. It's this kind of, like, fizzy, explosive premonition almost where you need to share. You absolutely have to just get this out of your body.

And because normal gossip isn't inherently harmful and the goal isn't to ruin anyone's life, there's no damage done in doing that, so it's an easy feeling to have. I'm Kelsey McKenney, and this is Normal Gossip, coming soon from Defector Media. For every episode, we'll gather some normal gossip from the real world, we're going to anonymize it, and we can't guarantee that it's true. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and for more information, check out Defector.com.