We’re back! Ann Arbor AF is…the same but different. Molly and Jess catch you up on the haps and where the pod will be going this summer.
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter and Facebook. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no.
Transcript
NOTE: This version of the transcript was generated by an automated transcription tool and will contain (sometimes hilarious) errors. When we have time for human editing to clean this up we will update it, but we hope this imperfect version is better than nothing.
Jess/Molly (00:12):
Hello.
(00:16):
So what are we doing, do you think We’re, we’re going to figure out how to podcast again. Oh man, that was fun. Let’s do it again, right? It was fun. Hi listeners. It’s been a minute. We left them up last year. I had some life going on. Molly had some life going on, and in the grand scheme of things, what we had to let go for a minute was the podcast, but we’ve missed it. And so we just wanted to say a little bit about being gone and then what it’s going to look and sound like now that we’re back. Yeah, we have only vaguely planned this, so yeah, this is a very rough beginning. No problem. Yes. But that’s okay. Yeah. So I mean, one thing that sort of fell by the wayside last year was we had hoped to do a sort of wrap up of everything that we learned from all of those wonderful interviews. And we didn’t get to do that, but maybe we thought some of you, our listeners might have learned some things, like saw some connections and we would love to hear about them. So I know Twitter’s kind of gross now, but maybe share with us on Twitter. We’ll get back into that account and see what’s going on there. Maybe we need to find, I had some life going on too, man. What? Twitter? Oh yes. Serious life happening.
(01:55):
So yeah, that was one piece of stuff that we wanted to talk about. Yeah, I missed that. We had such amazing conversations like Jenny Schu to fix her upper and Ben from Dan Arbor, and being able to talk to folks from North Carolina and New York and just really kind of understanding what’s going on. I really did want to do that conversation and I missed it. I didn’t even really have the bandwidth for it in my head for as much as I deeply enjoyed being able to talk to people doing work that I was excited about in places where I don’t live. Totally. So yeah, if you remember any of those and you have anything that you want to share about it, we would love to hear from you. So please come find us at the Twitter and our F pod and let us know what you thought about any or all of those interviews.
(02:42):
Yeah. So what are we doing next, Jess? Both Molly and I have missed the pod. We’ve talked about it a lot and neither one of us is really ready to pick up the stick the way that we were it before, in part because what have you been saying about this? It was Pan, this was the podcast was a pandemic project that I didn’t realize was a pandemic project. The pace of timing with council meetings where the agenda drops on a Friday and the meeting is on the Monday, which meant that we pretty much had to be recording on the weekends, but it was okay because there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. And we could spend every Saturday afternoon for a couple of hours record recording a podcast. And those were pandemic conditions that are not ever going to exist again for us.
(03:36):
So we were thinking about how to move, move a project that we love forward in ways that feel manageable and for various reasons we have floated and put aside some ideas, not necessarily forever, but for now we’d love to talk more about the county, like the broader county and Arbor’s context within it. We’d love to do more interviews, more conversations, but we both still have kind of constrained bandwidth when it comes to just physically the time of doing these, but also the mental load of the every episode, figuring people, figuring it out, putting something that’s interesting to you all, but more importantly maybe to us forward. And so talking about this, I can’t remember if we did this on purpose or if it just got derailed, but we started VEing about things that we were like, you know what I’d really love to talk about?
(04:29):
And then civic therapy was born civic therapy. Cause this is how we talk to each other. And this is, I think some of our favorite past episodes that we did were the ones where we were working out big feelings about bridges or zoning. So we’re just going to lean all the way in to the civic topics about which we have feelings. We’re going to go all in. So this summer we’re going to be doing a handful of episodes with a handful of cool people, some of whom you already know, talking about the stuff that we have these big feelings about. And I don’t know, are we going to solve the problems of the world? I don’t know. But we might get more into like, why are there big, not just why are they issues, but why are they big feelings issues? And then what do we do with that?
(05:20):
Yes, right. Something productive to do with our feelings for us and for all of you. And not just shake fist at cloud, which is also tempting. Yes, yes. And in the meantime, for folks who really miss those council previews, our former co-host, Michelle Hughes, is now doing written city council previews on her blog. And I think that’s a great format for this kind of work. And you can check those out at this amazing url, A to counsel info. So strongly recommend you check those out. I don’t know the exact timing of she’s releasing them relative to when the meetings are, but just before the meeting is all I know. But you can go and take a look at those. Yeah, for sure. And she always has been. They’re thoughtful and they’re thorough and they get into the good stuff. So definitely do. So that’s a two is in the number A two counsel, that info. Yay. Anything else we need to cover right now? I missed you guys. I missed doing this conversation with you, Molly, and I miss being able to talk to folks, so I’m glad we’re back. Me too. But for now,
(06:38):
That’s it for this very short episode of Ann Arbor af. We don’t have to think yes because it is only our awesome selves here. But as always, you can check out past episodes and transcripts on our website, Ann Arbor af. You can keep finding us and other people in various places to various degrees, sometimes on Twitter at the 18 council hashtag and always at Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for All group. We are your co-hosts, Molly Kleiman and Jess Leeta. And thank you to producer Scott Trudeau, who we may or may not have informed that this episode was happening. Sorry Scott. Thank you. Our key music is Ida Know by Grapes, get informed and then get involved and you can even get in your feelings. It’s your city.