Welcome to Dear Prudence. I'm your Prudence, Jeney Desmond Harris.

Today we'll be weighing in on readers' questions about how to cancel family vacation plans that sound horrible to you,

how to break it to your butch lesbian girlfriend that her friends might be misogynists,

and how to convince your parents

to let you go to a high school in a not-so-great neighborhood. Here to help me out is New York Times

best-selling author and journalist Carvel Wallace. Among other things, he's one of the hosts of Slate's

how-to podcast, and he's the former co-host of Slate Parenting podcast, Mom and Dad are Fighting,

now called Karen Feeding. This May, he released a memoir, Another Word for Love. It's the examination of his

experiences growing up black and queer in America and his perspectives on love and healing. Welcome, Carville.

Thank you for having me. So I know you've been on your book tour and you've probably been having

to talk about

yourself and your life nonstop. Not stop. I hope this is a good break to talk about other people's lives. I hope so, because towards the end I really got sick of my own story. I was like, enough. I mean, your story is great. Don't get me wrong. Everyone should read it. But I know that I know you must be sick of talking about and answering all the same questions.

Yeah, totally.

So this will be a nice break.

Feel free to bring in your own life, but, you know, mostly we're going to focus on other people and what they're doing wrong. Okay. Sounds good. I love that. And before we get started, I want to ask you for one piece of unsolicited advice. Try meditation, even if you don't like it at first. Just see if you can sit

in meditation for two or three minutes a day and then maybe five minutes and maybe 10 minutes.

That's my unsolicited advice. And it's hard and you probably won't be able to do it for that long

and then you'll stop doing it and then try it again and keep trying it as like an ongoing thing. That's my advice. Okay. I was going to say asking for a friend, what if you've tried it maybe 15, 20, 30 times and you just can't seem to stick with it. Should you keep trying it? Yeah. I mean, I think the idea that we have that like, oh, it needs to be this like, you need to keep escalating

until you become like someone who can sit on a mountaintop for like, you know, in 40 straight days

of meditation. I think that's a mistake. It's just like you have done, you tried it 15 times.

You haven't done it in like two years. Okay, so do it again for three minutes on Saturday.

And then on Sunday you forget or you don't feel like it. That's fine. Do it for two minutes on Wednesday. Like that,

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