Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

So I hope that you all saw the title of today's episode, which is when you literally can't even.

This is something that I've heard on the interwebs, and I know it's what the

kids say. You may have seen the Saturday Night Live episode where they were just playing

with the fact that people say they literally cannot do things. And there was when literally

cannot do things means you literally cannot do things so there's a

woman who has broken both arms from the shoulder to the fingers and she's in these two arm casts that

make her walk like a zombie and she keeps saying things like the people around her are saying i

literally cannot stand that could Could you open the window?

And she says, I literally cannot. I literally cannot open the window. The point is, she's the one

person in the skit who literally cannot, but everybody there is saying they literally cannot.

Well, this morning, I got up. I'm just usually started a little later than this.

We just got a bunch of people quickly. So this morning, I awoke. Yes, I did. And I thought,

I'm going to start a new day of being up on the news because I used to read the New York Times

every morning. And then I kind of got out of the habit. And used to read the New York Times every morning and then I kind of

got out of the habit and I thought, oh, I don't know anything about what's going on in other parts

of the world. So I went to the New York Times and I read all about what's happening in China right now

and what's happening in Ukraine right now. Oh, oh, it is really bad. I mean, what some people are going through right now,

especially when it's cold. You know, our hot water quit for a while this week, and I had to take a

cold shower in Pennsylvania in the winter, and I was like, I think I literally cannot. Well, I did. It was a very

unpleasant experience. But then I'm thinking about all the people who are in places like,

...