Queenie and TT talk about time, life, and death and then say fuck it to stressing about the state of their homes before having people over. Queenie cites a reel she stumbled across of a real family home — magnets on the fridge, dishes in the sink, vacuum out, shoes by the door, freezer crammed to capacity. Just life. The contrast with the endless influencer stream of perfect organization and aspirational tidiness is stark and exhausting. TT puts it cleanly: the whole commercial machine is built on making you feel like you need something in order to be enough.
Tag Archives: #cdqpotcast
S5, E22: Love is Like Oxygen/Gloria Hallelujah
This one has weight to it, but it wears it lightly. It’s the kind of episode that starts in the thick of a hard week — hospital transfers, oxygen dependency, a mom who needed five people to keep her safe — and somehow finds its way to a birthday gift and a cannabis board game without it feeling like whiplash. There’s exhaustion here, yes, but also a kind of hard-won clarity that comes through in everything from the silent treatment conversation to the Fucket List to the tribute to Gloria Steinem. Queenie is navigating a lot — caregiving, grief-adjacent uncertainty, a friendship that quietly closed a door — and TT is steady beside her, funny when it helps, serious when it matters. The emotional throughline is permission: permission to let go, to not respond, to stop being the one with all the answers. It’s a midlife episode in the truest sense — not defeated, not falsely cheerful, just honest about where they are and who they’re choosing to be.
S5, E21: That Ain’t No Way to Have Fun
Queenie is back home after leaving the Cape early to rush to her 93 year-old mom, who had a serious fall. Meanwhile, TT is recording from the Cape on her last day — computer balanced on four puzzle boxes, microphone rattling every time she shifts on the bed, doing her absolute best. She’s not ready to leave. Nobody ever is.
The “Wait, What?” segment this week is a roundup of things people only discovered about their partners after moving in together. One sock removed hours before bed, the other stays on — nobody knows why. Three hundred used contact lenses tossed behind the headboard instead of the trash. So many strange things we discover about each other!
The outro poem/song is beautiful — salt still drying on skin, the bay deciding your schedule, going sane by surrendering to it.
S5, E20: It Went By Like Dusk to Dawn or New Rules for New Seniors
This one moves like a good beach afternoon — unhurried, a little sun-dazed, funnier than it has any right to be, and then suddenly kind of profound. It opens in full vacation mode: leaky boats, duct tape, Dina Martina, and a fishing photo that made someone’s son feel existential grief about a fish. But underneath the easy laughter is a real current of weight — caregiving fatigue, aging parents, the strange loneliness of grieving a future that was never promised to you in the first place. TT’s honesty about the grandchildren question lands with real force precisely because the episode earns it slowly. By the time she names it as something she can finally put on the Fuck It List, it feels less like resignation and more like release. Equal parts wry and tender, with a sticky bun chaser.
S5, E16: Somebody Help Me or Mind the Gap
This week, amongst other things, Queenie and TT land on a core problem: modern medicine is fantastic at keeping people alive and not particularly great at keeping them *living*.
The discussion end with an impromptu spoken word piece about the morbidity gap — trading lines about pills for the knee, stents for the artery, being saved from the dying but not from the living. It’s part blues, part comedy roast of American healthcare, and it works. “They’ll save you from the dying but they won’t save you from the living” is just a line, delivered between two women riffing.
S5, E15: You Got a Brand New Key or Another Use For Zip Ties
Queenie meets her assignee’s kids over Cheesecake Factory excess, TT works through her cannabis stash while Massachusetts considers repealing recreational legalization, and a London dementia study offers real hope about THC and CBD for agitation. Also: night sweats vs. hot flashes, the triumphant zip-tie solution to a lost-key saga, a 180-pound pig who demands three Cheerios post-litter-box, and a pitch for guilt-free French Sundays — complete with an original poem.
S5, E13: Oooh, That Smell…(How to Ward Off Dementia for Midlife Women)
Queenie survived a bridal shower, a pool party, and being complimented on her “dress” (it was a bathing suit) — all in one weekend. CDQ covers smell training as a legit brain health tool, a reassuring new cannabis-and-cognitive-decline study, a TT’s Choice debate about sign language vs. Mandarin, and Queenie’s F***It List entry on finally setting expectations — not boundaries, expectations — around her availability. Aging brains, long marriages, colonoscopy prep, and ASL for “fuck you”: a perfectly normal episode.
S5, E12: Time Sure Flies When You’re Having Fun!
Queenie and TT ring in the post-Fourth of July with fireworks smoke, pickleball head injuries, and a serious conversation about reclaiming patriotism from people who turned a flag into a bumper sticker. Along the way: Weed Water upgrades, a science lesson on why time speeds up as you age (cannabis helps), and a TT’s Choice that asks whether you’d rather have great weed or a great bud tender — but not both.
S5, E11: March of the Misremembered
Queenie and TT celebrate summer’s arrival with TT’s chaotic pickleball debut, a mortifying “it’s an Indian name” moment, and a brand-new segment — Wait What? — launching with the news that a real mushroom causes consistent hallucinations of tiny mischievous people. They also debate when vs. how they’d want to know they’re dying, TT fucket-lists her own inner critic, and the episode closes out on a candid, conflicted Fourth of July reckoning. Light in places, heavy in others, and honest throughout.
S5, E10: Nobody Does It Better
Join Queenie and TT as they share their latest adventures, thoughts on current events, and humorous takes on life as seasoned queens. This episode covers everything from local events to global sports, with plenty of laughs and insights. And be sure to stay tuned for their newest podcast adventure–Pleasantly Confused!