Sometimes what these newsletters force me to do is sit down and consider if I’ve thought about anything in the last few weeks. Most of the time: no. One of my best tricks is my sly ability to convince people I’ve been reading and thinking and engaging in my times of privacy, my trademark reclusive interims, when actually what I do most often is zone out for long periods of time, return to consciousness with nothing but another 40 minutes in which I didn’t do something.
I’m in what I can only consider as a gentle period—not so much restful as it is a little dissociative, all flute sounds and laying down and deep breathing and saying no to things. It’s rare for me to want so much time to myself, especially to be so unproductive. Symptomatically it sounds like depression, obviously, but actually it’s not—it’s the puffed-out, floating, staring at the sky, reflecting, evaluating, figuring something the Fuck Out before you turn 27 sort of thing I imagine we all go through at some point. Maybe, firstly, at 26.
In my Amazon cart are How to Do Nothing (read it once, loved it, always mean to refer back to it upon realizing that it was my former roommate’s), soft floss picks, and “Memory Foam Slippers Indoor Slip On Shoes Bedroom Sleepers Lightweight Non Skid Rubber Sole.” No, I’m still not dating. That should be obvious.
I feel quiet, unfettered, frustrated, peaceably alone again.
The thing I’ve been most keenly aware of, all this time spent in my room, in the interminable dark, wet gray of March, is the way I’ve curated my life. It’s on my walls, in my closet, in the twisted silver sculpture on my antique trunk, the Odezenne poster, the Louis Bourgeoise, chinoiserie planters and two packs of unsmoked Marlboros on the windowsill, the books stacked behind my bed, so far now from the initial Plath-ness of their owner. Sticky red wine remnants in a jam jar, concealer crusted onto a dark wood dresser, two Glossier lipsticks in shades horribly unsuited for my skin tone.
I’ve been thinking about the way in which we build our world—which is self-building, which is curation—both intentionally, and unintentionally. This was more or less prompted by watching The Matrix, the first of which I loved, the second of which I didn’t, to which my brother responded “awww is baby bowed by absuwdly intwicate wowldbuilding.” Yeah, I am, a little. I’m moved by a less intricate world-building, a less conscious kind. One that doesn’t beg to be impressive. Something slow-paced and low stakes.
The internet makes world-building particularly interesting because we borrow our style and interests and obsessions from the content we engage with. It feels deeply inauthentic, doesn’t it, that we decide to love clogs because we see that someone else is loving clogs—wait, okay, they’re everywhere—and we absorb it, subconsciously even: I could wear that, is that what people are wearing, doing, listening to, I like that, too. Then, in turn, you curate and design your life to also look chic in images, and to seem as if you’re also aware. All the while, there are plastic tubs busting with miscellaneous shit, your old things, shoved under the bed.
It is also, obviously, a portal to discovering ourselves, the things we do really love. But it’s easy to get lost in there—to choose a sort of being, to panic for an identity and its correct adjectives. To go -core about everything.
I live in an apartment almost deliriously curated. Which I love—it’s warm, and feels every day like the day after Christmas. It’s all deep reds and beautiful objects, Persian rugs, candelabras. But sometimes I recall the kitchen in my childhood home—peeling yellow-white tiles with pink flowers in the corner, shameless IKEA storage units full of loose papers and markers and Sam’s toys hanging out, their automated sounds sometimes screaming out in the night for no reason. Two filing cabinets with a water-stained block of wood on top to make a desk for the monitor, on which we’d sit in office chairs and watch Treasure of the Sierra Madre when Netflix still came by mail. All the dead bugs in the windowsill. And now I have an enamel punch bowl? With three tiny bird nests in it, each with three colorful chocolate eggs?
I slept in a bunk bed until I was 17. Our carpets were professionally cleaned twice in 20 years. My dad try to cure his own ham on top of the fridge. He also once blew up the porch by sending a firework into it. I don’t know, sometimes it feels strange to hold a Dyson AirWrap, you know what I mean? Like you weren’t raised to be that person.
My sister curates perfectly. For example, the closest thing she has to a brand name is Patagonia, proper coats being the only thing she’ll spend real money on. She buys her sneakers secondhand. She then spends money, that for example I’d spend on a $200 “summer dress” with the structural integrity of a Dixie napkin, on things like: a pewter penguin holding out his top hat before him in which there’s space for a taper candle. A nightmarish ET mug (since returned to what she calls the Great Goodwill River). She’s completely evaded Salter House Instagram. The algorithm barely leverages her as a consumer, gave up on giving her anything other than “glambots and wannabe fashion influencers GRWM from the DC area.” Her curation feels completely relevant to her and completely irrelevant to anyone else. I think that’s curation at its absolute best, that’s the strongest kind of world-building, the strongest kind of self.
I grew up with a strong sense of self for a few reasons, likely being that I didn’t have reliable television access, my parents were tangentially involved with me in particular, and maybe most notably I was well-received by people until I was about 20. I didn’t think to feel small, or Wrong For Something, or Without, or feel pressure to create myself into a certain sort of person, nor did I have a strong perception that people were doing that so consciously. Until I was 20, and I began to sense that I wasn’t so well-received anymore, that the bit was sort of up, maybe, and people were seeing through me in a way that I hadn’t realized was possible, or even that I had something to see through. And then I became more conscious of curating myself and my world—of how to look and be and affect and be received.
I’ve been considering recently, in these belly-up days, if I became the woman I expected or wanted to be and then remembered I was blessed not to have the foresight of expecting or wanting to be any kind of woman in particular. I came into exactly who I always was, without a real thought for it until it was too late: all drama and malaise, fearful and chatty and boy-crazy, selfish, sometimes chilly, moved by everything and unmotivated by anything besides the single thing I wanted to do (that part changed invariably—at different times: kiss, write, work, disappear, hurt, drink). I was always ambitious for something unnamed that I felt nearly no adults had a grasp of, or could understand the transience of. It wasn’t a job, salary, house, or partner, exactly, a certain place or time—not to be older, or richer, or smarter, or “better” in whatever way we were being groomed to be.
That ambition becomes clearer all the time, and I’ve been piecing together its terms of on the floor of my room in these last few weeks. In short: to Build Something real and Be Loved, really. The sort of curation that counts, people, and that’s why I’m not buying that $200 Deiji Studios dress!!! Even though I really want to!!!
review of: they are gutting a body of water concert I went to on a whim
Literally disgusting in there and so many bodies it was like that time I tried to buy candles in Chinatown on Lunar New Year and was absolutely grid-locked for 15 minutes. Zero movement, just all panicked jostling and the yelping of squashed children. Only here I had a beer and was loving the music and the presence of my sweet friend Eleanor who said Sure I’ll Go and then was awesome about it the whole time despite clearly being like I don’t really know if I like hanging out with Julia as much as I thought I did.
Something interesting about this concert was they decided to play in the middle of the floor so then everyone stood around them including all these people packed onto the stage so it felt almost like a male retrospective of dozens of men plagued by shoegaze, self-consciously showing themselves to the room, revealing themselves for the sensitive, sick boys they are. I loved it! Great music also if you’re like I’m thinking 700,015 things right now and need to scream but that’s obvi socially inappropriate
recommendations:
Y’all the Cassis tasting room is. awesome. Amazing drinks, amazing sun, amazing people. Right outside of Rhinebeck and all my escapist city friends should beeline
Here’s what I’m listening to this month
Recommending also Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch movie about three outlaws who escape jail and really find something out about companionship on the way <3 Tom Waits is in this movie and really irritating imo but I have a fraught relationship with him anyways
Teen Suicide is playing in Brooklyn end of this month and I’m going and also please go
the existential crisis of holding a dyson airwrap is soooo felt/seen/heard