It’s August 31st, and it’s a big day because I cooked bacon for the first time and tomorrow everyone goes back to Hogwarts.

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Personally I drive to college in a week, so I’m sitting in a sort of liminal space that’s analogous to the days between Christmas and New Years, when I have way too much time on my hands with a lot of newness to think about, and I never know what day of the week it is.

Unfortunately this leads to a lot of navel gazing. Thinking about friendships: the ones that have ended and the ones that have blessedly stuck around, others that are cropping up or growing; reflecting on my first year of college as (unproductively) a series of unfortunate events but also (somewhat more productively) as the most wonderful thing ever of all time.

But thinking too much about all of this is never good for one’s important sense of very small existence in the very big wide world, so I do my best to shake myself out of it and say “so what?” and get back to the present. Which maybe isn’t in line with the ethos of Substack, but oh well, too bad.

“Did the journal factory explode?” you may be asking. Alright, I’ll get to my point. With school starting up I won’t be able to focus quite as much time on writing long form, but I assure you I’ll publish relatively frequently when I can eke out some words between classes, and I’ll also post my weekly radio show line up for extra kicks and giggles. And I’ll keep posting notes, too, because I 1. love the attention and 2. love connecting with you all, and that seems to be the best way to do it. Please send me your writing, too; I will always be reading.

Finally I’ll leave you with something brief but very sticky in my brain that I’ve been thinking about as my summer comes to a close, a short quote from the poet Marie Howe. The following is an assignment she gives to her poetry students.

Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

And then, a quote from Randall Jarrell’s poem “90 North”:

The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness

And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

I’m not getting dark and poetical. What I’m saying is that no matter what the summer months held — the good, the bad, the thrilling, or the forgettable — as we go into fall it’s okay to just let it all be. It’s okay for the light through the glass to just be light, the pain to just be pain, the moments of unabashed joy to simply exist, unencumbered. All of this, even though it’s often difficult to accept that sometimes things have no meaning outside of themselves, no narrative benefit.

Anyways, I’m grateful to all of you supporters of Messy Girl for making this summer one of the most creatively exciting ones yet. Thanks for sticking around, and for not minding the mess. Talk soon.

♡

“I mean, it’s crazy,” my mom remarked to me as we rolled our suitcases through LAX security. “They take a picture of you, and then your name pops up on a screen. They know your face.”

I nodded, and sighed, thinking aloud. “It must be so hard to be a criminal these days.”

She laughed in my face. “That sounded very sympathetic.”

She was kind of right. And I did feel a little bit of sympathy. What of the good old fashioned robin hoods and heisters of this day and age? How can the Ocean’s 8ers of the world pursue their epic missions in the era of face-recognizing cameras?

The digital age has ruined a lot of great stuff. All things considered, though, I think that the heist, if anything, has become even more riveting.

We live in a world of digital crime. AI uncertainty, social media hacks, and elaborate internet scams are nasty and remote sorts of offenses that make me feel sick. Both sets of my grandparents were scammed within the last year, in ways that I’m not sure I could have caught for myself. I hate the fact that elderly people are frequent targets, and I can’t stand how easy it is for people to get away with these anonymized crimes. They are massively harmful and very slippery.

Now, look. I’m an art history major. I love art more than most anything in the world, and I hope that it ends up being my job someday to study and talk about it. But I will never. NEVER. Not be just a little tiny bit on the side of art thieves. Just a little. As long as they don’t hurt anyone. Not because I want art to get stolen or that I think crime is good (in fact I’m always happily confident that the stolen works will be quickly restored, and I’m heartbroken when pieces are damaged). But because I respect that they’re doing things the hard way.

Most criminals nowadays are pitiful little internet trolls doing all sorts of terrible things from a distance. But to rob a museum…you’ve gotta stick to the old ways.

Almost a year ago two people dressed in construction worker uniforms used a furniture lift to access an exterior window of the Louvre. They cut through a window and threatened the guards with their power tools long enough to grab a couple million worth of priceless artifacts and stick them in their pockets. They took the furniture lift back down and met the other half of their team waiting in the street with electric getaway scooters.

I commend the costume design and the acting chops. It was likely not easy to keep cool on the very long and slow ascent up the furniture lift, then again on the way down. Their execution, however, left much to be desired. The museum reported a hundred million dollars worth of damages because they drilled a hole too small. I find this very upsetting and incredibly stupid. Rookie mistake. Investigators also recovered 150 pieces of evidence. I mean, that’s just ridiculous. If you’re gonna heist, at least do it perfectly.

In 1972, a man with spiked boots meant for telephone pole servicemen climbed a tree next to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, then hopped onto the roof. He dropped a ladder down, and two other guys joined him. They opened a skylight and lowered themselves into the museum on a nylon rope. Classic.

In 1990, two men entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston dressed as police officers and told the security guard there was a warrant out for his arrest in order to get him away from the emergency button.

In 2000, robbers exploded some cars on the street next to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm to cover their escape via boat.

In 2003, unknown heisters stole £4 million worth of paintings from the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England just to stick them in an old toilet nearby with a note that read, “We didn’t intend to steal these paintings, just to highlight the woeful security”.

In other words, there is always some degree of flair to an art heist, regardless of how steeped in tech the world is. You’ve gotta be a little bold, a little crafty. A little artistic. There is no room for art in an ugly internet crime.

Will I ever rob a museum? Absolutely not. I’ve watched too many documentaries on YouTube about prison life and I care too much about preserving history and public access to the arts. But I am too fond of the gritty nature of The Heist not to maintain a little respect for them.

♡

The other day I saw a Note by Geneva Vanderzeil:

Can’t stop thinking about the woman who realised that all the junk in her house used to be her money which used to be her time

I was sitting at an Erewhon outside of the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA). I had spent the past few hours wandering through the modern art wing and permanent collections, absorbing the artistic pursuits of a thousand eras in a thousand different places. I frowned when I read it. I guess you could say it felt a little trite to have spent $20 on a “healthy” ice cream sundae in the shadow of hundreds of years of rich artistic history. Or to explain to my mom what I meant by “viral food.” I found myself struggling to articulate why the internet collectively decided that this particular junk was worth our time. And how could I agree, when centuries of human life were manifested in physical form just feet from me? Not to be dramatic. Although I will admit the sundae was quite good.

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One of the standout rooms in LACMA was a small gallery in their permanent collections full of Flemish and Dutch still lifes. It mirrored my favorite gallery at The Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford, England, which is packed nearly floor to ceiling with works made from 1600-1700 in The Netherlands, which inlcudes parts of modern-day Belgium, parts of Luxembourg, Northern France, and Western Germany.

The LACMA gallery is quite similar, although I was unimpressed by the key historical details missing from their signage. Mainly that these paintings are not what they seem.

At face value, these still lifes have a lot in common. They often boast large bouquets of flowers and plates teeming with food stacked on wooden tables against dark, moody backgrounds. They seem to be the perfect picture of abundance and wealth. A second glance pokes holes in that story.

The flowers are wilting, the petals browning at the edges. The bread is molding, the citrus peeled in winding curls of thick skin so that the insides are exposed to the stale air. The fish and oysters are slashed open and rotting, and skulls are concealed in the midground. These are not depictions of wealth, they are pictures of mortality.

These paintings are called “vanitas” paintings, a name derived from Ecclesiastes 1:2:

Vanity of Vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity

…where the older definition of “vanity” is used — not pride, but meaninglessness. Many of these works emerged from the Protestant provinces in the northern Netherlands. Where their Catholic counterparts to the south were commissioning dramatic depictions of Christ, the Protestant church frowned upon obvious religious imagery. Artists were forced to find roundabout, concealed ways to show their faith. The result was vanitas.

In the place of the prone body of Christ, you might find a plate of bread slowly molding over.1 Vanitas artists found alternative ways to depict mortality, reminding us of the fleeting nature of time through the deterioration of objects.

These works, with their lack of objective religious references, take on a degree of secularity. They can be read instead as general contemplations of life and how we use it, in an equally powerful fashion. Vanitas paintings often include musical instruments, books, and wine — literal manifestations of wealth — that, although they might initially read as a flaunting of property, are a mockery of it.

Next to a vase of freshly wilted flowers standing as evidence of the brevity of life, an exorbitant amount of stuff just looks like junk, like meaninglessness, like time and money thrown away. There are more important — if less concrete — things in life than the trivial objects of our time.

I did enjoy the Erewhon sundae. But it felt a little bit like an old goblet of gross wine next to the profound skull of the LACMA art collection.

♡

Tucked on the first floor of BCAM at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a large angular doorway fit with a heavy black curtain, behind which sits a 24-hour looping art installation by Christian Marclay. A ticket will get you inside The Clock (2010), a video made of thousands of film and TV clips stitched together so that the clocks in the film always read the exact real-world time, down to the second. It was the first piece of modern art I’ve ever seen that convinced me of the magic of the modern art world, and showed me the possibilities of video as a medium.

I first saw The Clock back home in New York City about a year ago when it was installed at MoMA. I was delighted by the dark screening room filled with couches packed with viewers relaxing and watching the movie projected on a large screen.

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I got there a few hours after it first opened for the day, and was forced to stand back a ways between the blackout curtains that prevented the light from the hallway flooding in as people entered and exited. I felt a little bit like I was spectating the spectators. The room itself felt to me to be an art piece beyond Marclay’s work.

The darkness lended a strange anonymity. The flickering of the projection reflected creepily on the faces of the entranced viewers, not lasting long enough to make out their features. It felt like a strange, overcrowded, dystopian living room, a looping video of silhouetting light illuminating the flyaways of thirty or forty heads of hair.

And when I say entranced, I mean entranced. Dumbing it down, the installation is literally just watching time pass. But as scholar Julie Levinson pointed out in her 2015 review, The Clock demonstrates the subjectivity of the amount of time that time takes, and it’s an addicting feeling (Levinson, 89). I could easily have stayed in The Clock for outrageously long amounts of time, and not really care that time was passing outside of our strange shared living space.

There’s a lot that I suspect contributes to how easy it is to become enamored by The Clock. First, it’s the movie spotting. My favorite clip was from season 2 of The X-Files, an episode called “Soft Light” where Mulder does a lot of running through a huge train station. The Clock includes a shot of him jogging past a giant station clock, and when I spotted it, the recognition was its own little thrill that carried me until the next face I recognized. I like knowing references, to be honest. It makes me feel very cinematically intelligent.

Each distinct movie lasts only for a shot or two, and it’s easy to forget that you aren’t watching one continuous film. I get surprised when the camera cuts to a different clock and then pans to someone who wasn’t in the last shot. It’s somewhat jolting, being swept in and forced out of the world of a conglomerated movie that doesn’t actually exist.

There’s also a sense of competition, I think. Who can stay the longest, who can see it the most. I’ve known people who traveled to see the piece, who followed it like the modern art equivalent of Deadheads. Museums will do 24-hour runs of The Clock and people will try to stick it out the whole time. Some seem to imply that if you don’t watch the full 24 hours, you haven’t really seen it.

The Clock recently opened at LACMA, and they did a short interview with Marclay. “I don’t want people to go in there and think they have to sit there for 24 hours, it’s not natural,” he said. “You have to eat, you have to go to the bathroom. You have to, you know. Take care of real life.” This suggests an entirely different experience.

“There’s no beginning, there’s no end,” he added. “So when you enter, that’s when it starts. And when it ends is when you leave.”

He spoke of the work as almost passive. We the viewer make it art. While playing, the work always exists, technically speaking. But it only really becomes art with a spectator; we imbue its significance. I guess you could say the same thing of time. It is constant, but only only concrete when we’re paying attention to it. Like turning over an hourglass or watching a clock towards the end of a sports game. Suddenly time is visible, and it has meaning.

☆ Works Cited ☆

Levinson, Julie. “Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock.’” Cinema Journal, vol. 54, no. 3, 2015, pp. 88–109. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43653437.

♡

As I was watching the most recent season of Survivor, I couldn’t help but realize how the show was, in a sense, an Iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma. Over and over, a set group of participants (prisoners) must blindly choose whether to cooperate with fellow players (either in their alliances or otherwise), or to defect, and betray people for their own self interest. The strategy of Survivor, in that sense, is rooted in somewhat fraught philosophical questions.

Still, a participant could spend hours studying up on rationality and philosophical theory to create their gameplay strategy, and still fully flop. As Kathy said on Survivor All Stars Season 8, “[Survivor is] not just a game… the line between game and life blurs, it is not just cut and dry.” You the player can hold no faith in the idea that other participants will act as rational agents. And in this sense, you can’t rely on yourself to be rational, either.

Survivor is not just an isolated bubble of straightforward gameplay. It becomes a distinct world, nonexempt from the social and political dynamics brought in by its playersu. Real world perspectives saturate the gameplay of a very fantastical bubble of not-reality. This becomes a draw to the show; we are enchanted by the players’ inability to deny their anger, jealousy, annoyance, betrayal, and individual biases when making decisions in the game (Salter, 370).

The designers of the show lean heavily into these dynamics (Lindstrom, 165). Often the “twists,” which create variety and bring new interest to each season, appeal to tensions in the American political and social spheres. We’ve seen the “Battle of the Sexes” in four separate seasons, which splits men and women and tackles tensions and stereotypes within gender. In recent seasons there’s been a lot of discussion of “new era” versus “old era” players.1 While the era distinctions seem rooted in gameplay priorities, they also lean towards discussions of age and generational values. This past season, the youngest player Rizo faced some flack for his age. Fellow competitor Ozzy said something along the lines of, who would give the money to a kid?

A 2008 study of elimination order on Survivor found that up to that point, the main elimination pattern on the show was by age, with the eldest players getting eliminated first, particularly older women. “...and as one might expect,” they pointed out, “the older competitors—especially older women—were not deemed terribly important. Thus, the Survivor programs appear to have perpetuated the age-old patterns of Hollywood, namely that men grow more distinguished with age, thus continuing to star in movies in their seventies and eighties, while women simply grow older” (Denham and Jones, 94).

This nasty (but often realistic) version of family dynamics is present throughout the show and countless other reality series. Survivor’s “tribes” function as family units, dealing with “broken promises, unfair distribution of chores, personality conflict, etc” that viewers are familiar with in their own lives (Saye, 11).

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Through confessionals, Survivor and other reality shows expose the internal dynamics of otherwise private family lives. They “[pathologize] the nuclear family… Trash television, as the new postmodern theater of public confession, now has the power to incriminate the entire public as it reflects a perverse and already widespread normalcy” (McLaren et al., 111).

A bit of a harsh take, but it stands regardless. We watch reality TV to see our own secretly dark natures and to make ourselves feel normal and seen. TV, as an extension of shared popular media, becomes a universal way of understanding the okay ways of being.

Survivor, for every aspect of race/gender/political/social dynamics that it speaks to, appeals to another point of contention for its viewers. And we like seeing how these concerns play out in a sample group, a distillation of people who otherwise would never have been friends or would have ever met in their lives (Rose and Wood, 292-293). We like seeing people being forced to tolerate one another, and we like thinking that, well, we could have done a better job.

The viewer is able to take a wide view and declare that they would not have fallen victim to this or that silly notion or unreasonable emotion, and that they would have made the rational choice. It is pleasant to think of ourselves as superior, and maybe more importantly, nice to briefly take on the unrealistic expectation that the world is so straightforwardly understandable, where rational choices lead to certain success, and, in the language of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, minimal jail time.

Scholars Rose and Wood claim that “...the consumption of reality programming represents a sophisticated quest for authenticity…” (Rose and Wood, 284). We seek the purely authentic, especially in our AI-ridden world rife with confusion over what’s real and what’s not. It’s debatable whether Survivor can be described as entirely authentic, given the fact that it’s edited aggressively by producers in retrospect.2 But it feels real, maybe in part due to its grounded natural location and earthly beauty. Maybe we crave this, the simplicity of living in the natural world, where humanity is to an extent distilled without the complexities of real adult life and technology, where the largest worry is who’s going split the coconuts, and whether the next day’s hurdle will be an endurance challenge or a puzzle on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

☆ Works Cited ☆

Denham, Bryan E., and Richelle N. Jones. “Survival of the Stereotypical: A Study of Personal Characteristics and Order of Elimination on Reality Television.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 30, no. 2, 2008, pp. 79–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23416126.

Lindstrom, Lamont. “Survivor Vanuatu: Myths of Matriarchy Revisited.” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 19, no. 1, 2007, pp. 162–74. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23721978.

McLaren, Peter, and Rhonda Hammer. Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces. New York: Routledge: 1996.

Rose, Randall L., et al. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 32, no. 2, 2005, pp. 284–96. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/432238.

Salter, Mark B. “Teaching Prisoners’ Dilemma Strategies in ‘Survivor’: Reality Television in the IR Classroom.” International Studies Perspectives, vol. 15, no. 4, 2014, pp. 359–73. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44631212.

Saye, Neal. “No ‘Survivors,’ No ‘American Idol,’ No ‘Road Rules’ in ‘The Real World’ of ‘Big Brother’: Consumer/Reality, Hyper/Reality, and Post/Reality in ‘Reality’ TV.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 27, no. 2, 2004, pp. 9–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23414952.

I’m a DJ for my college radio station. My freshman fall I was given the graveyard shift, an hour long slot at 1am that I showed up to in my PJS and slippers every Monday.

It was winter in western Massachusetts and about negative one hundred degrees, so I wrapped my arms tight around myself and shuffled as fast as I could to the basement of one of the larger dorms on campus, where a winding, secret, temperature-controlled haven unfolded just out of view.

The radio station is made up of a few rooms: the lounge, the office, the live studio, and a recording space. It’s all connected by a hallway plastered with heavily creased music posters shipped by mail. The lounge is full of radio-show-themed collages pasted together by the station’s DJs. An empty decorative bottle of Svedka and boxes of hot cocoa mix sit on the large desk scattered with bits of ephemera left behind by passers through.

In the office, bins upon bins of vinyls and CDs are stacked into ceiling-high shelves and sit pressed into corners for cleaning up or rifling through. In the studio, post-its with scribbled doodles and notes for friends with shows later in the day stick to the tops of desks and the sides of computer screens. Colored pencils litter every flat surface. An occasional rule breaker leaves a gross dining hall bowl on the shelf outside the studio.

In other words, there are remnants of life everywhere. Sometimes too much life, in the case of the nasty leftovers.

On Monday nights at 1am, walking through the station feels dystopian. It’s like I’m exploring the unattainable Wegmen’s second floor, or moving through some sort of modern Pompeii frozen in time by a catastrophe I can’t see or hear.

When I stretch out in the rolling desk chair and queue up my show for the night, I tend to pillage the room for what people have left behind. There’s a few staple objects: a jacket and water bottle that have been sitting on the windowsill for ages, a couple of records that have been tucked in the shelves for a while. But between the familiar artifacts are scattered remnants fresh from the week since my last show.

The first things I reach for are the stacks of CDs that prior hosts tucked beneath the transmitter. I shuffle through them, writing down albums I want to go back to. Sometimes I pick a random song I haven’t heard before off of the tray card to play for my special “In The Stu” segment.

A lot of the CDs have been in the collection for upwards of a couple decades, and sometimes they have little scraps of paper tucked inside with penciled recommendations and warnings about which tracks have curse words (can’t play explicit songs before 10pm). Some contain little arguments between DJs about which songs are best and worst, scribbled across time like a years-long pen pal-ship.

On one album:

reviews are saying they’re the new beatles

shut up. no one is like the beatles

The stationery brand Papier has a new campaign about “the analog.” Their website has quotes like, “Analogue looks good on you” and “That’s the beauty of analogue.”

Analog is a word that’s been thrown around a lot recently. I think of those bright yellow and blue clocks they used in first grade to teach us how to tell time. I also think about the proliferation of the digital camera, the cutesy black and white photo strip, the leather journal, the record collections, all things that have infiltrated social media and “returned.” We are reaching for the physical, stuff that wear and yellow with time, where value is often assigned in its largest quantities to the intangible and distant…AI models…crypto…workflow optimization…

When I look to the archive — to the annotations you find in a second-hand book or to the blemishes in old polaroids — it’s impossible for me to keep floating in the digital disconnect. The physical trumps it!

So I leave little bits of myself scribbled on post-its and I add on to humanity’s paper trail, and I cherish the moments where I can pick up where someone left off, a day ago or thirty years ago.

I am as solitary in the station as I am scrolling on social media in my bed at night. But when the surfaces around me are imprinted with the little fossilized footsteps of people I know, have never met, and never will meet, I could not feel more in company.

♡

My high school creative writing teacher was a runner. Seems like an odd thing to know about one’s writing teacher, but it came up a lot.

My teacher was a runner all through college, and continued to make time in his day-to-day in order to run, despite his hour-long commute back and forth from New Jersey to the Upper East Side of Manhattan where I went to high school. I had a chronic earliness habit, and would often see him dressed up in his running gear heading down to fit in a short run before his classes. Did you know there’s a shower in the East Annex leftover from when this was an apartment building? he once noted when discussing the quirks of the school. This little remnant of domesticity made his running life work.

Running came up often in the four or five semesters of creative writing I took with Mr. Teacher. He would often pull up one video or another of a runner fresh off the track, and we would study the way they talked about running.

Mr. Teacher would say that he was never good at pacing. The part of racing he loved best was the final stretch, when he could let loose and run as fast as he possibly could, no pacing, no consideration for the payment down the road.

He talked about endurance, the pain cave and the immense tragedy of just not being fast enough, and I would walk away from class thinking, how can he say all of this stuff about how awful running is, but still run every single day? It just didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t see how running could possibly be worth all of it.

To some extent I was looking into a life that I couldn’t understand and hadn’t lived. The life of an athlete, of a competitor, lived by the numbers and miles. Still, I just didn’t get it. What could be so magical about running that makes it so worth all of the absolutely entirely shitty bits?

I laughed off Mr. Teacher’s occasionally long-winded musings about running as a quirky byproduct of his incredible creative writing lessons. And then I broke my arm.

With my range of motion and ability to put weight on my arm entirely limited, I couldn’t do any of the forms of movement I did in the past. And so, realizing my mental health was suffering from lack of exercise, I was presented with the incredibly awful solution to my absolutely horrid predicament. My only choice was to go on a run. Running, which I had always hated and never understood, had now become my sole option.

Surprise surprise, I’m a running addict now. I literally cannot understand how this came about. Running sucks and it’s awful. And it’s not like I’m particularly good at it, or that it’s at all easy. But a few months after I started to look forward to my runs, I started thinking back on class with Mr. Teacher, and realized that the often excessive discussion of running maybe wasn’t that excessive at all.

I think running and writing, in a way, are based on the same idea. When you sit down to write a novel or stand at the edge of the road in the sweltering heat of Virginia summer, in both instances you ask yourself, “how on earth am I gonna finish this?”

There is an equal sense of having to put in thousands of small steps in order to achieve a larger goal. And you can’t predict how it’s going to end or what the journey is going to be to get there. It involves an inherent, wild trust, and a little bit of insanity.

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Practically speaking, I can appreciate how running brings clarity. When you’re suffering it’s difficult to think about anything else. So it puts you in a kind of open state.

Sometimes when I run I think through plot problems. Other times I talk to myself under my breath, my thoughts winding but often centering around the fact that I can get to that pothole or around that bend. In life, I often worry about trivial things, but when I run, worrying feels impossible.

Mr. Teacher was tasked with a challenging situation. He was teaching a student body of incredibly perfectionist, grade-focused, and literal students produced by years of UES private school intensity how to do something that requires being the opposite of all of that. He frequently revisited this metaphor that your writing is a wolf (bear with me pls). If you restrict your mind to what you think is standard or right, the wolf will be caged up. Your writing will be boring and dull and not honest to yourself. He would say you had to let the wolf out of the cage, to learn how to let your ideas out onto the page without restricting them or making them feel “correct.” Then, he said, you had to put a leash on the wolf, fight with it a little bit, rein it in. The leash is the editing process, the refinement, the distillation. The leash was learning skills, like rhythm and grammar, and using them as a framework.

It took me a while to recognize that this framework applies to running, too. I thought back to Mr. Teacher’s anecdote about sprinting. Pacing is much like wolf-handling. And it’s as much of a mental battle, to rein in your wild thoughts of wanting to stop or slow down or give up. Maybe these skills apply in both writing and running. The blind trust in yourself, the letting the animal out of the cage. The gripping at the wiry fur of the wolf as it thrashes!

♡

p.s. There’s a lot of literature about running that I’m eager to read — especially Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. If you have other suggestions please please share them!

This article was originally written for Future NOW Media Foundation’s newsletter, The NOW. You can access the original article and a plethora of other valuable interviews in their archive, linked here.

Many thanks to Julia Lambert for her time and thoughtful insights.

I just finished watching season 50 of Survivor, rife with returning players, high stakes, and big strategic moves. I’ve watched a decent amount of reality TV, but something about this watch felt different.

Survivor sits alongside several reality shows at the forefront of the pop culture sphere, like The Traitors, Love Island USA & UK, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Cake Boss, and, of course, The Great British Bake Off, among countless others. Reality TV has a massive influence on virality, product growth, and the cultural landscape and language of today.

Frequently labeled “trash television” or a “guilty pleasure,” the unscripted genre is, almost ironically, a lucrative industry. Maybelline’s collaboration with Love Island USA during its most recent season, for example, has rocketed their products to viral status on social media in the last few weeks. The show has launched full blown careers for its contestants, and skyrocketed them into fame.

But what about these shows drives people in droves to tune in? For Love Island fans, this means watching upwards of forty hour-long episodes that release 6 nights a week. Aside from being a source of entertainment, this “guilty pleasure” is a time commitment.

I spoke with Julia Lambert, a Post Production Supervisor at ITV, to get an inside perspective. Lambert has worked on many reality shows, from Pawn Stars to House Hunters, and now works on Alone, where participants self-record their experiences surviving in the wilderness, completely…well, alone.

As a Post Production Supervisor, Lambert has to “wear a lot of different hats,” managing logistics from the field to the final cut for TV shows in order to help the creative team “achieve what they want to achieve, all within budget and within schedule.” She manages the granular details of TV production, juggling network requirements, unique executive processes, and all of the exterior roadblocks that come with producing media about real people. “You kind of just have to be prepared for anything and everything,” she said.

Alone comes with its own complex can of worms. Since all of its footage is recorded by the contestants on cameras they operate themselves, footage amount and quality is entirely unpredictable. “Yes, it’s a reality show, but it’s a very human show,” Lambert commented. “Seeing what pushes people to the edge, what keeps them out there surviving in the wilderness, or what takes them out...It’s just an interesting study of humans and how far they’re willing to go for money, or the pride of being the winner of the show.”

Lambert thinks that this humanity is the essence of reality television. The viewer is given access behind otherwise closed doors. We witness immense vulnerability and moments of tension, whether a divorce, breakup, or loss of some kind. “And yes there’s a lot of drama, there might be fights. But there’s also a lot of really genuine moments that viewers might relate to, and it kind of makes you want to root for these people…in our own weird, dark ways…or judge them, or disagree…there’s just something about that connection that I think is so unique to reality TV.”

Unscripted is often considered deceptive. There is a common prevailing sense of unease around the authenticity of reality TV, a feeling that we can’t quite be sure that what we’re consuming is entirely real. Lambert pointed out that ultimately, “there’s always going to be moments that will be heightened for dramatization…but these are real people showing their real lives on TV.”

In the field, producers are adept at knowing what questions will tug at certain threads. They are skilled at pointed curiosity. Then, “you have your team in post that knows how to take those things that they pulled in the field, and cut it in a way that makes the most compelling story.

“I don’t know if I would call it inauthentic, because it’s usually a producer knowing the right questions to ask.” Many shows have little to none of this sort of interviewing. A show like Fixer Upper is more devoted to showing a cool house renovation than it is to exploring the complexities of human relationships.

Still, Lambert thinks that the unscripted genre as a whole differs from scripted in one key way. “Sure, you watch a scripted show and there’s interesting characters, interesting storylines, but you know that those people are fake.” With reality TV, however, you have the ability to connect with real people experiencing real issues, issues that you yourself might also be facing.

These connections don’t stop when the season ends. “You can follow them on social media and online after,” Lambert said. “The show might be over, but you can still keep up with these people and root for them and follow them throughout their lives.”

With that in mind, Lambert said it’s difficult to call reality “trash” television. “You’re dealing with real people,” she said. “It really is just a human experiment.” This, she thinks, is also a draw to the genre. “People are being put, sometimes, into pressure cooker situations, and it’s kind of like a human social experiment of how do people react when pushed to the edge?”

Unscripted becomes an alternative reality where we can see ourselves echoed in both very real and incredibly outlandish situations. It lets us confront worst case scenarios, like finding out you’ve been cheated on or losing a relative, with a protective screen. It becomes a feeler for real life.

Alternatively, reality gives us access to worlds we wouldn’t experience otherwise. We can get a taste of a life beyond what is feasible for ourselves: as a world renowned cheerleader, a professional baker, or a survivalist. And while fiction can mimic this, with reality TV, there is no need to suspend your disbelief. “And it does make you think, well, if that was me, how would I have handled that situation? What would I have done differently?”

This is somewhat universal to all the umbrellas within unscripted content. “You’re just telling real human stories across all the different genres of interest. Literally any topic you can think of, you can make a reality show about it. Maybe they’ve always wanted to redo their car…and, like, that’s a show.”

So does reality really deserve the designation “trash,” if it’s just distilled humanity? I guess so, if you’re willing to admit that the rest of us are trash, too.

♡

The fields on the farm were filled with skeletal chicory and stilt grass that prodded at the backs of my knees and shoulder blades like a million fingernails. Fat flies buzzed at the gaps between my boots and my shins, and flocked the bloody cut on my knee. Next to me, Alex brushed her hands over her thighs — to push away the bugs, or to eliminate the imagined sensation produced by sitting in a pasture you know is full of them.

My last August on the farm was record-breakingly warm. Even early in the morning, the sun beat down violently until we burned and glistened. It got so hot we would stand in the industrial freezer outside the bakery, a giant dystopian metal cube that felt like a blessing on the skin. In the afternoons we wore pants and long sleeves because putting on more clothes kept us cooler than if we exposed our limbs to the sun.

Jess would say the cows knew the way home. There were sixty or so dairy cows on the farm, self-organized into a matriarchal hierarchy that I envied. The herd was led by Pearl, a grandmotherly cow with fur like a well worn white sneaker. Her shoulder blades jutted up and pushed through her sagging skin. She had sharp eyes, and her horns were streaked with warm greys and browns. Pearl, though among the oldest, was not to be messed with. Pearl held the trust of the whole herd. Jess would say she had to stay on Pearl’s good side, otherwise everything would fall into chaos.

The farm was a blessing I didn’t grasp until I was much more sure of myself. It was steady and repetitive and every problem had a resolution. The farm was a resolution, a balance between land, people, and animals. A full organism. Nothing has ever been so sure as the fact that the morning would come cold, and the cows, steady and warm, would need milking. The horses would need feeding, and the fresh eggs, warm from the roost, would need to be plucked from their beds of hay. Even uncertainties were undoubtable. Death was inevitable, and so was drought and disease and spoiled harvests. But these were facts of the land and still the chicory would prick and the electric fence would jolt if caught against your shin by your boot.

That same early morning we walked to the edge of the main campus of the farm, cut through by County Route 21. I stabbed the toe of my boot into the asphalt and it left a dent. Across the road rose the North Pasture: a rolling hill just beyond the roadside brush, lined with an electric fence. Deep black troughs sunk into the grass to the left and just in front of us. There were five or six cows huddled at each one, heads stooped down, their necks sloping. We crossed the road between cars, and, going first, I reached for the rubber handle of the fence and released it, the line going slack so we could step over.

I glanced back over my shoulder as we hiked up, and the entire farm splayed out behind me. Beyond the pasture we had just been laying in, I could see the path leading to the right, veering off into the woods towards our cabins — wooden and shabby with gaps between the floorboards so you could see the ground below. I could make out the small playground that the younger kids played on. Out beyond stood the loafing shed, to the left the cow barn. To the right was a small garden, the hay barn, the pigs, and the sheep. A ways off I could glimpse the greenhouse.

I turned back to Jess and Alex and jogged to catch up. Sweat had already broken on my brow. From ahead of me I could make out snorts and huffs, hooves kicking up dirt. The herd seemed agitated. I glanced at Alex, and she met my gaze somewhat passively.

Alex was intimidating. She had brought makeup to the farm — eyebrow gel and mascara — and kept them tucked in a sweet little toiletry kit in her cubby on the screened in porch where we ate our meals. Her hair sat in a cascade of perfectly messy loose curls that glowed cherry red under the sun, a color so perfect that you began to question whether it was actually dyed, or if she was just born that way. I was 13 and she was 12, but she had a level of confidence that far surpassed my own. She talked about sneaking out. She was tough and wasn’t scared to complain about the counselors. She seemed unshakable. Meanwhile I was covered in mud, looked a mess, and was fresh off of a mysterious illness that left me dehydrated from vomiting for a day.

Although the group was fewer than ten kids, Alex couldn’t have felt more unattainable to me. Not only did she live on the other side of the path in the woods, but I didn’t think she liked me very much, or any of the other girls in my cabin, a feeling perpetuated by the counselors insisting on her including us more. We claimed we didn’t want her to. We pushed each other away out of pettiness. It upset me that the counselors assumed I was socially helpless (though they weren’t wrong) and that I needed their intervention. I figured I didn’t need a twenty-something-year-old environmental science major to beg the other kids to hang out with me on my behalf. I felt like I had found out my mother was offering money to my classmates to spend time with me. Still, I am heartbroken for this version of myself who just wanted the support of a herd, and was met instead by a division which I did not understand until I began to write.

My summers at the farm found me at my most unconfident, annoying, and awkward tween girl stage. I didn’t know how to be a friend. I hadn’t been around long enough to get particularly good at anything. My idea of the future was sucked from Indiana Jones and fantasy novels. Strangely but maybe predictably so, there was nothing that made me more aware of these shortcomings than certainty of the farm. I felt like a speck compared to the antiquity of the land, where at home in New York City I felt old in the shadows of the constant stream of high rises popping up on the skyline. It’s a lot harder to avoid uncomfortable facts of life when you’re moving steady through a repetitive task across several hours, sweating in a field, cutting at the stalks of kale plants, arduously peeling away hay from the bale. You get lost in these moments. They provide just enough activity to keep your mind in a space of thinking, but not enough to block the more complicated thoughts from coming in. You end up receptive to the oldness and vastness of things. The field could be anywhere in the world. It has no belonging to any time or place, and the peace and placelessness turn you introspective, and suddenly, at age 13, you are incredibly conscious of every mistake you’ve ever made. There’s something about being early in a journey where you can’t place exactly what is off, but you can sense that something is bound to break and refix itself. The farm was dynamic, reliably in flux, and it felt wrong to stay completely stagnant.

At the top of the hill we were met by a herd of dehydrated cows and a broken irrigation system. Alex and I spent that afternoon sprawled out over five gallon buckets in the trunk of Jess’ six seater, trying desperately to keep the lids from popping off and the water from sloshing out. It was like a high stakes game of twister. We lugged five or six rounds of buckets up the face of the North Pasture to tip into the near-empty troughs. We pretended we were spies on a mission to make the work more bearable. Alex’s acceptance of the pretending surprised me.

The water splashed in, raising the level by an inch or two, and the cows grew feverish again in their attempts to drink, horns hitting. The water was so low it looked like black sludge. Overall it didn’t seem like we made much of a difference, but Jess insisted it was necessary, important work. Good Stuff, Agents, she said.

On rainy days it was beautiful and cool. Water sprayed in through the screen and onto me where I slept in the top bunk. In the mornings we’d feast on fresh maple yogurt, eggs from the chickens, grits, and bread warm from the bakery. The kitchen was housed in a small building behind the Main House, with a big bell in front that we rang at the beginning of every meal. We filed in, tugging off our muddy boots and slipping on sneakers or flip flops to plod through the indoor dining room and out to the screened in porch. When it really poured, I ran with my childhood best friend Greta outside to the grassy patch across the path and splashed in the puddles, bursting into bouts of The Sound of Music soundtrack (she had a very strict German mother who only let her watch this, the Lindsey Lohan Parent Trap, and Treehouse Masters).

It was a similarly foggy, wet day when Lydia the sheep died. All of us stood on the porch, hands pressed against the wood wall set below the screen windows, and watched as the roving excavator lowered her into a hole in the ground just past the chicken coop. I caught a glimpse of her legs, stock straight as they stuck out from the bowl of the excavator.

Everyone was very quiet. Even Asher, who had just turned ten the day before. Asher and John were the only boys in the group, and had a cabin to themselves. Asher was a little blonde menace. John, on the other hand, was somewhat reserved. Despite the significant age difference they got along much better than anyone anticipated, and ended up something like brothers.

Looking down the line of sad faces, I saw Asher glance up at John, his eyes wet with unshed tears. Behind me, Candace, the most emotional counselor, wept audibly. I wasn’t a fan of Candace. Every evening, we sat out in a small wooden pavilion in the woods just beyond our cabins. Matt, one of the counselors, would play guitar, and we’d sing. I liked Wagon Wheel and Take me Home Country Roads, but my favorite was Circle Game by Joni Mitchell. Any time Candace was with us for our evening time, she’d always say we couldn’t sing Circle Game because it made her too sad. I’d say, isn’t that the point? And Matt would play and the peepers in the stream just below would begin to sound, and we’d wrap our arms around ourselves and bunch our knees to our chests against the cold and sing. Just below us the stream wound through the underbrush. It was a forbidden stream, because it belonged to the old man who owned the land just beyond, and the rumor was he had a gun.

I watched Lydia get lowered into the hole and remembered just a few days prior when I had been on feeding duty early in the morning. The bits of hay and debris that peppered her fleece pressed into my palms when I sunk my hands into her wool. I had felt the heat of her skin through the fibers. I remembered her cloudy eyes and the soft, bumpy fur of her forehead, her bleats and twitching ears. We were all very quiet that breakfast, and the bread felt colder than usual.

On the last night, we decided to sneak out. Alex had a little watch that she wore on a string around her neck, and Bex had a wrist watch, so we set a time to pull on our sweaters, crawl out of our creaky bunk beds and slip out the door. I led the group, taking Greta’s hand, and she took Bex’s, and so on, and we walked towards the other cabin. I held my breath at first, knowing we had a particularly strict counselor close by that night, but the grass cushioned the noise, and even Bex, the littlest, kept quiet. I glanced back and noticed a glowing shape — Bex was wearing her glow-in-the-dark dinosaur shirt, and the dino bobbed up and down with each of her careful steps.

I paused where I could make out the other girls’ cabin in the moonlight. Greta ran into my back with a whispered, laughing “sorry!” As our feet quieted and our nervous breathing settled, I realized again the darkness of the woods, the gentle, animalistic quiet. Someone rustled behind me, and I shushed them.

After a few minutes, the door creaked open. The girls filed out and I took Gia’s hand and Lee took hers. Alex walked to the guys’ cabin and peeked through the door. She drew her nail gently across the screen so it hummed, and a few moments later the guys stumbled out, bleary and mussed from sleep. Asher took Bex’s hand, and John took up the back.

We crept quietly, hands linked together, Alex, our Pearl, towards the top of the hill. I figure now that we must have looked like the herd on their way out to pasture. Jess’ low, humming tones were replaced by the steady stir of the forest, and instead of a cattle prod we were led by moonlight.

I felt an immense pride in my own rule breaking. We were disobeying our curfew, but we were also engaging in a rendezvous, like we were forbidden enemies convening in secret. Our separation, I realized, was entirely falsified, spurred on by our contrary natures and the abject lack of understanding on the part of the adults around us. The counselors pushed a narrative of my own exclusion, and, out of anger, I enforced it. For whatever reason, everyone else did, too. But when we were alone, or out in the fields harvesting bins full of kale, or when we were toting unfathomably heavy buckets of whey to the pigs, we all got along quite well. It was difficult, in a place where you felt so a part of the Earth, to feel all that different from anybody else.

We sat in a circle on damp logs around the fizzling bonfire. I knelt before it and blew at the embers, sparks flitting up and out. It was quiet and cold and the stars were bright and incredibly certain. I thought about the scrapes down John’s chest from when he dove into too shallow water at the pond and how Alex fixed her broken watch with a stick, and how Lee and I traded books when we finished our own.

This week, two of my friends from college and I decided we wanted to walk from the northernmost point of Manhattan to the Southernmost. My Strava reports a 14.66 mile trek that took about four and a half hours.

There is a phenomenon that you experience when you live in New York City long enough (which I have often named as my favorite part of growing up here) where your world slowly expands in units of city blocks. As a little kid, you start to get to know little bubbles of a few self-significant streets: the four blocks around my old ballet studio, my middle school best friend’s neighborhood, my walk to school.

I was not born with any sort of directional aptitude. Instead, I experienced a slow piecing together of puzzle pieces a few streets at a time, a stitching together of quilt patches. I connected places in reference to one another until I could close my eyes and walk through whole neighborhoods in my mind.

This stitching together mirrored the size of my world, and with every moment of, “oh, I know where I am!” I felt everything open up a little more. Often these eureka moments occurred on long walks or bus rides at the window seat.

To walk all of Manhattan within days of coming home from my first year of college felt appropriate. We traveled through the neighborhoods where I grew up, where I went to school, where I used to spend time with my best friends, where I took art classes, and I stumbled across a million other memories in between. I surprised myself with how much I’ve had the privilege of forgetting and re-remembering in just 18 years! In a similar vein, how lovely it is to have known a city block so well that you recognize how it’s changed since your last visit!

Our itinerary (in case you are interested in undertaking the trek yourself):

We started at Bunni Cafe in Inwood on 207th and Broadway. Felix got the cardamom latte and Fiona got a vanilla chai. The first mile was very uphill, and the 14 miles ahead started to feel a little overwhelming. Thankfully things sloped down pretty soon into the journey.

For brunch we stopped at Harlem Biscuit Company on 135th and Adam Clayton Powell. Bacon/egg/cheese biscuit sandwich with strawberry jam. 10/10. Crispiest most delicious bacon ever.

With renewed energy, we made it to Central Park. We went east around the Harlem Meer to the Conservatory Garden around 106th just off of 5th Avenue. Not necessarily in season but still beautiful!

We switched to 5th Ave and walked Museum Mile from El Museo del Barrio to The Met before dipping back into Central Park and walking towards Bethesda Fountain. We left the park by way of the South East corner and, via 5th, made a beeline to Xing Fu Tang in KTown, passing the absurd Louis Vuitton suitcase scaffolding and the Empire State Building on the way.

Next was the Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park. Then, Washington Square Park, and suddenly we were already south of Houston!

Our last mile or so was spent dreaming of life in Soho before we reached City Hall and the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, and parted ways.

As I steep in memories of the messes I made (and cleaned up (and learned from)) in my freshman year of college, Manhattan T2B (top 2 bottom, although I guess we did more of a forehead-to-achilles situation) showed me how lovely it is to trace back over your old stitching and come across all sorts of mistakes and bits of fabric you’d forgotten about. Even more, it reminded me how exciting it is to watch your quilt grow.