So instead I invested my spring and summer into looking for the best mango flavors. However, you will not see any Mango Sticky Rice flavors on this list because the sensory experience of rice in ice cream sounds like a baby being introduced to solid foods.

Haagen Daas Mango Ice Cream

From the grocery store <3

I devoured this as I wracked my brain trying to pin down the flavor. I had to get another pint to write this review. When I was in elementary school, I had this chapstick that did not moisturize my lips at all, in fact it probably made them more dry. But it did taste delicious between multiplication tables and practicing my cursive. I kept the chapstick in the interior orange nook meant for a pencil and snacked on it throughout the day.

I was probably chomping on that precious delight when the Twin Towers fell.

Haagen Daas Mango Sorbet

From the grocery store <3

Sorbet bastardizes the concept of a mango. Sorbet provides rehabilitation to fruits that need a little assistance in reaching their full potential as frozen desserts.

Mangos do not need this. This is like forcing them into conversion therapy to pray the gay away.

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Morgenstern’s Mango Lychee Lemonade Ice Cream

Lower East Side, NYC

Catastrophically disappointed in this concoction after waiting in a long line of Gen X tourists who were overwhelmed by the amount of flavors and the fact they couldn’t taste test them. I remember enjoying Morgenstern’s Lychee Lemonade last spring even though the texture was reminiscent of water ice and made me wonder if lemon should be designated as a sorbet ingredient only.

Mango Lychee Lemonade was like snorting Crystal Light powder at a middle school lunch table. Syrupy, sanguine, and texturally unpleasant. I wish I could have summoned the spirit of Susan B. Anthony or some other annoying white woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer and demanded a refund.

Morgenstern’s new location is smaller AND they got rid of their reward system. I like being rewarded for my loyalty so I will not be back.

Ollie’s Ice Cream + Stuff Mango and Cream Ice Cream

Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC

An elevated experience of eating my childhood comfort chapstick. I went outside to eat it because I needed to be alone with it. Did I moan? Maybe. My troubles disappeared for three minutes. Orgasmic. A high I’ll always chase.

Malai Mango & Cream Ice Cream

Philadelphia & NYC

Not sure what went wrong here. Malai is an Indian ice cream company. India is the world’s largest Mango producer. According to Malai’s website, “The flavor combines the simplicity of sweet milk with a fruity, tangy and sweet mango and puree. It's almost an ice cream and sorbet in one!”

There wasn’t any purée or D1 commitment to a mango experience. This was basically toilet paper with a few pieces of frozen mango mixed in.

Malai also has a vegan mango soft serve so maybe that’s where all their attention was allocated. But for the sake of this piece, only hard ice cream that has faced adversity matters.

Cuzzy’s Mango Ice Cream

Philadelphia, PA

This tastes just like my sister’s preferred dried mangoes from Trader Joe’s. It is as refreshing as scooping a mango out with a spoon without the juice running down your chin. Dense, rich, and a short trek from YOWIE.

Let me know if there’s any other mango flavors I should try!!

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How much planning do you do before starting a painting? Your material use seems intuitive like the gnarled frame in “The Captive Maternal.”

Chayse Sampy: I wouldn’t say I do a tremendous amount of planning in the traditional sense. My process is really guided by the research, archival materials, and images I’m collecting. I spend a lot of time reading, writing, gathering documents, and building digital collages. You could say the work “starts” with digital collages—they’re spaces where images begin to build relationships with one another. Once I start making, though, I try to leave room for intuition.

I think of research and making as collaborators rather than separate stages. The work often tells me what questions I need to ask next. The frame of The Captive Maternal is a good example. I knew I wanted to begin with domestic architecture—a baseboard—but as I worked it transformed into branches. That wasn’t something I fully planned or knew how to execute beforehand, but it made perfect sense conceptually because the piece is about lineages that continue to grow beyond the structures meant to contain them.

Who taught you how to sew? How/when did you start incorporating textiles in your work?

Chayse Sampy: I mostly taught myself, I can do a mean sew-in, so I often use a hair sewing needle and thread. My grandmother sewed, and sewing has always been present in my family, but I never received formal training. I started incorporating textiles in graduate school when I realized fabric already carried the kinds of histories I was interested in—domestic labor, care, repair, resourcefulness, inheritance. Fabric isn’t just another surface for me. It arrives with a history before I even touch it. I tend to mix textiles from my family with those from strangers.

Coming from a family/people that often repurposed materials, sewing also felt like a natural extension of that resourcefulness. Instead of hiding seams, I became interested in making them visible. They function almost like scars or sutures, recording how the work was assembled.

When did you decide to abandon the conventional canvas? “Migrating the Fire Next Time” is mostly painted on tarp? How did you prep the tarp?

Chayse Sampy: I don’t think of it as abandoning canvas so much as expanding what a painting can be. Every support carries its own history, and I’m interested in those histories becoming part of the work.

The tarp in Migrating the Fire Next Time comes directly from my experience growing up on the Gulf Coast. Hurricanes and flooding taught me very early that home can be incredibly fragile. After a storm, tarps become temporary roofs, shelters, and symbols of rebuilding. They’re both protective and provisional. Since the painting is about migration, carrying home with you, and imagining the future, the tarp already carried those ideas before I ever put paint on it.

Technically, I cleaned the tarp, lightly sanded areas where I wanted more tooth, and applied several coats of acrylic gesso before painting.

“The Captive Maternal” appears to be about the destruction of maternal identity or the death of a former fixed identity to become maternal because of the lack of conventional clearly outlined features. You also can’t see the baby’s face.

Chayse Sampy: I think that’s a really thoughtful reading. For me, the work is less about the loss of identity than it is about identity becoming multiple. The title comes from Joy James’s concept of the “captive maternal”, where motherhood/parenting extends beyond biology and becomes a political and communal practice of care. Throughout my work I’m interested in figures that carry multiple histories, memories, and temporalities at once.

Obscuring the baby’s face was also an act of protection. It felt like one final gesture of shielding the child from the viewer’s gaze while allowing them to become a more universal vessel. Rather than depicting one specific child, they can hold many stories and many futures simultaneously.

Both works feature engraved words in cursive. How did you decide to include this in the composition? The cursive looks formal like in The Declaration of Independence.

Chayse Sampy: The writing functions differently in each piece. In The Captive Maternal, the engraved cursive comes directly from the manumission papers of my sixth great-grandmother, Marie Simien, and her son, Louis. Those documents literally recorded a legal transition from enslavement to freedom, so embedding that handwriting into the surface allows that history to become part of the figure itself. It functions almost like ghosts beneath the image. Even when it isn’t fully legible, it continues shaping how we understand the figures.

In Migrating the Fire Next Time, the text is James Baldwin’s words stamped onto the moving truck that carries one of the figures forward. I think of it almost like a mantra or affirmation for the journey ahead. Rather than functioning as illustration, Baldwin’s words become something the figure carries with them into an uncertain future.

Is “Migrating the Fire Next Time” based on your interpretation of James Baldwin’s book?

Chayse Sampy: The work is in conversation with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Baldwin’s title became a way for me to think about the future and how I would talk to young people about hope. In the painting, his words are stamped onto the moving truck carrying one of the figures forward. I think of them almost like a mantra for the journey ahead.

The burning house is also in conversation with Martin Luther King Jr.’s concern that, even as Black Americans fought for inclusion, they risked being welcomed into what he described as a “burning house.” That metaphor has stayed with me because it asks us to consider not only the pursuit of freedom, but the conditions of the world we are entering. The painting places their ideas in conversation with my own experience of relocating to New Haven, my family’s history on the Gulf Coast, and broader questions of migration, inheritance, and what it means to build a future within structures that have always been unstable.

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What do acrylic skins add to the work? When did you start using them?

Chayse Sampy: I was first introduced to acrylic skins a couple of years ago through an exhibition by Zsavon Butler at Art Is Bond in Houston. I was fascinated by the way paint could exist as both image and object, but I didn’t begin incorporating them into my own work until I arrived in New Haven. They’re almost like fragments of paintings that can be relocated. I can move them around, layer them, stitch them into different contexts. Like the archival images I work with, they aren’t fixed. Materially they also create another temporal layer. Some areas are painted directly onto the surface while others are made elsewhere and later embedded into the work. That accumulation reinforces my interest in collage, where meaning emerges through relationships rather than isolated images.

In “Migrating the Fire Next Time” the Black people are depicted with browns but in “The Captive Maternal”, the Black figure(s) are black like onyx—similar to how Kerry James Marshall depicts Black people. Was this an explicit decision?

Chayse Sampy: Yes, it was intentional. I’m interested in color operating symbolically rather than descriptively. In The Captive Maternal, the figure needed to exist almost outside ordinary time. The deep black body absorbs light instead of simply reflecting it. It becomes less about skin tone and more about presence. Black functions almost like a material or a space rather than a color.

As I was researching Black women across the African diaspora, I kept encountering remarkable moments of synchronicity. Whether I was looking at my own ancestor Marie Simien in Louisiana, the signares of Senegal, Isabel de Olvera in colonial New Mexico, or free women of color in New Orleans, I found women navigating different versions of the same sexual economy. Intimate relationships could become sites of negotiation, survival, mobility, or coercion, and again and again I saw that a woman’s Blackness shaped not only her own possibilities for freedom but often the legal status and future of her children. The signares, for example, occupied influential positions through relationships with European merchants while navigating the racial and economic hierarchies of Atlantic slavery, revealing just how entangled intimacy, commerce, and power could become.

Rendering the figure in this deep, onyx black allowed me to collapse those histories into a single body. She isn’t one woman or one ancestor. She’s a vessel holding these recurring patterns across the diaspora. The work asks what it means to inherit not just a family history, but these larger historical structures that continue to echo across generations.

How did being in New Haven impact your work?

Chayse Sampy: It was the first time I had lived outside the South, and that distance made me understand how deeply Southern history structures my thinking. I wasn’t simply making work about where I was—I was constantly looking back toward Texas and Louisiana.

At the same time, New Haven introduced me to different archives, landscapes, and conversations. I found myself thinking more about movement, migration, abolition, and how histories travel with us. I also became more ambitious materially. Being at NXTHVN gave me the time, space, and community to take risks I probably wouldn’t have attempted before.

Material Conditions of Becoming & Paper Trail also features work by NXTHVN Studio Fellows S. Yemisi Adeyemo, Alexandra Bell, Benita Nnachortam, Masud Olufani, Haejin Park, and Kristopher Wright, and is curated by Curatorial Fellows Tara Fay Coleman and Juanita Sunday. The show is on view until July 24.

Gisela Lazarte was born in Venezuela to Peruvian immigrant parents and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her solo show, come what may, a flor de piel, is up currently at Nassau Gallery in Brooklyn until June 28. It is kismet that her show is happening concurrently with Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance so I had the perfect excuse to finally ask her about her work as it relates to abstraction, identity, and growing up in Venezuela.

CS: What kind of work were you making before discovering your current techniques?

GL: I was making figurative work. I informally studied oil painting and drawing when I was a teen and painted on and off throughout my early adulthood. At one point, several years ago, I tried purely abstract painting for the first time, and I felt a sense of self-expression I hadn’t experienced before. But it wasn’t until I started experimenting with raw canvas that I fell in love with that process almost instantly, with the organic feel of it and the fluid, unpredictable nature of the process.

While I enjoyed figurative painting there is an aspect of hyper-control in the process that wasn’t working for me. Abstract and the raw canvas allow a level of freedom in expression and a sensory experience that was deeply liberating for me. From that “discovery” moment onward, I started developing my current techniques further and further, and haven’t looked back.

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CS: How have your current techniques changed how you approach art making?

GL: They changed it almost completely. I approach art making from a place of freedom and presence now. I look to follow my curiosity first, rather than to follow a set plan. There are leitmotifs and a visual language that repeats itself throughout my work of course, but it’s important for me to leave a lot of room for exploration and a spark of something new that goes a bit further in each new work.

CS: What preparation do you do before starting a new work?

GL: I always start every painting session by lighting some palo santo and sage. Then I like to do some exercises or dance to warm up and get in my body. Especially for large scale work, it takes activating my whole body. Then I play music to set a mood and tone. I use music to channel feelings, that is also key to start and during the process.

CS: How has making abstract work expanded your voice as a Latina artist? What do you gain from not making representational work? Do you feel like the audience processes the work differently?

GL: I don’t know if the audience processes the work differently, but I think creating abstract work has expanded my voice by allowing me to tap into a form of self expression that feels truest to me as an artist. That’s what I gain from not making representational work. I’m personally not interested in creating work that depicts anything but instead expresses a lot, and therefore connects with the other in a plane that is often wordless.

I believe that individual forms of expression are what allow us to connect with each other the most, because they tap into the core of our humanity. My unique voice as a Latina immigrant woman might be less overt as such in the type of work that I do than if I did other types of art. But I’m not worried about that: my identity, my background, my memories, they all get embedded into the work that I do.

Having pursued a career as an artist, pushing for the time and space to develop my voice, showing up every day to a practice that unapologetically focuses on expressing my inner world in an honest engagement with the process: that’s all a lot more than any of my female ancestors were able to do. And that alone is invaluable to me, as an artist and as a Latina woman.

CS: Does your background as a filmmaker influence your work?

GL: Absolutely. I strive for my work to have a cinematic feeling, an atmosphere and a sense of movement, action. Also most of my notions of composition come more from filmmaking and basic photography. And the way that music and sound influences the work as well, I’ve always been interested in that in terms of our interpretation of images, and I still delve into this but from the creating the images side of things.

CS: The first work I saw of yours is “the shade of the mango tree in the parking lot.” I was captivated by the deep purple. Do you think purple is a hard color to work with? How do you choose when to use it?

GL: Color choices are intuitive for me. Now I work mostly in bodies of work and I do that part of the process early on; I spend weeks testing and playing with color combinations I feel drawn to at the time and then annotate a sort of master palette that guides me through the work in each series.

Purple is one of those colors that almost always finds a way in my work in different variations from its whole spectrum. I find it to be such a rich color, regardless of the shade or tint, it always carries a distinct level of warmth and depth. There’s both mysticism and whimsy to it. I personally don’t think it’s hard to work with, you just have to figure out how to complement it.

CS: “the shade of the mango tree in the parking lot” also reminds me of Latin American cinema and decolonized Latin American feminist histories. I think it’s the vibrancy and combination of a deep purple, green, orange, and yellow--with a dash of red. Do you have any work (doesn’t have to be a painting) that inspires you?

GL: Lots of works inspire me but in an indirect way. Once you know [the title of the work], perhaps you pick up on the yellow, orange and red shades as references to mangoes. That piece in particular (and a lot of the work I did that year) was very nostalgic, I was reminiscing a lot of memories from back in Venezuela after having lost hope I might be able to visit that year [2022]. There was a mango tree in the parking lot of the residential complex I grew up in. When I say that, I think it often makes people think of jungle scenery.

But I grew up in Caracas, a large metropolis. The city coexists with nature. When I would come home, I’d often pick up mangoes from the ground and bring them upstairs, everyone did. I never thought too much of it, when it was part of my everyday reality. Now I know how special and rare that experience can be. When reliving these memories in my head, it gave me a sense of warmth and protection. I think that’s where the purple came in.

All my work comes from a medley of memories and current feelings. I grew up surrounded by color and liveliness, so naturally color is a vital aspect in my work. And that’s probably where the connection to the work of other Latin American artists comes from, whether in film, painting or any other medium.

CS: I noticed some of your titles are in Spanish and some are in English, especially in your solo show up right now. How do you come up with your titles? What is special about the titles in this show?

GL: My titles typically come from journal entries on the day I started a painting or are lines borrowed from music I was listening to during the process. For my current show, being my debut solo, it was important for me having most titles be both in English and Spanish. Spanish is my native language and I’ve lived in NYC for a decade now, so I feel my work lives somewhere in the intersection of these two worlds, as do I. Each title has two parts, one in each language - they’re not translations, they complement each other to form a whole.

CS: Did you see Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance at Gagosian? Or have you seen any of her work in person? If so, what did you think?

GL: I did and I cried, though I often cry with great art, but it’s a very special connection with Frankenthaler’s work. I’m pretty sure I’ve cried every time I’ve seen her work in person. The first solo exhibition of hers I saw was at the Palm Springs Museum in 2022, I was lucky to be travelling to California while the show was up and made a point of going there exclusively to see her exhibition.

I was blown away. It’s always remarkable because her work has had such a special influence on my own, especially early on, but also because the work itself is absolutely striking to experience in real-life. The freedom in her marks, the monumental scale of so many of her paintings that just sucks you in and envelops you in these incredible, pulsating worlds. I think anyone, especially anyone who thinks they don’t “get” abstract art should spend an afternoon with her work. In person, of course.

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1. Muddy colors that communicate an ignorance towards color mixing, making portions of the work appear accidentally brown.

2. “Work” that has an aesthetically pleasing process that perfectly suits Instagram.

3. Lazy mark making.

4. “Untitled”…ok so is the work finished or not?

5. Big paintings without big ideas or enough stamina to fill the canvas.

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During the pandemic, my algorithm showed me a video of Helen Frankenthaler discussing her process and she got my attention amongst the Black Lives Matter smatterings. Of course, I cannot find that video so I attached two other videos in this post that also highlight that she was savvy, pondering her Color Fields, and making art for more than “art sake.”

The first Frankenthaler show I saw was A Grand Sweep at MoMA last year. It was located in the atrium, where the walls are so high and close to the massive windows that you feel like Alice in Wonderland with an easy escape.

My favorite works were “Chairman of the Board” and “Mauve District”. Both these works utilize colors that I find difficult to use, purple and orange. Think about how often you see orange and purple in real life. You barely see them in art galleries. How about walking down a crowded street? In interior design? At a wedding? Only in the produce aisle at the grocery store?

Rare.

Orange is audacious and ferocious. Purple easily sucks the life out of a painting, if you aren’t careful. It’s matriarchal and severe and usually needs to be muted.

Four months after attending the MoMA show, I went to see Frankenthaler’s solo show at Gagosian, Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance, on view until July 2. There was a robust flow of Boomer onlookers standing directly in front of the massive works so no influencer could use them as a backdrop for a social media post.

There were two paintings that stopped me in my tracks. One was entirely orange and purple, titled “Gamut.” The other was deep cerulean blue and expansive, titled “Ocean Drive West #1,” that reminds me of the 1969 film, La Piscine. Big, experiential paintings.

Another work stopped me in my tracks but for the wrong reason. This essay is titled Frankenthaler’s Bastards because I have a folder saved on my Instagram of artists who copy Helen Frankenthaler. Before I continue, I do want to say that I did email most of these artists (95% of them), offering them a chance to comment on how Helen Frankenthaler and abstract expressionism inspires their work. None of them responded but my work must go on.1

This work seemed familiar until I realized the box made it a little bit different than the work of Spanish artist Violeta Maya. Her work came across my feed when she had a solo show at Nichelle Beauchene. Maya does cite Frankenthaler as an inspiration in this interview where she goes into detail about her technique and references. But describing the work as an “emotional landscape,” an overused phrase to communicate an abstract work has an abundance of colors, demotes it to purely interior design.

Part of Polish-American artist Maja Dlugolecki’s artist statement reads “each piece reflects a specific personal moment in time. in lieu of a daily journal, maja assigns past recorded thoughts to her titles. she feels this process best reflects the elusiveness of an ephemeral moment and the value of time when deepening the understanding of self.”2 Frankenthaler had a work similar to this in the show at MoMA titled “Commune”.

Dlugolecki’s other works are more ambient and overlap colors that create the sensation of hearing a song from 2012 in public when you’re just trying to survive a day where everything is going a little bit wrong and you’re about to crash out like a baby on a turbulent plane.

Brooklyn-based Arlina Cai is the only East Asian on this list. The weakness of these paintings is how the wash effect, created by using a paintbrush to rub the watered down acrylic paint into the canvas to execute “a manifestation of an unseen, unspoken inner world -- a reflection of the mysteries and truths that coexist within us all,” as Cai says on her website. Does she varnish these works? Cai’s paintings look like faded photographs of the creatures from Arrival (2016).

These three women artists’ work are evidence that Frankenthaler’s techniques are easily duplicated but inefficient without a command of voice or scale. Frankenthaler’s most famous works are large and grandiose and not as seemingly commerce-driven as these three artists. At least two of the artists mentioned above offer commissions, which are impossible to execute if you’re an artist motivate purely by ideas, introspection, or politics and not just aesthetics.

How satisfying is it as an artist to only be motivated by aesthetic? Are you an artist if you’re only (appear to be) motivated by aesthetic?

Frankenthaler doesn’t only have bastard daughters, she also has at least one bastard son. A man in women’s business. The Andy Cohen of Frankenthaler’s bastards.

Brooklyn based Jake Snowden’s work is an effort less version of the Abstract Expressionists that came before him.

Obviously, I want to know if you have spotted any Frankenthaler’s bastards in the wild. Feel free to link them below. And if you’re an art advisor who bookmarked this essay to use for future clients, I want 10% .3

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On view until June 13

“Kutera mutsara / Hearing Inner Lines” is Zimbabwean-born, NYC based printmaker and painter Virginia Chihota’s (b. 1983) first solo exhibit with Nicola Vassell.

The front room of the gallery is filled with massive works on canvas spanning up to 12 ft wide and works on paper up to 4 ft high. The works on paper are mostly in portrait orientation while the paintings create horizons between shame, girlhood, and overcoming self-induced paths of destruction.

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At first glance, the works are reminiscent of Phillip Guston, especially the nearly 12 ft work, Munei mandiri ( What Do I Have in Me), 2025-2026. Beyond the bubblegum pink/black/green/red/white color scheme, like Guston, Chihota also uses cartoonishly outlined fingers as a playful grounding as the protagonist of the work tries to grab hold of something. Another inventive way Chihota uses fingers is to make a finger coliseum cake-like shape.

The background impressionist paint application and printmaking techniques bleed into the foreground and blur the line between the timelines of life. How do we know when one part of our life is over and the next chapter is beginning? In a turmoil of red, is a child has her back to the viewer as if she is counting while playing hide and seek.

There is a baby hand, reminiscent of communist graphic design, overtaking a figure of a small woman and on the right side of the canvas. The baby blue above her head makes the interaction feel more delicate and like a private moment.

There is a thread of shame between the works especially with the repeated technique where Chihota scrapes away ink and paint to ensure the built up layers underneath can show. Shame morphs as playful moments are always accompanied by torment. In Zvinotombondiremera asi (It Does Get Heavy at Times But), 2026, a morbid 90’s Nickelodeon-cartoon reminiscent bunny, is off kilter on the central plateau that grounds the work. The ominous, amorphous figures create an existential iconography that imply what is referenced in the press release as, “This introspective self-excavation is particularly visualized through the presence of the human figure in varying states of emergence and dissolution, creating a gradation of adaptable selves within each canvas.”

Another playful, tormented moment can be found in Ini ndinowa, Ini ndinosimuka (Me Fall, Me Rise), 2025-2026. A bike is obscured by the legs of a child in messy tights with a skirt, featuring red figures, further obscured by Basquiat T-Rex-aesthetic legs getting forcibly hugged by a Black figure. This combines with the main figure as it is surrounded by primal gestures and figures, with a set of eyes hidden in the forest green on the left.

“Kutera mutsara / Hearing Inner Lines” is a recommended show to witness in the aftermath of Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s death. Mrs. O’Neal’s abstract impressionist tradition preserves and is in safe hands with the Black women artists of today.

The same week I viewed Chihota’s show was the same week people were debating the intent and execution of Olivia Rodrigo wearing babydoll dresses. I probably wouldn’t have connected the work so directly to girlhood without this discourse. Every take on the situation was correct. Rodrigo’s body type cannot communicate the angst and disgust of the punk aesthetic the way her inspiration, Courtney Love’s curves do. Even if Rodrigo’s politics are punk—giving out Plan B at concerts, making a music video that features Palestinians, and the list goes on and on.

Another argument against her wardrobe provokes Lolita, also fascinating and on the money but may I ask a more pressing question?

Girl dinner (usually something resembling a Lunchable).

Girl time.

“But I’m just a thirtysomething girl.”

“How are kids born in 2001 turning 25, when I was born in 1990 and I’m also 25?”

Why are women who can afford to be adults—with mortgages, stable jobs, steady partners, splendid vacations—obsessed with being girls? Why not completely indulge in adulthood since you can afford the version of adulthood we were promised?

Especially at a time where more post-college grads are living at home with no job prospects or ways to get any momentum.

The women with momentum seem transfixed on infantilizing themselves even though it appears that they didn’t suffer from adultification as girls.

Honestly, the tenth anniversary of Lemonade was not on my radar until I heard people talking about it without any retrospective cultural analysis. Even seeing Mrs. Carter at The Met Gala didn’t bring the social reckoning I hoped for. Some people even felt obligated to say they liked her sparkly skeletor fit. The most uproar we got was people just found this year’s Met Gala grotesque, gaudy, and Hunger Games-like.

Let’s talk about Revolution As An Aesthetic Choice™. The past ten years have brought an influx of other Black culprits, besides Beyoncé, whose artistic pursuits have been pushed as revolutionary or thought provoking when really, there’s nothing deeper to analyze and white people are too comfortable with engaging with their art. If you can even call it engaging.

At the 2017 Emmys, when asked who she was rooting for, Issa Rae responded, “I’m rooting for everybody Black.” In typical internet fashion, Black women are meme-ification magnets and that quote went around the world at the speed of light. When I heard that quote, I immediately thought of all the Black people I am not rooting for.

In 2026, that list of Black people is growing so consistently that I keep a list of Light Skins That Need to Be Stopped in my notepad. But I have enough posts where I whack light skins. Let’s move on.

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It seems like the only Black people who are “winning” are the evil ones. Usher. Chris Brown. Kevin Hart. Dave Chapelle. Hakeem Jeffries. Ye. Cancel culture seemed to only work on exactly three people.2 Hell, even the superintendent of Atlantic City Public School District got a pay increase of $319,866 from $282,000. When just earlier this year she and her husband, the Mayor of Atlantic City, were in court for child abuse charges. They were ultimately found not guilty but that may be because not everyone believes hitting kids is bad. Or manhandling them. Or pulling their hair…Or that a husband and wife shouldn't be in two of the most powerful positions in a city. This is like when I learned that Antony Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, was also in Biden’s cabinet. No wonder nothing got done. Everyone was just holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes.

The presentation of revolution parading as solely just getting a Black person in a position—politician, entertainer, artist—is failing us. More than 400,000 Black women have been laid off since last year and people are trying to distract themselves from their disillusionment and disappointment in what the Black Elite has sold you by clinging to the fact that, at least Cecred is a great product.3

Instead of fighting back, now as a treat, we have Revolution As An Aesthetic Choice™. Kamala Harris’ supposed run for president again is because the response to her losing was a protest where people marched with “We could be at brunch” signs. A palatable ethos that is easy to meme and keep people, on all sides, comfortable.

This lack of response and interrogation from Harris’ supporters is why we keep going in circles. You can be a fan of someone and expect more from them. Jets and Mets fans do it every year. Everywhere we turn, it is more and more evident that the Black Elite think we are fools that will bow at their feet. The image of a police car drowning, with no one inside, without any direct political statement resulted an influx of what liberalism perceived as the Black utopia fantasy, Black people rising up against the police and winning.

The trickle down politics of Lemonade are really the upholding of the Black Elite.

Which ladies were supposed to get in formation?

Kamala Harris even used the song FORMATION during one of her rallies with the Queen Bee in attendance. Harris’ career and further aspirations make her the police state even before she said she was a proud child of immigrants in a speech where she also told immigrants, “Do not come.” Somehow that authoritarian rhetoric was also meme-ified. You people disgust me and you’re easily distracted. That was a slam dunk easy way to question what change that libra lady was offering as a potential president. Now we have an orange demagogue.

It’s not just politics. TV and film have offered representation as politic.

Candyman (2021)

See You Yesterday (2019)

The scene in Nope (2021) that features an NWA song

Blackkklansman (2018)

Whatever Kenya Barris called himself doing.

Every Cop TV show having a Black woman cop. The only Black women you see on TV are playing cops.

It’s not just TV and film. I saw two art shows this past week that also invoked Revolution As An Aesthetic Choice™.

Vaughn Spann at Almine Rech

(All) Americans on view until June 13

Making work that solely depicts the American flag is tone deaf, even with the Black power color scheme as a foundation. This show consists of 7 flags and provides a safe space for the type of liberalism the Bradley Whitford’s character in Get Out exudes.

Somehow the flags make the white cube feel more sterile.

The most interesting work in this show, America (Redacted No. 2) (2026), features a collaged use of chopped towels within the red and white stripes (“Terry cloth,” according to the press release) but you won’t learn that from the materials description. All materials are identified as “mixed media” and the lack of specificity is a missed opportunity to politicize the work—especially when compared to the material-charged descriptions of vanessa german.

In the top half of the piece, behind the top six red and white stripes are light green impasto. These are some of the most evocative gestures in any of the works, communicating that America’s nationalism and pride camouflages its foundation of greed.

Some of the flags feature an orb-like shape made of polymer that is similar to the shape of a flowering cotton plant. But the shape is hard and obtuse. Instead of utilizing a new technique that would instantly communicate labor, Spann uses a familiar technique as in his previous paintings.

This inefficient command of materials muddles the desired conversation between the flag and the Black labor that built and builds America’s economy. The refusal to discover a new technique through experimentation and curiosity is a missed opportunity for charm, clarity, and cheekiness.

The canvases are built up under the flag portion of the works and it’s unclear if it’s a metaphor or a lack of planning. Seph Rodney’s press release says the work is in response to the first stanza of the Star Spangled Banner…an anthem written by Francis Scott Key, a slave holder who also believed “all men are born free.”

Spann’s work, according to the press release, also asks to be placed in the canon, or inspired by David Hammonds, Dread Scott, and Faith Ringgold—artists whose activism extends beyond the canvas and is more than just an aesthetic choice. These works don’t even invoke Jasper Johns.

Danielle McKinney at Marianne Boesky Gallery

Forest for the Trees on view until June 13

Although I have seen all of Danielle McKinney’s solo shows at Marianne Boesky Gallery, last week was the first time I got to go to an opening. It was packed and I was under dressed.

McKinney has risen to post pandemic fame for painting Black women at rest. Lounging, smoking cigarettes, and most importantly, in solitude. It was odd looking at these paintings of Black women at rest with a crowd of (mostly white) people. I prefer to feel like I’m alone while looking at them.

The front room had some watercolors similar to the work of Debra Cartwright and were the weakest link of the show. But the works that people hauled their way to Chelsea in their best fits to see left me feeling like the way people felt watching the Met Gala this year.

At a time where most Black women are in survival mode, looking at Black women lounging around like they’re in the movie, Mahogany (1975), felt like a spectator sport. Although we know ancestrally and culturally, that Black women could use more rest—who is actually getting to rest right now?

Which Black women are actually being granted the luxury of resting…

One of the biggest cultural shifts between 2024 and 2025 was people going from prioritizing self care and boundaries to community. Some of the boundaries people were setting included the expectation that they were allowed to cancel plans at any moment, even if it inconvenienced the other parties involved, for the sake of their mental health. And we were supposed to believe that, 365 days later, these people genuinely were interested in community post-election? Community for community sake or community for their personal survival.

The culture of wellness and self care has become more overtly capitalistic and self involved. Which begs the question have these women earned rest or do they just have a restful lifestyle? McKinney’s work has been collected by people such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z so we know who is connecting to the women in the paintings.

It is possible that rest is the only revolutionary act for the women in these works.

Prioritizing their peace, skin care, hair care, and access to healthcare on a whim.

Lucky them.

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When I was in New Haven, Connecticut attending my art show I came across Via Lactea, a plant based ice cream shop. I know I don’t cover a lot of vegan flavors/brands (feel free to recommend me some) but this one caught my eye on the walk to the train station.

Via Lactea translates to the Milky Way in Latin and offers their Home Planet flavor year round. The ingredients of the flavor are:

• Coconut Base

• Butterfly Pea Flower

• Lime Zest

• Matcha Cake

• Cookie Crumbs

As I licked the ice cream and read the description of ingredients I snapped a photo of on my phone, I couldn’t demystify what I was experience. The flavor is smooth. I was not really sure what Butterfly Pea Flower is. I originally connected to the flavor because my favorite milk alternative is pea protein milk. But it turns out Butterfly Pea Flower, when ingested in large quantities, can create alleviate chronic endometriosis pain and induce uterine contractions in pregnant women. The inclusion of this spiritual ingredient is perfect for a Gaia inspired-flavor.

Although, I usually find matcha catastrophically offensive, the matcha cake pieces and cookie crumbs mostly provided texture over flavor and aesthetic value that balanced the experience.

The second Earth Day flavor I tried was made by my arch nemesis Van Leeuwen’s. In the spirit of spring, with spring in my step, I had to go to several Philly shops to find one that still had the Earth Mama flavor in stock.

When I finally found a shop with the flavor, there were several harbingers that let me know this flavor was about to be nasty. First, the shop only had one employee working on a Saturday afternoon with 80 degree weather. So the line was wrapped through the store. The second, the presumably life long, white vegan sisters in front of me liked the their scoops a little too much.

It reminded me of when I was in high school and made this girl gluten free cookies for White Elephant. I thought they tasted disgusting but figured maybe she would indulge me and pretend like she liked them. Much to my surprise she ate them like Cookie Monster…It had been too long since she had the real thing.

I found myself an empty table with my $7.51 scoop and grimaced as I ate a spoonful. The culprit of my grimace? Blueberry.

Blueberry, an imposter, doesn’t belong in ice cream. It tastes too much like breakfast. Sometimes blueberries can potentially taste like a summer day but ice cream always tastes like a summer day. Blueberries need to stay in their lane.

More importantly, blueberries don’t make food blue. They make food purple. As you can see in the photo of the ice cream, there aren’t any blueberry chunks visible. So what they’ve actually done is added blueberry flavoring like they’re Nabisco and calling it a day.

I had to Google the ingredients in the flavor and this is what Google told me:

• Blue Spirulina

• Cashew-Coconut Milk

• Matcha Green Tea Cake

• Almond Extract

No blueberry in sight. My theory is they used some percentage of the base of their Dr. Seuss collaboration flavor, Swirly Whirly Blue Thing, also a suspiciously blue ice cream with blueberry swirls and honey cornbread.

Van Leeuwen’s is just grifting off Earth Day and our beloved Mother Earth with this flavor. Today is the last day it is available, thankfully.

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My sophomore year of high school we were covering impeachments in AP US Government and my teacher naturally gave us a crash course on the Clintons, Monica Lewinsky, and the fallout afterwards. The girls in my class thought the fact that Hillary Clinton stayed with her husband after he publicly cheated on her disqualified her from having enough integrity or dignity to be president.

I respected my fellow classmates reasons but found them harsh. Maybe I was too much of a church girl and had just learned about Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar in youth group, teaching me that we should extend mercy to people because we don’t know what they’re going through.

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Nearly fifteen years later, every cell of my body now understands that not everyone deserves our mercy. There is a plethora of reasons why and I should have picked up on what my fellow gals were putting down. After all, there is a reason companies try to market to teenage girls since the introduction of The Beatles to America, more than sixty years ago. Teenage girls have a pulse on what is cool.

Hillary Clinton has countless biographical books, for children and adults, written about her and by her. They have all found an audience. There’s even a play written about her and Bill during the 2008 primaries. More extraneously, there’s a novel that offers an alternate version of her life where she never met Bill.

If none of that is embarrassing enough, on February 27th of this year, during Bill Clinton’s deposition on the Epstein files, while looking at the documents, the 42nd President of the United States struck a countenance of fondness. And giggled?

Maybe Hillary and Bill don’t sleep in the same bed or live in the same house but that’s not the point. Why does that man have a woman to call a wife?

As an unmarried thirty year old, one of the most shocking parts of adulthood is the amount of women married to losers. Evidently, the incel problem could be worse but we have women who are giving charity pussy to men who, better be paying more than fifty percent of the bills, are walking embarrassments and blips on humanity.

If it’s not abundantly clear, women married to losers are also losers. After all, if a woman can’t leave her husband, we can’t expect her to say no to AIPAC.1 The longer they stay married their stenches combine and can’t be separated. It’s putrid and they refuse to wear deodorant (or leave). Now it’s everyone in their orbit’s problem.

Kamala Harris has the same shortcoming. Honestly, not sure where her loserdom begins (wanting to be more than a state representative) but in her book, 107 Days, she talks about her husband, coming up short on her 60th birthday celebration. Harris decided to share this story with the world because Elmhoff’s weaponized incompetence and fatigue is something she thinks American women can relate to. Husbands underperforming at tasks that indicate a lack of basic human decency and respect for their wives was the genesis of the patriarchy.2

Some women absolutely relate to that strife and have accepted it as their cross to bear. But even Jesus got the cross off his back eventually.

I’ve talked about liberal women losers and maybe you’re expecting me to talk about conservative losers now but that’s like kicking a crying baby. What purpose would that serve.

When your president called Senator Rafael Cruz’s wife ugly and fat in a Republican nominee debate, Cruz did not defend her honor and a lot of people relate to the loserdom of the Cruz’s (both wife and husband) and your president in that situation. At least, one of New Jersey’s most infamous losers, former Governor Chris Christie, dropped out the race instead of basking in shame and riding a flaccid dick to submission.

Republicans that are just fiscally conservative and not fascists3 don’t recognize the Republican Party and liberals don’t recognize the Democratic Party. For the past six to fifteen months, people who believe in liberalism have wondered where the democrats have been.

Do they have a plan?

Do they have a strategy?

Are they making a plan?

Are they making a strategy?

Are they aware of anything bad that is happening to their constituents?

How many letters and social media posts are they going to post telling constituents what your president is doing and how bad it is? When in reality we are equally impacted by Democrats lack of inaction?

Earlier this month, The Atlantic published a profile on Cory Booker. Cory Booker is one of the biggest losers in American and New Jersey history. He’s the Drake of politics. Corny. Only liked by flaccid men without real political opinions. He finally found a light skin delusional enough to marry him so they can look like the Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz of politics. Armed with the sexual appeal of a Frito, we have no proof he has penetrated any of these Rosario Dawson clones and it makes us giggle.

But I’m sure a lot of men relate to his pageantry and meandering quest to find love that matches the aesthetic of his ambitions.

Since Booker is Drake, we need a Kendrick Lamar to make him go away for a while (forever). The same week The Atlantic published that wretched article, which online liberals mostly found revolting, a man in North Jersey said he wanted to run for Booker’s seat. All he had to do was get enough signatures to get on the ballot…and he only had a week to do it. Plus the signatures had to be collected in person.

Needless to say, he did not reach his goal. But we need to be empowered to use our imagination and scour for new ideas. We, the public, are at an advantage. None of us are in a government position currently so if we were to seek a position of power, at the very least, none of us can be associated by a lack of inaction or complacency since these people’s checks clear whether they make an effort for their constituents or not.

My fellow Americans, we need to stay steadfast on not accepting whatever crumbs the Democrats plan on offering us as a half-assed remedy to everything we’ve been enduring.

We are not married to this version of liberalism. Maybe we need to abandon it altogether. But we cannot have other Americans or people outside of America looking at non-conservative Americans and wondering, “Why is she with him?”4

That’s the only way to eradicate the pandemic of loserdom. Knowing our worth and knowing we’re not losers.

I leave you with this insane graphic from an MS Now broadcast.

“Next” is the opposite of “now” which applies to none of these people.

Here are the birth years of the people in the photo:

• 19595

• 1960

• Three born in 1964

• 1965

• 1967

• 1969

• Two born in 1971

• 1973

• 1976

• 1977

• Two born in 1978

• Two born in 1979

• 1982

• 1987

• 1989

The weather was rainy but pleasant. I didn't eat as much ice cream as I expected. I was not scared to melt when a rain drop touched my skin but the rain surprisingly made me crave other things instead of ice cream.

After loosely following Google Maps to my destination, the first glace I got to try was at Bachir, a Lebanese ice cream shop in Montmartre. There was a line wrapped around the block and I couldn’t tell if it was mostly tourists or locals but the line moved briskly. The owner/manager brought around vanilla samples coated in pistachio for us to try.

The biggest adjustment to tasting this as an American is it’s not very sweet. Maybe it’s as sweet as things should legally and healthily be and that’s enough to give any American proof that our government wants us dead.

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Although it was not very sweet, it was refreshing and I see how it could be more soothing on a hot day versus a basic 45 degree day. The flavors I got were blackberry, apricot, and pistachio with whipped cream. I found that apricot is a popular flavor in Paris and I saw it on most ice cream menus.

Bachir brand signature is coating whatever flavor you want with pistachio and topping it with whipped cream. If I went again, I would definitely splurge on that.

My next ice cream adventure took me to Le Bac à Glaces in the 7th ARR, walking distance from Musée d'Orsay. The first time I tried to go to this shop, all the chairs were stacked on the tables and there were thirty minutes until closing. I didn’t want to be that person so I returned the next day.

The shop was full of women catching up with on another and I got complimentary mint water while I decided what to order. While perusing ice cream menus around the city, I noticed that a lot of them had ice cream sundaes available to order. When you see ice cream sundae on a menu, you immediately think, “When is the last time I had an ice cream sundae?”

For me, I think the last time I had an ice cream sundae was as a senior in high school on the Ocean City Boardwalk and it was supersized, overpriced, and disappointing. So more than a decade later, I was excited to get reacquainted with ice cream sundaes.

What I really appreciated was the waiter not judging me for ordering this and eating it all by myself. It’s clearly meant for two people but little did he know I was eating for two, me and Aunt Flo.

The sundae was constructed of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream—classic. But the strawberry ice cream was actually sorbet making the whole strawberry experience texturally inconsistent and infantilizing. I felt like I was eating homemade baby food when the sorbet was scooped with the banana and whipped cream. Instead of taking turns eating each flavor, I just excavated the strawberry sorbet, consumed it, and got it over with.

This is a pretty unorthodox experience for me since as a child, when my aunt only bought Neapolitan ice cream, we would all fight over getting the perfect strawberry and vanilla combo and completely abandon the chocolate. Eventually she just bought strawberry and cream ice cream—a true matriarch.

Fitting with the sweets being less sweet doctrine, the dark chocolate ice cream complemented the skimpy fudge and bananas. Is there a fruit the belongs more in ice cream than bananas? They’re already so soft and reassuring.

This is a bodega cat I befriended when I went on a late night ice cream run and ended up just getting a Coca Cola and rosé instead.

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The exhibit features some great Joan Mirós and I discovered some artists I hadn’t heard of like Hungarian-American André Kertész and George Platt Lynes.

The Leonora Carrington and Remedies Varo room features the strongest curation. It positions two women surrealists in conversation with each other based on their interest in the occult and location in Mexico.

The exhibition requires a special ticket and spectator wise, it was wall to wall and it makes sense. History is unfortunately cynical which is reflected by the current trendiness of fascism, world war(s) and genocides, and the threat to free expression. At some point in my lifetime, I would love to see an exhibit dedicated to female and/or surrealists of color.

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Visitors at these surrealist exhibits gravitate towards the artists that never left pop culture like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Would a surrealist show be a blockbuster if it was just marketed as a surrealist show and didn’t feature stars? I’d like to think yes due to the never-ending timeliness and though provocation that surrealism offers.

There were some questionable hanging arrangements within the exhibit that reminded me of the abstract expressionist room at LACMA. The room is crammed with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and other abstract expressionists least impressive works like a shrine to an only child going up the steps in a proud parents’ home. The work is seemingly randomly even though some of the artists have a clear relationship with each other, such as marriage and friendship.

In PMA’s exhibition, Kay Sage, one of the only female artists in the show, is hung next to Wifredo Lam and Joan Miró. Color wise, her architectural work looks out of place as her piece has a yellow ochre undertone. While Lam’s work is figurative and rooted in mythology and Miró’s work is mostly greyscale.

Sage was married to Yves Tanguay, also in the exhibition, and I caught a presentation of their work together at Helly Nehmad in NYC a few summers ago. I would have loved to see Sage’s work in conversation with people she had close relationships with.

PMA has The Lives of the Surrealists by Desmond Morris in their giftshop and I definitely recommend reading it before or after seeing the exhibit. It’s the most salacious art history book I’ve read and it’s an anthology of sorts you can use as reference. The book includes photos of the artists and their work but more importantly it includes gossip about their personal lives. Reading it can prep you for the gossip betwixt the works of the exhibit.

After leaving the museum I went to 1-900-ICE CREAM in Rittenhouse Square. I got the peppermint bark and sweet cream swirl excitedly because I had never had bad peppermint bark flavored anything. Until I licked this. I even got the $1 white chocolate shell sprinkled with candy cane crumbs to really feel like a Christmas movie protagonist.

Despite my best efforts to commit to the experience and the sales girls’ success in getting me to spend an extra dollar, it didn’t taste like anything. I felt like a dog licking water from one of those massive bowls cafes leave on the sidewalk in the summer.

What I should have asked before getting the flavor was, “Does it tastes like Ghiradelli’s Peppermint Bark chocolate that I have been addicted to since my mom bought it at Border’s (RIP) since I was an adolescent? Does it taste like the candy cane white chocolate Hershey Kisses I’ve dream about until November 15th every year since buying them on clearance one time in college?”

No.

Because I didn’t ask for specifics in relationship to quality, I was disappointed. I will try to apply this lesson to everything in life moving forward.

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An art museum.

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You need to leave that man at home. You don’t date him because he’s cultured. You date him because in America, once women got the right to have a bank account and their own money, the cost of living went up—forcing women to stay partnered. Elizabeth Warren has spoken to this economic burden and I see it everywhere I go. He can pay your rent on his salary alone and that’s fine but let’s both be honest with ourselves.

Art museums are romantic because they’re intellectually stimulating and you don’t have to tip anyone or interact with the underpaid people doing invisible labor, unlike a resort in a dominantly brown country. But while you try to break up the monotony of winter with a culturally engaging activity, your man doesn’t know what he’s looking at. You told him to look at the Joan Miro on the wall that you’re transfixed by and he’s stupefied like Frankenstein in a plaid shirt. And he’s blocking the whole thing with his Division 2 lacrosse shoulders.

Museums don’t have room like at Macy’s or food courts for men to sit and huff and puff in boredom. The minimal benches are for kids who are at their limit and need a nap or old people who need to sit and reflect on what they just saw. The miscellaneous men scattered around like red cups after a frat party are a fire hazard.

One the right of you stands your man. On the left of you stands your philistine mother. The mother you dragged out of her cozy house so she would stop watching Facebook reels and reading articles with only a headline. That woman raised you and you turned out fine so you moved to the closest city so you can eat food on a weekly basis that she would call “spicy.”

Best case scenario, your mother is liberal. But she doesn’t understand why Kamala Harris lost this past election and still has too much faith in our political institutions. She wants to spend time with but the preferred location for that is probably some combination of a craft store and botanical gardens. You cannot expect a woman who doesn’t question institutions or the world as is to immerse herself in abstract or surreal paintings. That requires an endless imagination and capacity to understand limitless interpretations of a finished product.

Maybe the problem is there’s nothing to see at the movies. There’s usually one Oscar bait movie, one children’s movie that offends your intelligence, and one CGI orgy. None of those pass the mom-man litmus test women are looking for at this time of year. But why do the rest of us have to suffer?

You may be asking yourself, “What about dads?” The dads that accompany their adult children in the museum read every. single. possible. wall. text with their hands clasped behind their back. It’s like they’re watching The History Channel. The dads can stay. But your liberal in concept, conservative in execution mother? Your philistine yet dependable man? Leave them at home.

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But my mother rarely bought toppings. Sprinkles, jimmies, and caramel sauce were never in the sales paper. I made due by picking flavors with robust fillings. The one topping I always wanted, no matter my mother’s reasonable reasoning, was the chocolate sauce that would freeze and create a shell around your misshapen spoonfuls of delight.

My mother’s reasoning for not buying this bougie chocolate sauce was, “We have chocolate syrup at home.” She was correct. It took us about six months to finish chocolate syrup because we (me and my two siblings) were not greedy children in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.1 Chocolate syrup is also more versatile than the shell sauce. You can put it in milk. Remember the hey day of Got Milk?

When Nutella took over Tumblr and became the pantheon of food spread fads, my mom bought it but I was wary. I don’t like any spread designed for bread that doesn’t come from abusing domesticated animals, respectfully. Peanut butter, yuck. Almond butter, yuck. Fluff, grow up.

So tasting Nutella was sensory overload. It’s smooth and doesn’t get stuck in the back of your throat like peanut butter. It’s nutty but not like Brittany Murphy in a Girl, Interrupted (1999) way. More like a man is tweaking on the A-train and you turn the music down in your headphones to hear him out because you overhear him say, “We wouldn’t have so many immigrants if we didn’t go over there and fuck up their countries.” And the tweaking man doesn’t have a weapon. So he’s worthy of a semi-captive audience.

Just the right kind of nutty. A safe nutty.

Most importantly, when you put Nutella in ice cream, it hardens. It makes little Nutella chunks. So my mom would buy Nutella for breakfast toast and I would use it to make a little chocolate shell effect in my ice cream. Win-win.

Outside of gelato shops, it is hard to find hazelnut ice cream. It’s even harder to find hazelnut chocolate ice cream. 1-900-ICE-CREAM dropped this cosmic brownie Nutella soft serve swirl option and this was the actual song go the summer that everyone was searching for.

This flavor was the perfect ending of a magical afternoon. It was a sienna, nostalgic blend of sweetness. Before this treat, I went to the ICA Philadelphia to see Mavis Pusey’s show, Mobile Images. This is the first museum survey of the Jamaican abstract artist and is open until December 7. Admission is free and the museum is open from 12pm-6pm on Wednesday through Sunday.

I found myself spellbound by the abstraction of urban forms. After returning from Europe in 1968, Pusey was inspired by the construction, machinery, and destruction of buildings that make up the NYC soundscape and landscape.

Abstraction really has really had a “moment” in the art world the past five or so years. Abstraction is hard to “get” to some non-art people who feel like abstraction is created in some sort of intellectual code. But abstraction just requires you to respond emotionally. Abstraction is often just depicting how something feels, to the artist then to yourself as the viewer.

Abstraction asks you to bring your life experience to the artists’ brush strokes and blocks of color. That is the freedom within this field of art.

It was refreshing to see Black abstraction because in the current state of the world, it seems that we are going backwards in the possibilities of Black art. Black figuration, such as portraits, are pretty conservative. Yet in tumultuous times, the simple existence of a depiction of a Black figure is seen as radical just for existing. This was exemplified when Amy Sherald canceled her show at The Smithsonian due to their request to exclude her portraits of Black trans people. You cannot tell the subject of the portrait is transgender just from looking at it but here we are.

The show has since been mounted at the Baltimore Museum of Art but I want to live in a world where all Black forms of expression can flourish and be visible. I want the radical to actually be radical and not just Black people painted with black paint. I want art that focuses on the interiority of being alive.

I want women artists to get flowers (more flowers) when they’re alive. Mavis Pusey lived from 1928 to 2019.

This work on paper by Pusey reminds me of Alexander Richard Wilson’s work. Wilson is a Black queer artist that works in Denver. They paint the pulchritude of the Colorado landscape and also document how the landscape is impacted by gentrification and corporate greed.

The never ending expressions of Black expression are inspiring—whether it’s urbanism, mountain ranges or grocery lists.

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The main reason I started this Substack is to be an ice cream historian (of sorts). As a child, several ice cream shops in my town closed. Some had been around for decades, some never got their footing, some didn’t get the ideal strip mall placement.

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This blog is meant to review flavors but also memorialize ice cream shops that are no longer with us.

The first internship I got that actually paid me was walking distance from three ice cream shops: a Filipino spot with two flavors, Van Leeuwen’s, and Morgenstern’s. I can’t find any trace of the Filipino shop that sold green tea and lychee soft serve, separately or swirled. The reward card with stamps is probably in the abyss of a wallet I no longer use.

The Filipino scope and tea shop has been replaced (not in the same exact location but on Prince Street) by an Upside Pizza spin-off, Softside. Which fills a void in the market for soft serve ice cream, I must admit.

Van Leeweun’s is laughable but Morgenstern’s has always been worth the hype. There’s a line around a block until it closes at midnight where people young and old chatter and sidestep around strollers or college kids holding hands.

This blog already did a ranking of about fifty flavors.

This is a list of flavors Morgenstern’s currently has available.

My favorite flavors aren’t on either.

Banana Brûlée, Banana Praline Macadamia, Banana S’mores…They have the best banana flavors.

To be clear, the scoop shop is closing and they will be selling pints online. But that ruins the whimsy of spontaneously getting a scoop of ice cream.

Getting a scoop of ice cream is an adventure. A scoop is a gamble. Especially in a shop with no samples. Just take a chance and prove you’re not an amateur ice cream consumer.

Walking through downtown Manhattan with an ice cream cone and pleasant weather is as close to a 00’s romantic comedy as you can get with these 2025 rent prices.

Morgenstern’s other location, Bananas, a vegan, soft-serve ice cream shop will remain open. Vegans won this round.

But friends, if you find yourselves in Manhattan before Sunday, make sure you try a banana flavor.

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Jacket on, jacket off.

Closed toe shoes on, Birkenstocks off.

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After Labor Day, brands start rolling out their autumnal flavors. Pumpkin spice is expected but this year I’ve noticed more unique flavors.

Jeni’s Ice Cream posted a photo of their new flavors and I asked my Instagram audience what flavor I should try via my story. They chose Miso Butterscotch Brownie.

I went to the Jeni’s location near Rittenhouse Square and planned on getting a scoop. But something told me to try a sample first. I am so happy I micro-dosed this limited edition flavor.

Eating Miso Butterscotch Brownie ice cream was like licking the Chuck E. Cheese carpet under the tunnels. Just pure sensory overload.

Miso soup, perfect. Miso ice cream, like choking on ocean water.

Butterscotch krimpets, perfect. Butterscotch trickled through miso, hard to process. Like a liberal with the 2024 Presidential Election results.

Brownies in ice cream are usually transcendent. But in this flavor, the brownie arrives last to your taste buds. It’s like rushing to get to a Christmas party and forgetting to eat. When you arrive, you see that everyone brought a dessert. So you eat cookies, brownies, and drink eggnog until your tongue is dry and borderline numb. You even get a bit of a headache.

I think the people who developed this flavor were PMSing. Maybe even pregnant because this flavor tastes like several, hormonal cravings at once.

Salty. Sweet. Sticky. Saccharine.

On further thought, Jeni’s food scientists and flavor developers must ONLY do taste tests when they are at certain points of their menstrual cycle because the other flavors I did end up getting scoops of were also extremely intense.

You can read about those next week.

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Yellow has always been “in.” If it doesn’t look good on you, that’s a personal problem. I’ll rephrase to be inclusive. Maybe you haven’t found the right hue of yellow for you?

Meanwhile yellow has been my favorite color since high school. It replaced a decade long love of blue. I had long retired my tomboy-mainstream attitude towards anything girly and found yellow to be delicate, vivid, and feminine.

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My junior prom dress was butter yellow. My phone case is popcorn butter yellow. My iPad case is Gatorade yellow. My iMac would be yellow if my local Apple store hadn't ran out.

I have yellow clothing for all seasons. Because there is a yellow for each season.

The butter yellow trend has trickled into food. For the first time, I saw corn flavored ice cream this summer.

While in Echo Park in Los Angeles, I went to Organic Ice Cream. An ice cream parlor full of disorienting mirrors. They had the conventional flavors but the corn caught my eye. Maybe because the label had exclamation points!!!!

It’s possible that it popped out to me because I went to my friend’s Fourth of July backyard celebration and she had corn on the cob. Which I hadn't had since childhood.

When you have something naturally sweet like sweet corn, strawberries, or sweet potatoes, life has meaning in a way you usually miss, if you’re not careful. It’s like smelling dewy grass in the morning or someone laughing at your joke.

You are embarrassed to have forgotten, you are supposed to make sure you feel this way every day.

Even if it’s for only a moment.

If you are a Black woman or another othered identity, experiencing a different internet did wonders to your teenage mental health. I could avoid magazine covers with blonde white women and their standard of beauty (kinda) by logging onto Tumblr and seeing archive Ebony magazine advertisements, learning about the natural hair movement, and just seeing pictures of carefree Black women amongst Bukowski quotes.

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I could scroll past photos of Alexis Ren and hip dips and Fiji natural hair movement but the Arctic Monkey’s AM album was unavoidable. And I didn’t mind it. Teens today dream of being a teenager in 2014, when I was 18, and I completely understand why. It was the perfect amount of technology. We still mostly sat down at computers to do computer things. I spent my teen years texting tweets to Twitter, religiously seeing reruns, and technology respected my boundaries.

The media that you enjoyed, you would share in tangible ways. Burning CDs, buying $7-$10 movie tickets, and scouring Walmart $5 DVD bins for gems. Social media has made it easier to share every little thing that interests you. But most people use social media as an advertisement of their life and lifestyle.

Whether you’re posting a $9 smoothie, ski trip, or your daily ten mile run—you’re signaling lifestyle choices. Usually ones that endorse skinniness, leisure, and a surplus of disposable income. Even when people share screenshots of music that they’re listening to, it feels more like a Spotify or Apple Music advertisement so we know what format to expect your wrapped music for the year.

Spotify Wrapped posts just signal how much time you spend driving in your car, disassociating, or casually supporting racists and rapists since you can separate the art from the music. The truth is—when you actually think something is cool, you give it to someone. Not digitally. Not so they can find it through the algorithm. You buy the CD, book, movie ticket, or decadent meal and you make it an experience. A memory. A moment.

I saw Bottoms (2023) three different times in three different cities with three different friends. I’m committed to the rebirth of quality monoculture.

The death of monoculture came because instead of recommending media and clothes to each other, without expecting a financial return, people decided that they wanted to be a part of culture even if they had nothing to offer culture. While we are all consumers of culture, clearly we are not all artists.

It became blatantly clear that monoculture was six feet under due to anybody anywhere chasing fame and relevance when I saw subway ads for both Overcompensating and Adults. I thought they were the same show. During the press runs for these shows, Owen Thiele was on a podcast that I occasionally listen to, Keep It! Thiele is an influencer (?) and podcaster. Maybe a content creator turned actor?

At the 00:59:12 mark of this episode, Thiele says that podcasting doesn’t come easy to him. He continues, “I usually would say yes, but no, it doesn’t come that easily to me actually…First of all you actually have to have takes on the world and actually be well read and smart. So one thing I’m actually not. And two, you also need like, interesting lingo, like you need to captivate people. Like you need things that people want to comeback for. And it’s just, really hard to build.”

A+ for the self awareness but Thiele is highlighting a bigger problem here. Everything and every person that is trying to be cool or have a cultural moment has an expiration date the moment it tiptoes across the culture line. Because they don’t even know why they have to do the things they have to do. Why are you a multi-hyphenate if you’re not multi-talented? The imposter syndrome is accurately diagnosed.

This trend is not just podcasters and actors. Look at Dua Lipa. She had that one song. She couldn’t dance. She still can’t dance. She just surrounds herself with better dancers. Her lyrics are impersonal and she’s clearly just going for a “vibe.” During this decade of existence, vibe has become a word that is divorced from an adjective. Leaving it devoid from meaning, as a placeholder in a conversation you never circle back to. I can see why it has become a trendy word to talk about our culture and engagements.

Lipa’s last album is a travesty but she’s on a world tour because she’s a legacy act? At the age of thirty? It’s funny that she, like other celebrities, has created a brand to extend her career. A book club. A compulsive vacationer. A fiancee. But prioritizing becoming a brand is sacrificial to any artistic endeavors. Were these brands ever interested in being an artist? Or just famous?2

Capitalism forces people to become brands. Sure. But becoming a brand instead of becoming an artist riddles our culture with black holes.

No need to gang up on Miss Lipa when there are other moving targets that join her company. We now have a famous person named Addison born after 9/11 who “saved pop music.” I was unaware that Whitney Houston, Donna Summer, and Britney Spears’ music got wiped from the face of the Earth. When we witness what Addison does with a microphone in her hand, could the expiration not be more clear?

We have a famous person with the last name Carpenter, there always needs to be one, whether it’s John, Charisma, or Karen. The newest Carpenter heir inspires think pieces while I remain completely indifferent to everything but her charisma. The Lolita and Marilyn Monroe references leave bad tastes in many people’s mouths because once you have a developed frontal lobe, you realize how tired those references are. Marilyn Monroe was misunderstood and mysterious. Any maker that attempts to demystify her through movies, shows, fashion, art, or books is clearly a necrophiliac.3

Even in fashion, overly feminine and infantilizing styles always come back around. Remember ballet core? At least when we wore ballet flats and got shin splints during the Bush administration, we could get the shoes at Payless. Tight, gelled back buns reinforce a straight haired, white ideal (clean aesthetic) that every worker bee in a dystopian movie adorns.

Do you want to circle back to any of those people and trends in ten years time? If VH1 were to do a Top 100 Songs of the ‘20’s countdown, what would be on it? Besides Not Like US? How many songs would you recognize? Would any AI made videos or songs slip in?

When I heard the Arctic Monkeys on Tumblr in 2012, I was captivated. I went back through their previous albums to listen to their body of work. There were things about the older songs I liked and I could hear where they needed to grow. AM will always remind me of being sixteen. As someone who was vaccinated against nostalgia, I don’t long to be sixteen again. But as people get sick of being trapped in the digital world and its limited interactions, people will yearn for the discovery of art (actual art) that isn’t trying to sell them anything. Art to make you feel seen and that’s it.

Only then will we get back movie stars, theatrical experiences, music that feeds more than an algorithm, physical stores, style, and art for arts sake.

I am actually hopeful that if a monoculture does not completely come back, then a respect for actual culture makers will. Here’s a short list of things that give me hope.

1. Used bookstores FULL of patrons

2. People pissed when mom and pop shops close

3. Go fund me’s that keep local stores open

4. People trying to spend less time on their phones

5. Haters in comment sections making astute observations

6. People casually browsing record stores

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Red Onions I Was Unfamiliar with Your Game

I felt prepared when I went to college. I could do laundry, cook, and clean, and I possessed time management skills. But while I used my other life skills as a freshman, my dorm building didn’t have a kitchen space, so I trekked daily to the dining halls. In the dining hall, nothing was seasoned—I’d previously thought salt and pepper was a constitutional right entitled to all foods. (By junior year, I carried adobo in my backpack.)

During lunch and dinner, I observed my fellow freshmen like an anthropologist. Some guys were devoted to gaining the freshman 15 and would eat a plate of french fries with every meal. Some gals would also get a plate of french fries, just to have something in their belly for Thirsty Thursday before they’d be scrutinized on YikYak on Friday morning. They’d also eat salad.

In my 18-year-old brain, salad was something you ate for attention. Salad was for people who liked noisy, crunchy food and were scared of carbs. But after eating turkey burgers and spending Thirsty Thursdays on my knees in front of a toilet, I knew something had to change in my eating habits. I couldn’t afford to keep spending my work-study money on Tums and ginger ale. So I went to the salad bar to observe—and learn.

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There were your base options: romaine, iceberg, spinach. Spinach tastes better cooked. Iceberg is a waste of time. Romaine tastes like a humble hug. I chose romaine. Then, I added toppings I knew I liked: cucumbers, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheese, and carrots. The grilled chicken was always picked over, but I got a few pieces. Maybe some chickpeas? Sure, why not?

If I absorbed anything from my sister's Food Network obsession, it’s that the more color on your plate, the better. My plate was orange, red, and white—but mostly green. I looked at the remaining salad bar options and saw something purple: red onions. I’d previously always removed onions from my plate, but here I was forcing myself to try this audacious allium. I put a spoonful of onions on my plate before I could think twice.

Now, to eat my salad—and my red onions.

Their purple color reminded me of the primroses my mother always admired while driving. They had a wonderful crunch—the punch of a perfect, snarky quip; the Marc Maron of vegetables. Red onions saved my life. I suffer from a chronic sweet tooth, and the red onions’ sweetness made it so I could eat “real” food. They made bland food edible. I could be a salad bar girl. There’d be no more Thirsty Thursdays on my knees in front of a toilet. French fries weren’t my only option.

So thank you for entering my life 10 years ago, red onions. I’m sorry that I was unfamiliar with your game.

I’m very late but here are some recommendations on what to consume this pride month.

Music:

Joan Armatrading

• A Black, British & Carribean lesbian born in 1950, hailing from St. Kitts. Her music sounds like Tracy Chapman + Billy Joel.

Books:

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen

• This book is about trans Asian women volleyball players and they’re a power couple. I’m still reading it but it’s already giving me a lot to mull over. Comes out on July 1

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

• Obviously this book is about asexuality but it’s also about society vs. individuals expectations of sex. We all know the shortcomings of sexual education in America but are we ever taught what we are supposed to gain or feel from sexual encounters. Is sex owed to us? Do we have to initiate it? How does our gender performance and expectations impact our sexual desire? Is rape sex? Chen excavates a lot in these pages.

Movies:

• Working Girls directed by Lizzie Borden on HBOMax

  • This film is about a lesbian sex worker who navigates being overworked and under appreciated at her workplace.

• Saving Face directed by AliceWu on Criterion Channel

  • This film is a classic. It’s about Chinese lesbians navigating cultural norms in NYC.

  • If you don't have Criterion Channel, you can also watch Wu’s, the half of it, on Netflix. It’s about a shy, smart student that tries to woo the most popular girl in school.

• I have a list of over 40 LGBTQ+ feature films here on my Letterboxd!

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In the 2000’s, the middle class’ (and upper middle class?) obsession with the recognizable logos like Ed Hardy, Michael Kors, and Coach accompanied by spray tans and flat ironed, limp hair put a hole in the ozone layer.

We’ve replaced that brash peacocking of disposable income with the facade of quiet luxury. In the pursuit of this silent but deadly trend, people with disposable incomes pledged allegiance to brands that appealed to their sensibilities as consumers. These brands promised to appeal to their body types and propel them into a sustainable future they couldn’t wait to live in.

What we have found instead is that these companies’ brands are extensions of their founders’ egos. There is no separation of church (founder) and state (company). Your money supports their “ethics.” If they are both the grandson of a European emerald mine owner and the grandson of Nazis who and moved to South Africa in support of Apartheid, they should have never saw a cent from you.

If a gaggle of faux, ethnically ambiguous sisters whose father (and stepfather) was O.J. Simpson’s lawyer and paraded around with Black fetishes until it was time to be white again, they should’ve never saw a cent from you. If you find those reasons petty, S**** investors include Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

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The companies previously mentioned and many others would have failed in their first year if people were conditioned to not only be ethical consumers but vaccinated against aspiring to the sinister lifestyle of society’s most lecherous individuals.

They told you to want a beige house, beige kids (or pure white), and a beige moral compass. Actions are only bad if they don’t get you outside validation or money. Underpaid garment workers? White ethno state? Breeding white male children? Drying up local water supplies for data centers?

That was all fine with you as these companies saw exponential growth and sinful gains in wealth. Your complicity in giving these companies your capital chiseled away at your moral code.

So now your code is diluted and beige, at best.

Aspirational luxury and taste, according to the algorithm, instructs you to buy white couches and keep walls white and buy art that looks like a middle schooler’s blind contour drawing and white faux fur rugs and get simple little line tattoos.

Less clutter in your space signals less clutter in your mind. With less thoughts to organize and label in your mental space, the more susceptible you are to beige thoughts, if any thoughts at all.

Meanwhile, some people are trying to keep their world white. Pure white. Because they don’t want to deal with the convoluted impracticality of beige. Minimalism (in supremacy, design, and color) solidifies the illusion or truth that no labor is done by the people who live in the space. Instead the labor has been outsourced by people forced to wear all black to work.

This labor-invisible luxury is one of the ultimate wealth signifiers so no wonder its loyal followers have been programmed not to care about the labor that makes their luxury possible .

We cannot forget the “minimalists” who make their baby’s nurseries beige and buy them all beige toys purely for aesthetic purposes, even though it hinders their baby’s development. All labor in that household, for the baby’s sake, will be curated within the cut style of their vegetables. Everyone who performs labor in the baby’s presence will be darker than beige and wear maximalist patterns to match their cluttered, socially conscious mind.

The beige toys in the household won’t be wood because that would force the inhabitants of the house to have an appreciation of craftsmanship, also known as the celebration of labor. People have been discouraged from valuing craft in the pursuit of a passive income stream, cue social media.

Is there a craft to social media if it is an intangible item? Or is social media only an item when it presents a facade of tangibility if it successfully presents you as a tastemaker?

Craftsmanship is only commendable if it comes from a home remodeling and/or furniture refurbishing white suburban woman with a white collar steady income (or a white collar husband) so she can perform craft as a hobby.

Both morals and crafts are to be put down and picked up when inconvenient to society at large, even if at suspense of the maker.

There are both practical and fascist uses for minimalism and the dilution of colors.

It is a class signifier that some people can look at the color beige and see “nude” pumps, the perfect cashmere sweater, thrifted fake cubist art, and a latte. When on the other side of the sidewalk they always cross, is a homeless couple sleeping in a cardboard enclave.

Cardboard is beige. It can go either way. Representing movement, like moving boxes that you may or may not have to touch if you can afford laborers, or stagnation.

After the last census in 2020, there were reports of what the average person will look like in 2050. It was an ethnically ambiguous person. As a society that adores beige, this is an exciting trend. One less binary we’ll have to deal with, race. Or at least realizing someone is not entirely a person of color by just taking a glance at them will make them more viable for affluent roles since white people will marginally be able to relate to them.

The beige mindset of celebrating someone like Cory Booker when he performs theater as a filibuster when no bill is on the floor could be avoided if you just listened to the people of Newark, New Jersey. New Jersey, like many states, has legacy politicians who get re-elected purely based on name recognition even though their reputation has been questionable for a decade(s). Usually these politicians are relic republicans, like Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

But the people of Newark have been sounding the alarm about Cory Booker since at least 2013. As mayor of Newark from 2006-2013, he mismanaged a $100 million dollar grant from Mark Zuckerberg that was intended for Newark’s school system. The grant was presented to him on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was allegedly used to create charter schools instead.

In 2011, there were claims of embezzlement in the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation. By 2016, Booker was senator and dropped from the federal case. Meanwhile in 2021, disgraced police officer Janell Robinson was sentenced to nine years along with six other people for their roles in the fraud scheme.

If that isn’t enough beige morality, according to the North Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, as of December 2023, Mr. Booker has received $750,669 from AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

So it isn’t a surprise that Cory Booker was the sole democrat that voted to confirm Charles Kushner as ambassador to France. The Kushners are not only real estate tyrants (like father, like father-in-law) but some of the biggest Z******s in New Jersey and NYC.

Although aesthetically, moral ambiguity helps people blindly participate in capitalism as much as their heart desires, it’s time to think twice before compulsively following the beige agenda.

The beige agenda keeps morally beige politicians and people in power.

These ruminations about the color beige were inspired by boycotting Unilever products due to them censoring their brands from speaking up for Palestine (Talenti and Ben and Jerry’s). My non-beige (possibly fluorescent) morals motivated me to go to Whole Foods (it is the closest grocery store to me, we show up how we can) to try to save money and try a new brand of ice cream.

I was so excited to try Alec’s Ice Cream’s Brown Butter Peach Cobbler flavor. I was expecting rich, decadent crust crumbles. Juicy, caramelized peach pieces. With a hint of whipped cream. The perfect post-supper treat.

Instead I got beige.

When I got three quarters of the way through the pint, I arrived at some chunks. One chunk tasted like peach jam if it were part of a fake food play set for a toddler. As if a four year old had excitedly given me the food, I politely ate it until I became disgusted with its lack of commitment to the peach flavor. Texturally, it was like if you ate the jelly that comes out of a menstrual pad that you accidentally put in the washer.

Then the one other chunk at the bottom of the pint was a ball of crumble. It felt was like getting sand in your mouth at the beach and realizing your water bottle is entirely covered in sand so you just accept your fate.

This beige ice cream had the consistency of baby food. It was so infantilizing it could be the official food of the centrist DNC strategy. From beginning to end, the $9.19 through consumption, was an absolute waste of time. I felt awful for falling for the beige propaganda.

Rejecting the moral ambiguity of beige can get society back on track.

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But it’s 48 (let’s be honest, 72) hours where no one is going to respond to the 25 emails or job applications I submitted last week. 

I have run out of money to distract myself from the fatigue of begging for economic relevance. 

All parroted advice reeks of privilege. No one can help anyone. 

You need money to network. You need money to buy tickets to mixers. Money to buy drinks at mixers. To be out and about and meeting new people. Who can “do” something for me. You need money to have internet access to ask people for “virtual coffee.” Normalized disingenuous behavior.

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People with economic and social capital who can actually help you won’t shut the fuck up about AI. 

The real problem is that when I was in university every industry was booming. The world seemed to be full of options. All advice can be sifted for gems when it appears the world cares about you. 

Maybe I should’ve married the first guy who gave me any attention so I could have my own economic unit. The world is designed for two income households and the pursuit of happiness is impractical. 

My dollars turn to pennies with every second that passes. 

To be clear, I’m not even dreaming. I don’t have a dream job. I simply desire stability.

My remaining ounces of escapism and disassociation evaporated in 2024 with the autumn drought. I want to be here and present. 

“Survive until 2025.”

Survival is now a crime as the daffodils and tulips bloom, the world grows colder and I am stupefied aimless. 

I can’t wait to love the weekend again.

Happy Resurrection Sunday. 

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