Carmy:

• has three functioning legs and moves more like a bunny than a cat (except for when sprinting, when he tucks his front paw in for sports-mode zooming)

• is like two years old and has a ton of energy

• doesn’t know what ‘no’ means, since he’s just a cat, and a very well-loved one at that

• yes, is named after that Carmy (of The Bear)

I didn’t grow up with cats or dogs, only hamsters, which come with their own unique brand of childhood trauma #iykyk, but I’ve always been neutral to positive about both. My friends who have them love them dearly; I see how much joy they bring to their lives every day, even through weird health situations, general misbehaving, and the tribulations that come with being responsible for another living being.

So I was excited to live in proximity to a cat for a more extended period of time, to see if I would maybe be ready for such responsibility, especially since I am famously not working and theoretically could use the company.

Friends, I am not ready.

I learned this very quickly, when Carmy overcame his initial shyness and spent the next two weeks biting my toes to wake me up, whacking his food dispenser with his good paw until it unwillingly spat out one more kernel of food, sprinting around the apartment in sports-mode chasing after me, trying to get in the shower with me even while the hot water sprayed in his face, watching me pee with an intent gaze on his look, and otherwise being a cat doing cat things.

I learned that despite how much progress I feel I have made in therapy and in meditation, I still feel crazy when I’m not in control. My irrational mind, the one that wants to yell at a being with a walnut-sized brain, takes over before my rational mind can take a breath. I learned that you can’t control a cat; you can only adapt around them.

Eventually Carmy and I came to an understanding and we got along just fine, but the first three days of psychological warfare felt immensely educational. In addition to learning about myself in relation to this cat, and being tested in ways that I am not normally tested in my day-to-day life, observing Carmy unearthed new insights every day.

For example:

• Laying on the ground is really as incredible as it looks. Carmy and I would spend an hour just sprawled on the rug in the sun, staring at nothing, slowing our breathing, nothing to do and nowhere to be, enjoying the feeling of soft carpet on our legs and sun on our cheeks.

• The anticipation of an event is most of the fun. Carmy knew when his food would get dispensed and would spend an hour prior slowly getting closer and closer, as if the kibble were real prey that he could leap onto. The way he longed for brown kibble made me feel embarrassed about the times that I shoved freshly-delivered, gourmet delicacies in my mouth with a screen directly in front of my eyeballs.

• Dedicated enrichment time is a requirement. Cats are supposed to get at least one hour of enrichment time (active play) per day, broken up into several segments. Making sure Carmy did made me realize that I don’t prioritize this for myself at all, especially if you don’t count phone time. I definitely don’t spend an hour every day playing. That’s so sad! Now calling every hang out with friends ‘enrichment time'.’

• … And it’s just not as fun doing enrichment time solo. When I was busy or leaving the house for a while, I’d leave Carmy to his own devices and some automated toys. These seemed Fine, but when I came home and waved around the feather toy, all was forgotten: Carmy definitely preferred to play with someone else.

• Your human will still love you if you establish boundaries. This lesson I’m still learning.

Despite that, the best food I had recently was Taco Bell and Carmine’s. I’m not sure what that says about me. Maybe that my taste buds are dying a slow death as I get older. Or that I’m iodine deficient and crave salt like an extremely dehydrated person (very possible). Either way, NYC is the place to satiate saline cravings - I’m convinced that the restaurants here use 2x more salt than the next city. My #1 complaint eating anywhere else is blandness.

My intense craving for salt intersects with my increasing dislike of waiting in lines and/or having enough forethought to battle for a Resy spot. Why am I, a simple human craving granules of an ancient mineral, forced to duke it out in the digital warzone with Benjamin’s AI agent and Chad’s Amex Plat concierge for the pleasure of eating 400% my daily recommended intake of sodium?

Lucky that NYC is the Dead Sea of American cuisine, the opposite of an oasis in the desert, a culinary manifestation of the collective saltiness of its citizens.

Without further ado, my definitive guide to saltmaxxing with NO lines. I apologize in advance for the lack of photos: most of the food on this list is meant to be scarfed down, no paparazzi, while piping hot.

Carmine’s

Con: Located in Times Square.

Also con: The wine comes in glass thicker than what they have in front of tellers at the bank.

Pro: Has the best calamari I have ever had, and I used to live in Astoria. Sorry to the Greeks!

Also pro: The portion sizes are super-Texan-sized and the salt is plentiful, but tastefully done.

And lastly, pro: It’s the best option in the area and a great post-Broadway meal that still feels “NY Classic” with minimal wait if no res, and else, a very easy reservation, because that restaurant is simply ginormous. Much like its serving sizes.

X’ian Famous Foods

Popular foodies will have you thinking that XFF fell off/sold out/grew too fast and tastes too bland now. Be that as it may, a plate of thick, succulent noodles coated in perfectly salted meat is yours for less than $15 and NO WAIT. My recommendation is to consider the neighborhood your XFF is in and adjust expectations accordingly. (The Chinatown one is the best. The UES one is probably the worst.)

Khachapuri, anywhere

Thank you to the Georgian immigrants who brought this marvelous cheesy bread to NYC. If you want your cheeks to puff up after a meal, eat one of these and feel blessed. Chama Mama and Chito Gvrito are two easy walk-ins.

Nan Xiang Express

Face it, you’re not going to get the perfectly weighed, Taiwan-approved xiaolongbao of your dreams in the US. Might as well settle for a fairly optimized version, available to you within <5 min of ordering at any Nan Xiang Express. The original restaurant in Flushing is also worth visiting but will most certainly have a wait.

Lenwich (chicken caesar wrap)

I can’t opine on anything else at Lenwich because I have exclusively eaten their chicken caesar wrap, and it is good. So good that chicken caesar wrap has entered my palate’s lexicon, much like other unexpected white-people-food entries (pastrami, matzo ball soup, egg salad, scotch eggs, khachapuri [see above], etc..)

Popchew OR smashy

Union Square, NOT the East Village, is the definitive kingdom of smashburgers. Controversial as they may be for their miniscule meat to bread ratio, these two shops both do a great job crisping the shit out of the meat such that it caramelizes and, you guessed it, gets nice and salty. If you see a line at one place, just walk two blocks to the other place.

Hen House NYC

This Lebanese place is just really good and of course, they use a lot of salt. They’re small and put out a post that they need business so please go!

Casa Miguel OR Ceremonia breakfast burrito (to go)

Perhaps this saltmaxxing tip is a stretch given it requires two qualifiers to count, but both of these Williamsburg shops are heavy hitters and offer two of the few breakfast burritos worthy of bringing a West Coast guest to. To avoid a line, takeout is a necessity, and both places may still require a 15-20 min wait on weekends when they get very busy.

Martini with fries

An extra dirty martini with fries can run you up to 800 mg of sodium, YUMMM! These folks have done the work here and compiled 550+ places that offer NYC’s happy meal. Surely one of these is line-less at this moment.

A slice / a BEC / halal cart

I have no opinions here that haven’t already been said, except that despite thinking L’Industrie IS worth the wait, I haven’t had it in over two years.

Good line-less alternatives for pizza: Upside Pizza, Joe’s anywhere outside of midtown Manhattan to avoid lines (it’s GOOD, ok), your local joint that has more than 1 person in it when you go to order, it’s New York, you don’t need a list to find a good piece of pizza goddammit.

BONUS: Sugarmaxxing without a line, because one vice is not enough

1. Peter Pan Donut & Pastry. Bring cash, eat anything here. Also a good saltmaxxing spot.

2. Mia’s Brooklyn Bakery. Yes, there is also one in Manhattan.

3. BonBon. I kind of hate these conceptually for their sleek VC look, but those pillowy pink marshmellow sphere things cannot be resisted.

Lots of reasons to love Skyrim (and return to it again and again as I grow decades older waiting for Bethesda to release the next in the series …) but side quests are the primary source of joy in the game. My first playthrough, I spent 300 hours pursuing hundreds of side quests much to the expense of the main quest timeline. These included mundane missions like fetching certain wildflowers to create a unique potion as well as deeply complex experiences like getting kidnapped by a cult, indoctrinated into it, and then choosing whether to betray your new countrymen.

By the time I finally ‘beat’ the game, I was accidentally incredibly overpowered from all my side-questing such that the final dragon slaying was more like a culling. There’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

A side quest IRL is simply an experience and/or journey that deviates from your main quest, which I’d describe as ‘regular life’: working, commuting, going to the gym, eating, and maintaining a routine. Controversially, I would categorize planned vacations as main quest material as well, unless the vacation is somewhere far outside your comfort zone. (Going to Western Europe is not a side quest).

How to go on side quests is really a question of how to become someone who goes on side quests, because I believe that side-questing is a personality facet more than it is a set activity. And here there are two types of side questers: Type A and Type B. I obviously am the former; after all, I’m writing a Substack about the practice. The latter though are special kinds of people — everyone has that friend that’s always Doing Something, the friend from which crazy adventures seem to just spring from their loins, the friend that’s definitely not writing a guide on how to side quest. (If you don’t have a friend like this, find one, and in the meantime, read CAFE ANNE to see what I’m talking about).

But if side-questing doesn’t come naturally to you, that’s okay: investing energy into the act of side-questing as a Type A is still worth it. Like Skyrim, the main quest will happen eventually. It’s the side quests that make the game fun.

People who go on side quests often share a few personality traits: curiosity, openness, mindfulness, agency, and willingness to be alone. Think of your Type B side quester friend frolicking around in an open meadow, screaming “YOU CAN JUST DO THINGS!!!” These traits help two-fold: first, to discover and pinpoint the available side quests, and second, to really enjoy the act, such that you feel motivated to do it again.

If these aren’t personality traits you have, or you’re otherwise struggling to get out of a rut: mindfulness is the best place to start. Leaving your phone at home or putting it away, opening your god-given eyes, nose, ears WIDE and trying to see things you haven’t noticed before, and walking (not driving !!) all create a meditative experience by which you can start to observe the many side quests available to you. I like to think of each discovery as a new Skyrim objective symbol, floating in the air, waiting for me to return to it.

Being willing to go at it alone is also crucial: side quests are awesome with other people, but they lose their power if they’re dependent on other people. Plan to go alone but tell people about it: you’d be surprised at who signs up to go with you next, or how it feels to do something you want to do even without others coming along for moral support.

Becoming someone who side quests has incredible benefits for you: you become truly magnetic, because most people feel trapped in their main quest and are drawn to the adventuring side questers. Your new skills of mindfulness and openness just generally make life more colorful, and contentment feels closer. You’ll find that your side-questing energy bleeds easily into your main quest, such that mundane chores like laundry become full of new meaning and interest. And you will never have a boring response to “what did you do this weekend?”

Side note: I’m personally skeptical of social-media driven side-questing; that is, curated events that are intended to pique the interest of someone who wants to side quest but doesn’t know where to start. Many times, side quests are not about the destination or about the consumption of something, but rather the journey there and experience overall. Williamsburg Smorgasburg does not hold the loot you seek.

If you still help getting started, here are 25 ideas to try out:

1. Write a mental map of all the storefronts close to you. Then, walk along the street and see how right (or wrong) you are. For every store you missed, you must enter and peruse. Bonus points for capturing stores above and below ground level.

2. Walk until you see a flyer tacked onto something. If you live in the suburbs, go to your nearest library or coffee shop to find one. Do the call to action on the flyer - take the guitar lesson, go to the concert, buy and read the self-published book.

3. Go to the park that’s second closest to you, the one that you usually skip in favor of the one closest to you.

4. Get on a train or get in the car and drive to a ‘nowhere-town’, one that’s not making the Travel + Leisure list. Wander.

5. Take a train line you don’t usually go on, and get off at whatever stop has the weirdest name. (One day I’ll go to Cockfosters in London!)

6. (NYC-specific) Try to see some or all of the art available within the train station, even if you get particularly fond of one installation only to realize the artist once took a video shooting his dog and called it art. iykyk

7. Put together a sequence of things to do with a theme, name the theme, and then do them. For example, Astoria “Rocks” Day - getting Greek food and then going to the Noguchi museum to see some rocks.

8. If you live in a big city and don’t already do this, find your closest butcher, cheesemonger, fishmonger, and local groceries. Cook using their supplies for a week.

   

9. Properly picnic with a very luxe picnic spread, featuring cheese from the cheesemonger you now know!

10. Listen to an album, start to finish, laying down in your bed without falling asleep. (Side quests don’t always require movement!)

11. Swap out one of the photos in a picture frame that’s been hanging on your wall for years.

12. Find a way to guerrilla plant some native wildflowers in your area. First, procure them (make sure they’re not invasive!) Second, sprinkle them on fertile soil in the dead of night. Third, come back to say hi to the bees.

    

13. Write a Substack article about something you care about. Hello.

14. Volunteer doing something mobile, like picking up trash in your neighborhood.

15. The next time it rains, put on chunky rain boots and wade into the biggest puddle you can find.

16. If close to water, go to the beach for sunset or sunrise on a weekday. Substitute big hill for beach if not available. Substitute roof for big hill for beach if not available.

17. [credit to for this one] Make your girlfriends get breakfast with you, in-person, on a weekday a la Sex and the City.

18. [credit to Mike for this one] Pick a big bar, like a brewery, and tell all your friends to come dressed like it’s Prom.

19. Reuse your Prom outfit, and go to the opera closest to you.

20. Pick up the most unhinged option you can find on Too Good To Go; better yet, host a TGTG potluck. For me, this is hopefully going to be picking up 2 lbs of raw meat from Taqueria Ramirez and grilling it in McCarren Park one day.

21. Map the supply chain of something close to you. For example, if you see a Baldor’s truck on the street, try to figure out which restaurant(s) its serving and where the produce and fish likely came from. Or if you see a water tower in a specific locale, figure out its source and where it’s filtered.

22. Find a cuisine you have never had before and go try it.

23. (NYC-specific) Go to Staten Island.

24. (NYC-specific) Go to Governor’s Island.

25. (NYC-specific) Take the train to Coney Island. (are you sensing a theme here?)

Even now, many of my friends don’t really know what I went to India for. Some asked me ‘how’s the retreat going? Are you extremely calm?’ in their minds’ eye, likely picturing a lush garden with bubbling water and peaceful silence, during which I would achieve enlightenment like the Buddha and come home a totally changed person.

They were not alone in this vision: I went with similar aspirations in mind. After a month reflecting on the experience, I’ve realized four common misconceptions when it came to my perspective of a yoga teacher training in India:

1. It would be a peaceful and quiet environment

2. I would get physically fit

3. I would get really ‘good’ at yoga

4. I would find myself

1. It would be a peaceful and quiet environment

India was a total shock to the nervous system. Upon landing in Delhi, I made the mistake of briefly exiting the airport before my driver got there, during which no less than ten (10) men followed me around asking if I needed a taxi. I finally understood the meaning of ‘close on my heels’ as I feared one misstep and my whole shoe would get trapped by one of these men’s toes.

When I finally got into my six hour taxi to Rishikesh, I was struck by the vibrancy of the mundane: every truck we passed was painted a bright orange or blue gradient, with gorgeous script denoting HORN OK PLEASE in English and Hindi.

HORN OK PLEASE is basically a framework for Indian driving. The only predictable and consistent thing about the driving in India was the honking. You’d never be able to predict when a road that absolutely looked one way was actually three lanes (if you believe, you can do anything), or that when you’d look out the window you might nearly kiss a roadside monkey, or surmise that the car had come to a screeching halt because an unfazed cow was taking its time crossing the road. But you could bet it all on black that someone, somewhere, would be honking for way too long, to the point where I started perusing honk sound regulation because there was simply no way the volume of each honk was legal.

In addition to the sights and sounds, there was the smells: sometimes great (roadside chaat), sometimes bad (cow poop. everywhere!) and sometimes worse than bad (the sweet poisonous smell of burning plastic, one I got accustomed to in Rishikesh).

In the midst of this assault of all senses, I was expected to meditate? Lol okay!

2. I would get physically fit

For 25 days, each day, I woke up at around 5:30 a.m. right as this one particular bird in the jungle near our school started to caw, rivaling the volume of an average Indian honk. He would be joined by other types of birds, then the monkeys, leaping around the balconies of the school, then the howling of the dogs — by then, I would be wide awake before the sun was up.

I didn’t sleep or rest a lot in Rishikesh: this, I would learn, is actually desirable by yogis, who are ultimately trying to optimize their life around maximum time for meditation. Sleep is important insofar as you don’t want to fall asleep during meditation, but long periods of sleep weren’t necessary to sustain lifeforce. Unlikely that was my case; I think it was really the birds (and anxiety).

After the morning block of classes from 6:15 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. (hatha yoga and pranayama), we’d have breakfast, and then get an hour break. I’d usually spend that hour furiously washing some clothes in a bucket in my room, since I had only brought around 4 tops and 4 pants and was constantly sweating through them. Then, we’d have an afternoon block of classes from 9:45 to 12:15 (philosophy/religion and anatomy), and then another break before lunch, and then one after. During this mid-day break, me and my friends would frequently scramble out for some rare time outside of the school and to get hot chai (even in 100F+) and gossip. After lunch, we’d have our final block of classes from 3 to 7 (alignment, ashtanga, and meditation), followed by a silent dinner.

All in all, we did 2.5 hours of asana classes per day (hatha and ashtanga), but much of the class would be spent reviewing and discussing form. The bigger physical challenge of YTT in Rishikesh is learning how to sit on the floor for 6+ hours a day. The first day, I was so uncomfortable I could barely get off the floor. My step count each day was sub 1,000. Although I did get stronger and could see myself improve each day in asana poses, my final form was far from ‘physically fit’ in a Western sense.

More importantly, I did feel mentally much more fit at the end of it: resilient to the uncomfortable sitting situation, the schedule, and the unexpected boredom that came from listening and learning without devices for the first time in years.

3. I would get really ‘good’ at yoga

As someone prone to being a ‘jack of all trades, master of none,’ I’ve learned that my pursuit of a million hobbies at once is often an avoidance of one ground truth: If you ever want to be immensely humbled, learn more about what you’re doing. Or said differently: shit gets hard once you pass the intro course.

I was ‘pretty good’ at yoga as I understood it, having practiced the physical form on and off since high school. I knew what chattarunga was (unlike some people in my program, which still is unbelievable to me). I could go from extended side angle to full bind to bird of paradise. I knew some of the Sanskrit words. In India, I expected to learn more about the roots of each pose and maybe a thing or two about alignment.

Instead, I was humbled. Yoga is a practice that has unfolded over 5,000 years, so investing 200 hours ‘learning it’ truly felt like scratching the surface. Even the hyper-condensed version of our philosophy class caused fierce debate and discussion in our group. Yoga weaves in and out of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, traditional chinese medicine, the relationship between the Western colonial structures and the East, so on and so forth — every new learning created 10 more questions.

Potentially even more intimidating was the realization that yoga is and should be a lifelong pursuit for knowledge of yourself and your relationship to the divine. No way was I going to get ‘really good’ at that in one month.

4. I would find myself

I certainly learned a lot about myself in 25 days.

I realized that I am the most uncomfortable in my own skin when around other people. It was a latent social anxiety that I hadn’t recognized in detail until now - this persistent, nagging feeling of performance. Like the first few weeks of college, existing for most hours of the day around completely new strangers made me realize how much time I spent worrying that I looked upset, seemed inhospitable, or otherwise was fucking up the vibe.

I tried to “be in my body” and ended up really feeling some nerve pain, likely caused by joint hypermobility, another thing I learned about in detail and shifted how I think about my fitness goals.

I learned that being a lifelong judgmental person might be a fun way to for me to develop caustic, sardonic humor, but the greatest victim of silent judgment is myself — when that weapon is pointed directly back at me, when I’m by myself.

Despite all these learnings, my biggest learning was this: I didn’t need to find myself, a la many self-help books regarding journeying to India. I didn’t have incredibly profound self-realizations because I am already found; I am here. Before I had even come to India, and despite all the drama and the reasons that had brought me there, I was aware of a simple fact: that life is good, and I have a lot to be grateful for. All of my new reflections felt like learnings on top of a foundation that felt solid and grounded.

Wherever you go, there you are.

I find that most of my major life decisions to-date seem to happen this way: like an AC unit freefalling from a nearby building and clonking me in the head, a la Chidi in the Good Place. Upon reflection, they actually had been stewing in my subconscious for months, emerging in small bursts during conversation. This is evidenced by the fact that most of my friends are Zero Percent surprised when I tell them about my latest AC-clonking revelation, since I had unconsciously been talking about nothing else for months prior. Self-awareness: I’m working on it.

The signs were all there: after five years of grinding in the soup that is tech startups, I was running on empty. That, combined with three tumultuous years with my family as they grappled with me coming out, led to a level of body-mind dissociation that I have never experienced before. Most of the time I would say, and truly feel, that I was “fine,” that life was “good but could be better,” that my body just ached because I was getting older, and that my emotional span was pretty much limited to a range of “just fine” to “not bad!”

My body, pesky as bodies tend to be, disagreed. I gained weight and could not shed it. My hair fell out in clumps. I started to have these “episodes” (what I called them) at work where I would uncontrollably start sobbing after a mundane comment or bit of constructive feedback. I freaked out a fair number of men with these waterworks, all while hiccuping and saying “I’m actually fine, my body just does this sometimes!!!! :) :) :) Just give me a moment!!!!” To the credit of my boss, this happened enough times that after a while, he was able to continue having a conversation with me while my body completely rebelled against me. While I used up a box of tissues managing the emotional hemorrhage, my rational brain could still collaborate with him. We could list out our next few action items and agree on a path forward before I ran out of tissues.

It was both easy and hard to rationalize what was happening to me. Easy because I worked objectively stressful jobs, easy because like many of my insecure high-achieving peers who had graduated during the pandemic, I hadn’t taken any longer than two weeks off of working my ass off since middle school, easy because of the waves hands stuff that happens when your parents do not accept your multi-year queer relationship. Easy because the world around us is both crumbling, and also the crumbling itself is being filmed, narrated, and commented on 24/7. Easy to conceptually understand what burnout is.

But hard because I know I’m lucky and constantly tell myself that, hard because I’m good at the work I do, and I was successful at it; hard because it could really easily be worse (during Just Fine times, I would take to rattling off a long list of jobs that I would find much harder); hard because truly, deeply, I do like my life and I liked the people I worked with and the waves hands stuff was easy to ignore most days. Hard because I didn’t feel like I was about to have a nervous breakdown most days. Hard because the range of emotion stayed just fine to not bad.

In December, I was in China and had been #offline from work for a while when I started to think about the prospect of returning to work and to my regular life, and for the first time in years, I processed my body’s reaction: an immense constriction of my chest. The desire to both run away and curl into a ball.

I started to put myself in the shoes of my friends, who had been hearing from me for years about how I was Just Fine but also #criedatwork again. I imagined a world where I was in the role of my friends, who love me very much, listening to me rant about all of this yet again. What would I tell someone who described to me their uncontrollable breakdowns and weight gain and hair loss, and also told me that they could afford, financially, to take a few months off? That they could do this during a time with very few external responsibilities (pets, children, etc.)? I’d tell them, emphatically, to take the leap. Life is short, I’d say. You can always get another job, but you can’t always be in your late twenties.

From there, the path forward felt clear. In a world where high agency has become the golden attribute of an employee, I realized that the highest agency thing for me to do would be to pick another path altogether. I would quit my job, self-enforce a sabbatical, and use the free time to sleep, focus on repairing my mind-body connection, figure out what to do next with my life, and maybe address the waves hands stuff with my parents. A fortuitous conversation at a wedding cemented a possible step forward: a 200-hour yoga teacher program in Rishikesh, India. As my friends would call it - it was time for my eat-pray-love* era.

So, I took the leap. I put in my notice and registered for the first yoga school that seemed legit. It seemed like the perfect way to ramp down from a world of 70 to 80-hour work weeks and the hustle of NYC. A 200-hour certification is the minimum number of training hours you need to be an ‘accredited’ teacher, which means basically nothing as the industry is veryyyy loosely regulated (if you’re in a city like NYC, most likely your yoga teacher has had 500 - 700 hours of training). The training equates to about 25 days in the yoga school - for 6 days a week, you wake up at 5:30 a.m., start class at 6:15 a.m. and finish up around 8 p.m. just in time for your silent dinner. I was drawn to the idea of having to feel disciplined, about being ‘in my body’ whatever that meant, and to not ‘wasting’ the gift of time off.

All of this did feel incredibly ironic to me. Of course I would find the most productive possible way to just take a goddamn break.

*I did not read Eat, Pray, Love before I went to India. In fact, the only exposure I had to Elizabeth Gilbert was her All the Way to the River which…. Jia Tolentino puts it best in her critique. I’ve since started reading EPL and all I have to say is: I’m glad I didn’t read this earlier.

My credentials: According to Beli, I’ve been to 173 coffee and tea shops in NYC and surrounding areas - not including repeat locations of chains. My top spot goes to Té Company (for coffee, drip coffeemakers). My bottom spot goes to Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee (thinking about it - blech). During my formative years in high school, I expressly drank frappuchinos from Starbucks, so it’s been a long journey from there to tolerating pourovers. I own a Gaggia but I’m too lazy to mod it. I judge coffee shops on some amorphous, holistic combination of: vibe (decor, seating, patrons, music) + price for value + quality of espresso. Does this make me a coffee snob worthy of critiquing the actual creation of coffee? Absolutely not. Does this make me the ultimate judge of coffee shops that most normal girlies, casual iced-coffee-havers, would like? I’d like to think so.

Tiny Dancer Coffee

IN THE SUBWAY AT, 210 W 50th St Concourse Store #2, New York, NY 10019

Every other major metropolitan city with a functioning subway system has seemed to have figured out inter-subway-commerce- think Tokyo with clean Family Marts bustling with commuters at all hours of the day. NYC struggles in this domain, partially due to the impact of COVID, and probably also partially due to subway-piss-smell phenom. Tiny Dancer Coffee is an exception. Tucked away near the 1 entrance on 50th street, I stumbled into this shop on the search for non-chain caffeine near Hell’s Kitchen. Sipping coffee here on a peeling vinyl barstool feels like old school NY. According to their website, they also do private events, if you ever wanted to throw a rager in the subway.

Academy at Coffee Project NY

21-10 51st Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101

The best quality espresso is yours to have … as long as you brave an incredibly bleak walk near the highway/no-mans-land between LIC and Greenpoint. Coffee Project was founded in 2015 and is best known for their East Village cafe plus other locations, and in my experience, tend to have forward-thinking espresso drinks before the rest of the market (think: espresso tonic way before it was cool). Their Academy location serves really high quality drinks as well as classes for coffee enthusiasts.

Book Club Bar

197 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009

This barely made the list as Book Club Bar is very well known for being every girl’s entrepreneurial dream: a bookstore, a coffee shop, a bar. It’s just missing the plants.

I particularly love the ambiance of this bar: dark wood, dark lighting, and loungey chairs contrast nicely with an all-window front that opens up in warm weather. It feels like a place to snuggle up, just as long as you purchase your book first. Also has a great back patio with lots of greenery.

Note: the coffee is just ok. They’re doing a lot at once!

SEY Coffee

18 Grattan St, Brooklyn, NY 11206

I’m a simple woman. I see SEY beans, cash exits my bank account. SEY-roasted beans are (IMO) the best you can get that are roasted locally, and if your local cafe uses them, that’s typically a good sign. Their location in Bushwick offers a bright, sunlit space, where you can get a true espresso tasting experience or pourover. Like most serious specialty coffee shops, it’s served with water on the side.

DAGNY Astoria

11-12 30th Dr, Queens, NY 11102

To be honest, I can’t even tell you how the coffee is here: this is on the list as one of the very few coffee shops in NY with a truly enormous amount of space to hang out. Its inconvenient location is your benefit: you can typically find a spot to chill here, and there’s glorious views of the river. I wouldn’t make a trip just to come here: the Noguchi Museum is nearby. Polish off with a Costco food court hot dog.

Note: recent Google reviews complain of overly loud music.

Balkan Grind

5 Withers St, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Tucked away on a side street in Williamsburg, this newer coffee shop serves Turkish coffee and treats. Ever wonder what exactly was so good about a Turkish Delight that had Edmund betray his entire family in Narnia? Well, you can find out yourself here. This was my first time having Turkish coffee and I was simply unprepared for the near-heart attack that ensued. It’s prepared traditionally in cezves that are delivered to your table as well as delightful ceramics to accompany it. Definitely a shop that welcomes a longer stay. You will probably meet the owner, who is absolutely a gem.

Kis Cafe and Books (Amant)

315 Maujer St, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Located inside Amant’s primary building, this cafe feels hidden and is correspondingly very accessible for a lazy day of reading the books in the cafe or doing your own thing. The architecture is absolutely stunning and they serve drip coffeemakers. If you get bored, wander around Amant’s free exhibits and marvel at what billionaires spend their money on. And if you’re a true coffee enthusiast, pop around the corner to three-legged cat for a tip-less drink or KL5 Coffee to contemplate spending an arm and a leg on your very own espresso machine!

MCM Coffee

88 Fulton St Space E, New York, NY 10038

This coffee shop is probably 100 square feet and still holds more charm than all of the Jack’s Wife Freda locations combined. Tucked away in the basement floor in FiDi (yes you read that right), this tiny Uruguayan shop offers just-fine coffee with VERY good alfajores and other hard-to-get Uruguayan pastries. The owners also hand craft ceramics which are precariously on display, and for sale.

Larry’s Ca Phe

135 Woodpoint Rd Phe, Brooklyn, NY 11211

There are increasingly more dedicated Vietnamese coffee shops in NYC, but few with the story of Larry’s. You can read it yourself here or in store. Heart-warming story aside, I find Larry’s to have the most innovative drinks, ranging from cà phê dùa (coconut coffee) to pandan matcha. They also offer a less-caffeinated version of viet coffee (bac xìu) for the ibs girlies out there.

Mighty Oak Roasters

28-01 24th Ave, Queens, NY 11102

Another roaster + cafe combination, Mighty Oak is the only wood-fired roaster in NYC. Wood-fired roasting is an increasingly rare thing to find ($$$!); most beans are roasted with gas. Wood-firing is net more sustainable, and also creates a different flavor profile (allegedly the roasters have more control, and a more smoky flavor can be imparted). Honestly, ya girl really can’t taste the difference, but I love to go to a one-of-one. The actual cafe is very standard vibes, practical but not homey. They also have a takeout window.

analog how? a few major shifts:

• reading physical magazines cover to cover again. I grew up coveting copies of TIME and the economist that my parents randomly had delivered — they were sometimes my only form of entertainment

• writing by hand, although this has always been preferred by me much to the detriment of anyone forced to read my handwriting

• discovering music by plucking a random $5 used vinyl and playing it — shoutout to shirley scott

• shopping almost entirely in person for food (woah, butcher shops are an experience) and gifts (hello extremely pricey shoppy-shops)

• navigating without my phone and relying on my memory, a flex and major source of pride from recovering-clueless-navigator

• using a physical alarm clock and calendar instead of my phone and calendar apps

to make a point, I even decided to write this newsletter by hand first:

so why this change, besides to be insanely pretentious? (although a curiosity why that’s the likely kneejerk reaction … people tend to be very defensive about their preference for digital)

many of these habits I’ve discussed wanting to form in the past but was mentally blocked. truthfully, the internet in its immediate nature and growing enshittification via AI slop has pushed me to the other extreme. i also benefit from living in a walkable city which has made analog living a possibility.

on the immediacy of the internet: it’s actually deeply fucked up that my brain is subject to a veritable firehose of simultaneously alarming and utterly rote information whenever i go to check a map or text a friend. the analogy is cartoonish in an analog world:

• you’re browsing the racks at your local thrift when someone jumps out from behind a dusty-looking PJ set to let you know that your right to marry your partner is very much at threat (looking at depop and getting a NYT notification)

• you’re talking to a friend on the phone when your call is interrupted by an alert that more people have died by preventable natural disaster (calling your friend and getting a NYT notification)

• you’re examining your route on the subway map when someone on the train shoves a video of dying children in front of your eyes (doom scrolling twitter on the train)

• you’re looking at your local bulletin when you get the eerie feeling that a lot of the flyers are fake, and why do some of these people have 12 fingers? (ok, a stretch, but AI-generated profiles + content on social media)

obviously, these are caricatures, but maybe not so far off from the experience of being digital these days. and it’s so exhausting. how could it not be?

a very online response to the desire to shut off the firehose of the internet might be: well, it’s incredibly privileged to want to shut off the news and be blind to the atrocities around you. i think there’s very little moral difference between me learning about the latest atrocities in the world 1-2 days later when i’m in the headspace to read the news (like, picking up a physical paper) vs. me learning about it via push notification. The reaction is probably the same both times (staring off into space in dread). if anything, repeated experiences like the latter make me want to turn away even more — run off into the woods and live off the grid. that’s what happens when my sympathetic nervous system is constantly on-edge from the barrage of bad news, every day.

the appeal of inconvenience (analog-versions of life included) is that it introduces so much more blank time. blankness is needed; blankness is processing. sometimes, to savor a moment of interest, i have to have been bored in the first place. inconvenience introduces contrast, which in turn texturizes a day.

the act of seeking inconvenience, which digital-versions of life often enables, is directly correlated to time savings. there’s a desire to reduce “time-to-X”; reducing “time-to-knowing the news” or “time-to-being able to scroll again” or “time-to having my next shopping desire filled.” all of this time reduction isn’t random: it’s often micro-optimizations to be able to find more time for yourself/family/relationships/hobbies etc. in a capitalist society hellbent on forcing you to micro-optimize all your waking hours just to catch your breath, convenience feels like a lifeline.

but ironically, for me personally being real with myself, catching my breath often meant rushing through life to get back to my phone. life shouldn’t just happen in the time we allocate to it via planned events — it should happen spontaneously.

for example — it’s incredibly convenient to use amazon, and i still do sometimes. the trade of not using it is steep: 1-2 hours schlepping by foot around my neighborhood to buy versions of my amazon cart that aren’t exactly what I want and are probably more expensive. but evaluating time savings in a vacuum isn’t fair: there’s so much more potential in those 1-2 hours! the most exciting aberration that can come from buying from amazon is to go down the shopping recommendation rabbit hole and add a few more items to the cart with a click of a button. but a 1-2 hour meandering errand? maybe I run into a friend and neighbor, have a conversation with an owner of a store and then support them financially. maybe I get to see blue skies and kids laughing as they scooter across the street. maybe I see a hidden wine bar I’ve never spotted before, or laugh at a stupid piece of graffiti on the ground. maybe, in the gap of time between wanting to buy this particular thing and having the time to go on the search to find it, i realize i don’t need it after all.

(i explore the relationship between convenience and shopping more in this newsletter.)

i’ll end with this ask: the next time you reach for the convenient, often digital option, reconsider. what are you conserving your time for? could a different path be of interest? at the end of this newsletter/tirade, my cramped hand certainly thinks so.

aging is wild, because you wake up and realize it’s been a half decade since you graduated college/covid happened/you were thrown in the workforce kicking, screaming, and crying. and with that, some notes on 2024:

• girlboss tracker update: i did not complete this this year, giving up mid-year. however, i think i maintained habits fairly strongly (except for flossing).

• successful resolution update: my favorite resolution, and one that i’ll carry into 2025, is to do something nice for a stranger once a month. this mostly took the shape of helping random people on the subway or handing out compliments while passing someone on the street, and every single time, it did make my day better!

• unsuccessful resolution update: volunteering more. candidly, this resolution requires forethought, which i didn’t have a ton of in 2024. otherwise, waking up on most saturdays, the last thing i want to do is free labor.

• dietary additions of interest:

  • efforts to hit daily recommended fiber (INSANELY HIGH in case you didn’t know) were a mixed bag. ate more beans but conversely farted more :/

  • stopped eating octopus because it was way easier to give up than meat that substantially hurts the environment, like beef

  • became a farmers market girl — learning what fruits/veggies are in season is a great way to reckon with seasons, the passage of time, and nature being real

  • cooked a whole lot more. would consider myself a decent home chef now!

• created:

  • this newsletter! ba dum tss

    Subscribe now

  • a podcast with dear friend teresa

  • some pretty solid landscape photos with a new camera, which never see the light of day except for this newsletter (scroll to bottom to see)

  • small pockets of community (hosted diy coffee shops, dumpling making, good ol’ parties)

if you’re still reading this, please text / email me a random list of 2024 back xoxo

• did not create (and wish i did):

  • more newsletters

  • literally even one piece of drawn media

• social media:

  • overcame a brief 4 week of stint of being horrifically addicted to facebook reels

  • have continued to resist the main platforms, but do look at reddit a lot

  • have become chronically offline friend (good! call me grandma)

• new york:

  • year 3 in the big city done!

  • coming back after travel feels like coming home

  • i continue to require all my friends to move here eventually

  • now live in brooklyn but continue to side quest as much as possible

• favorites (specific):

  • substack article: how to like everything more (really edged its way in there)

  • longform piece: eat what you kill (thanks anna for sending)

  • app: finch (mental health)

  • thing to eat: beef noodle soup in taiwan, closely followed by duck skin caviar toast at juqi in flushing

  • high-brow drink: the high note at raine law room in chelsea

  • mid-brow drink: ginger kombucha (GT’s)

  • low-brow drink: dunkin donut refresher

  • movie: twisters in 4d

  • book: the anthropocene reviewed and the red rising trilogy

  • on-body purchase: either my oura ring, or finally caving and getting a baggu medium crescent about four years too late

  • home purchase: tushy bidet :|

• least favorites (this is basically just a list of outs and some random specific dislikes):

  • dog owners in public (sorry but … it’s getting crazy out here)

  • the normalization of being a loser incel

  • book: glossy

  • aspect of new home: heating built for the 1910 influenza

• streaks/various pseudo-achievements that apps use to trap me on as an active user forever:

  • duolingo: 480 days

  • beli: top 1% diner in nyc

  • partiful: top 1% partier AND hoster in nyc (lol? how??)

  • goodreads: 26 books read in 2024

• other:

  • started climbing, felt personally victimized by this

  • visited 7 other countries and visited an absurd number of mid-sized american cities (least fave: orlando. most fave: detroit)

  • still zero status on any airline

fancy photos:

hoping for more list-making in 2025.

love,
christina

two days ago it was black friday, and tomorrow is cyber monday, but honestly? if you looked deep into my brain crannies and found the (admittedly extremely poorly functioning) part that keeps track of dates and time, you’d find nothing there right now. smoothness. these things aren’t events at all anymore — obliterated in a world of constant shopping.

because if you can shop a deal when you’re scrolling tiktok, and check-out without moving your head from your pillow, why bother having a day dedicated to shopping?

some may celebrate this total 360 loop that we’ve done in the past few decades. first we decided to end our thanksgiving gratitude by trampling each other buying TVs at walmart. then we decided to become more civil, slowing sliding into a perpetual november where ‘25% off an algorithmically-manipulated price’ is touted as the ‘best deal of the year.’

yes, it’s probably more dignified. however, it’s fucking boring. where’s the drama? the pearl-clutching thinkpieces each year about society? yes, the late-stage capitalism of OG black friday is scary. but who was going to warn us that hyper-late-stage capitalism would be soul-suckingly boring (and even worse for the environment?)

despite all of my years of trying to be more sustainable and opt out of consumption cycles altogether, part of me deeply mourns the concept of a Shopping Event, where planning, anticipation, and the sensation of Hard Work all yield the prize of scoring a sale that doesn’t feel possible at any other point of the year. it’s like the thrill of stealing, except you only had to push a small toddler to legally get the item.

the one winner of this all: retail workers. i wish them all a trample-free holiday season.

ultimately, black friday is a victim to our never-ending lust for convenience. although some may argue that going to a department store filled to the brim with unimaginable goods on heavy discount is actually quite convenient, the american public has ruled that in-person shopping is inconvenient. you’re around other people (shudder), there is a 2-hour long line (ugh), you’ll get unnecessarily sweaty in the dressing room forcing your way out of a shirt that definitely doesn’t fit (yikes), and the parking situation is probably horrendous.

recently, i’ve been reflecting on how much of life is striving for more access to convenience — and then once achieved, striving for new forms of entertainment, many of which are… inconvenient. like getting on a submarine controlled by an old ps5 kind of inconvenient. traveling to antarctica kind of inconvenient. or running your tradwife ragged while you live off the grid.

the truth is, inconvenience is often entertaining, interesting, and memory-forming. inconvenient paths create space and opportunity for new things to emerge, like communities. simple example: grocery shopping vs. ordering grocery delivery. there are joys in picking out your own fruit, contemplating a new recipe because you saw a specific ingredient in stock, or running into a friend. for me, they outweigh the pain of carrying multiple bags onto the subway, sweating through my puffer as i balance eggs in my hands. (although, the occasional grocery delivery is quite nice).

taking the subway is another inconvenience to some compared to sitting in a car; walking even more so inconvenient. but with each different type of transport, there are different pros available to you — a ride with no internet, so you can read your magazine in peace. or marvel at being in proximity with so many strangers you may never see again.

so often, inconvenience means 'having to be around other people,’ which means that the drive toward a more convenient lifestyle means marching toward a more isolated life. although the fading of black friday is a rather un-heroic thing to mourn, i see it as another symptom of an increasingly lonely, convenient society. (hat-tip, writers of wall-e)

somewhat related reading:

Telling the Bees

The Mainstreaming of Loserdom

I know the title is provocative, but let me make my case first. Over the past few years, something has shifted in the perception of acceptable recreational behavior, or the way people talk about their hobbies: people are gleeful to admit they have no hobbies, no interests, no verve. Somehow, one of the main “hobbies” accepted by the masses is staying ho…

Read more

2 years ago · 9145 likes · 517 comments · Tell the Bees

& a palate cleanser: this is your reminder to try to shop local for holiday presents! talk about an incredibly inconvenient (in a good way) activity — it takes a ton of time, but it feels much better and is my way of giving back to the community. disclaimer: most likely will not have a door-bustin’ black friday sale.

a brief gift list:

1. museum gift shop gifts — every museum has a banging gift store. great place to get coffee table books, quirky puzzles, and often solid wall art pieces. or, pick up a fun postcard and write a nice hand-written note.

2. farmers market basket — dried flowers + candles (if there’s a candle-seller) + whatever root veggie is in season in the winter. you’ll look hippie, and they’ll get to make some good soup.

3. coffee beans — for espresso lovers, go to a coffee shop that roasts their beans and buy a bag. they’ll usually throw in a free drink for you, the lucky purchaser!

4. gift card to a local restaurant

5. bookstore — stalk their goodreads and buy their next ‘want to read’; pick up a novelty bookmark or a journal

6. art supplies / stationary store — stationary, mini-watercolor sets, journals

7. local clothing store — comfy-cozy items (slippers/hoodies/slouchy tees)

8. shoppy shop — every major city has at least one catch-all ‘shoppy shop,’ which has bits and bobs to delight. pick up a nice hair clip for a girl friend, quality tea-towels, interesting spices, teas, candles, or novelty jesus candles.

   1. my challenge to you is to buy from 1 through 7 vs. all in on the shoppy shop, even if that’s the easiest thing to do

we’ve been distributing ‘side quests’, and my side quest so kindly provided by mackenzie was to write a newsletter weekly (or at least biweekly). so here i am, trying to do just that!

honestly, having this social pressure is super helpful, because a big reason i only write a newsletter once a year is … i’m lazy. but actually, another big reason is because i put a lot of pressure onto the act of publishing any kind of public writing. and for good reason! who knows when an old blog post will get dug up from the dregs of the internet in 10 years and then i get canceled for a full one-quarter of a news cycle? it’s horrifying to think about, really.

when it comes to digital footprints though, i’m already a goner thanks to my 100+ articles/opinions in rice’s newspaper. the hot takes i had when i was 19 will forever be immortalized, or at least until the newspaper staff forgets how to renew our domain (yes, this has happened before. it’s ok, it happened to google too).

i went to asia so now it’s my earthly obligation to yap about it even though every take possible has been discussed

re: hour 20 of being awake, i just got back from my longest PTO ever (eight whole working days) in japan and taiwan! there, i experienced time warp caused by the absolute onslaught of novel experiences, did not step foot into a car for a week thanks to tokyo’s marvelous public transportation system, and also basically conducted a silent retreat for my first 4 days since i was alone.

the google map-ification of my experience really stood out to me. i’ve talked about this before: in nyc, where a meal can casually run you $30 if you so much as sniff at the bevvy menu, it feels like a preventable mistake to eat a restaurant with a rating below 4.5. this extends to basically anything that has a rating system. (go look at how people rate random shit, like a walmart or a public bathroom in central park, if you want to see just how obsessed we are with rating).

while traveling in a foreign country, it’s even more tempting to meticulously plan each step — food, lodging, entertainment — with the rating systems available. it’s because our enshrinement of ratings as all-knowing comes from a place of optimization: i fear a subpar meal on a trip to a foreign country where i only have 15 meals. if you’re obsessive about having a good time like i am, just 1 meal being subpar (7% of the food eaten!!!) can feel like an abject failure of planning. like, why didn’t i pay attention to the review with the 65 upvotes that said all other reviews were bought? i could have prevented this.

it’s completely understandable why i do this, but also so frustrating that i do.

for one, it prevents me from just like, chilling. my favorite activity is to meander around. you can’t meander if you have five reservations in a day. you’re locked into your choices, believe it or not.

for two, it creates a cyclical effect where the ‘good’ restaurants are quickly separated from the ‘mediocre’ and ‘bad’ ones, and then more planning must be done in order to ensure you can even get a spot at the now-very-crowded ‘good’ restaurant. inevitably, said ‘good’ restaurant often turns out later to become quite mediocre due to the stress of the public’s demand.

for three and worst of all, it prevents and stifles the success of new places. one bad review can set a restaurant back months, further limiting the total expanse of options available. mom and pop shops with no existing brand awareness suffer the most in these situations — are we really expecting 55 year old popo to learn google maps seo along with cooking the best food you can get around town???

one thing i did not anticipate, however, was how different google review culture was in japan. a quick search for ‘restaurants near me’ would yield a crop of 3.3s, 3.4s, and at best, 4.1s — all black marks if they were in nyc. however, a deeper dive into the actual content of the reviews and i started to notice that many japanese people truly rate ‘average’ places as 3 (and this includes average meaning casual, not meaning average-tasting). or, super-indexing on things i don’t really care about, like ‘bad’ service (which in japan means they didn’t immediately greet you and offer you the world upon your entrance into the restaurant). apparently, japanese-based tabelog is even more extreme, with most restaurants consistently rated a 3. (see more discourse on reddit here)

the result was one of immense freedom. i could meander again!! it wasn’t so much that the rating system was that much more intelligible. while it’s definitely better than discerning if a 4.75/5.0 airbnb is actually going to be the most disgusting place you’ve ever stayed, i took even more freedom in the knowledge that i couldn’t possibly understand the nuances of the rating systems in japan in my short stay, and therefore why bother? i was doubly comforted by the knowledge that a mid meal didn’t seem to exist in japan.

while i didn’t fully embrace no-google-maps, i did walk into random restaurants and shops much more often, freed from the self-contained pressure of optimizing my time. as a result i had two bowls of very solid udon, one pretty good but very cheap bowl of ramen, one absurdly cheap and amazing omakase set, and one relatively pricey but super traditional omakase set (where the chef paused after each round to painstakingly write out the fish’s name on google translate. (“grilled mackarel.” “okay! :D”)

i’d like to extend this further out — what would it be like to read without checking goodreads to make sure it’s ‘worth my time’, or watch a movie without running to letterboxd? or even cook a nyt cooking recipe below a 4 star rating? or walk into a random restaurant in nyc and just let fate decide if it’ll be good or not?

here are some photos — i got a new camera (more on this next time!)

i hope you enjoyed this more-casual installment of on a tangent because i definitely did not edit it. have i mentioned i haven’t slept in 20 hours? see you next time xoxo

first of all… hello. this time, i’m going to not do the thing where i indulge in 1-2 paragraphs bemoaning my total inability to write unless forced to (reader, i am on a 6 hour flight to sf right now with VERY limited wifi) and instead just get right into it.

holy shit it’s been a year ‘off social media’

in my last annual newsletter, i celebrated two months off social media (tiktok, insta, etc. the like*). the pros/cons i identified two months in are pretty spot-on, but one year in, i’m sharing some new ones for your consumption.

*okay horrifyingly, i have been recently sucked back into reels via FACEBOOK. I KNOW.. i’m embarrassed, you’re embarrassed reading it, let’s all just take a deep breath. the fb-marketplace-because-you-moved to two-hours-mindlessly-scrolling-furniture-flip-reels-via-facebook pipeline moved quick for me. actively working to undo right now but damn those videos are pretty good

more pros:

• when someone at work asks you if you’re on instagram, you can simply say no → great if you don’t want to operate under extreme cognitive dissonance trying to resolve your multiple personalities every time you post a story

• when you don’t get invited to something by someone you thought would invite you to said thing, you simply don’t find out about it and are none-the-wiser until it’s months later and you can’t even muster one feeling about it

• zero awareness of random people getting engaged, married, and having children

• related, legitimately forgetting about large swathes of people, thus allowing you to focus on your core friends. i feel my mental directory is now akin to someone who lived in a small town in the 1800s. i am remembering people’s whole addresses again!

• total disconnection from fleeting moments of cultural beef and discourse

more cons:

• when someone at work asks you if you’re on instagram, you can simply say no → sad if they are friend-shaped and this would have been the logical next step to becoming friends

• if your friend posts a horrifying photo of you, you don’t find out until it’s too late. (read: anna posting a pic of me just absolutely SHOVELING popcorn into my mouth during charli xcx. i will not be resharing for this audience.)

• you have to borrow your friend’s phone to scroll twitter whenever a National Televised Event is occurring (i mourn the amazing content i most certainly missed during the debates, the olympics, every awards ceremony ever, etc)

• your friends forget you’re not on social media and start conversations off without providing the extra context you need (wait what do you mean you went to france literally when did that happen?? wait you’re NOT dating that guy anymore???? you broke your leg ARE YOU OKAY????)

• hard to tap into any new community — so many communities are predominantly online, even in new york

• (is this a pro?) you find out about major events via chain texts (how i discovered trump was shot). first we had the news boys, then we had twitter, now we have chain texts.

one thing i do miss a lot is catching up with people who are not in the lucky group of i-remember-your-address. i love the style of anna’s newsletter and, if i knew i wasn’t SO FLAKY, would like to commit to more of these newsletters as a way of staying connected to all of you all (awww). like basically, you can think of this as a letter to you. write me one back!

is everyone boring, or am i depressed?

okay clickbait alert because obviously everyone isn’t boring… i’m not… you’re probably not…

but here’s something fascinating that has happened to me over the past year: so many things bore me. it’s fascinating because i expected social media divestment to cause the exact opposite: for me to find rich color in life, experiences, and people again. Precisely because i am not hammering all my senses all the time with novel content, i should come to enjoy regular stuff more.

this has happened to some degree: in particular, i find that i really like going on walks and just looking around. i’ve been able to concentrate on much longer conversations with friends. i also have found that i can read full books and magazines without stopping, and really enjoying them.

but at the same time, i sometimes have this extreme out-of-body experience particularly when talking to someone new, where i feel like i’m playing sims and resurrecting my meat sack to play back the same npc lines over and over again. anson once asked me what % of people i like on first meeting, and i said like 50%, and she said like 3%. but now, it really might be 3%! these people are reciting lines from a play! anson you were right on the ball!

and similarly, this year became a year of world-tour-featuring-only-mid-size-us-cities for me (think: richmond va, orlando fl). when going around these cities, i experienced the same out-of-body feeling - there’s the coffee shop x book store on the artsy Main Street of the city; there’s the large brewery with the outdoor seating on logs that definitely will give you splinters; there’s the ex-movie-theater-now-trader-joes-x-boutique-hotel-x-sweetgreen. i can tell you exaaaactly what the ‘vintage’ shop selling dusty baby tees at eye-watering mark-ups smells like. and so on.

(as an aside, one thing that delighted recently: detroit’s motto/brand of ‘detroit vs. everybody’. that’s metal as fuck. and so not boring)

so what happened to me? it’s really no shade to anyone — as acknowledged in subtitle, i could simply be Depressed — but i suspect it has something to do with the broader homogenization of tastes (as explored beautifully here) which, ironically, is caused by the very algorithms that caused the creation of diverse content to explode. it’s like in a world where we have endlessly interesting content to explore, society has somehow still converged on overall very bland content, items, and discourse.

or, maybe like the fated morning when you wake up and your back and neck HURT and it doesn’t get better when you stretch — this dulling of the world is a universal experience of getting older.

p.s. it only gets worse with ai, doesn’t it

i could go on, but then how will i have enough content to truly fuel a newsletter to be published BEFORE Q42025? i’ll leave you here. miss you. write me a letter, seriously.

zzz……

oh, still here?

fun fact: this silly newsletter thingy has 115 (???) subscribers? i find this kind of nuts because who is signing up in this day and age to receive Emails In Their Inbox anymore?

speaking of, i recently went on an unsubscribe rampage because i was tired of getting nudged by random stores every hour, and i swear to god if i was even slightly more persistent i’d probably make a killing from some ~ftc reports~ on companies violating the can-spam act … because some of those unsubscribe buttons? are not unsubscribing!

ok, that’s my long convoluted way of saying — thank you! it is really nice to know this goes to a captive audience who reads it despite my refusal to capitalize ‘i’.

okay now to the point

(totally expecting some unsubscribes once this newsletter goes out, but optimistically will ignore this likelihood): faithful subscriber among population 115, who no doubt was patiently awaiting the next installment of on a tangent instead of going about their day-to-day life: you may be wondering, what event has brought me back to writing this newsletter?

pretty simply put: i'm off social media* as of TWO MONTHS, and therefore at my wit’s end (read: moderately bored). honestly though, this is the positive conclusion of some of my previous writing on social media and how it makes me feel like my brain is melting out of my ears.

*not active on instagram, tiktok, and twitter; not using it on web, mobile, or app form. which leaves facebook (occasionally used to find furniture and also find out who got engaged), linkedin (vomit), pinterest (i will never leave her), reddit (web version, because my neighborhood reddit is how i find out where to eat next and also what that loud sound on 36th and 23rd was), and a few new apps - see below!

pros:

• no longer feels like my brain is melting out of my ears

• i feel more in control of what i’m doing when i’m on my phone — obviously i’m still spending time on my phone, but now i religiously maintain a duolingo streak, complete all of the nyt games, and record everywhere i eat on beli

• i’m shopping way less: i estimate i’ve spent at least a thousand dollars less this year on purchases motivated by my phone

• it doesn’t feel like i’m strapped to an electric chair forced to keep up-to-date with the mundane updates from that one girl i met in a bar bathroom 6 years ago

• no more discourse and things that make me very angry, but only temporarily

• i read the news slightly more than before vs. relying on social media

• more time on fun, newer social concepts:

  • retro.app (like 1 second a day meets insta), beliapp.com (stack-rank everywhere you’ve eaten), letterloop.co (make a newsletter where all your friends are co-authors)

  • none of these apps have a ‘never-ending feed of content’ feature, which make them really pleasant to use + non-addictive

  • shout out to alyssa for introducing me to retro + letterloop; thank you anna for persistently plugging beli (my presence on that app should make up for the fact that i’m never going to watch the 200+ tiktoks from you awaiting me)

cons:

• i talk to about 10 whole people (this could be a pro depending on how you look at it) — but generally the concept of an acquaintance is very different. the time scale of ‘getting to know someone’ is either much longer (because i don’t have many ways to learn more about them until i see them again) or much faster (because i might prioritize spending time with them vs. passively observing them on social media)

• i’m on slack (work) wayyyy more >:( out of the sheer desire to read some content

• information channels feel less diversified: much less access to information that isn’t readily available on more mainstream news channels / sites

i’m not going to lie, the first month off socials was really hard. i didn’t feel ‘withdrawal’ persay and the need to redownload apps, but i did feel pretty unwell for at least two weeks: very isolated, bored, sad, with a lot more time to feel anxious about everything immediately in front of me: work, family, relationships, etc. etc. etc.

by now though, i feel like i’ve stabilized, and i’m reaching the point that i wanted to reach all along: i’m looking to divert the emotional and mental energy i used to pour into social media, into new hobbies, my friends, this newsletter (knock on wood) etc. etc. etc. i don’t think i’ll return to social media.

i’m thrilled to be here and i hope to stay in this happier, more fulfilled groove throughout the winter despite the best efforts of a sun that sets at 4 p.m. (cruel and unusual punishment).

the girlbossification of christina

close friends know this: an unfortunate (?) arc of christina in the past two years has been my rapid rate of girlbossification. without diving deeper into my own personal thoughts on what that means (and also why we tend to look at ‘girlbosses’ with a mix of disgust, disdain, and also respect), it basically means that i have swung hard into the world of self-optimization. this is largely due to my sense of my time being taken away from me, and me wanting to claw it back.

i think there’s a razor-thin tight-rope when it comes to trying to improve yourself: on one side, a yawning gulf of falling prey to a hamster wheel carefully designed by capitalism to keep you perpetually dissatisfied and yearning for more; on the other, a malaise and sense of ennui that keeps you from changing up your day-to-day and growing as a person, friend, and member of a community.

i haven’t figured out the perfect balance and frequently pendulum between the two gulfs (e.g., i purchase a peloton during the same year where i’ve written one (1) newsletter), but i successfully tried a tactic for a full year where i tracked daily how i did against five things i cared about: (1) working out, (2) spending no money, (3) learning/reading something, (4) flossing (lol), and (5) having a good day.

disclaimer: not advocating for everyone to do this, just stating that this worked as a way to improve myself while not beating on my failures. i didn’t really assign definitions or rigor to trying to improve how i did from month to month — just by tracking these habits, i felt more accountability to myself than i ever have before and feel that i can end the year knowing i’ve grown as a person. i’m also shocked (and proud) to have maintained this for a full year!

i wouldn’t be a girlboss without a graph, so here’s how i did:

conclusions? i should probably invest in a water-flosser.

in all seriousness, i did conclude that summer months are good for me (i was popping off in july), that work intensely affects if i have a good day or not (you can guess when i quit my job), and that duolingo is my saving grace (it’s why i started reading/learning daily with so much more consistency). i also quit social media around late september and credit that with increased overall stability.

other things + what’s next

i know better than to promise a newsletter soon, but i do think that all signs point to more of these, especially since i have fewer avenues to catch-up with people that i don’t talk to every week. if you’re one of those people: please text me (or i will text you) because i likely miss you and am wondering about you.

or, i can spare you the effort to catch-up and you can continue to voyeuristically read what i’m doing from afar:

my r.e.p.o.r.t. (Reading, Eating, Playing, Obsessed with, Recommended Treat)?

thank you alyssa for keeping me up-to-date with tiktok trends, including the r.e.p.o.r.t

reading:

• emily henry for some feel-good romcoms (thank you anna - wow alyssa and anna each get two shout-outs in this newsletter. remember when i said i talk to only 10 people?)

• ghosts on the glacier (nyt) — extremely haunting read that i read this morning

• freedom is a constant struggle: ferguson, palestine, and the foundations of a movement by angela davis and cornel west — being off social media means i feel very uninformed esp on information that doesn’t come through mainstream channels, so trying to patch my understanding

• a cure for existential boredom (podcast, rec from mike) — not a read, but i found this podcast really helpful in mapping out my next steps after deleting socials

eating:

• soup! amy got me a le creuset dutch oven for christmas and i will be making some very cozy stew/soup this winter. two recipes i really enjoyed recently: green garlic & ginger chicken and rice soup (i recommend less jalapeno, otherwise it tastes like a giant bowl of salsa) and japanese-style beef stew

• at new places: beli has encouraged me to try more new places in nyc vs. settling into my comfort spots. tried this past week: giant 5-pound italian sub (gill informs me this is a hero) at sal, kris, and charlies; albanian food at dua kafe; xiao long bao at deluxe green bo

playing:

• pokemon violet: i dusted off my switch recently to fight off the urge to scroll. violet is significantly worse than arceus, but the hilarious glitches are very entertaining

• an Adult (capital A): i am somehow the youngest person at my new job again

obsessed with:

• making matcha and espresso at home: i talked myself into buying an espresso machine by saying it’d be cheaper than buying coffee every day and funnily enough this is actually becoming truer every day

• every app doing a 2023 recap: did they totally rip off spotify? yes. do i Love to Learn More About Myself Via Data? yes.

  • side note: it’s so sick and twisted how much validation I Feel being told i’m top x% at something. like top x% at being a loser on my phone? yes.

• my friends’ pets. every day i yearn for a little guy to return home to. good thing i can reliably fill the gaping hole in my heart with strawberry and buster :’)

• telling everyone to get their data off mint and deleting the app so they don’t support the terrible parent company behind turbotax <3

recommended treat:
just going to make this into a combo holiday-shopping and listening recommendation list

• shopping local for holiday presents. it feels way better, it is literally better, and it’s Immediately In Your Hands

• a silly phone call with a friend while on a walk. even when it’s freezing cold outside, this is a guaranteed pick-me-up

• leuchtturm1917 planner. this is the planner that i successfully used for a year, the user experience is just that good.

• an episode of normal gossip. season 1 is the best (by far)

that’s it for now. sweet dreaaaaaams!

that’s not to say I haven’t tried writing: the multiple half-assed drafts in my substack suggest otherwise. what has stopped me, besides a general lack of discipline, is the ever-present fear of ‘wasting time.’ being solidly in my mid-20’s, moving to new york, and the world generally reviving again despite covid very much still around have all coalesced into a question that drives me to distraction daily:

is this the best use of my time right now, out of all the other options available to me?

‘free’ time as a concept has been haunting my conversations and thoughts recently. for me, free time is taken to mean any time outside of my job (hence, the quotations), which in itself is already kind of fucked up since it implies that there is no freedom to choose to spend most of my conscious time working. an obviously true statement, but still depressing.

having free time also pairs with access to convenience, which is a slippery slope to exploitation in the hellscape that is capitalism. for example, those with enough resources may ‘optimize’ the amount of free time they have by outsourcing necessary tasks, such as getting their groceries delivered; their laundry washed; the apartment cleaned by someone else; their children taken care of; getting driven around instead of walking or taking public transportation; the list continues. this is not to say that these practices are inherently exploitative, but it’s worth mentioning that the pursuit of ‘free’ time for one often comes at the expense of others’ time, resources, or experience. an extreme example of convenience enabling free time for one at the detriment of many is seen in the lavish lifestyles of billionaires who take private jets at tiny distances just to save themselves time (and the onerous experience of being near other people).

not only is free time is a bit of a misnomer, i often feel a lack of free will in choosing what to do with my free time. a peek behind the curtains at any marketing operation reveals why this is: companies are spending billions in a zero-sum competition for our attention and precious ‘free’ time. and i, hapless consumer being farmed for every bit of my data, fall prey to the lowest common denominator: my comfort content of choice that i turn to when faced with the overwhelming prospect of endless possibilities.

the array of options available on the phone and the internet feel inevitably overwhelming, and this feeling is largely intentional: not through the fault of a random seo marketing team but rather through the goals of capitalism, which are always to accumulate more users which equals more growth which equals more investment, profit, stock value, etc. so how much free will do i really have in controlling my free time as long as i am reliant on my phone as a way to communicate, navigate, do work, read, listen, organize, and more? (great read suggested by anson: is the internet inevitable?)

said differently: how does one actually wrest back control of their free will, and thus their free time, from the large corporations vying for their attention? i’m not the only one grappling with this: on tiktok, people describe their ‘5-9 before their 9-5’ or their ‘5-9 after their 9-5’ with all sorts of ideas on how to ‘hack’ the precious free time before and after work.

when trying to answer this question myself, i’ve come across a lot of content that feels like those tiktoks; there is of course a ted talk on the topic in addition to endless self-help books. most of the tips can be distilled into the following: to gain control of your free time, you need to track it, schedule it, and optimize it.

these solutions seem plausible as someone who has a literal kitchen timer on her desk to keep on task during work, but still feel a little #girlbossy as they put the onus of both finding free time and using it well entirely on the individual (vs. addressing the systems that limit our free time and our free will). however, when thinking about the billions of dollars spent trying to get me to do anything and everything besides things i want to do, maybe a schedule and a tracker are necessary tools to bring to the fight for my time and attention. i find it difficult to separate traditionally good habits (discipline) with their warped ‘boot-strappy’ extremes, but it’s good to remember that not every ‘hack’ is a bad hack, and not every schedule and attempt at self-efficiency is a manifestation of capitalism.

another tactic i have considered and used to varying degrees of success is developing a clear understanding of what i want to do with my time vs. what i actually end up doing: ‘scrolling on my phone’ is low on the list of things i want to do, whereas ‘staying in touch with my friends’ is high on that list. sometimes, scrolling feels suspiciously close to ‘staying in touch,’ when in reality a screen-free phone call accomplishes the job much better. similarly, i might want to read more long-form content and learn things, but what i actually do is look at twitter and reddit instead of reading a book.

upon reflection, this is a very meta newsletter: 10 paragraphs explaining that the reason i haven’t written a newsletter in 1.5 years is NOT laziness but rather a lack of free time caused by a lack of free will in capitalist america 💅

the system is the root cause of rot

things in common between the shootings in california and the police killing of tyre nichols: the perpetrators were the same race as the victims. while some will use these as an example of ‘it’s not white people it’s [fill-in-the-blank]’, it’s not very difficult to understand that: 1) most of the time it is white people and 2) all of the time it’s a symptom of our carceral society: one that punishes and punishes and punishes — a society with roots in slavery.

reads, both recent and not

• why do rich people love quiet? the sound of gentrification is silence.

• ‘luddite teens don’t want your likes

• Black Cops Don’t Make Policing Any Less Anti-Black

in a previous newsletter, i wrote:

I feel that we haven’t processed the months of pent-up trauma that we have collectively been experiencing out of fear that in our moment of vulnerability, disaster will strike harder than ever.

unfortunately, turns out i’m the accidental prophet — since my last newsletter four months ago in january (a few weeks after the capitol riots):

• houston froze, so suddenly that the ice took the pipes and water and power with it. in a year of isolation, this was the loneliness icing on top — i don’t think i’ll ever forget the 30 hours i sat alone in my apartment, with the flurry of mutual aid activity that happened after — the weight of the world and anxiety with it. i still remember the gaslighting i felt when i stepped outside in shorts a week later; the reminder that climate change is no longer the slow-moving fairy-tale beast of my middle school powerpoint presentations but rather very much here, present, and wreaking havoc

• Delania Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Elcias Hernandez, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue were shot and killed in atlanta. i waded through the incredibly complex feelings i felt (what is an aapi community? what is solidarity?) while i smiled on work calls between crying and thinking how i shared a last name with xiaojie; texting my sister and searching up tasers that my parents could figure out how to use, now that a previously distant fear was at the forefront of our minds

• i, like many others, continued to struggle through the growing pains of adulthood. i joined the 2020 grads re-emerging from the cocoon of a frozen-year at home, disillusioned with the prospect of a corporate job after so much restlessness and ennui. constantly wondering about my status quo, my next steps, the assumptions i had made about my next five years that i would upend in my mind in an endless game of ‘what-if.’ watching some friends get married; others move cities; others mourn losses; and others playing the same games of ‘what-if’

• daily, i would feel my mind stretch and contort with every covid contradiction; in steep cognitive dissonance every time i felt happy from re-introducing a ‘normal experience’ while cases climbed in india and the delta variant spread and anti-vaxxers turned down shots

• so many other traumas happened throughout: news notifications about violence against palestinians juxtaposed against emails advertising fits for our incoming ‘hot girl summer,’ watching the derek chauvin trial side by side next to the powerpoint i was supposed to be editing, and more. and more.

but, i got vaccinated. i graduated. i felt the joy of being in proximity to my closest friends. i was able to hug people, more than a year later. sit in a coffee shop and people watch. i planned my next move, venturing into the next decade of uncertainty. and now i’m sitting in a new apartment in new york city — the first city besides houston that i will live in for longer than three months, and remember it — amidst broken-down cardboard boxes and the tiny bits of memories that i was able to cram into my two overweight suitcases.

i have a scar on my ankle from when i was 4 and stuck my foot into a moving bicycle wheel. 19 years later, the scar still prickles from time to time, a reminder that recovery remains elusive and nonlinear — that even after the skin changes from bloody to evenly scarred, turbulence hides beneath the surface. this is how i picture our collective ‘recovery’ from the traumas of the past year, and every year — a series of wounds in various states of healing, prone to twitching every now and then as if to say, “remember me? i’m still here, bitch!”

two months ago, i went to my favorite coffeeshop in houston, snagged a rare outside patio spot, went inside and ordered a lavender chan (in a for-here glass, finally), turned right. and made direct eye contact with my abusive high school ex who i hadn’t seen in six years.

after the eternal second of eye contact passed, i went outside and sat down. my glass is for-here, i told mike, we can’t leave, i didn’t get it to-go, and it’s nice outside, and i love this coffeeshop, and it’s my coffeeshop, and it’s my city, my space, my last two months here. but just like my ankle scar, something prickled underneath the smooth scars, and as i protested i started violently shaking, so much that we put my chan in yet another to-go cup and walked out.

i, like you and everyone else, am still figuring out what to make of the past year and the years before it. but one key aspect for healing, even if only partially and bit by bit, seems to be vulnerability and openness: of acknowledging that everything is in fact, not really okay, and that in itself is okay.

a big reason for my hiatus: my guilt at asking for reading recs and then not reading said recs. see previously mentioned mental block for ‘fun’ stuff that feels like ‘work’ — something i want to work through, hopefully in time for another newsletter. here’s some other recs in the meantime:

• nyt: spend less time online (a mantra i will try to follow this year)

• nyt: these chinese millennials are ‘chilling,’ and beijing isn’t happy — as much as i vehemently dislike nyt’s china coverage, this piece is A+ and i asked my parents about tangping and it’s a real thing! good to know that discontentment with capitalism is a universal sentiment

• twitter: follow @nytdiff, to balance out the two nyt recs above — this bot tracks every change the nyt makes to its headlines and ledes. it lays bare some of the deeply editing processes at the nyt (which, icymi, doesn’t even have a copy staff). egregious example from covering palestine:

• new yorker / alfred knopf: crying in hmart by michelle zauner (a.k.a. japanese breakfast — she also just dropped an incredible project, jubilee) i read the first chapter of this book when it was published early in the new yorker and had some full-body cries. the book is no less cathartic/extremely painful (and very specific to my asian american girlies with difficult relationships with their mom!) if you buy the book, consider buying from a local shop (brazos bookstore in houston is a great, reliable place to shop from)

  

• substack: popular information (s/o to anna for the rec!) super succinct newsletter that tracks the movements of corporate america: what they say vs. what they do, such as changing their icon to rainbow for pride month while donating to homophobic politicians

corrections from my last newsletter:

• liana gently corrected me: a life sentence is not always 15 years — it ‘depends on parole eligibility for when you can physically leave prison which sometimes is as low as 15 but often sentences are multiplied/consecutive/or without parole.’ this is why i have smart readers like you all — to keep me in check!!

• i was also corrected on ‘hibernation is not a months-long sleep’ by gill, who confirmed that bears actually can sleep for months and do not defecate or eat during that time

lessons learned: one-minute tiktoks are not enough to learn things!! and also! i’m keeping myself more accountable to transparency than the nyt does!

see you soon,
christina

p.s. if you have family members who are seeking vaccines and have the bandwidth/talent of a ticketmaster scalper (this is a job for alyssa)…this is for you

stonks

icymi: gamestop stock closed today at $347.51 — that’s compared to the $18.84 it was when I last sent an email. if you’re too hot to know about stocks, the tl;dr is that when hedge funds moved to short gamestop (betting $$$ on gamestop’s failure, which would then trigger other people to short gamestop), reddit (/r/wallstreetbets) moved to fuck up their bet — by boosting gamestop to the moon, even as in-person retail shops tanked during the pandemic. here’s a twitter thread of a dude explaining this on tiktok

I already thought the stock market was fake, but this turn of events only further proves it. what made me pause was the fragility of the stock market as an institution, and subsequently the precarious hold of all of the hedge funds and private equity firms and banks that leech on the economy. one of my favorite classes at rice was corporate finance (shocking I know) because my professor would teach us all the basic theories and models that drive financial markets today, and then highlight the impossibly optimistic assumptions and bad heuristics that serve as their very rocky foundation — like he was pulling out jenga blocks from the leaning tower of america’s economy.

I haven’t decided if I think the entire gamestop thing is #good or #bad but what I have started thinking about is: so much of our society is built on the idea of “pragmatism” and “logic,” when in reality most of our systems are highly idealistic at best — and in the wrong way. it is hyper-ideal to assume the united states has a free market, as companies consolidate and morph into ghastly, hidden monopolies while regulators turn a paid, blind eye. despite this, legislators, billionaires, and a lot of misled americans hide behind the guise of “pragmatism” to defend the sputtering machine of late-stage capitalism, conveniently turning to the idea of a “free market” to defend the status quo and argue against less regulation, lower minimum wage, higher hours, more productivity. in this hellishly idealistic world, only the ones with enough privilege to stay in their idealistic bubbles, convincing themselves that their work and this world are the best they could be, can really thrive.

another example is our policing system, also highly ideal at best: america believes that giving people — mostly white, mostly men, quite a few with far right ties — the absolute protection of universal amnesty and guns, will somehow inspire community and safety for all. this is clearly not the case: proven over and over again by cold, hard, “logical” data in addition to the collective pain of so many.

yet we continue to pour additional money into our failed police forces. why? “pragmatism” feels like a defense of the status quo: a status quo that benefits whiteness and capitalism and masculinity above all.

pragmatism and logic are what people hide behind when they don’t want to imagine a different world; they are why “abolish the police” changed to “defund the police” changed to “divert a couple millions for a few years until no one pays attention anymore.” it doesn’t feel “practical” to administrators who have worked at rice for over 20 years to tear down the statue of an enslaver, even as students (shout-out shifa) sit at his statue for the 125th day and dream of a world without it.

the most frustrating part of this pragmatism-secretly-idealism is that if we have already chosen to be idealistic (for fuck's sake the stock market is really a thing, isn’t it), why haven’t we chosen to be idealistic in the right way? can we, instead of being comfortable with our uncomfortably-idealistic status quo, demand better? can we acknowledge that money is fake, but food and shelter and healthcare are real — all of which we have more than enough of but “can’t” be redistributed for '“pragmatic” reasons?

our spoon-fed ideals are not looking so white-picket-fence picturesque anymore

the long-debunked ideal (or scam) of america is the obviously american dream: that anyone can pick themselves up by the bootstraps if they just work hard enough. this scam, often spouted from people who have never known financial hardship in their entire life, is an underlying assumption of american life, and one that still sways an alarming number of americans. the guise of pragmatism invokes fear in people who think dramatic, radical change will remove their chance at the american dream, as opposed to bring them closer to their ideal life.

the american dream sells this model of “pragmatism” at its finest: save up (ignoring the sub-1% APR for all banks, and the financial knowledge and time needed to invest) and work hard (spend your prime years scared to take a vacation day because you don’t want to lose health insurance or because you have debt) so you can buy a house (either when there’s a housing bubble so you lose out in the end or through a sub-prime mortgage packaged with made-up debt on debt on debt) and have children (immediately having to consider putting between $50,000 - $300,000 in the bank in case they ever want to go to college; also more money for the childcare you’ll need because you can’t take a day off because healthcare).

worse: as consumers, we are preyed upon daily for wanting to believe in a pragmatic life. when I walked into ikea for the first time, I thought about this: how the showrooms try to convince you that the key to having your shit together is a $79 MALM dresser that you can bruise a toe trying to assemble at home. or that being in debt won’t matter as long as your coffee table matches your chairs matches your lamp. or that if you mimic the eating habits and lifestyle of your favorite influencer, your life can also be pristine and clean and productive and happy.

maybe that’s what’s so exciting about this gamestop stock phenomenon: it takes this “pragmatism” and flips it over to show the rotting maggots underneath. financial news outlets report that the gamestop stock, in addition to rising amc theatres stock, show a “detachment from reality” — ignoring the fact that the stock market has far outperformed expectations while the unemployment rate rose to 15% in april and 60% of the restaurants that closed during the pandemic, have closed permanently.

the stock market has always been detached from reality — we know this now, and we knew this in 2008 when (legitimately made up) cdos crashed the market, and we know this because in the end the stock market is a construct that people dreamed up 200 years ago and now it somehow determines when I get to retire.

final aside and disclaimer: yes I did do debate in college. no I never actually read baudrillard until now. I liked these excerpts as an alternative contextualization of what’s happening, and why it feels exciting, and why it feels like everyday we wake up to a world that’s somehow imploding even more than it was yesterday.

whew that was a lot

this time, I don’t have any recommendations to offer because my brain feels like it’s re-entered the primordial slush. but I would love to read new things: please send me recommendations (either reply to this email or text me or dm or something)! I will read all of them and include all of them in my next newsletter so we can all revel in some new, interesting content.

I need to stop convincing myself that tiktok is “educational” just because 16-year-olds informed me that 1) hibernation isn’t a months-long sleep and 2) a life sentence is 15 years, not an actual lifetime (please tell me I’m not the only one who thought these things)

with love,

christina

(oh if you like lorde listen to maude latour! thanks teresa for the rec)

before I finish my last newsletter of the year (ha ha ha) I did want to thank you all for sticking with me! I try to not look at substack stats since this is largely just a way for me to create a little community of thoughts, but my newsletters have hit 80% open rate which is absolutely insane to me (just based on the number of emails I personally ignore). thank you thank you thank you for sharing your thoughts with me throughout this and for giving me the encouragement to continue writing on my own terms.

2021 does not roll off the tongue very nicely

even though it’s been a while since we’ve last ~virtually connected~, this one will be briefer than usual: the combination of winter, the looming one year anniversary of the big Quar (with a capital Q) and everything else means my brain has largely been short-circuiting.

this year has been horrible to say the least — the wombo-combo of pandemic-related isolation and frustration, combined with the realization that there’s been a lot of Bad for a long time and many of us, myself included, were too privileged to really see the festering wounds in society. it’s like driving by the bayou and admiring a houston sunset all while holding your nose and ignoring the fact that pollution, not a heavenly influence, is probably the reason why the sky looks so pink.

I personally am choosing to enter the new year in absolute denial that it’s happening, and I’ll keep that mindset until proven otherwise. but the inclination to celebrate the end of this year comes from a very human belief that all bad things come to an end eventually — even if there’s no clear signs that point that way (@me avoiding all the inevitable long features about how the vaccine rollout is disastrous). I feel that we haven’t processed the months of pent-up trauma that we have collectively been experiencing out of fear that in our moment of vulnerability, disaster will strike harder than ever. so instead, we wait with bated breath and crossed fingers and hope that fireworks will usher in the changes we so desperately need.

with new years comes the inevitable desire to start afresh, which really makes me think that the southern hemisphere has their shit figured out because who has the energy or desire to Start New Things in the middle of the most depressing season (especially in Texas)??? as I ruminated on potential new years resolutions, I started thinking about how so many of them — like so many things in our great american society — are focused on self-improvement, mostly for the benefit of yourself. whether it’s exercising more or quitting vaping or starting a side business, resolutions are often framed as something you can accomplish alone. while self-care and prioritizing self is a major hurdle for many (especially those who are used to giving), a lot of generic resolutions end up along the lines of How Can I Become A More Productive Member of Society?

I wondered if there’s a way to reframe new years resolutions to be from a community perspective, and wrote some possibilities for myself below:

• Resolving to go to therapy in order to relieve friends and family from the emotional burden I place on them during trying times

• Intentionally and methodically distributing wealth in the form of mutual or direct aid

• Shopping from smaller, more local businesses in every domain, from food to clothing to gifts

• Becoming a better listener in order to become a better friend

• Trying to understand more and expect less from people, including my parents, so healthier relationships can be born

these resolutions are less SMART goal, less results-oriented, but feel gentler, more realistic, and more in line with the framework I want to see more of in the world. what are your new year’s resolutions?

we really decided bald eagles were the symbol of freedom and then pushed them to the edge of extinction #justgirlythings

I spent the last six days driving to and from west texas. as we drove down us-90, watching trees become shrubs become savannah erupting into hills and then mountains, the original appeal of the West became apparent — the feeling of endless freedom and potential, with no signs of development as far as the eye could see: just us, hurtling along the road in a metal box going 100 mph blasting old taylor swift songs. it felt american, it felt wild and true, it felt fun and collegiate and adventurous. it felt like freedom. reader, i was truly feeling 22 for the first time in a while.

but our 100 mph stint was abruptly stopped by a sudden mandatory border patrol check, where maskless officers inquired about our birth towns and, upon hearing no suspicious-sounding accents, let us go without asking for identification. a swift reminder that freedom in america is as conditional as proximity to whiteness is, that only a portion of america ever experiences prolonged ‘freedom,’ and even then, to a varying degree.

there is nothing free about being strapped to tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and trapped at an increasingly laughable minimum wage, nothing sexy about a bloated private sector and vulture-like ‘entrepreneurs’ that pick at the bones of the industries they destroy, nothing true about a dream that involves working yourself ragged for most of life so that you can be quietly retired into a nursing home.

on the 534 miles there and the 534 miles back, we saw a collective 71 trump flags/signs/bumper stickers: raggedy, flown next to a ‘don’t step on me’ flag; new, flying above a Mexican flag; pink and bright, on top of a tractor in the middle of a ghost town; spray painted on rotting walls; looming on the bed of a pickup truck that cut us off in the middle of traffic. of course, one sign hanging across from the border control station itself. in this paraphernalia, I saw hopes for a return to “Freedom,” the tattered remnants of an american dream that was never intended to be accessible to the people who still hope to dream.

a section in which I exclusively hype up my friends because I haven’t consumed any Media for weeks now

(i do have one non-friend recommendation and it is this article about how a bloomberg journalist covering martin shkreli — yes, that asshole — FELL IN LOVE WITH HIM. it is SUCH a wild ride to the end. it haunts me to this day.)

my friends have newsletters now! feeling like an #influencer. read anson’s “third thing” for really interesting, well-informed thoughts on public health and social media and everything I wish I knew more about. since my last newsletter anson has pumped out six (6!!!!!!!!) articulate, spicy newsletters. she is the more consistent, more well-read version of me. also, read liana’s late night snack for content that feels like one of those lovely long conversations you have when you run into an old friend at a coffee shop. (fun fact liana and I used to co-run a blog in high school when our biggest problems were having tiger moms lol)

the lovely aris dropped a chapbook of poetry called blac•ademic and for just $9 (including shipping) you can Cry like i did. I am so lucky to know people who are so gifted with their words …

happy 2021 friends! see u in the new year.

love,
christina

also, for the holidays I’m trying to shop small and encourage you to do so too. here’s some places I’ve shopped at or received gifts from that I recommend in case you’re looking: tinymade earrings, fran’s hause jewelry (50% off everything right now!), eva malley prints & apparel, and cloth & paper stationary. I also plan on checking out from the people (thanks anna for the rec!), an Indigenous marketplace.

lastly: thanks to all the lovely people who replied to my last email and sent me tons of things to chew on!!! many of them are in the recommendations below and also inspired me to form New Thoughts which was much appreciated. <3333

individualism is a disease in america

in america, the individual is everything — the superhero in the marvel movie that single-handedly saves the world through sheer ability and grit; the ever-present ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps narrative’; the adoration of celebrities and individual skill. individualism is at the core of the american and capitalist experience. the trick that we tell ourselves is, as individuals, we have the power to change whatever we want to change; we can become the next kim k, or the next bill gates, if only we try hard enough. failing to do so lies with the individual, and not with society.

nothing has better laid bare just how wrong this narrative is than covid, where individualism is quite literally killing us: it allows for people to insist that as an individual, you should have the choice of being selfish and not wear a mask, or the choice to put others at risk. as a result, america has hit over 13 million covid cases, an unfathomable number to countries where community-based cultures encourage individuals to consider each other (what a concept!).

(note: I literally read and re-read the first clause of the last paragraph and it still looks grammatically wrong I’m so sorry)

but still, individualism remains insidiously buried in american culture: personally, it’s very hard to shake off. even concepts like self-care remain highly individualistic in america; instead of telling people to “fall back on your community” it’s “you don’t owe anyone shit! ignore your texts! prioritize yourself! sit in a hot bath and drink wine!”

individualism has also enabled the rise of influencers and influencer culture. social media has made it possible for people to gain mass popularity off of their personality, appearance, or lifestyle alone, while more people seem to ‘make it’ than ever before (or even semi-make it: 10k followers is enough to make some $$$), millions more are left yearning. impressionable pre-teens now dream of the day that their tiktok blows up and they’re considered the “main character,” a “heather,” someone who “deserves more fame than charli” — all ways of saying that this individual deserves their flowers as the newest Z-list celebrity. rather than democratize celebrity culture, social media seems to have even more engrained it as a goal for everyone to be the shining, marketable, and branded version of themselves: dog mom, lover of walks, podcast listener, roller skater, obsessed with coffee … all the while absorbing large amounts of data on what everyone else likes to see in other people, and what character traits to absorb in order to become that Individual who in turn can exert influence on others.

fun tweet to break up the text. thankz to anson for sending me this one

I’m guilty of wanting to brand myself and evoke a certain image: this newsletter is no exception. but when I was a pre-teen and teenager, fame was nothing more than a pipe-dream and a wish that people in my school liked me: not a wish that millions of people followed and copied my every move.

the new idea of having a personal brand is not only extremely tantalizing as a way of avoiding identity crises, but also becoming somewhat of a necessity in many professional circles. in journalism, for example, ‘influencer’ journalists are making huge waves by jumping ship: ezra klein from vox to the new york times, ben smith from buzzfeed to the new york times, kara swisher from the wall street journal to the new york times — oops, maybe this is more of a niche complaint about the looming monolith of the new york times than a complaint about influencers. if you’re not into journalism, just think about your communities and the people who have become the Stars in that field: cherished and looked up to as icons, mini-celebrities amidst normal people.

we’ve heard about the male gaze, but what about the public gaze? for me, it follows me everywhere: I wonder if I should film my mom cooking food, a palatable recipe for a mostly-white tiktok audience to potentially ogle over; I post my rollerskating progress to my close friends story in a facsimile of personal connection, when in reality it’s the only motivation I have to go outside; I dress nicely for once and immediately reach for my phone camera to document the occasion.

but here’s the question: if everyone’s the ‘main character,’ who are the side characters? how can we begin cultivating community when everyone’s obsessed with cultivating themselves first and foremost?

fun meme related to a prior newsletter that anna sent me! also a nice meme to distract you from the fact that I have no idea how to conclude my rant but here’s graphic design frog

does anyone else see 30 as the end of themselves as they know it

this isn’t a rant as much as a question: is anyone else terrified of turning 30? losing a year of being in my 20s (and potentially more than that… *aggressive knock on wood*) has definitely enhanced this fear: I feel a sense of constant, minor FOMO that I’m somehow not doing enough/working enough/learning enough/earning enough/looking hot enough for my age. to be honest, I feel like I have mentally matured in some ways, but in other ways I still feel ? like maybe 18? when I was 18 I felt 15? wondering if this is just how everyone feels and no one says it out loud. when I bought roller skates I had several moments of doubt where I wondered if I was “too old” to do that, which 1) sounds ridiculous in hindsight and 2) coughing up Adult Money for roller skates was way more money than I originally thought, making me side-eye the sheer number of tiktok teens who are sporting $250+ skates.

anyways, I never really felt these fears in college, so I wonder if it’s related to my mental image of someone who is a Professional: stoic, with polite, adult hobbies like wine-tasting and playing golf — not someone who just spent money on pastel graphic liner and roller skates. I’m sure part of it has to do with a society that hates women who age and who look “old,” and part of it has to do with the large amount of fear I have around “settling down” and becoming, well, less of an Individual. (all of my fears tie in together like a nice bow on the biggest pile of shit around!)

tiny rant about the grammys

okay I’ve already complained very loudly about this to several people, and for fear of contradicting literally everything I said about the toxicity of celebrity culture, I’ll keep this short. I CAN’T BELIEVE YUMMY GOT NOMINATED FOR GRAMMYS AHHHHHH CAN’T BELIEVE JUSTIN BIEBER HAD THE AUDACITY TO COMPLAIN HIS MUSIC ISN’T R&B AHHHHHH AND THEY REALLY PASSED OVER CHLOEXHALLE FOR ALBUM OF THE YEAR…. THEY PASSED OVER RINA SAWAYAMA…. THEY PASSED OVER MAGDALENE (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) … PAIN

~reading~ recommendations, many from y’all!

you should read “welcome to your bland new world,” a very in-depth and visually engaging look at “blands”: direct-to-consumer companies that have sprung up in almost every industry and largely prey on the desire for individuals to be Different and self-focused in their consumption habits. it’s such an interesting read, and points out a trend that has been building over the years with the success of companies like the dollar shave club and warby parker, crescendoing into the birth of a million vitamin prescription boxes and “personalized” self-care. the question that I wish the author explored more, and which you should send me your thoughts on: are D2C brands necessarily worse than what we had before? is it more harmful for companies to follow this identikit of ~general social awareness~ and pretend to host respect for the individual, as opposed to the distant, corporate Walmarts and Microsofts out there?

you should read “‘emily in paris’ and the rise of ambient tv" (shout-out to anson for the recommendation!) if you’re like me and have always been wholly incapable of watching ‘serious’ tv and movies, preferring to stick to re-watching gossip girl for the 5th time or soporific, superficial productions like emily in paris, this new yorker breaks down the habit and its massive popularity in america. a great line on why this trend might be more bad than good: “The ambience of ambient TV is often predicated on homogeneity; any diversity or discordance would disrupt the smooth, lulling surface.” did I watch the entirety of emily in paris in two nights though? yes. it was for gabriel. sorry austin.

you should read “the challenge of combating fake news in Asian American communities,” which highlights a problem that many immigrant families (asian and not) face: the heady mix of language barriers, pre-existing prejudices, and fake news. straightforward article that highlights a little-discussed, emerging problem.

in preparation for even more sunday scaries, you should check out the advice in salty’s “s.a.d. girl vibes how one depressed person is preparing for winter”. (thanks 2 gabby for the recommendation to check out salty, another independent publication!)

please continue to send me your recommendations! in the meantime, peace, luv, and stay warm,

christina

using my phone as a pacifier

after spending a truly horrendous amount of time on tiktok (around 20 hours a week — literally more time than the credit hours I took per week in college), I deleted the app. not to rehash old points, but tiktok feels like a constant sugar rush for my brain: endless amounts of content custom-tailored to my interests and aspirations, with clips just short enough to keep me attentive for hours on end. in an attempt to futilely reclaim my autonomy from the ByteDance overlords, I deleted the app in a rush of adrenaline. it was honestly a little alarming how similar deleting the app felt like breaking up with a toxic ex, but once it was off my phone I felt optimistic about all the time I would regain, the art I would make, the exercise I’d get in, and the newsletters I’d write (lol).

to my horror, my screen time the next week was the exact same: the only difference was that the time I spent on tiktok was now evenly distributed amidst definitively worse platforms in terms of content quality. I peeked at instagram reels, started watching pretty much whatever video popped up on facebook, and even started scrolling through linkedin for more than five minutes (I’m really exposing myself here), soundly defeating the purpose of deleting tiktok. granted, it was election week and I felt anxious beyond belief, but none of these platforms offered any relief: if anything, the content was to-the-minute anxiety-inducing. alternating between worrying about a trump win to watching covid cases spike higher than ever to feeling very defeatist about living in america, I continued to waste away on my phone — tiktok-less and all.

this entire experiment drew me to a fairly obvious conclusion, but one of those conclusions that I had to reach myself in order to really believe in it: my phone has become my pacifier. I pick it up almost every couple of minutes, reflexively checking to see if anyone texted me (usually not) and if they did, proceeding to ignore them for hours but taking the notification as an excuse to continue scrolling. it’s an activity that feels very mindless and thus harmless in practice, but in reality is the opposite: somehow, absorbing gigabytes of information a month has come to feel not just normal, but comforting in a strange way. while this used to manifest pretty regularly in pre-covid social interactions (the classic ‘pull out your phone at a party to hide the fact that no one is talking to you’ move), it’s been eye-opening to realize that this escapist behavior follows me even when no one is around.

I’m no longer hiding from that creepy guy at the party who keeps lingering around, or from the few moments of awkward silence at dinner — I’m hiding from myself and the thoughts that spring up when I’m not on my phone.

another demonstration of how my phone has become my go-to distraction: people always talk about shower thoughts, and how they have their best ideas while shampooing their scalp and scrubbing their feet (PLEASE scrub your feet. this is a psa). I think a lot in the shower, but also find that I think a lot while cooking, folding laundry, or cleaning. the common factor between all of these activities besides being Clean and Domestic is that I’m not on my phone because I literally can’t be, unless I’m listening to a podcast or something. in those moments of content-less bliss, my mind is actually the most at peace: and the most creative and active.

when I’m doom-scrolling, it’s almost as if the tweets and tiktoks and insta posts replace any thoughts in my head, crowding and shoving into every corner of my brain until it all threatens to spill over in my next frenetic facetime call to a friend. I want to take my brain out and wring it like a loofah, squeezing out all of the things I read/watched/listened/consumed and watching them circle down the shower drain.

sadly, this rant is unlike the other thousands of think pieces on the same topic: it doesn’t end with a neat conclusion. constant content consumption is an embedded part of our culture now: and to write newsletters like this, engage in regular conversation and generally feel like a part of some community (especially during covid), I feel obligated to remain in the loop, forcefully sponging up content until the next moment of futile resistance.

but good news for you! this WILL be my last rant on social media for a while. I promise! I did make it another 50 pages into trick mirror which is probably why this is top of mind for me. back to irregularly scheduled, unpredictable content soon ™

a piece-meal rant on the myriad problems of trying to put a price on reporting and facts

I’d like to flesh this thought out more later, but here’s my no-nuance-november take: the age-old model of journalism, like many age-old models, is not withstanding the inexorable forces of today (tiktok being one such inexorable force).

why? the field relies on archaic rules that look increasingly arbitrary to the casual reader (ap style’s hatred of oxford commas come to mind), and sets up a dynamic where disruption of the standards and practices of the field is seen as thrilling, welcoming, and to some, a sign of authenticity and thus trustworthiness. the problem is, ‘traditional’ journalism ostensibly reports on the truth, which means ‘non-traditional’ journalism oftentime doesn’t: or at least not to the same standards that have been developed over time.

while traditional liberals flock to the nyt and the wapo for their reputable sourcing and writing, their adherence to Facts, and their determination that people will always want to read Facts, a large population of america is not just watching fox news, but also reading breitbart.

the outlets that largely throw caution to the wind, twist quotes, and frame events in bite-sized articles/videos that invoke immediate reactions of fear and anger, are succeeding in ways that your local newspaper isn’t. their appeal comes from the appeal of getting your news from twitter: hot, short takes that are easy to agree with and re-confirm your biases and pre-conceived notions of the world. as local papers get bought out and sold for scraps to private equity firms, the monolithic daily mail model of click-for-money continues to clash with the pay-for-Facts model of the nyt.

again, no-nuance-november + no-thoughts-only-tiktoks mean that I don’t really have any further thoughts besides wow this is really not going to end well and also that you should consider subscribing to and supporting not just local papers, but also outlets using alternative sources of funding (the texas tribune, for example, relies on a number of supporters to provide free, quality reporting for everyone).

the few tidbits that penetrated my brain fog this month

for truly soothing content, you should watch this video. a wife makes her husband and child carefully packed bento boxes every day. nothing deeper here, just good food and lots of quiet love. my brain/loofah liked this one a lot after a stressful day.

you should read/think about this article in the 19th, another ~alternatively-funded~ outlet that focuses on gender and politics: “White women had doubts. They voted for Trump anyway.”

“White women who said they were having second thoughts about the president, citing their concerns about health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, his divisive racial rhetoric and even his general demeanor, ultimately chose to stand by him … Initial exit polling by NBC News this week showed just a 6-point gender gap in support for Trump, and an 8-point gender gap in support for Biden, who won women by 13 points, roughly the same margin as Clinton.” 

in a later piece I definitely want to delve more into thoughts about white people, identity politics, and liberalism, but for now, just sit on these damning stats.

you should read “She’s a One-Person Newsroom, But Lee Enterprises Kept Cutting” in wvtf for a truly piercing look at the effect of over-attention on the national level trading off with inattentiveness on the local level. what I mean: people now seem to care more about what happens on a national/federal/global level than what happens locally, and the news business reflects that. a really rough line: “Spinks’ technical title is Managing Editor of the Floyd Press, but in practicality she’s reporter, photographer, layout designer and editor. Each week she single-handedly pulls together the 16-20 page newspaper. And she does it all for $36,000.”

the interviewee, ashley spinks, was fired for doing the interview.

you should add music to this playlist. if you’re in houston, the weather is chef’s kiss, but I can already Sense the cold around the corner… if you’re a little baby like me about daylight savings time (speaking of: did you know most of arizona, besides the Navajo nation, does not do DST ???? like… that was an option for the rest of us?) or generally are looking to ~cheer up~ in the winter, please add some of your brightest and cheeriest songs to this list.

hope you all are wringing the junk out of your brains and staying safe,

christina

face first in the firehose

the way I write goes as follows: I think about something, it percolates in my head for weeks while I shower, do laundry, and walk around the same 10 square feet in my house; I start picturing the sentences and structure in my head; it ripens into something somewhat okay. then I write it down in one go, edit, and it’s done transforming from a piece of sludge in my brain into a somewhat more polished product. i don’t have the patience to make diamonds.

lately, however, my brain is entirely sludge with little to no polish or product ever emerging from the muck. there’s so many possible reasons for sludge brain, but austin made it most clear when he looked at me, approaching my 4th or 5th hour of tiktok that day, and said: “this app is stimulant overdose. how can you absorb so much content?”

this is pretty much the central criticism behind any vice/vox/etc. investigation and also one theme of jia tolentino’s ‘trick mirror’ — a groundbreaking book that i am legitimately disrespecting by letting it gather dust (sorry, anna). tolentino talks about the ‘firehose’ that is the internet and the news cycle: every day, we are blasted with so much information and jokes and existential crises and messages and general Content, all mixed in with each other until they become grey, well, sludge. the spark of excitement from a good read or the flash of anger from bad news or the pain from traumatic, graphic videos are all immediately dulled and softened by oodles of other, somewhat less compelling content that fills the rest of the day, and the feed, until we find the next Thing.

here’s a pull quote to break up the text, one of the many tricks i feel like i have to play on you so that you don’t lose interest just yet

one of the points that tolentino makes (also, if i’m mischaracterizing her book it’s because i’m on page 70, because, tiktok) is that social media is designed to be mostly boring, with moments of excitement, joy, and most frequently anger. in search of those feelings, we scroll relentlessly until we find them. it’s probably why people look at vine or old tweets with nostalgia — the very best of the sludge resists the passage of time, letting us forget all the other crap that came along with it.

tiktok and twitter have started to defy this model for me — tiktok is always exciting and interesting, but it is also designed so that my patience has worn so thin that i can’t watch a tiktok longer than 30 seconds without feeling antsy, and that has translated into an inability to watch film (besides reality tv which is addicting in much the same way) and also, alarmingly, less ability to sit on phone calls with friends. twitter is largely rage-inducing nowadays, which feels incredibly unhealthy but also comes with the threat of feeling completely out of the loop from Society ™. i deleted twitter for a bit and came back to find out that texas gov abbott was threatening felony charges for a wide range of organizers — info that i felt i should know but wouldn’t have without twitter. so i stay on twitter pretty much from sheer fomo.

i’ve tried many things: time limits, deleting apps, using web-version only. none work longterm, especially in a time where the only way i feel connected to the world and my friends is through my phone. conversely, i feel noticeably further from those friends who don’t post as often, or aren’t on all the platforms i’m on — a testament to the social trap i have subjected myself to, where friendship and general awareness of peoples’ lives is determined through digital interactions as opposed to personal connection.

my struggle with social media could take up many more pages, but like me, you probably have also developed the attention span of an earthworm. maybe you already clicked away after you saw the fifth em-dash and decided you had had enough of this! totally fair! someone take em-dashes away from me!

*note: i am so mad at myself, because i just looked at my last newsletter and noticed that i had already used the sludge/diamond metaphor to talk about the internet. i’m leaving it in because it shows how little creative power i have left going on up there

how is everyone doing with self care? what is radical to you?

this is just a question for you — answer by replying or texting me! are you practicing self care? does it feel like self care to you? what is possible to you during this time?

the only example i can think of for myself is yesterday. while racked with some of the absolute worst period cramps i have ever experienced, a familiar feeling of ‘let’s work through it, ignore this pain because you have shit to do’ came top of mind. instead, i decided to just go to bed at 9:30, ignoring the list of things to do because i wanted to prioritize how i felt. the fact that that felt radical to me was a little scary and is just a testament to workaholism. but, baby steps

if i ever

i started a spotify playlist called ‘if i ever,’ themed after if i ever get around to doing a certain activity that i want to, but am scared of doing (hint, it rhymes with rooms). so far it’s only got two songs so if you have recommendations of songs that sound kind of like swimming underwater, but with a good beat, send them my way. it did get me thinking about making more playlists about potential future events that may or may not happen any time soon, like going to a party. :’(

the internet things that made me feel something

last newsletter, people read the ebay cockroach scheme and also found it nuts so please check it out if you didn’t because it’s genuinely a trip

for this newsletter, you should read vanity fair’s cover story featuring alexandria ocasio-cortez. yes we should not stan politicians, yes i am still obsessed with aoc and would have also been obsessed with her had she been around when i was active on tumblr. i’m only a little sorry about it. the fashion is pretty, the photos immaculate, and the interview is candid and sharp. it’s also full of quotes that are just destined to become someone’s etsy sticker business soon. my favorite is: “I don’t want to be a savior, I want to be a mirror.”

t/w mentions of sexual assault // you should read an anti-rape movement without police which discusses how a domestic violence org lost $25,000 in grants and faced backlash from police after simply putting Black Lives Matter signs up (!!! what!). the article discusses the history of women fighting to separate policing and prison from sexual assault / domestic violence cases, noting that often the police or prison guards were perpetrators themselves, notwithstanding the lack of justice from those cases in the first place. whew.

you should take this quiz by the new york times, which tests if you can guess who is voting for who by looking into their fridge. honestly there isn’t some Big takeaway here besides the fact that biden supporters like yogurt. it’s just generally kind of fun in the way that buzzfeed quizzes about which kind of bagel you represent, are fun

you should read the tenants who evicted their landlord, a piece that tested the absolute limits of my attention span but at the same time, kept me engaged the whole time. it paints a vision of an alternative future and a path forward. also i know i include too much nyt, but i have to milk the shit out of this subscription. plus their relative success is making it harder to find equivalently well funded and researched pieces. but that’s a thought to be explored in another newsletter!

you should have an existential crisis over this instagram post (but seriously it did send me into a crisis and is an extremely raw portrayal of what life feels like a lot of the time. do not recommend if you are feeling not up for it, only if you need a nice cry. thank you tammy for sharing!):

lastly, you should read these beautiful pieces of poetry by beautiful people aris and anna maría <3 it’s a blessing to know people who are so gifted that they ARE the spark on my social media feed that i’m looking for

if you made it here, i love you like really. thank you for spending time reading my scrambled eggs of thoughts! if you know a friend who would like this, tell them to subscribe at onatangent.substack.com.

why is this newsletter in your inbox along with promotional email campaigns you can’t seem to unsubscribe from, no matter how hard you try???

I am probably the least successful journal user around: I remain completely incapable of writing for myself, as evidenced by the multiple (we’re talking in the double digits) started-then-abandoned diaries over my lifetime.

this newsletter is coming from someone who got used to the steady rush of writing opinions in the school newspaper and sleeping tight knowing that someone out there would see it. I desire the ability to write for an audience that reads my words — or at least skims them. as a a result, I haven’t written anything of my own volition for five months.

but I don’t think it’s so bad to miss writing for people, or to miss bouncing ideas back and forth. most importantly, writing for an audience requires having to select and choose sentences and words that flow with cadence and punch at the right times. so here I am, writing for you. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

hi, my name is ______ and I am a ______

whenever I play any kind of video game that requires character customization (think sims, skyrim, etc.) I spend no less than an hour agonizing over the tiny choices that might later decide how well my character does. it’s so bad that even the customization menu on mario kart stumps me (speed vs. weight??? who knows what difference this makes??? not me acting like it will make a difference as I willfully accelerate too early and lose every race)

lately, and by lately I mean for the past six months — I’ve been feeling frozen at the character selection screen of my life. navigating the post-grad fog has been much harder than I thought it would be. without the pandemic pressing the pause button on my life, I think I would have seamlessly swapped my student journalist title for a Corporate Cog title and gone on to find the next title, the next hat to wear, successfully avoiding all self-introspection until the day I died. instead, with a delayed job offer and the red carpet of senior year yanked out under my feet, I found myself in identity free-fall.

this summer, no longer able to call myself a student and feeling increasingly unable to call myself a journalist, I filled all my free time with new possible roles to define myself with: working with mutual aid (organizer?), designing for local campaigns (volunteer?), serially doing senior graduation shoots (photographer?), and focusing on revamping my art instagram (artist?).

in the midst of a pandemic and a national racial reckoning, it felt extremely self-indulgent to spend my post-grad space trying to relax and fiNd mYSeLf for the first time in 16 years. but one month into this attempt at finding a new box to cram my identity in, I was burnt out and even more disillusioned with the prospect of ever being able to feel confidence in who I am. I dropped my volunteer efforts and stopped doing shoots; I spent that time doom-scrolling instead, and felt all the worse for it.

in this liminal space (fancy word I saw on twitter that I may be misusing), I’ve reflected a lot on how capitalistic ideals drive how I define myself. reliably, measures of productivity are how I allow myself certain titles. if my life was a game, I’m always trying to gain enough XP to level up and achieve the next possible title. can I be an artist, if I only make art every two months? am I really a writer if all the writing happens in my head and never makes it onto a page? was I ever a journalist if I didn’t publish in a “real” publication?

but faced with a pretty unromantic corporate career ahead of me, I feel increasingly disenchanted with the idea of branding myself with the work I do, with the things I accomplish, and with the idea of branding myself altogether. my previous experiences capitalizing and monetizing on activities that used to be fun and relaxing have made my worm brain unwilling to do any of them again: reading and writing feel like work thanks to school and grinding frantically to meet deadlines; art feels like work after years of doing freelance graphic design for money; even scheduling facetime calls with friends feels like work after months of online classes and remote work meetings.

in my free time, I instead find myself turning to the very few activities left that feel unattached from any kind of work: scrolling on my phone (although even that is slowly turning into work: social media managers rise up), playing video games, mindlessly binge-watching shows, and aimlessly window shopping online. there’s nothing wrong with those activities, but I can’t help but notice that the former group of activities involves production, and the second consumption. the only activities that I find somewhat relaxing are activities where I am a consumer. equally daunting is the realization that the more-expanded list of activities I enjoyed pre-quarantine were also consumption: eating out at restaurants, going to concerts, and otherwise spending money to consume. capitalism strikes again!

unfortunately, I haven’t found the perfect solution to this cycle of working, then “relaxing,” then feeling bad for relaxing all while my most creative hobbies languish and gather dust. and I imagine that this is a cycle that will take a long, long time to break. but I welcome the challenge of redefining my attachment to work and productivity because the possibilities on the other side are promising: a way to define myself outside of capitalism, and a way to re-embrace activities I cherish without exhausting myself.

(alternatively, if you’ve got it figured out, dm me).

some diamonds amidst the sludge of the internet

the central idea behind this newsletter-ish is one long thought (above) and several disjointed thoughts and recommendations. at this point in quarantine I spend upwards of 8 hours a day on my phone (I am fully aware that this is bad for me but can I stop? no) and therefore consume way too much Information. one tweet that I remember frequently is “in the middle ages, you smelled bad but at least you were only exposed to one take every year” or something along those lines. given that, here are some of the Things that have penetrated even the noisiest social media feed, and that I recommend for people both super online and not:

you should read: “buying myself back: when does a model buy her own image?” by emily ratajkowski (emrata) — a brilliant and vulnerable essay on how the male-directed fashion and art industries can prey upon even the most successful icons.
t/w: the piece mentions sexual assault.

here are some questions I am still thinking through:

• how can edgy, subversive contemporary art not harm someone in the process? if so, at what point does subversion become unacceptably harmful, and who gets to determine that?

• while digital storage has made it almost inevitable that recorded trauma and mistakes last forever, art has been doing this forever (as evidenced by several incidents in her story). what are other incidents of harm that have been preserved and even lauded in the art world for centuries?

• can you copyright yourself? is legislation/law the only route in which you can preserve your image and how it’s used?

you should read: “review of houston eviction cases finds most moving forward despite federal moratorium” , stellar reporting by local journalist jen rice. rice sat in on over 100 eviction cases in Houston, finding that most are still happening despite a national order from the CDC (directed by trump) to universally halt most evictions nationwide. it is a short but highly informative piece that shows the disconnect between trump’s posturing and the actual impact on the ground, on real families. rice’s reporting on houston evictions has in general been spot on — highlighting especially (democratic) mayor sylvester turner’s refusal to enact an eviction moratorium. meanwhile, houston is the #1 metro with highest amount of residents experiencing housing insecurity.

you should listen to poet & rapper chika (find her tiny desk concert here). i’m also seeking songs that sound similar to cinnamon girl by asl and other tracks that sound like nostalgia!

you should read “inside ebay’s cockroach cult: the ghastly story of a stalking scandal” (nyt subscription required — lmk if you need help). this story is literally batshit crazy but also a very concerning look into what goes on in seemingly innocuous companies (I mean — ebay??? a little embarrassing). a long, new-yorker-style read that is begging to be made into a netflix original.

you should know that 90% of republicans who listen to exclusively fox news or talk radio think the u.s. has controlled covid-19 as much as possible, compared to 97% of democrats who use msnbc, cnn, npr, nytimes or wapo as their primary news source who think the opposite. these numbers were a shocker to me, especially the first statistic. not to rehash the tired eChO cHamBeR point, but it really is important to get reminders on how the media shapes narratives, and how those narratives can be patently false.

if you made it this far, you are officially my favorite person and have genuinely made my week!!! please comment/text/message me any thoughts you have or let me know if you end up reading/listening to any of the recs above. also, if you have a friend who you think would like this newsletter, you can share it with them using the button below:

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