Weltschmerz + girl gadgets + mommy/mamacita.
Hitting send on a Sunday feels spicy!
(Absolutely out of breath, with a leaf stuck in my hair,) phewww! Sorry for the wait! I ran all the way here in a red tube top, covered in sand, to the safety of your inbox. My creative output has been Sexy Red Princess Jasmine in the Hourglass held hostage by the horny Jafar of ennui!! Just when I have had had it up to here, some guy in a fez broke me free. He was talking to a rug the whole time. I didn’t ask questions.
The last time I sent my aimless tidings via Substack, it was before the nation’s fate was sealed with a thin-lipped, spray-tan-flavored kiss. It’s been, what, six months and we are already fucking COOKED.
My god, what incredible timing for both Love Island franchises to air. I hear the “dun-dun-dundun” of the opening music and I turn into a feral little gremlin dancing at the feet of the devil. Tandem watching US and UK is a hobby that somehow manages to be both an escape as well as a means to tap back into culture. An entire nation with the same stim, “I’m a mom. Mamacita?”
I just feel bad that Jon can’t watch an episode without it inciting multiple lengthy monologues or husband booby traps like, “Which Casa girl would you couple up with?” I am LOCKED IN and my nervous system is ACTIVATED, ready for anything.
Whatever the opposite of the Nobel Peace Prize is, it should be given to the show-runners of Love Island. This show is basically about what happens when you completely remove ethics from TV. Let’s all watch what happens when you keep the cameras rolling while a young adult, obviously in need of professional support, explodes at their partner/scares their housemates and call it “crashing out,” totally disregarding the psychological impact that unwittingly becoming a cultural villain for weeks on end will have on them. This show has created discourse about herpes simplex and how it relates to shame. World War Three Jr. happened while these beautiful fools were suggestively milking fake udders in front of millions of strangers. I cannot get enough. I am sick in the head.
The other day, I earnestly tried to recall the last time that I was totally unaware of what was going on in the world. I was nine years old, I think. My only concern at that time was whether or not I got to be The Thinking Woman’s Spice Girl (Sporty Spice) on the playground. I was also incredibly stressed about a chance that the internet might literally explode the planet because one of my cousins told me that all of the computers in the world were not able to function past the year 1999. The zeroes were too powerful or something. That New Year’s Eve, I climbed into my bed fully ready to meet my maker.
Fast forward a scootch, my 5th grade class watched two planes crash into two tall buildings, a war on terror started, and THEN Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle came out. One could say my innocent ignorance went up in literal flames.
It feels impossible to not be wistful over the brief period in my life when I was hopeful and ready for anything to happen to me. I was excited about the future, excited for the computers to get smarter so that they wouldn’t blow up the earth. Whereas now, I’d like for everything to please stop happening and can we maybe cool it with the computers getting smarter?
Speaking of technology. I spent my childhood enjoying the simple, indisputably gendered devices with which I used to record my hopes and dreams. I was obsessed with my “Girl Tech Password Journal” even though I constantly had to reset it because either I would forget the password or the journal would forget my voice. I miss the arcane divination tools of my pre-teen girlhood: paper fortune tellers painstakingly folded, J-14 Horoscopes, and mood rings. Not to brag, but I still have my Tiger Electronics’ My Dear Diary, which had a horoscope function that would arbitrarily tell me if I was gonna have a good day “:)” or a bad day “):”. I keep the defunct gadget purely for nostalgia’s sake, for its bouncy buttons, quaint functions, and dedicated spaces for wishes and secrets.
Don’t get me started on M.A.S.H.
Poor, accused women in the Salem Witch Trials walked (burned on pyres and drowned in lakes) so that my pre-teen girlfriends and I could run (play M.A.S.H). With the ink of my Jelly Roll sparkly pen, I drew the requisite rune-like spiral on a sheet of paper and prophesized many improbable futures for my friends and I. All of us were predetermined to live in our Mansions Apartments Shacks and/or Houses with our combined total of 1100 children. On a regular basis, I was able to suspend reality so that I could create my own. A reality where I drove my pink convertible to my shack where Legolas, my spouse, was hungrily waiting for me to come home from my job as an international spy. Like, I truly made space for things like this to happen to me, no matter how absurd or unlikely or illegal. I miss that level of openness and imagination, basically nirvana on training wheels.
Adult me lives in a reality that is permanently suspended. I watch videos of ICE raids sandwiched between eyebrow tutorials and a roundup of handbags I can’t afford. I lie in bed, with my chin tucked into my neck, and scroll through a carousel of dark tweets about living in a nightmare and send them to my friends as a way to say “Hello! Just thinkin’ about you xx.” I write essays about feeling jaded to the point of nihilism and I lace it with jokes. The very serious is so easily made unserious.
I learned a new word today, trying to find a word for all this: Weltschmerz.
Looking at this from a different angle, I do realize that I am so privileged that a small chunk of my childhood allowed me to be this blissfully ignorant and sweetly expectant. After a long day of assigning fake husbands to real 9 year olds, I slept in a warm bed under glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceiling. My nights are not so dissimilar now, but I traded in the sticky stars for a practical bathroom nightlight, because I have the bladder of a dying horse. It’s a privilege to pontificate about how bad things are getting from the comfort of my cozy living room. It’s a privilege that the only thing I’ve been forced to surrender is a naive, younger version of myself.
A lot like my pelvic floor, life will remain hard to control. However, a leopard cannot change its spots no matter how disenfranchised or how high its cortisol levels are. I still buy jelly pens for my journal and dream and donate and march on.
I even forgot the password to my Substack this week. Just like old times.
Thank you for reading. Love you, bye!
