peak low humidity season
exhilaration and exhaustion
I went to a nice in-person multi-day event early this past week, and am still recovering. Saw some people I know, met a bunch of new people, talked a lot to actual humans about real things, did a scavenger hunt; it was a lot. (It was great, but it was a lot.) I’ve been processing and trying to get over the adrenaline for about 3 days.
Here are a bunch of things if you, too, need a minute:
this has a lot of feels and thoughts and some nostalgia but mostly uncomfortable flashes of memory, specifically if you are a formerly-teen-girl, of a certain age bracket, and maybe never quite found “your” teen magazine, if such a thing is possible.* no matter what age I was and no matter the magazine, I always felt like they were written for someone else (and reinforcing that insecurity, I assume, was the point): someone cooler, or hotter, or nerdier but in an adorable and thus cooler way, or more mature, or more nonchalantly carefree, or more effortlessly composed, or more in on the inside jokes, or more able to not be bothered by not understanding the inside jokes, or just… more.
speaking of nostalgia(…?): this piece feels like it’s searching for a reason to have been written now, versus in 2018, or at any other moment it mentions? It references Lana Del Rey like 4 times (OK, twice) but never mentions her *2012* video for “National Anthem”**? The video isn’t actually that good but I just watched that 3 times in a row, as I always do when I remember it exists.
Anyway my theories***, that you definitely wanted to hear, on the every-so-often resurgence of prep are that a. it’s never really in, so it can’t really ever go out; b. the silhouettes are generally acceptable to a lot of people because they’re pretty simple; c. a collar turned up is always flattering (it is absolutely just my personal opinion but also an unarguable fact that all great coats are made at least 40% greater with an upturned collar); d. the visual boringness is the point. It’s not a searing insight to say that prep is an unexciting aesthetic; its intrigue, if there is any, comes from a very literal embrace of the trappings of old money (well, old for America), and frequently well-founded suspicions about old money behaving badly.
Maybe the only timely thing about all this is that headbands are the best Zoom accessory, but the Vox piece doesn’t even glance at that.
actual wonderful nostalgia: 2021’s small silver lining (for me) is that I’ve always preferred Ben to Matt, and this year Matt has revealed himself to be… well, just not all that great. But Ben! Ben has brought back the best part of the early 00s, which was: celebrities hanging out on yachts strategically sort of visible to paparazzi ohhhh noooo how did they catch us? They are my favorite thing.
perhaps (uh no… definitely) we should just always aim for contentment, caftans, and comfortable sandals
Moneyball for saving California
this is a super well-written library of writing to help people understand what their company’s engineers are doing and/or understanding when their non-technical teams are preeeetty much just making things up. Kudos to a bright young person making a nice resource for people to work better together — here’s an example with actually-useful, uh, examples. (And here’s the backstory.)
I genuinely do think about whether it’s OK to use these two words a decent amount?
on the Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of Thomas the Tank Engine
* Rookie and other not-completely-awful-teen-girl-culture media all seem, to me, to have been created after I could have really used some not-awful teen girl media. YM and Seventeen aren’t just painful to look back on; they were painful and brutal at the time in a specific late-90s-early-2000s way… suburban malls and champagne-gold SUVs and flat irons and the lowest parts of Mean Girls. fits my long-running theory that each subsequent generation is just a better group of humans than the last one one. the kids are alright — or if they’re not totally alright, they’re at least an improvement on the previous options.
** like all video content on the internet, I learned about it by reading about it after some delay, because I am not cool and I don’t know where cool videos are (it was this piece)
*** theories A and B were worded much better by someone else a long time ago, but unfortunately I can’t remember who; sorry!