#171 - Diet Coke & Weed Pens would like to present: The Twelve Days Of Smokemas Day 1 | End Of Year Essay Extravaganza

The thing about procrastination is that it's actually really boring to talk about. So it's even more boring to write about.

So, here's the deal: I didn't do what I said I would do in order to make the task manageable for myself and so here we are, with 12 essays and 18 days left for me to hit my #52 goal for the third year in a row.

Is this goal arbitrary? Yes!

But like, that's true about everything except the basic necessities like eating/sleeping/bathing and what a boring way to approach life.

I've been a longtime procrastinator. I would say the last two years of somewhat self-discipline were anomalous, this year I've absolutely let myself "relax" right on into destructive past habits because um, well, they're easy and I'm often lazy and careless with my quality of life when I'm not careful and/or experience depression.

Not in like a bed-rot (which, we have to talk about that phrase at some point) way but more in a order food instead of getting groceries and feel restless/empty/tired/sad/over&underwhelmed way.

And look like, I'm fine and enjoyed a lot of my hedonistic indulgences this year, but it's also time to get up and get going and the best way to reinforce myself is to believe & achieve something and since I very publicly made a list earlier this year I am compelled to follow the fuck through.

I also just like...can and should so I will? So here we go.

I keep seeing gift listicles this year titled "25 things to get the COOL girl in your life" and I know it's branding and they probably have like "25 things to get the COQUETTE/FRAZZLED ENGLISH WOMAN/RECENTLY CAPSULE WARDROBED girl in your life" lists too – but I just keep imagining a world in which the same writer followed through and made a "25 gifts to get the uncool losers in your life" list as well.

But like, doesn't everyone think their friends are cool?

Also though, if we're going with what they actually are implying – isn't the definitive Cool Girl thing being a unique individual who probably doesn't want the same Dusen Dusen towels that 30% of people in Bushwick already own? It doesn't count as a trinket if it comes from Anthropologie. You must source things with your heart and not just your wallet!!!

I think gift giving is 85% listening when people say "oh I love that" when you walk around with them. And I simply don't believe that every single woman I know wants some form of object that resembles a semi-opened sardine can.

Gifts can totally be cute and meaningful and extravagant – but they can also be a bunch of the lip balm that they love and a really nice card. The "thought" that "counts" is the exchange of being known and witnessed.

And while lists can provide inspiration (especially when it comes to brands/online marketplaces) truly what is the difference between this Buzzfeed linkfarm and the ones they've been running all year with titles like "32 things you didn't know you needed until right now" because they built something so close to cool with that empire and then sold out bighuge to advertisers, because the entire world is marketing which makes watching Charlie Brown Christmas so on the nose it gets painful. (We didn't heed the warnings, we used them as guidelines instead!)

Treats are now a thing people give themselves daily permission for. Shopping is one of the major ways we interact with the world around us.

That's why gift giving in a world of über capitalism does come down to the thought.

Anyway. Gifticle rant over.

(Wait no, I have one more thing: the tinned fish revolution started by actual cool brooklyn girls makes a lot of sense and the way trends trickle down is just sooo Cerulean Sweater monologue from Devil Wears Prada but everything is so over-saturated within what feels like weeks now that I can't help but feel desperately sad at how much of it will swiftly end up tossed away.)

Stop Trying to Convince Me Tinned Fish Is the Height of Luxury

Can we all admit that tinned fish is just okay?

EaterAmy McCarthy

In other news, I've been working on my posture and breathing again recently. Drinking more water. Still staying up too late but these days it's because I'm reading and not because I'm slowly fighting sleep and yet continuing to play Stardew Valley on my uncomfortable couch for too long!

#167 - Do the Dew

or: it’s Switch Stardew Valley update day babeeeey!!!

Smoke ShowClaire B

My resolutions for the new year include impressing myself. I'm going to attempt to live in hope instead of fear. I think I'm going to have to be more careful in curating my news intake because otherwise I'll spend four years wearing grooves in my already uneven floor. Y'know, because of all the pacing.

I'm going to make more vision boards because I did it several times this year and it felt a little silly but I ultimately enjoyed the result and I'll only get better with repetition because I'm not exceptional without effort.

Will vision boards change the world?

Idk, depends what's on them!

It's no surprise the world is banding behind someone who dared interrupt the medical insurance industrial complex. It's not that murder is good, it's that murder is bad, and denying people insurance claims to pad the pockets of six dudes in a boardroom is murder.

I get people who aren't into vigilante justice. But thousands of people reported claims getting passed in the wake of this. The meeting was still held by the shareholders that morning so I don't know why the public is being held to a higher standard of Appropriate Mourning when his co-workers couldn't be bothered to delay for even a day.

Depravity is often banal.

That's what makes it horrific. People are the ones hurting other people. Corporations are made of people, so at what point do we blame the entity and not the lemmings?

(If you work for a weapons manufacturer, I'm begging you to quit your job.)

This essay is all over the place, but then again, so is the world.

So, let's wrap it up with something a little lighter: comedy documentary mini-review!

I re-watched Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show (Hulu) recently and it always leaves me feeling really inspired to create things and do it in big ways.

That show flopped. Hard. Like tanked the most promising career in television so fast he basically left the industry for two decades.

The writers and actors they assembled within it, went on to all have pretty Big and Defining careers in TV and American Comedy. I mean, The Ambiguously Gay Duo managed to transfer over to SNL and stuck the landing. Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell got their starts there like, it managed to be a launchpad despite also being a crash pad.

But before their season opened with the infamous Bill Clinton Nursing Puppies sketch that immediately ruined any chance they had at a second season, they were creating exactly what they wanted in a silo. With a budget.

Which means that the clips that they show fucking rule. You can see exactly where all of the writers are going to go next (including the unfortunate, albeit thankfully limited screen-time of sex pest Louis CK) and the actors all managed to do uh, pretty well for themselves.

Carell's definitely one of the highest paid TV actors just in terms of syndication with The Office and Colbert's got The Late Show (for all that he's completely defanged himself, The Colbert Report was subversive and really DID matter to American politics) and while the Dana Carvey show didn't work out, most of the careers within it did.

Am I biting their title bit with the title of this essay series? Mmmmmhmmm! Just a little fun explainer for you if you've made it this far wayyy!

It's a great documentary, as is any doc about a passionate group of people who put their all into something and get to dissect what happened years later from a much more healed place than they might have ever thought possible at the time. I love a cultural autopsy. What goes ~wrong is often more interesting than what goes right in life.

And being for Everyone doesn't make great art. Casting the widest net possible does not lend itself to singularity.

Looking back on my year, I don't think I'll spend the next one similarly. Which is great! It's good to know what I don't want and it's really good to know that I really don't like the results of not putting effort in and spending a lot of time focusing solely on myself and my problems. It's so easy to spiral, and to start listening to the self-doubt in my head, and to get all fogged up and like, emerging from that fog is often embarrassing, but the alternative in staying obfuscated just to avoid being seen in ways I'm not attempting to justify.

I've been a better friend in other years. I've worked harder. I've achieved more. I think this year was a chrysalis year. I may have spent it mostly as goo but now it's like getting uncomfortable now in the cocoon so even though I don't think I trust my wings quite yet it's time to learn how to fly babeeeey!