#98 - Rabbit Rabbit! Fuck Karl Lagerfeld's fatphobic legacy!

Rabbit Rabbit!

It’s May! It’s Monday! It’s both the Met Gala and International Worker’s Day and we can start the betting on the disparate amount of coverage both events will receive real low because the over/under isn’t great. (Is that how betting works? I’m not a great gambler because I’m over the entire concept the second I lose a single cent.) Anyway, I developed a weird self-hatred-fueled fascination with Karl Lagerfeld when I was like seventeen so I’m glad that all of my useless knowledge about him will come in handy when I’m judging celebrities’ outfits later tonight.

Karl Lagerfeld was an extremely talented fatphobe who drank an enviable amount of Diet Cokes and revolutionized fashion and brought muses to his summer homes (one of which was in Grand Isle, Vermont, and I have a lot of fun imagining Karl & his Muse Of The Moment making a quick run to the A&B station for some more DC’s) and designed some of my favorite collections but would have dramatically fainted at the idea of dressing a woman over a size 4. And tonight, he’s posthumously honored by the world’s most boring Editor In Chief at The Met!

Anna Wintour should retire, American Vogue is so embarrassingly blaaaah compared to its international counterparts who are actually daring to do interesting shoots and concepts, meanwhile, Anna can’t seem to stop hiring Annie Leibowitz who is uhhhh resting on her laurels and seemingly can’t figure out how to properly light anyone except the thin white actresses she photographs! Any other skin tone is shit outta luck when it comes to Annie’s camera. Anway the Annie + Anna partnership/snoozefest is just another encapsulation of a particular subset of a generation thinking that their legacy is equivalent to their longevity and, in turn, tarnishing whatever goodwill and reputation they had built by refusing to modernize or make a single bold choice!

And honestly, Boomers are hellbent on maintaining ruin in the world because they spent so much time eschewing social safety nets because they were brainwashed by bootstrap rhetoric so now most people can’t retire even if they want to because it was somehow better to punish everyone than to allow for blanket prosperity because then we couldn’t use work ethic as a baseline for the value of human existence and oooooh protestant-based societies really don’t like the sound of that.

But like, can someone explain to me why stock buybacks are legal other than we all hope one day we too will be rich enough that having “assets” is more important to us than everyone in our immediate community having food/shelter??

The point of life is to take care of each other, and the wealth hoarders have made that increasingly impossible while also spinning a narrative that it’s the workers that are greedy??? The train unions were asking for two weeks off! Sick days! Like, bare minimum workers protections, and our fucking current “pro-union” president pulled rank on them (yes I am infuriated he’s running for reelection, fuck the incumbent bump, I’m so angry that the dems have abandoned their actual voting base for a non-existent proto-republican-moderate one). And I hope the Writers Guild of America gets everything they’ve ever wanted in these negotiations because the fact that studios are making more money than ever before in history and writers are making so little they can’t afford to live in the place they’re demanded to in order to secure these jobs is unsustainable and at this point, the ruling class can either learn to placate us sufficiently or we simply must to being razing Warner Bros lots to the ground.

Also, I think that Millenials now have a generational ally in Gen-Z and we can finally take on the hoard of boardrooms filled with greedy fucks determined to ruin the social state. Wall Street is full of fake money and false promises and billionaires can cause bank runs in group chats it’s WELL PAST time to regulate!!

So. Anyway. Fuck Howard Shultz and all of his billionaire buddies.

Now, back to me & my life!

I think I’ve been avoiding my life recently in an ongoing effort to circumvent taking responsibility. I just wanted to have some time off from being an adult. Partly because existence is hard sometimes, and partly because I can’t stand how adulthood is now spoken about/framed. Like, I know it’s hard for millennials to grasp that we’re not The Youth anymore but holy shit if another 30+ person refers to a banal action as “adulting” I will lose it, we’re not twenty-somethings setting up our first gas bill babes we ARE adults we have to EMBODY being adults rather than treating it like a fun side hobby we sometimes engage with! Like, grow up! Literally!

Being an adult means my choices are my own, and it also means I have to both create and then follow through on opportunities, and it means that my life can look however I want it to if I put the effort into it.

Which is daunting! Control of one’s life is heady, which is maybe why so many people do look for a [benevolent] higher power that comes with some sort of guideline because this shit’s wild in terms of unique options and the gumption required to take them.

But I don’t want to live my life conservatively.

Conservatism, at its philosophical core, is the belief that known results—which may not be the optimal results—are better than unknown results. The idea is that even if the unknown is better it’s riskier and therefore should be avoided.

But I think that’s just such a boring way to spend our existence.

And it happens slowly and it happens in culturally reinforced ways and I just see it more and more and it really does break my heart.

I don’t think life is about being happy all the time, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be one long thought experiment in how to best temper our misery either.

We, as a society, had a life narrative to follow and it was seen as Right, Good, and Safe. Get a 9-5 with benefits and have a family and don’t question authority.

And now that narrative is being exposed for what it is and very few of us have the means or desire to follow it. (Hence, the resurgence of unions!)

But in the absence of that narrative, I think there’s a lot of spiraling happening about what we’re meant to DO with our time here. And if a job is required how do we make it satisfying? And what can we do to make it easier for each other without overburdening ourselves (a bit of burden is fine babes!)? And is there anyone who really feels like they’re living in alignment with all of their values or are we in a list five/choose two paradigm across the board?

I don’t know that I’m ready to tackle the massive question of How To Live because I’m still actively coming to terms with how little/much I actually know about myself and my desires outside of the influence of others. And in terms of capability and understanding it does come down to basically running little litmus tests for myself and then looking at the results.

But I no longer get to live my life in theory.

So I’m trying to leave the house more. And in April I did a lot of stuff and I got tickets last minute to comedy shows and concerts and tried to maximize my existence in this city and drank a lot of iced coffee and prepared for everything as best I could and then determinedly went with the flow as much as possible.

What I’ve realized from Doing Things was that I had a real lack of trust in myself and my choices. And also that as soon as something deviates from my assumptions I lose most of my patience, which isn’t great really oughta work on that part of learning to be more chill with honoring my choices and not weighing them against some imaginary Best Choice Possible to see how far I deviate.

Because I’m starting to suspect we’re all making it up as we go along.

So my focus this month is to spend less energy trying to Get It Right and a lot more energy trying to understand why my choices feel good when they do, and then to keep going in that direction. I know that I am not a bad or evil person who seeks to cause others discomfort so I can let go of my “but what if I irrevocably fuck up?” anxiety.

Send the text! Be honest about our feelings and what we can do to change them! Live liberally without fear of making things worse in our attempts to make them better!

I’m getting back into morning routines and journaling because I think maintaining a certain level of self-discipline makes me happy and I genuinely like having a little system in the morning because then when I wake up I can auto-pilot my way through getting out the door and going on a walk during which I get to appreciate & witness the world around me and by the time I get home I’m finally awake enough to start my day and I got the thing I’d inevitably hang over my head to do, done. I do feel better about myself/my life when I wake up early and move right away. I hate that it’s true because uuuugh I wish a lower-effort option was available but dragging myself around my neighborhood each morning, does, in fact, make my life better.

Well! I think there’s maybe a mouse/rat in my ceiling and I hear my landlord/super outside and I’m feeling extra invigorated to speak up for changes I need made so I’m going to go ask him to do…something about the noises from up above. Because I already dealt with a (singular) bug problem and while I trust the hunting prowess of my two cats (especially Goob) (sorry, Weem) I don’t actually want to deal with what that would entail.

Happy May Day everybody! Remember to treat service workers with kindness because they’re performing a service and not acting as temporary servants! Support unions always even when strikes are inconvenient because remember, it’s not the workers but rather management that refuse to negotiate that cause strikes! Go WGA goooo!!