#18 - And Now, My Top 5 Special Interests of 2021

#5 - BTS

I mean is it really a surprise? I wrote two whole essays about them this year, and neither of them even mentioned Jimin’s modern dance solos. More shit has happened with them, when is it not, it’s so fun to keep up with, their company makes wild decisions about their merch (because the band makes an unfathomable amount of money) and tried to get people excited about NFT’s so that was a whole thing. But their recent GQ and Vogue covers aaaare incredible, even if I still wish they had partnered with Gucci or Prada instead of Louis. (But Fila fits them so well!)

But did I absolutely spend a solid 45 minutes of my life watching a shitty twitter stream of a girl at one of their concerts in LA? Oh yeah. And it was great! She was having the time of her fucking life, her reactions to everything were so genuine and you could just tell she couldn’t keep them in, what a joy. The sheer amount of content I consumed of their this year is, for lack of a better phrase, alarming. And you have to really pay attention because it’s all subtitled (and performance-based).

I watched them travel, I watched them have a staycation in a mansion, I found some really excellent yang yum wings in my neighborhood because watching them eat food is like 40% of their content and always makes me want what they’re having, and I watched them do the same dances over and over in different outfits and I loved it. There was so much to learn, and I really feel like I did my best to learn it quickly.

I’m deeply interested in their group dynamics, definitely into the legacy and like…mythology of the band, the music is great, the dances are captivating (the amount of distance they can cover in two steps deserves to be studied), I find them so fucking endearing and I just really want their next album to be a little less Butter and a lot more Dark & Wild vibes. And release Ddaeng you cowards!

#4 Mechanical Keyboards (& typing)

I’ve always loved tactile technology and been weirdly picky about keyboards, but this year I found out that there’s a whole world of customizable keyboards with different switches (the things that make different click sounds but also control the pushback/tactility of a key) and endless custom keycaps.

Loooook at this blank keyboard, oh I want it so bad but I’m so sure it would infuriate me.

Anyway, I haven’t invested all the much yet (I started with a super cheap one from Amazon and upgraded to a Rotal Kludge with brown switches) but I did start fucking around on MonkeyType and went from being able to type sort of quickly to incredibly quickly. I’m up to like 115wpm pretty consistently at this point, and one of my super fun 2022 goals is to do it for five minutes every day. Also, it’s been helpful to do if I get stuck while writing because it keeps my fingers moving, and sometimes I’ll stumble into a word or phrase that sparks something new.

Also also, typing ASMR videos are fun to listen to while working if you’re into click-clack library vibes and then you can find out what specific clicking you like the best, something everyone should definitely know about themselves.

#3 A group of fashion influencer girlies in NYC who Live Their Lives Out Loud online

I love checking in on a subculture I’m not part of. It’s fascinating, I am not going to call myself a pop culture anthropologist with any hint of seriousness because oh my god, ew, how embarrassing, but I am an observer, and there’s a group of girls who live in New York City who are all full-time influencers and they make some of the most bonkers content I’ve ever seen.

They’re influencers in the most classic of sense, so they share their decorated-within-an-inch-of-their-life apartments, upstate homes that they are DIYing, their various mutations of Doodle dogs, and do a constant rotation of Nasty Gal and ModCloth hauls. But their sponcon is on a whole other level.

Last year, one of them did an ad for Heinekin’s new zero-alcohol drink. She had to pretend that it was something she regularly consumed after working out and the shoot was her in an athletic set drinking a fucking non-alcoholic beer next to a weight rack. Ba.na.nas.

Now, normalizing non-alcoholic beer is really great and a totally wonderful thing to do, but this was absolutely not the way this drink was meant to be consumed. I’m assuming that this was an event orchestrated by Heinekin, so I don’t blame her for having to post in that context, but now anytime I see those green bottles this is what I think of. (Which is actually quite a feat because I used to always think about those ads where they made Jennifer Aniston their spokesperson and then the ad was her asking a dude to grab her the beer from a shelf with just her eyes and he reaches up and takes the beer and walks away.) (That, however, is not the most bonkers sponsored content Jennifer Aniston has ever participated in, no no, that honor goes to when she was on Inside The Actors Studio and Dean Emeritus of Pace University Mr. James Lipton himself, 37 minutes into the interview, casually asks her how she stays in such great shape and she responds, “Smartwater”. And then they toast. With their Smartwaters.)

This year, a different member of their influencer cohort did a series in which she dressed up like various flavors from a hard seltzer line.

Now, this truly broke my brain and I have to talk about it.

An ad, which is what this was, is designed to sell a product. But what product is sold when the ad is just a girl getting dressed up in somewhat coordinated colors to a can. Am I supposed to dress this way the next time I go out? Is that a thing? Has anyone ever dressed like the cocktail they plan to consume? Sorry, the flavor of cocktail they plan to consume? Am I supposed to want to buy the seltzer because I like the outfits? Am I supposed to buy the outfits and the seltzer? Is the implication that I cannot enjoy the alcoholic seltzer without resembling the vessel it’s being served to me in, or just that I would more enjoy it?

And she did this more than once! Was the ad that much of a success? What are companies even paying for any more as far as influencer ads? I truly don’t understand what the business model of LikeItToKnowIt is and at this point, I’m too afraid to ask.

Anyway, they’re all fascinating and their friendships are obviously socially and fiscally beneficial so that’s a real added treat to all of it. Influencing is a career and these girlies are excelling at their chosen profession.

#2 Interior Decorating

Cultivating my space into what I want it to be has become a major focus for me in the last few months. I think I’ve finally gotten my desk to where I want it to be—and now I sit in front of a window during the day so I am happier but I do have to reapply sunscreen halfway through the day because I am, say it with me, the palest person in Ridgewood.

So, between YouTube videos, being my mother’s daughter, and following a lot of eclectic accounts on Instagram, I think I’m finally creating a cohesive vision for the pieces I am now actively manifesting into my life.

I don’t want to just achieve an aesthetic. I want to source things. My favorite piece in my apartment is a desk that was randomly stooped on the way to get coffee one day. It’s classic in a way that the rest of my living room isn’t, and it looks like something the twins on Antiques Roadshow would get excited about, and I love it. I am determined to find a leather chair & ottoman in a particular style that my grandad had and was the most comfortable chair ever. I love a good ottoman tbh. Feet off the ground, now that’s true luxury!

Vintage mirrors, some frames, I need a lot of art, I’m investing in lighting first and foremost, and then I need to figure out how to display things in a way that protects them from BooBoo, who loves to destroy things in order to prompt me to feed her before it’s food time.

#1 Journaling (& unconscious writing)

I think journaling is the best habit I’ve ever given myself.

I used to be really consistent about it, but some time while living in Portland I dropped off, but I picked it back up this year in a big way.

I started earlier this year when I had a massive panic attack about stifling myself throughout my twenties and feeling like I hadn’t grown (oh, sweet summer child) and started doing morning pages and going on morning walks. But then I fell off during the massive depressive episode I suffered this summer but THEN The Breakup happened aaaand I decided to dive back in!

I started off with three pages, then upped it to four, now I do six every morning. Once I start writing, I don’t stop until I’m done. I’ve found rain ASMR videos (is ASMR the ‘New York is the fifth character of Sex And The City’ of this list?) to be an excellent morning playlist. I write straight through, I try not to think too much about what’s going down on the page, and I always feel so great once I’m done. Remember!! It doesn’t fucking matter what you write in your journal!

Unconcious writing is a more specific thing and it’s supposed to help you write faster and people train themselves to enter a trance state and stuff. I’m not going that hard into it, I’m mostly just trying to write straight through the pages and not get distracted. I set my phone to do not disturb and everything. Partially because I don’t want it to take more than 40 minutes of my morning and if I just write…it doesn’t! Hooray!

It helps me feel accomplished in the morning, I get a lot of my thoughts out and become much more aware of how I’m actually feeling in the morning and what my mood might be influenced by. Sometimes it can be a rougher start, but by the time I’m starting page three, it’s a sprint to the finish.

I’ve also recently started bullet journaling again and wow. What a pleasure to spend some time actually thinking about what that day can hold instead of just trying to get through it. Perspective shifts are fun!

The list may not be exhaustive, I totally left out sports documentaries (ask me about Lance Armstrong, I dare you), skincare products, the commentary track on the box set DVD of Showgirls, Hermés tableware, training my cats, breathing techniques, my continued interest in preparing weirdly specific condiments (next on the list is a honey mustard made with local honey, what a way we’ve come), video games (I just finished Grow: Song Of The Evertree today and it’s all I want to talk about because I think video games are such a unique way to help people connect with stories and this one is all about the environment and I really just loved playing it so much), British quiz shows, the spicy pickles I can’t stop making, gameplay within The Bachelor franchise, and all of the other truly random shit that caused me to fall down wiki-holes and autoplay my way through countless youtube videos.

Can’t fucking wait to see what gets me hooked in 2022. And a very sincere thank you to everyone who listened to me babble about shit all year. Especially here in this written record format!

I have a feeling it’s going to be hard to top the sheer magnitude of content I consumed this year, but if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s finding weird and specific niches with a lot of internet history and drama!

(What a special and totally utilizable skill!)

Well. It’s Christmas Eve. I’m gonna go eat a bunch of olives that have been stuffed with garlic and watch some Christmas themed TV episodes now! Pickled garlic forever! Goodnight but not goodbye!