Buck up, I guess

There is still a world, a beautiful one at that, out there.

Welcome back! It’s buck the fuck up week. I mostly mean to say this to myself — a person who has been running from life, from work, from this newsletter, from anything that feels more difficult than letting my brain activity slow down, barely to a hum, as I scroll the depths of Instagram reels for an immeasurable amount of time. I’ve been afraid to show my face, and more afraid to say much of anything. How could any of it mean anything? How could any of it be good? How could any of it, especially in the shadow of this monstrous world, be important? 

I’ve decided I should perhaps Think About Myself, At Least In This Way less — as Jemima Kirke put it, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.” And she’s right! Luckily, I was recently given a deadline to jostle my brain into a direction other than inward by way of New York Magazine’s “My Week In New York” newsletter. It sounds exactly like what it is; each week, a staff writer details bits and pieces of their week and those bits and pieces are then mushed together and transmitted out to the magazine’s readers. A version of this newsletter that you’re about to read appeared in “My Week In New York,” although it’s been fleshed out, amended, slightly reshaped, etc. Writing this, something low-stakes and with a hard cutoff, helped bring me out of my rut — out of my cycle of, frankly, disrespecting myself and the world around me. It helped me tell myself to grow the fuck up, rub some dirt in it, and move on. There are very real problems happening out there in the very real world.

As always, thank you for being here, I cherish you, and please consider donating to Palestinian relief through Healing our Homeland. 

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well, true…

Sometimes, you come across a video in your mindless doomscroll that feels as though it were concocted in a lab to reach you, that some often-cruel TikTok God (The Algorithm) responsible for all the horrors we’re privy to on the internet had a lapse in character and took pity on you. An omnipotent digital deity saw within you a desire for some salvation and granted you — while the other algorithmic puppeteers looked away — a brief interval that filled you with some nebulous feeling of warmth, rather than the typical intoxicating dread of the infinite scroll. 

In this case, the video came after a week that put many in a spot of discomfort — an election that did not go the way a majority of New Yorkers hoped it would go. While the threat Trump poses to marginalized communities is very real, both in policy and simple rhetoric, there was, though, an unsettling juxtaposition on display. Many liberals were taking to social media to blame other marginalized groups for Harris’s loss — “now you get a dictator and a genocide,” one fashion editor wrote on Instagram, and TikTokkers made videos with captions like “WHEN GAZA GETS TURNED INTO A PARKING LOT OR RESORT…,” the comments encouraging each other to break the boycotts against Starbucks and McDonalds, as if the Palestinians in the besieged enclave, and their grieving family members here in the States, were the reason Trump won. I want to say I understand the impulse to point fingers, to find a person or place to unleash the worry, anxiety and unease that comes from a week as contentious as that, and from a future as uncertain as the one we have. But I can’t say that. I can’t understand cruelty. 

It was almost funny to watch, in the aftermath of the election, some of these very people turning to each other to say, very earnestly, “Go outside,” “Touch some grass!” In truth, going into nature would likely have done them some good — to understand how the way they move through the world affects others, to understand that there was, and is, an entire world that’s going on out there, a beautiful one at that, unscathed where we live despite how we might feel. How lucky are we? Other people’s lives on the other side of the world, in Palestine and Lebanon, are upended in an instant — with material, tangible, immediate loss — but our corner remains, on the surface, just as it was before. 

It was perhaps even funnier when I took their advice. Go outside I did. I sat in the park and watched a woodpecker flit from tree to tree and a French bulldog’s labored breathing as he chased a squirrel through the dirt. But what I really needed, and have been searching for all year, was a metaphorical adult binky, and a grotesque mangling of my attention via internet memes would be my fix – has been my fix. After enraging myself with more hate-filled videos posited under the guise of self-care and viewing a hellish advertisement for orthopedic shoes, I came across a clip with nearly 80,000 likes. It showed a still of my old street, shot on what looked to be an old camcorder and set to one of my favorite Jeff Buckley songs (“Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”). It was a shaky, grainy video, but it was clear enough to make out the streets I used to walk before I moved in September: down Avenue A, past Doc Holliday’s, through Tompkins Square Park, past the bench I liked to read on, past the other bench I liked to eat my Sunday bagel on, beyond the stretch of patchy field we stared at the eclipse from and through the cobblestone expanse where some street artist drew grandiose circles with prophecies inside like “BAD LUCK SPOT” and “SCREAMING SPOT.” I always avoided these. The final clip of this video seemed to show the exterior of a red-brick church I often biked past in the neighborhood. I once saw a couple of newlyweds kiss on its steps, friends and family cheering and showering them with white rose petals. I used to wonder what it must be like to get married there, in the chaos of an East Village Saturday. I wondered if I would get married there. I wondered if I would get married. I lived there for nearly half a decade, which I know might seem like meaningless pocket change, but given that I’m approaching 30, it feels to me like a significant chunk of time.

What I have now is different, but good. Very good. It isn’t coated in the nostalgia of my first New York, but maybe one that transports me to childhood instead. In the new neighborhood park and streets I haunt, there are young parents toting their children in cocooned strollers, an annual pumpkin smash the weekend after Halloween. And, at least by city standards, there are trees — ones that erupted out of the ground decades ago and are unperturbed by the transfer of power between old white men happening around them (at least until one of them gets ahold of the EPA, but I digress). 

Change, it’s so frequently said, is hard. It’s a point of contention between myself and I. Why leave behind all that feels so okay, or at the very least comfortable? And how is one meant to cope with the uncertainties of a new reality? I haven’t quite cracked the code, although I’m certain it doesn’t come from blaming an entire ethnic group for one’s angst. But this last week, and in truth this entire last year, has shown me that the answer does not lie in the infinite scroll. In fact, most of what lies in the cosmos of the cyberverse is either rage bait or enraging. In all my running from the real world, the internet somehow always brought the world right back to me. And honestly, as it should. Last week, my colleague Ej Dickson wrote, “Life goes on and so will we; there is no other choice.” That stuck with me. Let me be clear, I am not saying people should look away from the horrors unfolding in Gaza and Lebanon being disseminated mostly online. We need to, at the very, very least, bear witness. What I am saying, though, away from the places in our screens manufactured for fluff, is that there is still life to be lived. A life where what we do and what we say and how we act matters. 

Consumption Junction:

Objects, thoughts and media rattling around in my mind:

• Okay, so speaking of the Fourth Annual Pumpkin Smash, I was sabotaged at this event, and I have photographic evidence. After building up the courage to climb the ladder necessary to participate, one propped in the center of a decently large group, I was handed a gourd COVERED in wet paint. I played it cool. Told myself we’ll chuck this bad boy, get a crowd-pleasing collision with the ground, and deal with the repercussions after. A second later, the ladder under me BROKE on account of one of the pumpkin-smash-minders KICKING the ladder under me!?!!?! Climbing down, covered in paint, smash-less, was the most mortifying moment of my week.

  

• As I write this, I’m beginning to watch the Martha Stewart documentary and remembering how, after I interviewed her for a funny little Q+A, I bumped into her at store opening. When she discovered I was the writer of this piece, she looked at me, said “OH! WELL WHATEVER!” and turned away from me. Nothing I wrote warranted that reaction, but in truth, I love having one-sided beef with Martha, a woman who likely hasn’t since thought about me at all.

• I was enraptured by this essay by Lili Anolik, detailing her work uncovering the lives of famous literary women like Donna Tartt, Joan Didion, and Eve Babitz. Through her seemingly merciless research, she has bestowed upon herself the title of Literary Assassin. I had complex thoughts about this story and will likely feel the same once I read the author’s book Didion and Babitz, which I’m only 29 pages into and cannot form an opinion on just yet. Unfortunately, unlike Sally Rooney, who said something along the lines of she never feels interested in the interior lives of authors she admires, I’m quite the opposite. I like to know a writer after I connect with their work, so rest assured I was locked in to every word of Anolik’s piece.

• I saw country queen Kacey Musgraves in concert for the second or third time. Have you ever listened to her song “Mother”? Have you ever thought about the lineage of women you come from, and the way your mother misses her mother? Have you ever called your mother bawling after listening to this song only to hear her, deeply confused, say, “Okay, honey … it’s going to be okay”? 

• This is quite literally one of the funniest things I’ve seen this month, maybe even this year. A group of people allegedly committed insurance fraud by dressing up in a bear costume and claiming a real one ravaged their cars. The authorities found the bear costume inside one of their homes, to which I immediately thought, Why would you keep the evidence? Some people clearly have not watched enough NCIS.

• It’s suddenly very cold outside, and very dark early, which is very sad, but the way New Yorkers dress during the fall is very unmatched. Everyone’s fits are going off. Stunning coats, cozy wools, rich reds and browns, billowing scarves. ]

• My friends and I were in awe of the ingenuity of these women in Gaza who started their own sewing collective to create winter clothes out of old blankets, even using seashells as buttons.