Celebrity Sunday, Life, pop culture, Rambles

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING: KYLIE JENNER HAS HER GRIP ON THE THROAT OF POP CULTURE AND NO ONE CAN DO ANYTHING TO STOP IT

Did you miss these? You didn’t care? That’s fine. I didn’t care either. I didn’t even THINK ABOUT IT, DEREK. Just kidding, I thought of you all the time. I wrote you every day for a year. That’s from The Notebook, right? That seems like a lot of work. Also, did you not get the hint when a year went by without a response? Take a hint: either she’s dead, illiterate, or over you.

I ate like complete garbage this weekend, and my body is sorely paying me back for the abuse I’ve put it through. I’ll try to be better, body. Although the other day, I woke up, looked in the mirror, and just thought that my body looked snatched. In a good way; not in a “snatched as in Taken” kind of way.

Anyway, anyway—let’s dive into some good, old-fashioned, Wunderkindof-prime, grade A beef.

WHAT’S HAPPENING RN:

1). Kylie Jenner released her new line of glosses: If you didn’t get that tidbit from her gloss-release video, that’s fine. That video was more confusing than watching an old Italian movie sans subtitles. It basically involves Kylie lounging in a Rolls Royce while three girls—the embodiment of her glosses “Like,” “Literally,” and “So Cute”—serve us some Breaking BadNikita realness.

It’s smart of Kylie to branch out into something other than the Lip Kit, and the release of the glosses prove me right when I predicted that the change of her Instagram name from “lipkitbykylie” to “kyliecosmetics” means that she’s going to be a make-up mogul. If she releases a line of jungle-themed cosmetics, then she might be a make-up Mowgli. Ah? Ah? No? That’s fine.

The addition of “Like,” “Literally,” and “So Cute” up her lipcare products to eleven, and cement her dainty, Cartier Love bracelet grip on the throat of pop culture.

2). Beyoncé released a clothing line called Ivy Park: Everyone is jumping on this athleisure train and Beyoncé is leading as conductor, which would actually be a fitting sequel to “Telephone.” It’s a lot of black and gray and white, with “IVY PARK” branded everywhere—which is…chic, let’s be honest. But is it weird that I’m a tiny bit over it already? Maybe it’s the fact that everywhere we look we have celebrity products—let us all take a moment for Yeezy Season Threezy—but I want to be wowed. I’ll be wowed by the Formation album, but let me know when Beyoncé drops a line of affordable menswear capes.

3). Trump stuck in his foot in his mouth and somehow this time managed to screw up: Donald Trump said, when pushed by MSBNC town hall host Chris Matthews, that women who receive abortions should be punished. This then set off a whirling dervish of statements, reversals, and redactions, which proves that Trump neither has no idea what he’s saying and really doesn’t actually care. I’m glad that people are starting to hold him accountable, and force him to take a stance, rather than allow him to hide behind bluffing, waffling, and running out the clock. I wrote an entire article about it for The Odyssey Online, which I’ll link here when it comes out, because I don’t feel like repeating myself.

4). I started watching The Real O’Neals and Difficult People and both made me only mildly uncomfortable: Because I spent most of this weekend trying to lure people to my apartment—friends, not lovers or strangers—I ended up watching a lot of Hulu. I used to hate Hulu because it’s kind of the fucking worst, but it has some good shows on it. I found The Real O’Neals which is both unrealistic on a Catholic level and on a homosexual level, but it makes me feel slightly better about being a gay from a private Catholic school background, and also slightly worse because why can my skin have been that flawless while I was in high school? Then Difficult People makes me feel both slightly better about being mean to people and infinitely worse about wanting to make people laugh at/like me a profession.

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Source: Giphy

5). Will I ever not read into cute boys following me on Instagram?: Survey says…probably not.

6). I dressed in blacks and grays today, and did a Mary-Kate Olsen mouth: Which is neither a cry for help nor a victory, but somehow both and neither. This weekend I actively tried to be lazy. I succeeded, and somehow that didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t make me feel worse though, so I guess that’s a success.

7). Can I rant for a second: So I was sitting at Pavement, a coffeehouse on campus because sometimes I can’t help but be insufferably stereotypical—I also stare out of windows when it’s raining, so get those stones ready—and my laptop was dying because it’s old and the free Internet was about to run out. I stand up, start putting my stuff into my bag and before I could say “Beetlejuice” three times, someone was already standing right next to me.

“Are you leaving?” she asked. “Oh, yeah, I am,” I said, brightly. Then she starts dumping her stuff onto the table, nearly crushing my new J.Crew sunglasses. Now, I can hover with the best of them when it comes to securing coffeehouse tables, but there are rules, as typical to any civilized society. One: don’t move in before I’m ready. Two: don’t mess with my stuff. Three: back off, bitch, you’ll get your table.

I wanted to pinch her so hard, but I needed coffee more, and even though I was in a coffee shop, I walked four minutes away to the nearest Starbucks because my mom gave me a gift card and I’m skint.

8). What is the acceptable amount of time to absent-mindedly stare at someone before it gets weird: I was on the street the other day, and I read a text from a friend who had seen me walking on the street, commented on my outfit, leading me to absently stare around, looking for him. I then realize, when a person started walking toward me, that I had been staring accidentally at an acquaintance and she thought I was non-absently looking at her.

It wasn’t a horrible interaction, but I keep getting caught doing things like this—staring at people accidentally, or smiling at them when I don’t mean to but that small desire to be liked wins out. I thought I had an unlikable face—in fact, I was kind of banking on it—but the world refuses to acknowledge that, and everyone thinks that I want to be their best friend. Truth update: I have one best friend, and her name is Ina Garten and she doesn’t know I exist. There’s no other room in my world for extraneous people. Cue the mantra: “Don’t be extra-nice to extraneous.” In my head, that kind of worked.

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I only got mildly misanthropic in this blog post, so it’s a win. But then again, I managed to turn a “what’s happening in the world” post into a “what’s currently wrong in the seventh-grade science fair experiment that is my life” so let’s call today an Even-Stevens.

On a side note, I can’t wait to be 37 and bitter. Being 20 and bitter is exhausting, and—frankly—not great for my skin.

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Inspirational

OF CLOTHES & MUSCULATURE

I miss being able to wear clothes. And no, I haven’t joined a nudist colony. But I work at a summer camp, where I spend 10 hours a day in a heavy cotton t-shirt and gym shorts. Compression shorts that perk up my butt—an unintended perk (was that a pun?)—but that clamp up my front-junk-in-the-trunk in a spandex cocoon and encase my thighs in a stretch-dream. At the end of the day, I’ve sweated through that shirt ten times over, and it’s covered in Fudgesicles and sunscreen.

When I get home, I either go to the gym and then get into pajamas, or I get into my “in between work and sleep” oversized white tank top that I bought for five dollars at JoAnn Fabrics.

I miss the excitement of putting on an outfit, reworking clothes I already have into a new outfit, creating the kaleidoscopic push-and-pull of switching out this cardigan for that, kicking off shoes and slipping on a pair of TOMs, of feeling like I was this fresh person with each button pushed through the puncture in the fabric.

I miss having occasions. Even when I was getting dressed for class, it was an occasion. It was a chance to run into someone or show someone a part of me. Plus I like to think I have good fashion sense and I fucking live for compliments.

And connected to this is the idea of attractiveness. I don’t feel as cute or sexy lately, and so I pick apart my body more, agonizing over each square inch of musculature footage. It’s like my body is this house and when I can cultivate outfits, I’m reminded of each part in its individual-wholeness and it reminds me that my body is this sinewy, strong piece of work, blood-blushed marble breathing along every artery. And I treat it like it’s strong, like the stretch of muscle underneath is as hand-crafted as the brown-stitched blue denim that’s smoothing over my shoulders and buttoning over my heart.

But when I spend my day going from sweat-streaked staff shirt to sweat-stained workout gear to pajamas, I forget the ritual. I forget why I like getting dressed. And so the things I do to combat the rising anxiety and spiraling about Why does my body look like this and I need to do something now about it and What can I do what can I do like working out and eating salads stop being helpful mortar and pestle and start being hurtful sandpaper and grit.

This post started about in its nascence about bodies, but I find clothes much more fascinating. And not just “trends” and “how-to’s”. I fucking love clothes because I fucking love who we can become with them. I miss the luxury of dressing in all black, because when I dress in black I am simultaneously in mourning and vengeful, strong and languid. Clothes are a way of adapting myself to myself, of trying to verbalize how I’m feeling by being physical. I’ve discovered that I can’t often express myself in “healthy” ways. They eke out of me and mutate, so physically expressing them, through clothes or typing or working out, they make me heard, understood, felt.

Whenever I do…how to say this and remain correct…these emotionally rambling, or emotionally driven, essays, I always feel like ending with paragraphs that say shit like, “Omg guys, sorry for being so crazy. Like I don’t even know where I was going with this, just thought I would write! Lol quirks alerts :ppp.” Like, dude, fuck that.

I always tread this line of wondering how much of my life to share online. Obviously I’ve done the essays about first dates and first porn meanderings, but those are far removed and I change the names of the participants, so it’s relatively distant from the hurling hurricane that is my daily life. I was just really feeling inspired by Amy Winehouse, and I wanted to write and let it flow and it evolved like a Pokémon into this obvious aforementioned essay.

I’m really not as put together as I think I appear to be. And if you’re reading this thinking to yourself, “Dude, you don’t seem put together,” then take the number out of 10 that you think I am put together and subtract about a two. If you came up with a negative number, frankly I’m a little offended that you think so little of me, but if you ended up with anything higher than like an eight, then you’re fucking lying to yourself.

Also, Marco, as I’m writing this I’m texting you. So nice little shout-out to future you from present me. Well, I mean is it present-you and past-me? from whose perspective does the time matter? Time really is fucking relative, you guys.

In conclusion, I want to have the freedom to be a nightmare dressed like a daydream.

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