surviving january
watching movies, feeling Dread, and honestly not much else
notes from january
Technically, this is about December, but I recently went into the DMV to get my license renewed. I have never in my life seen so many adults throwing full-blown temper tantrums. At the time that I left, I overheard that the estimated wait time was four hours and thirty minutes. The last woman I spoke to after taking my new ID photo wished me a happy birthday. There were about fifty people feeling absolutely furious with her, but she still chose to be nice to me. When I received my license in the mail two weeks later, my face was comically off-center.
January is a prime Alone at the Movie Theater sort of month. Killing an entire paper bag of popcorn in a half-empty theater while I’m dressed like shit is my ideal winter Friday night. The woman seated next to me at the 4:20 showing of The Brutalist last week began snoring 15 minutes into the movie. She woke up about 20 minutes later and promptly left. At that point there were still three hours left of the movie.
Speaking of The Brutalist, I mentioned to my father that the movie was all about architecture and did not once mention structural engineering. I said this purely to be provocative as I knew this would get a rise out of him — that architects get all the media clout. “You’d think the architect makes the building stand up,” he said, indignant.
There’s a social contract at the roller skating rink — at least the outdoor one I sometimes frequent in Golden Gate Park. People show up with varying skill levels and agree to all skate in circles in the same direction. Beginners have to trust that the more advanced skaters will be able to maneuver around them. Advanced skaters have to consider the safety of beginner skaters in their proximity. I was thinking about this unspoken system as an example of how trust keeps us safe and builds community, but maybe I’m extrapolating.
I went to a Warriors game this month. They did all this before tip-off, only to lose by over thirty points, almost immediately:
I’m currently reading Another Country by James Baldwin. I’ve been reading too much capital-O Okay contemporary fiction lately. I want to make a concerted effort this year to read some novels that stand the test of time.
Speaking of Time: I realized anxiety about getting older is something I experience only relatively. Like when I memorized the pitch of each note based on its distance from G or how you can look at Medusa through a mirror. I don’t feel anxious about being 25 at all, but I feel anxious about the fact that 20 was five years ago.
I wrote a whole thing about the end of TikTok earlier this month as part of my daily writing exercise, and I felt very dumb just two days later when a pop-up thanking President Tr*mp showed up when I opened the app. Of course. How could I even begin to think this was anything more than political theater?
Many of my friends jumped ship and moved to Instagram reels much sooner than me. The algorithm there is much worse, which is part of the appeal — TikTok is too good of an app, it’s addicting. From 2019 until 2023, when I finally placed stricter time limits on my social media apps, at least once a week I would lay down on the couch and open TikTok for a few minutes of mindless respite before cooking dinner, only to realize that two hours had passed. It felt like entering a portal, at times. An entirely useless form of time travel. In the height of COVID lockdown, I would often stare at my phone until 3 AM, my face illuminated in my empty apartment (all my roommates went home) by an endless, hungry blue light.
TikTok was my own form of the anonymous internet. I think it scratched the same itch that tumblr must have for people 2-3 years older than me. I wasn’t trying to be an influencer, but I also wasn’t trying to evade the judgement of past colleagues or friends-of-friends. In fact, I didn’t have any friends following me. I started by posting small snippets of songs I was writing, captioning each video so people could understand the lyrics, and the thrill of a nice comment or some anonymous saves emboldened me. If I thought about it hard, maybe the experimenting I did on TikTok gave me the confidence I needed to start a blog. My very first expedition over cringe mountain.
But TikTok has always been uniquely attuned to all that I am anxious about. Periodically I would add new key words to ban from my home page — words like AI, drones, tsunami, and cancer — but inevitably some new anxiety would find its way to me. I blocked accounts the second I heard a transphobic dog whistle, but the all-knowing Algorithm never stopped showing me trad wives and incel-flooded comment sections. TikTok has also brought us terms like sewer slide and unalive, which have maybe done irrevocable damage to online vocabulary and accelerated self-censorship.
Generally, I want to take a step back from social media this year. (Btw, has anyone ever said this before?) I made a New Year’s goal to delete at least one app, which ended up being Twitter last week. Just four years ago, when I was involved in student journalism, I was told that maintaining a professional Twitter account to promote one’s writing was a requirement for success. I’ve been hearing a lot of conversations about the instability of platforms, how it’s important to have analog media, in-person organizing, and paper-printed zines. We’re taught that the internet is forever, but that’s feeling less and less true to me these days. It’s not like Substack is some completely ethical platform either.
last notes:
This year I am making a concerted effort to post more creative writing in my paid section. If you want to subscribe, I’d be so appreciative, but no pressure! Like, less than zero pressure. I am not going to send everybody previews that end in cliffhangers or promote paid subscriptions, because I find these tactics annoying.
In February, I am going to post a Real Personal Essay, I promise. Either about my digestive odyssey, the bizarre journey of learning Japanese, or some secret third thing.
The twitter advice you got reminds me of similar advice I would get in school that I should have an instagram account for my design work that I upkeep frequently as if it's my portfolio and that this would be the key to getting good design jobs! Still have yet to see it consistently hold true for any of my counterparts.
obsessed with this divaaaaaaa (your parents' dog)