Everything Is the Best

Not “the best stuff about being a girl” or whatever because ewwwwwissaboring! And doesn’t that depend on basically everything? And probably that would amount to the list equivalent of a sad pile of empty candy wrappers. I have a little, sad pile of crumply and crumbly candy wrappers right here and it’s just really tragic, like, they might as well stop-motion-style reorganize themselves into a frownyface. Fuck Halloween. Anyway, even though I do want to engage in an endless—literally endless—amount of offensive and incorrectly specific cataloguing of the girlsperience, because it’s fun, I think instead this could just be about what stuff is the best stuff right now. It’s more, just, like, aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh maybe we can take five fucking minutes to revel in the post-Tuesday-ness of this week and be IT’S THE BEST!-ish about it? Also maybe I was hecka situationally depressed for a year and now I’m NOT ANYMORE and maybe it feels like so many millions of undemanding, vacant-poolside oral sexes so I am in the mood.

DON’T FUCKING TELL ME WHAT TO DO A.K.A. THE OBVIOUS

So did you also wake up after that electoral confirmation that nobody is interested in being legally mansplained about sex and bodies, all crying and sleep-smiling, smiling so big that your skin turned into hard, clear plastic and we could see your muscles and organs inside all lit up neon purple and green? I did, totallys.

CLUELESS

Have you noticed how pouty and jealous boys are about Clueless being decidedly un-theirs? They want in on it so bad. So bad!

STAKES

Yesterday I watched Camille Paglia (go-go Google fingers!) do a talk about art and the best thing she said is that there hasn’t been a legit avant-garde artist since Robert Mapplethorpe was photographing downtown/New York/gay/S&M shit. She said that artists who aren’t risking something really real—like their careers or livelihoods or communities—aren’t avant-garde, and since the avant-garde was folded into the official art world (which is fine, it just was) there isn’t any existing or even possible (???) risk available, making “avant-garde” not… avant. Real risk, real alienation, real struggle is so crucial and minus Frank Ocean puhhhhretty absent in mainstream or mainstreamish culture. Which is exhausting when you consider how post-irony-invested you are in your hugely corny iTunes, you know? Anyway this all just emphasized the incredible value and possibilities of high stakes, and of trying, and of how much can happen if you’re just willing.

SIDETONGUE

My current obsession is the side of men’s tongues, which you can only see when they specifically show you, because when you are actually using it you are busy. HALLO, why aren’t we fetishizing the thickness and animal texture of this area already?

GIRL POP CULT BESTS I: BEYONCE’S TUMBLR

Beyoncé is problematic on her own. It’s too easy to get excited about her (and I mean ex-ci-ted) because she is so many different ways of perfect, when in fact she is a stalwart representative of the white-beauty industrial complex, and she seems to be weird about men, and probably other stuff, but of course mostly I love her. Her Tumblr, though? Her Tumblr. Can we just start up with the Year in Review shit right now so I can make, like, “Marfa photoset” the first thing on the Everything list?

GIRL POP CULT BESTS II: THE BEST SONG

The best song right now is “Die Young,” and I mean that it is the best song in the most affective and ephemeral and shape-shifting way. I think of whatever happens to be “the best song” at any moment—and usually they float in two-week cycles, I don’t know why “Die Young” is hanging on for me so much—as basically equivalent to a diagonal intersection (we call that a “scramble” in Canada; is anything other than “Zoodles” or “Smarties” cuter than a “scramble”? Are we the cutest? So cute), where the action is both sudden and breathtaking and intuitive but also totally boring and pre-determined. Like, for a song to be temporarily THE BEST it has to be half totally boring and half totally new and invigorating. That is science.

Also, one thing about the accelerated culture that I’m on board with is all the mini-ness. I don’t even mean ring-tones, because don’t be so garbage that you have to specialize every iota of your human existence, like, your iPhone case is not charming, BUT those supernew moments in time (HE-EA-EA-EA-EA-RT BEAT) that merit a real pause, a leaning in, a moment of attention. So much is focused and fixed on those moments now.

Also also, despite being titty-photographed with air-drying jizz and therefore sort of sent out of the triangulated mainstream, being an uncomfortable, unsure performer (REMEMBER BRITNEY SPEARS? LE GIANT SIGH), and, OK OK OK, just not the real best by any actual measure, isn’t it great that Ke$ha is also the one with this song? “I hear your hea-ea-ea-ea-ea-ea-eart beat!” I’m not interested in taste-consensus but if you don’t like that one singular moment that makes this The Song I think you are being a joyless Scaredy Squirrel a little bit.

GIRL POP CULT BESTS III: TAYLOR SWIFT’S OCCASIONAL AND EMBARRASSING FAILURES

So good! So reassuring.

INSTAGRAM

The best thing about Instagram is when a teen-idol-type (celebrities are gross but we can still have feelings for whoever we want) or someone you like or whoever you are distanced from but want to put your eyeballs on posts something casually and you see their stack of shoeboxes and Sephora bags, or like, their yucky hands, or their whatever. I’m not suggesting any of this is a failure on their part; I’m suggesting that it is fucking great when you get the dirty on anyone at all and especially them.

LOVE

Love is the best.

WINTER

Winter, you guys! Was going to do a whole Girl Newsathon about winter but that’s a little daggy probably? Anyway mostly what is so nice about winter is the way it demands a reimagining of the body and the functions of the body in a public context. Sweater and especially coat structures are so meaningfully obscuring. Somehow snot gets cute. Sexiness is not really subsumed but is basically just given up to woolens and rubbers and Gore-Texes and felts and fleeces and instead of feminine anarchy it is something other, something recognizable, sexy in a way that you didn’t choose. Actually maybe I will do a Girl News just about being cold? Anyway winter is dumb after mid-January, aka my birthday, but until then I’m just going to be a really happy porcelain figure in a snowglobe.

STOPPING

Revolutionarily, quitting and stopping and not doing and opting out and forgetting and disengaging and avoiding are the best. Have you done it? Do it. This applies, I think, to “awareness” the most. Deciding what to be influenced by, what to care about, what to notice, is something that eventually makes itself available in a girl life and at very advanced levels is why old old old old women are such sex witches.

This week I moved into a new apartment and decided I wouldn’t answer any emails or phone calls for a few days and then I didn’t and it was like amazing.

(I also filled my refrigerator with bottled water, large glass bottles of Pellegrino, plastic bottles of grapefruit Perrier and lemon Perrier, small glass bottles of Perrier, and my freezer with the last few handfuls of Halloween candy, all of which is the best, my best. “…WHILE YOU’RE HERE IN MY ARMS, LET’S MAKE THE MOST OF THE NIIIIGHT” is what I sang while I did that.)

Previously - Girlsplaining Part Two: Return of the Girlsplainings: Dawn of the Girlsplains: Girlfather Part Two

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway