FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

obseshes

Self-Imposed Chocolate Poisoning

OK you guys this is going to be a tough read because I did it while I was bent over at the waist—or like between being bent over, but not for long because sitting up is real, real hard—because I ate some chocolate really quickly before a meeting, and...

OK you guys this is going to be a tough read because I did it while I was bent over at the waist—or like between being bent over, but not for long because sitting up is real, real hard—because I ate some chocolate really quickly before a meeting (it’s like having lunch AND a coffee!), and it’s just all been very heave-ish and whatever adult moves I like to think I’ve made lately have shrunk in the face of midday self-imposed chocolate poisoning.

Advertisement

SAINT LAURENT PARIS LOGO

Is there anything more erotic than the original Yves Saint Laurent logo? The tilted “Y” and “L,” the all-caps, the threatening haunted-house-y-ness of the font, the getting-skins touchy-touch of the letters, all up on each other. And then, and then! The secondary logo where the “Y” “S” and “L” are threesomeing around like gross snakes? Just, magnifico.

So what do we think of the new logo? I feel no less rhapsodic about SAINT LAURENT PARIS, black-on-white, all-caps-y and brilliantly spaced, a held breath instead of sexual deliverance, but without the “Y” does it achieve that same level of immediate textual gratification? I dunno. I do like how un-t-shirt-able it is, that’s for sure.

NOT KNOWING

I don’t know if this is directly Cat Marnell-related or indirectly Cat Marnell-related (in no world is it unrelated to Cat Marnell), but I read some random shits this week about the potential and relative value of writing from inside an experience, rather than, I guess, from around it or past it. And every person on my Twitter feed was very “What’s yr deal, Elizabeth Wurtzel?” even though she had just explained her deal, in detail! And then sometimes also parsing, in quick bits, the ego and intentions of Lena Dunham, there less “What’s yr deal” and more “Let me tell you about yr deal” which is the diff between 26 or whatever and 40 or whatever.

I like this in a HAHAHAHAHAHA kind of way because what it presumes, that anyone with some distance from the particular horrors or whatever is being publicly metabolized by these women (I don’t do it, but I know it’s hard) is somehow and necessarily in a better position to reflect on the meaning of transgression (than the currently transgressing! HOW?!), is both incorrect (which is no big deal) and ungenerous and self-important (bigger deals).

Advertisement

Coming from a place, in memoir or whatever else, of I-don’t-know!-ness, of vulnerability and conflict and nuance, is so much more interesting and important and legitimate, and should be important to people who front as arbiters of authenticity. Right?! Like, Not Knowing. I Don’t Know. “How could I know?” You can’t. I like that line, or I guess “those lines” in that W.S. Merwin poem like “I asked how can you ever be sure / that what you write is really / any good at all and he said you can't / you can't you can never be sure / you die without knowing / whether anything you wrote was any good / if you have to be sure don't write” and the truly mean and judgey mania demonstrated by people who have to be sure, not just about the writing itself but by the experience, what it was and what it should have been – if you have to be sure! – is TOO WEIRD for me to even synthesize, is TOO MEAN to agree to. See?

JANUARY

What is the best way to do January? I am really into the idea of total rejection, like reverse-Thoreau-ing it, like, shutting down operations until not necessarily spring but when the all-systems shocker (haaaa, remember “The Shocker”? I liked it when things were new) of ice-pick winter is glazed over somewhat by a kind of numbness. So what that means for me is that I’m going to stay in a two-block radius of my apartment until the claustrophobia blinds me, just making cups of tea I forget about and leaving through the same magazine pages, giving myself chocolate poisoning, for weeks.

Advertisement

CRUSHES

I always recommend a crush, which can be your bf/gf or can be passive or active (figure it out, kiddo) or can be five people at once. But it has to be magic; their inferences and details and unknowns have to be magic to you to qualify as a crush. A crush is different, even, than liking someone: “Liking” or interest denotes possibility, but a crush really does not. It’s just a dose of the spectacular to keep in your pocket for later. Just a lil’ thought for you.

HAIRCUTS

I guess I’m attached to long hair for the same milkmaid-mermaid-Rapunzel-potential reasons as any other chiquita who tends to hysterically cling to more literal expressions of femininity. But then I told my guy he could do whatever he wanted, and he cut off the bottom half (HAAAAAALF! “HAAAAALLLLLFFF” she screams, bloody hair-murder, running in loose S-curves down a slushy January boulevard, S-curves like the way her hair used to bend and twist, back when there was hair). So now it’s… short? Not short but… half. And, it’s fine. This is revelatory; I keep grabbing at it, confirming the difference. (It looks better, but looking “better” is never what “looking” is about.) Like my point is, was this available to me all the time?

EVERYTHING SUCKS

This week all the normie stuff that happened was, taken together, a low and heavy sigh, drawing your head and lower lip down and coming out all “Foooooooooooooh.” Just “Foooooooh.” That Megan Fox interview, for instance. That made me so tired. Everything about sports and sports-people, as another. Like, Destiny’s Child has a song, that’s cool. But “Nuclear” sounds, objective-correlatively, like a crusty Toyota Corolla pulling out of the silent cool of a Target underground garage into a horrible hot-white weekday afternoon. Justin Timberlake has a song, that’s cool. But, while “Suit & Tie” has Timberlake’s unimpeachable sense of rhythm and sexual-adjacent tension – it’s just in him – it also has Timbaland’s ingratiating sad-guy stuff and Jessica Biel’s startling lack of personality, if technical aesthetic perfection. Jay-Z’s in there somewhere too. I like all that stuff when they’re doing something that’s their own, that is realer, but this sounds like what they think they should be doing. You guys, do whatever you want to do.

I meeeeean, it’s not really fair to assess an era, even a week, as boringer than an era before it, but it’s definitely fair to assess an era as bored. This week everyone was bored.

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway