April, consumed

This might be my most delayed consumption diary yet. I’ve nearly forgotten all of April already. I debated skipping this month because I’m just not really reading right now, or doing much of anything. However, I never miss an opportunity to Not Shut Up, so here I am! Here you are! 

Theoretically, I should have been reading more considering how I’ve been lying in bed with my cat for half of the month. My soulmate and fellow Virgo eldest daughter Oxford had surgery mid-month (after having surgery in December for an unrelated issue!!!) and needed a lot of monitoring. She’s been glued to me for a month, and who am I to deny her company?

All that is to say, I wish I’d spent that time doing something that felt productive or fulfilling. But now we’re halfway through May and I’m still not reading, but I am still fawning over my cat. Scroll to the bottom for a photo of Oxford in her surgical onesie, still beautiful. 

I notice that when my reading pace flags it’s typically in tandem with other areas of life requiring more attention than I’m giving them. I didn’t go to the movies or even really watch any movies this month.¹ I haven’t been doing anything fun around the city, my apartment is in disarray, I haven’t been checking in on my friends in the way I’d like to, every minor work task feels like the final straw. Every article/notification/TikTok/post with updates on the genocide in Gaza and the US government’s support of it (and opposition to protesters) fills me with a white-hot rage that renders all of the above frivolous.

There’s something nice to be said by someone smarter than me about finding our joy in the midst of sorrow, particularly in a society designed to make us feel like we are individuals above all else rather than a piece of the collective. But when that sorrow is on such a global scale, at what point am I simply justifying my apathy and privilege to disengage?

It’s not particularly hard for me to find small moments of joy; of course it fucking isn’t. I’m white and healthy and grew up safe and had my four-year degree paid for so that I’ve lived my entire adulthood without debt or true financial woes. It’s not brave or radical of me to take a breather from “the news” by downing three Aperol spritzes at happy hour or escaping in romance novels.

And not reading, or not doing anything at all, isn’t brave or radical either! The influencer girlies who also like to justify living capitalist, consumption-heavy lives would say that it is all about balance, but I personally don’t need more frivolity and nothingness to strike that balance. The cognitive dissonance of my normal, privileged life with what transpires globally every day makes my head spin, but I don’t think that’s a reason to ignore the discomfort.

Anyway, that made no sense, onto the things I consumed and was consumed by in April.

books

Hot Summer by Elle Everhart — what I have to say about this Love Island–themed romance, which comes out (ha ha ha) on June 27: Love Island starts on June 3, and a queer couple better emerge from the smoldering ashes of the heterosexual dumpster fire that is this show’s relationships. 

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein — my theoretical physics era is perhaps my most confusing yet, but this book felt very accessible even for people who aren’t pretending to be smart (i.e., me). The first part is a little dense and physics-heavy, but it shifts into more of a personal essay format where I thought Prescod-Weinstein really shines as an activist and leader in her field. At times, I felt a disconnect between the mathematical portion and the essay-like portion. The author says this isn’t a memoir, so I’ll respect that, but at the same time, it is her specific perspective that compels readers to think more critically about science and the scientific community. I didn’t need a math-heavy introduction to believe that she is qualified to write this book and critique the white colonialism of science. Prescod-Weinstein’s is a sorely needed voice, and if I’ve ever convinced anyone to read a pop science book, I hope they’ll pick up this one next.

Funny Story by Emily Henry — it feels silly to review Emily Henry books because look, I’m going to eat that shit up every time. Funny Story fell squarely in the middle for me in the EmHen cinematic universe, but do I care? No! I’m just happy to be here. I’m just happy to experience that giddy teenage energy that carries me to the bookstore on release day to buy a beautiful, stupidly expensive new hardback. But I actually did ramble a bit on goodreads, if you’re curious about my actual thoughts.

movies

High Life (2018) — this movie felt so half-baked that I’m still confused about the glowing reviews I read. What did I miss? All I got was a bunch of unexplored themes that could have been really poignant had they been fully developed. If you’re unfamiliar with this A24 movie (and it’s an A24 movie indeed), the premise is that the powers that be have sent a selected group of imprisoned people to the farthest reaches of space in a giant cube ship, which is a shape that only worked for the Borg. The mission feels immediately unclear to the viewer, and it’s apparent that the prisoners — shuffled from one prison to another, stripped of their autonomy either way — don’t know what they’re doing in their giant space box either. It reminded me a bit of the wonderful Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, in which prisoners are made to fight each other to the death for ESPN-like entertainment. The difference is that Chain-Gang All-Stars was good and said what needed to be said, and High Life said a little about a lot.

Her (2013) — I regret not seeing this movie when it came out, before the rise and normalization of generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT. Today, this movie feels very normal, and I imagine in 2013 I would have had many more existential questions. I think about Ex-Machina all the time, and it’s not like the robots needed better PR to counter that, but it is kind of sweet that Her exists at all. Any new AI movies feel stale at this point, especially considering that they share the same message. Her is still, 11 years later, different.

bought

this bougie sleep mask — I’ve entered the point in your 30s where you dabble in sleep masks, which was a personally heartbreaking realization as someone who could fall asleep truly wherever in her 20s. I know this was a stupid purchase because so many cheaper eye masks exist, but I was set on one that was silk + large and velcro instead of elastic so that I felt as little as possible on my face. 

links

• This substack made its rounds during April, and I saw it everywhere so maybe you did too! I found it to be a thoughtful and nuanced look at critique under the name of body positivity. I sometimes feel like the most vocal fat activists are as equally shame-y as their fatphobic counterparts, and it feels very exclusionary; if you haven’t reached the higher plane of enlightenment where you can exist outside of your body and body image, you don’t belong here! Do better! It’s an incredibly complicated topic that

  Mikala Jamison
  routinely handles with care.

Is it influencer critique, or is it misogyny?

• I almost forgot this is supposed to be a newsletter about books! So here, read something someone else wrote about books since I forgot how to read. This look into the publishing industry from

  The Elysian
  was so informative! And maybe a little frightening, though I can’t name what I’m scared of.

No one buys books

• I know I morally can’t be too devastated at the possibility of losing TikTok, which is only another meaningless social media platform contributing to brain rot, but idk, it feels better? It can’t substitute real news or fact-checked science, but I have genuinely learned shit from this stupid app. So I’ve been very curious where things go next; people’s entire careers exist on TikTok, meaning it seems unlikely that they will just accept their fate and join the ranks of underpaid 9-5 office workers. Instagram seems like the next logical platform because it’s already well established and has short-form video capacity, but Meta’s algorithms are so, so bad. The search is bad. The UX is bad. I know Mark Zuckerberg must be giddy at the thought of a TikTok ban that would drive content creators to his platform, but it seems inevitable he will crack under the pressure. I can’t bring myself to delete my personal, private instagram (the memories dating back to 2012!) but that has long been its best feature: privately and personally checking up on friends. That isn’t the purpose of TikTok, and Instagram has already pivoted to mimic TikTok as-is — and done a poor job at replicating its success. There’s little reason to think it would get better with an influx of TikTokers. And there’s no guarantee that content creators would have equal levels of success on Instagram (or YouTube).
  
  I think of Vine, a video platform millennials look back on fondly, and how few of its stars are as popular on new platforms as they were then. Something always gets lost in translation. So anyway, this New York Times article about what happened in India when TikTok was banned there was interesting and confirmed what we all already know: Social media platforms might all be doing essentially the same thing, but something is lost each time they compete.

• April was the month of The Tortured Poet, and I won’t subject anyone to my commentary on the album. But I do think we have reached a pivotal moment, culture-wise, in which Taylor Swift has gotten so large that she doesn’t need to do much of anything to invoke the rabid loyalty of her swifties. And I get it; I’ll always love her music. But the celebrity of it all, the fact that she is now a billionaire and her schtick is still to cosplay as one of us normies, like she doesn’t know how she got here — I don’t know that in a world with a landscape changing the way ours is, the billionaire-next-door-act will endear fans forever. Clearly, for some, the transition has begun, and where else do revelations happen than on Reddit? This Vulture piece on how the subreddit r/SwiftlyNeutral became swiftie rehab wasn’t entirely surprising. Also unsurprising: The subreddit has been locked down and turned private.

happy list

• texting my family from my hotel room balcony that San Diego is beautiful, my dad sharing memories of me as a baby in the same city. I can picture my parents’ beaming faces, not much older than I am now, holding an extremely bald baby in a tiny Padres outfit, strangers complimenting them on said baby’s behavior (I was, apparently, a perfect baby)

• Iced lavender matcha lattes, iced caramel oat milk lattes, the season of iced caffeine

• The leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window unfurling more and more each day, always something new to look at during spring. The tree is bigger and bigger each summer and it will be what I miss most whenever we move

• Booking impromptu plane tickets with some of my oldest friends 

May I present … Oxford ✨

Before you go: Find me on Instagram, Goodreads, StoryGraph, or Letterboxd to keep up with my obsessive tracking habits in real-time.

Consumption Diaries is a monthly series on what I’ve consumed and been consumed by. 

If you missed last month’s consumption you can find it here, and the full archive of these posts lives here.

1. For some reason that I can’t be bothered to explore, when I can’t pay attention to anything else, I become fixated on K-dramas. However, I believe approximately 0% of readers here watch K-dramas, so I will spare you the recounting.