consumption diaries Nos. 5 and 6

a February and March consumed

Hi, thanks for being here! It’s been a little bit, but if you’re new, you don’t know that! Subscribe, if u dare:

Otherwise, here’s the next round of my consumption diaries, or at least what I can remember because February feels like a lifetime ago. February and March are sharing a consumption diary and also coming more than halfway through April because it turns out I really struggle to feel put together enough for extraneous things like a newsletter no one asked for.

Please give me recommendations for things to consume in the future! Maybe April’s consumption diary will be out before June.

I’ve been working a lot, that age-old excuse, but also 2023 is proving to be a much more difficult year living in my head than I expected. I am, for lack of a better, less cliched word, struggling. 

But it isn’t all bad! It’s so cringe that I feel averse to even typing it, but practicing gratitude — and that’s what it is, a practice, a routine only made habitual through effort — has been instrumental in my acceptance of life, that we have so little control over so much it, that I’m often not very happy to be here.

I know this practice doesn’t work for everyone. We can’t, of course, ever choose to “be happy,” and the implication that we can lure ourselves into a false sense of contentment by simply being appreciative is reductive. But at the same time, sitting with our small joys alongside our heaviness can foster a sense of wonder and awe that feel crucial to getting through all of this. The small joys might be all happiness is anyway.

Again, I know this is so cliche and sparks immediate cringe in the era of dissociation on the internet, and there is an easy path from here to toxic positivity we’d do well to avoid. What works works, what doesn’t doesn’t, that’s all. My February + March happy list of tiny joys: 

an afternoon walk on a surprise 75° day, birds chirping, people who remember things you told them in passing, seasonally inappropriate piña coladas, all of my friends listening to me rant about dinosaurs, my friends being tolerant of me in general, a trip to see two of my oldest and dearest friends, Florida allowing for a pool day when it’s 45 degrees back home, spicy McDonald’s sprite, meeting up with a fav bookstagram pal, playing silly games in bars, taro bubble tea, tiny hints of spring, like almost-buds on tree branches, which you hardly have time to clock before they’re loudly here, the cusp of a new season making the world feel like it’s opening up.

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir by Dolly Alderton

American Royals III: Rivals by Katharine McGee — a guilty pleasure series, sorry for using the term guilty pleasure

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn — enjoyed this one more than Everything I Know About Love, maybe because it featured many different voices and felt geared more toward those of us in our 30s and up, and it really made me think and evaluate how I show love and how I like to be shown love.

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier — also made me exercise my brain in ways I don’t always, which in turn made me ruminate about anti-intellectualism for a solid week

Once More With Feeling by Elissa Sussman — longer goodreads review, tldr it was fine enough for a romance, the title is sadly not Buffy-musical-episode-related, thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the review copy

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo

The Fraud Squad by Kyla Zhao

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin — I posted an instagram reflection on this one and though the ~discourse~ (ew) was more than I expected, I really appreciated everyone’s perspectives. I am still thinking about unhinged women, which of them get their stories told, why we’re so fascinated with them to begin with. I’m also thinking about the line between an offensive character’s inexcusable behavior as necessary vs. unnecessary, which inevitably leads to the age-old “how willing are we to separate art from artist” question, especially in an internet age where many people find themselves in parasocial relationships with authors that let them make assumptions.

Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis — my favorite book of the year so far.

The Laughter by Sonora Jha — the closest thing to a real review I’ve posted in while. Painful, enraging, satirical and hyperrealistic. The more I sit with it, the more I think wow, this book is good.

I mostly watched a lot of trash TV in February, mostly due to my inability to start shows with hour-long episodes unless they’re reality TV. It’s not that I don’t like them! I just can’t do the Big Brain shows if they don’t make me laugh, don’t provide a distraction, or don’t keep me on my toes in a way that makes me panic (hi Last of Us). It makes me feel incredibly stupid, especially because I don’t approach reading this way. If anyone else shares my (unwilling) aversion, please recommend something or I’m going to keep watching bad shit on Netflix.

Ted Lasso — Very uncharacteristically zoomed through the first two seasons of this in time for the season 3

Laguna Beach — rewatched the first season and it made my heart hurt for teenage girls in the early aughts in ways I’d forgotten. Also, the fashion.

Prehistoric Planet — I’m on a real dinosaur kick lately, as mentioned in my list of small joys, and if you have Apple TV go watch this four-part series! It’s done like any old nature documentary, complete with narration by David Attenborough, which was simply delightful. A warning that they’re not sensitive about dino deaths, which felt a little unnecessary but probably realistic. The nature of the show’s format also means that, because we don’t know all that much about dinosaur’s behavior, the educated guesses scientists have made are often presented as fact without a disclaimer. If you are accuracy-minded like me, this is a little annoying at times but still informative!

Perfect Match — baaaaaaaaaaaaad

Drive to Survive — I feel like I’m getting over Drive to Survive? Like, the real-time drama and the races are just so much better.

Ticket to Paradise — one long Bali tourism ad feat. Julia Roberts and George Clooney, who deserve better work than an infomercial

Your Place or Mine — I have more chemistry with the static electricity on my doorknob than Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon do

The Worst Person in the World — fantastic, quietly heartbreaking. Very Kierkegaard-ian in its depiction of the anxiety of choice, which is maybe very Scandinavian as a whole?

“That’s all I have. I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books, and I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. I continued anyway. And now it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.”

Somebody I Used to Know — Alison Brie being Alison Brie, Jay Ellis being hot

Emily the Criminal — Emily isn’t good at being a criminal

Botox, sigh. I have so many thoughts about this still, but my main one is just that I do not have the energy to present this as a moral choice; it is simply something I was curious about. It is no longer an interesting argument to me to pose the question of good vs. evil when it comes to plastic surgery or cosmetic procedures. However, I have found it important to continue examining my impulse toward beauty in capitalistic ways that ultimately don’t matter, and Jessica DeFino’s substack The Unpublishable has been instrumental, even though it feels like a swift kick to the face of all my learned behaviors I hold dear.

A third pair of Air Force Ones, which is two too many

Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix

Bad Fruit by Ella King

A new lululemon belt bag oops! These things inexplicably have me in a chokehold

Starbucks pistachio cold foam cold brew thing, because their cold foam is one of my favorite things on the menu and their cold brew is strong enough to zap me awake, a true feat for this caffeine-riddled body. I also tried adding a pump of the pistachio flavor stuff to an iced matcha, which was incredibly sweet and tasted like a milkshake, but milkshakes are good.

pasta puffer — this doesn’t technically count as a purchase because I rented it (and could not stomach the $425 it retails for because that would require the kind of budgeting that allows for, ironically, eating only Barilla pasta and jar sauce for several months). But it was so polarizing amongst my friends — in a fun way, at least for me! — that I’m taking the opportunity to talk about the winter It Girl coat once more.

Happy spring, happy allergy season, happy rebirth, happy whatever. I’m beyond the hope of “maybe I’ll get better at posting” disclaimer; I am not a writer, I am not regimented, it does not matter.

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