#56 Plan_C - Something for Everyone
Whatever your circumstance the internet has something for you. Mostly. There is *always* an applicable Pingu if these don't work.
From my friend and yours, comic wordsmith Emily Kirkpatrick on newsletters. I will eat myself with self-awareness one day like the smug ouroboros I truly am.
Today is St Valentine’s day. So, much like reading your star sign in the back of Vogue, have a flip through and see which one applies most to you and follow that one.
For those of you who are in deeply fantastical relationships with manic-pixie-dream girls or softbois - here are the indie darlings in a rare moment of not playing a ukulele or jotting artful inking in their moleskines. If this doesn’t strike a chord with you I still think the soundtrack is very good, so there is that.
If you have really striking eyeliner and are secretly in love with someone then please use Margot. I, like most women, have all of the items to rustle up a Margot costume in about 3 minutes and I urge you to use that power when you need it (basically a hasty Halloween or hen-do with a theme).
Maybe you are in love for the first time and you just like “love the way he leans” like Angela Chase and Jordan Catalano. Maybe you see this infatuation as powerful but immature. Maybe you see this picture and feel like shouting, “What about Brian AND HIS LETTER, CARLY?” and I would agree with every single response and still bite my bottom lip when I think of Jared Leto here.
All Dads should be like Cher's Dad. I once told my Dad that my boyfriend had cheated on me and he said, “well people do stupid things.” He is correct. I would have liked it if he had called him a moron though. In times of unrequited love and strife borrow Cher’s Dad.
Is there anything this show doesn’t just absolutely nail? Owl, coma survivor and also Lisa Kudrow speaking here for the broken-hearted who have made it to the other side and wondered what the hell were they thinking.
Maybe the boy you fell in love with in the summer who was sweet and wholesome has inexplicably turned up at the high school you’ve been enrolled in because of a never really explained “change of plans”, maybe you remained hopelessly devoted and then with the power of changing everything about yourself, some tight trousers and some tongs it all came good and off you went in a flying car at a funfair while your best friend was a 32 year old high school student. Maybe. This one is for you.
If the lockdown has got to you and you’re seeking some illegal connections and human touch and that made you a little less choosy and now you’re on his sofa doing kisses and actually this isn’t right. The internet has this for you. Feel seen pop art valentines.
A whole book and film was made of this line. If you’re texting him and he waits 2 days to reply, if he says he likes you but doesn’t want anything serious, if he says he might be able to fall in love with you in time, if you have asked a friend with crystals in her house to do a tarot card reading, or if he tells you in a sweet and nice way that you could be great friends - he isn’t in to you. I’m sorry. He is obviously a moron. Please speak to Cher’s Dad.
If none of these are speaking to you then you know what? Blame the bloody internet and the way it makes everything binary and lack nuance! STUPID INTERNET. For every helpful app (deliveroo) there is a vicious rejoinder that makes people feel like shit or think that Paul McCartney is a lizard clone (all of social media it turns out).
Maybe your love is running a little dry at the moment. Maybe your job is too much or not enough. Maybe there is just too much of the grubbier bits of life wearing you down. You’re going to be ok because you will do it for her/them. Maggie has not specified her pronouns.
Or if that her isn’t yours maybe just do it for Greta Gerwig? She is flawless.
Maybe the world isn’t providing enough of the eligble people, that’s ok. Jimmy Stewart already existed and that is enough perfection for a lifetime, you can’t be blamed for that.
And - as always - a humbling reminder that real love, in all of its forms, is beautiful and mundane and I sincerely wish it for all of you.
None of these images, none of this information about Britney’s stratospheric teenage fame, mental breakdown in 2008, and the legal conservatorship that has governed her daily life in the 13 years since, is new. We just don’t often sit with the evidence – not this cohesively, not this viscerally.
You haven’t missed the discourse about this, I watched it and just felt sad that we keep doing this to people for no more compelling reason that having a gawk.
Article here.
Yet I was also aware of that scratching white noise of anxiety, which won’t lay dormant in your thirties. An old-school interference still cracking away and a manic preoccupation with ‘do more, be more, try harder, be better’.
The pressure to not just do your job and live your life and keep your kids content – but instead to exist in hyper 4D. To have an established, successful career that’s making an impact. Daily meaningful, golden-hued interactions with your children. Perfectly attended-to intimate relationships.
Article here
This article from a woman who has dated every sign of zodiac is glorious frothy distraction. I have read very meaningfully from Love Signs to prospective lovers before despite not being able to tell you anything about a sun sign, rising sign, 12th house or really knowing anything at all. I will remind you that I am a Libra for no real reason.
You don’t have to get too deep into the almost 1,000-page text to understand that Linda lived on her own kooky planet. In the foreword, she explains that she wrote Love Signs over the course of a decade while sequestered in a haunted suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, finally completing the book in 1978, a scenario that brings to mind Miss Havisham levels of insanity. (It’s worth noting that, fours decades on, the book’s conventional heteronormative framework in no way stands the test of time.) Still, it’s hard not to be just a little charmed by Love Signs. Like your favorite auntie, Goodman draws you in with her deliciously gossipy tone, casually dropping romantic advice in the form of cosmic cautionary tales.
Article here.
And for the cynics on this most heart-shaped of days this article - describing a feeling of which I have been guilty of in the past. For Valentine’s you do have to look past the plastic tat, truly baffling peddling of teddy bears for adults and those mediocre boyfriend reveals and maybe just be extra nice for 10 minutes? It is cool to be kind.
And yet, I refused to let up. For years, and years, right into adulthood. I still needed to be a girl who hates Valentine’s Day, because I wanted to be loved by the boys who hate Valentine’s Day, because Valentine’s Day is a day when things are expected of them. Hating it as a girl is your way of insisting “look how tiny I can be! I fold away and fit right in your luggage!”
If you are female with a credit card the internet has sent this coat to you on a myriad of platforms (and the lookbook for the Simone Rocha X H&M collection - simply everywhere I turn!). I can’t blame those marketing folk for their everywhere-ness because I do want this coat. I am a simple mind when it comes to coats. To borrow a wonderful phrase from a pal on Twitter, “I am back on the parcels” which is a fair description of my life right now.
These are in my hair right now, small flowers incased in resin and somehow optimistic Spring in a hairslide. I think I also like them because of a childhood obsession of the ancient mosquito in amber from Jurassic Park. I just want to touch it so bad.
There is a red for everyone and a beautiful lacquered compact of Chanel reds is never a bad thing to give or receive.
