I still have no fcking clue what to do with this newsletter
On tattoos, metamorphosis, Moon Lists, and leaning into the absurd
When I first showed my best friend Alanna my latest tattoo—a giant, beautiful dirty gin martini with three olives nearly spanning the length of my left bicep—she hesitated.
“That’s amazing,” she finally said, “but you’re the kind of person who gets really into things for a while, and then abandons them entirely. What if that happens with your tattoos?”
Her concern was valid. The annals of my personal history could easily be earmarked with evidence of my evolution, the paper trail documenting my constant flux. Phases of my life that were once true cornerstones of my identity have been shed like snake skin. I was a fervent lacrosse player in my teenage years, for example, but abandoned the sport in my second year of college. In my mid-twenties, I was a skater girl in LA, and—much to the dismay of family and friends—a huge fan of K-pop in college.
I am none of these things anymore (normal!), but the point Alanna raised had been taken. At the cusp of thirty, I’m not even sure how the current phase of my life could be described. Like all people, I’m evolving faster than my brain can catch up with, than language itself can describe.
Consequently, this newsletter is a source of minor personal anguish because it evolves as I do, an ever-metamorphosing mirror of my mentality.
Someone asked me not long ago what this newsletter is about and I couldn’t give them an answer. I still have no clue. My likes and dislikes, an outlet for pointless rants thinly disguised as cultural critique? No idea! And this sickly chartreuse green, this logo of the Victorian lady melting in the couch? They were resonant last year, but I’m considering swapping the color scheme entirely for black, white and red to better match my personal website1 (and to make this feel less like a self-pity party.)
The Substack gods have made clear that consistency is the key to healthy readership and to maybe even making money on here. I can’t give anyone that; I never have, not even to myself. I can’t pretend like I know what I’ll want in two months, let alone in five years. So why not act upon the present?
Of course, all of this is very trivial when you consider all the things that are happening in the world currently. To paraphrase this gorgeous Guardian piece published not long ago, “things are going down the tube quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark.”
We are waist-deep in eerily familiar waters, and I’m tired of hearing justifications for the awful behavior on display by the billionaire broligarchs buying their way into the White House and Germany’s AfD. (No, Elon isn’t just awkward! You know what you saw!) It’s exhausting, and, as usual, I’m turning to other artists for solace and good ideas for navigating this scary reality.
I subscribe to Moon Lists, a wonderful Substack that publishes prompts monthly meant for deeper reflection and discussion. This month’s prompts centered around the absurd. Here’s a snippet of the intro:
In the wake of World War I, the Dada movement emerged as a response to the incomprehensible horrors unfolding in real time—they rejected reason, embraced pure nonsense, found radical freedom in the surreal.
I’ve been thinking about absurdity on a smaller scale. Of the connection that comes from watching things unravel….together.
Lately, life has been seeming both too big to process and too specific to ignore. Things feel like they’re spiraling into madness and yet: my friends still text me videos of themselves being idiots in dance workout classes; or pictures of their dog wearing a fur stole; or a detailed timeline of their ex’s lifestyle pivot from financial analyst to….pickleball influencer.
This might as well be the era for leaning fully into the absurd. A martini tattoo might seem like an absurd thing to commit a lifetime to for some people. And maybe it is. The entire patchwork sleeve I’ve been inking into my arm, piece by piece, is perhaps a shrine to the absurd concept of radical freedom, my love and desire for everything this reality currently isn’t.
There’s the dancer, flowing lithely between the sun and moon, a nod to Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también; a wine bottle and a cigarette laying alongside a flower on a tabletop, smoke curling daintily from the ashtray; an oyster, the superstar filter feeder and unbeatable appetizer; and a skull in the desert, the dreamiest dreamscape I can possibly think of. Consciously or not, I’ve been building a mosaic of Dionysian daydreams, one that shuns reason in favor of hedonistic pleasure.
Will these images resonate with me still in twenty years, or they simply reflections of my present whims? I can’t tell, but the irony of permanently inking a “phase” of my life into my skin isn’t lost on me. Perhaps it is a little absurd. For the record, Alanna and I are planning on getting matching tattoos (orange slices, if you must know, and no, we won’t tell you why). But I’d argue that engaging in the absurd much better than being normal, which is boring at best, and, these days, dangerous at worst.
How does this tie back to the newsletter? Not sure. I’ve been drinking wine while writing this. The point is, I still have no fcking clue what to do with it, and I’m trying to just enjoy the process of being in the present vs. stressing out about whether I’ll still like what I’m doing with it in a year or so. If the whole thing changes in a few weeks or months or perhaps never, you know why.
As always, thanks for being here. I hope you find a way to embrace the absurd, live in the present, and fight the tightening fist of fascism however you see fit.
DO NOT look at this on mobile!! Squarespace has betrayed me and I cannot figure out how to make this look good if you’re not on desktop.