digressions in listicle form

5 things i love

1. chai lattes

   

morning routines are hard. there’s a lot of pressure to have a perfect and aesthetic one, something you can romanticize and film with beautiful cinematography and caption with a lyric or motivational quote. although i often complain about the trend of monetizing your life, i almost as often wish i was able to. it feels as though i am watching myself, almost in a way similar margaret attwood expresses in her quote on the male gaze.

“ pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else.”

i am constantly looking at myself through an externally depersonalized perspective, am i marketable? i don’t know, i don’t have social media yet i still hyper-focus on it, just as a result of absorbing public conscience. it’s an odd dissonance to hold, i am both a product and a person, an object to be observed and an autonomous being.

HAHA i bet you forgot this was about chai lattes. while easily romanticized, i prefer to look at it as a simple joy, you just stick a teabag in a cup, dump some sugar in, and maybe add a cinnamon stick to be fancy. they are spicy, i get caffeine and i fucking love them.

2. discovering forgotten nostalgia

recently i found a CD of one of my favorite albums from childhood in a thrift store. although i don’t own a CD player, the closest thing being my moms car which is not particularly reliable on the account of giving the CD back, i had to buy it, 2$ is nothing in comparison to the genuine happiness i feel looking at it on my windowsill. not to bring everything back to capitalism, but i will. i cannot ignore the rampant commodification of nostalgia, ugly live action remakes and reboots (yes, the two are distinct, although i don’t care enough to google it) and how it ruins one of the most innate human pleasures of existence.

nostalgia is personal. whenever i see tin foil i feel nostalgic for the old, slightly disgusting house we first lived in when moving in with my step mom because one day someone kicked a bit of it down the stairs and my siblings and i spent hours trying to figure out who did it. can nostalgia even be commodified? with the personal nature of it, it’s odd that it can be made into profit, and yet it has been. that’s depressing. maybe i’ll write an essay on that some day. someone else has probably done it better, being exposed to everyone makes me feel unoriginal, which i am but sometimes dillusion is nice.

on a lighter note, anyone else remember those weird plastic echo microphones?

3. haley blais

   

as someone who lives in vancouver, i can confirm that as she sings “but if you see me out, im the coolest fucking bitch in town” she is correct. haley blais is the coolest bitch in vancouver, it’s constantly raining, expensive and drabby, but at least haley blais is cool, what more do you need.

seventeen a good song.

It's a straight line to normalcy, kid
Never had braces 'cause I got nothing to fix
So I walk home and listen to music
Too dumb to notice that I couldn't choose it

Everything was lame when I was 17
So I'm trying to be that person that I could have been
No, I can't complain with all the things that I've seen
Do you think that it'll last forever?
You think, you think that it will last forever?

4. noise-cancelling over-ear headphones

i like the quiet. not tense quiet, the kind you can feel when writing standardized tests in 6th grade. i like genuine, calm, quiet. like when you are under-water, for that split second when all you feel is cold, all you can hear is ambient noise. the next best thing is noise-cancelling headphones. or maybe i just like isolation.

5. discombobulated playlists with stupid names

there’s something very satisfying about making totally nonsensical playlists. it gives me the same feeling as drinking water from a mug, its so wrong, why would anyone drink water from a mug? that’s so stupid. and i enjoy same-ness, but its fun to do weird things every now and then. autopilot is easy and, as much as i rely on it, doing those little things that itch your brain is that one specific way is good. shake up the monotony !!!!