Precipitation coaxed me back inside: I saw some snow (soft, loose, fluffy), then some rain (hydrologic overlook, as an imminent meteorological disaster; more dour showers over a groggy city), then clouds bloomed over the pre-solstice skies. I haven’t written one of these in a while, but the end of the year looms menacingly and I’m keen to churn out a few writing projects in the remaining time.
This collection is the care diaries.
- care / less: caring less, carelessness
- care of self, skin: we all care for skincare
- take care: care comes with costs
💌
care / less
could i care less? ; hadn’t you always been so careless?
We are so willing to bend ourselves into shapes others can love.
(This thought isn’t mine. I read it somewhere, and I can’t find it again in text, but I find it painted everywhere else.) Think of a person’s disposition as play-doh: tacky, colorful, sculpts and stretches like putty. Eagerly malleable. Like a children’s toy, all too easy to be toyed and trifled with. We are constantly collapsed and folded into new forms.
In this modern age, unspoken norms dictate everything is casual until it isn’t. That nothing can be more than it is, because attentions are scarce and authenticity is scarcer. If only there were a name for this mass delusion, to be in want of the real thing, but remain content for the compromise of a breadcrumb. We will not ask for more than what can be given, freely and easily. Perhaps we’ve been fooled in the belief that the parts can be summed to a whole.
Haven’t we always been so careless with each other? Unprotective in our encounters. Meeting new people, making small talk, meaning something to one another.
The carelessness breeds mistrust. A lack of belief that anyone can be any more than what they give in the present. Alternatively, a preemptive warning that everything can be exchanged and transacted for another. It’s all so easy. It’s all so interchangeable. Isn’t this the way, where I care more and skin my knees on it? We are the moving pieces, always evolving ourselves to more likeable and pleasant shapes. We say we could care less about doing this, even when we bend over backwards for it. We have the good sense to feel bothered when others don’t care much for it either. Realize, then: there are no good ways to protect against carelessness.
care of self, skin
i care, you care, we all care for skincare
Jia Tolentino already affirmed our consumerist fixations on the skincare industry as a collective coping mechanism. An escapist regimen as an affirmation; wanting to feel good (better, best), and a unbridled willingness to spend toward its achievement. There is little space to question the skincare rebrand as a discipline of selfcare, an insistence that every smear and smudge of product is a way for caring for myself as an extension of my largest, most vulnerable and overexposed organ.
I do this thing where I stand in front of my closet mirror, leaned in forward close enough for my eyes to narrow to focus pinpoints. A form of observation that borders on fixation. I study the history of myself as it is sculpted across my face. A scholar-critic of every ravaged wound, discolored scar (out, damned spot). Icepicks and craters as corporeal failures.
Cosmopolitan truths for a post-industrial era: every girl has something they want to fix; every industry thinks they can sell the fix. It can be packaged in dusty rose pink, or wrapped in vivacious yellows; or pressed down into powders and whipped up as emollients. Seven steps, scaled up or down to suit the skin. It can take any form of consumerist witchcraft, so long as it dangles the unfulfilled promise that it might just work.
In the evening, each layer of toner and cream feels like a sacred step in a healing ritual. As if doing it enough times can assure absolution, and rectify any cosmetic deficiencies that have mistakenly come to pass. I am caring for myself now, for the future, when I could not prevent these disasters in the past.
take care
care comes with costs
One of the best covers (of all time!) is this Florence + the Machine live rendition of Drake + Rihanna’s “Take Care”
you hate the fact that you bought the dream and they sold you one
Every institution of care has been corporatized. Childcare, daycare, eldercare. Caring for others has never come at such expense. I’m not in the business of long-term financial planning just yet, but sometimes I sit and my mind wanders toward the sheer cost of a lifetime. It is so steep. Staggering. Almost cheaper to care less.
I also kind of hate it when people sign off a message with “Take care of yourself” before they drop off your radar for an extended time, maybe forever. It reads so patronizingly. (I’ve probably been guilty of it on occasion, and sometimes I do mean it.) But if I could take care of myself, I would; I will. I don’t want to have to be commanded to take care, because that phrase implies necessity. It implies a required maintenance, an unkempt disposition. Abandonment, absence—they do little to alleviate whatever wounds I must heal in their stead.
these past weeks
- watched: the white lotus s02, the sex lives of college girls s02, making a dent in gossip girl (reboot) s02
- read:
- finished trust exercise by susan choi (narrator sarah asks “can’t there be a silent language?”)
- started the candy house by jennifer egan (somehow a sci-fi sequel?),
- listening: “christmas tree farm (old timey version)”