collections: a weekly reset

It’s February 15th. We are one-and-a-half months into the new year.

• all stories have a beginning, middle, and end: to all the boys: always and forever ends as a love letter to endings and how hard it is to say goodbye.
• we were both young: love story (taylor’s version) collapsed the years between middle school and adulthood.
• something like chasing stars: the american narrative is obsessed with space movies and sending astronauts on interstellar adventures

💌

At the start of this year, I said I wanted to write more. It was more of an aspiration than a resolution, but what’s aspiration without a little inspiration?

Here’s the plan: at the end of every week, I’ll block off thirty minutes to an hour on my calendar. I’ll write about what I thought about that week, spinning aberrant thoughts into a periodical narrative. Then, I’ll publish it.

This isn’t a newsletter in the formal sense (I’m not a newsletter writer, nor do I really want to be). It will be more like a semi-public diary. Some of these will be half-formed ideas that I have been nurturing; others will be half-compromises for fully-fleshed essays I hope to write one day but lack the energy and motivation to do so. I will get there one day.

I’m always thinking about something, and I mean this in the way that I care and pay attention a lot of things and they have the luxury of taking up space in my brain. I’ll take any opportunity to pathologize my inner thoughts and reason through my neuroses. A lot of this will be captured through the lens of my relationship with technology and the internet. The kind of armchair sociocultural anthropologist that pays homage to her tools and instruments. Infusions of soft-hued nostalgia and cultural references.

Sleepless nights when I try to make sense of the confused chaos of my own brain. These are the late hours when I think about:

• why we can’t let teen girls like things and the purchasing power they command once their wallets are valuable
• skewed perception of fiscal value and monetary services, until one day we learn about wall street and everything changes
• the implicit generational trauma of being a child of the internet, information overload and polarization unbound.
• the fuzzy edges of my consciousness from self-aware to world-aware in a house of cards newscycle: that post 9-11, kindergarten during katrina, elementary school financial crisis state of mind.

🌃

on turning twenty-two in the year 2020.

There’s a certain rite of passage when you turn twenty-two. All the major young adult milestones are presumably behind you: you’ve voted in an election, had your first legal drink of alcohol, and graduated from university. Everything ahead of you now exists in the postgraduate limbo called the rest of your life. You also listen to Taylor Swift’s “22” because i don’t know about you, but you wouldn’t really be twenty-two without it.

A perfect storm of happy, free, confused, and lonely.

Take these last three minutes and twenty seven seconds with your hipster glasses and oversized t-shirts. You may never feel this way again, but

everything will be alright if we just keep—

an ordered list of things i really really loved this year.

see my scrapbook 2020 for all the stories i consumed.

top picks

• tv shows (twenty-eight): never have i ever
• films (thirty-three): to all the boys p.s. i still love you
• books (> twenty-five book goal):
• audio (“2014 cottagecore”): folklore by taylor swift
• guilty pleasures (a few here and there): dash & lily
• lukewarm disappointments (too many to count): mulan