A List Of People I Am Mad At, 1/27/24
This is a weekly (sometimes) list of people I am mad at. This is the list for January 27, 2024.
Does anyone want to come over and slap my phone out of my hand so I can successfully watch Training Day without simultaneously screaming at the Connections puzzle, please?
Ben Affleck.
Still reeling at how strongly a group of women responded to my bodega beverage choice a few weeks ago: a sparkling Welch’s grape juice. It’s perfectly normal! Everyone drinks them all the time!!! Why would I get defensive about this????? I’M NOT YELLING, YOU’RE YELLING.
I thought I found a grey pube but it was actually just one of my cat’s hairs which I guess begets of host of other questions I am not ready to answer.
I think it’s nice that my friends have twined mental breakdowns to mine so that when I had to fix the disco ball mirror I made during my last manic episode, I knew someone who had extra disco tiles. Now, I am again finding them stuck to the bottom of my feet. I’m confident that I have already eaten at least half a pound of glass dust. What a comfort it is to be known!
My dad called curled hair “the hair with snakes” earlier this week.
You know, I liked Barbie. I saw it a few times, but the first time was the most valuable to me: I went with my mom, my sister-in-law, and my niece. We span four generations; my niece is biracial and my mom’s immigration story is well-trod territory in my writing, in the little stories I tell myself about my family. I know liking Barbie is corny and simple and reductive. I know it’s a billion-dollar movie about a doll. I realize: this is just capitalism speaking back to me in a pink mini-dress that I still cannot fit in. But it was also a lone cultural product that spoke to all four of us; it offered a kind of language that we could all understand. My mom hadn’t seen something that spoke so directly to her grief, tied to her womanhood, linked to her motherhood. She’s been angry for decades without precise but simple words to make sense of it. My 13-year-old niece finally had language for her rage; she went to school the next day and absolutely laid out her two male best friends for their passive involvement in the patriarchy. Not a lot of cultural products can do that. Not a lot of movies can do that. No one’s arguing that Barbie is Sontag here, but can’t it be enough that a broad cultural product began to sow some seeds of rebellion? In 20 years, we’ll look at Barbie differently, the way we’re fond of Clueless or But I’m A Cheerleader; some cultural entities need years to bake, decades to form its argument fully or to find its audience as adults again. But for now, we’re stuck in the present, watching Hillary “I Forgot About Wisconsin” Rodham Clinton wade into the Barbie/Oscar discourse, comforting Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie for not being nominated for Best Director and Best Lead Actress, respectively. Sure, their movie got many other nominations, and they’ve been been nominated for Oscars before for other projects, and their POC-colleague was actually nominated but she’s had to spend the press cycle talking about how these two white women were robbed, and they also made enough money to buy Yo-Yo Barbie, which I recall being very expensive. I don’t know. I guess I thought since everyone was arguing so fucking much about this movie about a doll, they internalized at least a fraction of its message. Alas. So instead of just enjoying this film, loving it for what it gave to the girls in my family, I must join the chorus of millions of people around the world who were ready to defend it against men who belittled it as girl talk, and scream: Oh, fuck off.
Accidentally Googled myself this morning instead of typing in my email; shrieked.
More Scamfluencers episodes since we last talked, including stints with Teresa Giudice and Martha Stewart.