While lockdown hums along, and I grow slowly more forgetful about what the before times entailed, the new thing that really has stopped me from dropping off the edge is looking forward to things, really anything, a pot of coffee, apple crumble or that 5.15 Pointless episode. The other day I hit ECSTASY and got a new mattress. My bed is like a little cloud now. Thoroughly recommend levelling up your sleeping situation. It’s lockdown so your despair centre needs to be comfortable.
A thing that is BOTHERING ME is the bloody Sex And The City dIsCOurSe. SATC is a show that was groundbreaking, the benchmark, comparison point for modern women’s television, the Seinfeld of it rather, but like, if it makes people happy go for it, but like resurrecting it seems foolish? It’s like bringing back Seinfeld, it wouldn’t really make any sense. It is very of its time…
Anyway, it is my 26th birthday on Wednesday, and while I still feel 12, apparently I’m not? As difficult this is to compute, it does not make it a lie. This feeble milestone makes my blood boil because I feel I deserve another go at 25. Being locked up during your twenties feels like an injustice, and while it is, so you a) can’t do that b) there are things bigger than me c) I’m going to have to just move on. If you want to make me feel better, you know what to do…
Either way, do you know what else is happening on Wednesday? Joe Biden’s inauguration! Every four years those yanks steal my thunder! It is a bit bittersweet because sometimes it is great and history-making, like in 2009 and other times, it’s like, hello, can we stop being depressed about that orange man, it’s my birthday! For the first time in a wee while, I’ll be a bit busy before this goes out, so who knows what has happened in America since I wrote this, and this is kinda why I am writing about this in a pop culture newsletter; American politics is a thing I’ve been ingesting like a film. This is not to say that politics is NOT incredibly serious and something we should not take seriously, but we are all so terrified and exhausted with learning about coronavirus, lockdowns and social distancing that we have been treating the situation in the US like a 24 hour streamed distraction. Like, on one level I’d like to THANK GOD, the election lasted a week back in November! I had nothing else to do but to watch John King and other random white men point a map that switched from red to blue to red to blue.
That week, CNN was pumped through the homes of clueless Brits like mine. To me, CNN, despite being designed to keep you in a state of constant cortisol, has this creepy, comforting vibe… sometimes. It is a constant, always-on, always letting you know about things because knowing about things sometimes makes you feel like you have control over them. Of course, you don’t. I think this is why I want to be a journalist; to monetise my compulsion to know about the news. I must say at this point that this newsletter has a ZERO TOLERANCE policy on people who describe themselves as “a politics nerd" because as I tried to say before up top, politics is not about factoids, it is about power, and how that power is wielded over people’s lives. Sometimes, it would seem that people forget that.
It is not merely anecdotes about ex-Home Sectrateries, Winston Churchill misquotes and the like. To be honest, I can sometimes reach current events saturation point, and listen to anything but, it always drags me back because as I said, its something I flicker towards.
There is something about watching events unfold live on telly, like watching that horrific attack on the Capitol. You cannot really believe what you are seeing, and wondering if it is actually as big as a deal as the voices being broadcast over the video. Are you watching a moon landing moment, but the domestic terrorist version? Where you when that happened? Well, I was knitting on the sofa and listening to Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper and my queens Abby Phillips and Dana Bash exclaiming g about it unprecedented nature.
Anyway, happy birthday to me! I refuse to let Joe steal all my vibes.