I’ve been thinking a lot recently about depictions of female joy in this blighted place. I think I wrote about this before, that the depictions of female joy seem entirely manufactured for lawn fabric campaigns. But instead, these days it feels like the one thing fashion campaigns nail is a sense of abject misery on everyone’s faces, particularly for wedding / festive season collections. Anyway, where are these depictions of women just existing, of doing everyday tasks, of finding any kind of joy that one can in this blighted place, of something that isn’t manufactured for an explicit purpose to sell us something (edit: and isn’t mined from some glorified idea of nostalgia, the latest plague that has afflicted ad campaigns) Every time I go out, I am astounded by how different things are in real life, the simple acts of fun and joy and beauty, of just being: a girl in a stunning pleather jacket with stunning hair sitting on the back of a motorcycle, girls conspiratorially leaning in in a shop or the two girls I passed by the other day, one indignantly saying to the other, “well, you didn’t have to save his number.”

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This song is so good. I cannot stop listening to this.

Also, thanks to the Crown, I rediscovered this:

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I really liked reading this by Stella Bugbee at the Cut: on Instagram, and the culture of sharing, and getting out of it. I have been reading a mix of books, most recently We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper, which I really liked for the way it unpacked and broke down all of the theories of a brutal murder. I am also spending a lot of time on Pinterest because I am not using Twitter or Instagram. My brain is blissfully conflict-free but I do think there would be a great market for a newsletter that’s just a roundup of microaggressions that I would subscribe to and then have to keep deleting unread.

I am also watching Schitt’s Creek again, as well as The Good Place for the first time, and Call My Agent for the second — because there can never be enough Herve. And this morning I saw this scene again. This is arguably one of my top five favourite scenes from Derry Girls, which I keep forgetting is set to have a third season!

I just realised everything here is about things that are currently making me feel any kind of happiness. I suppose there’s no point in rounding up things that are currently making me stressed/sad, which are far too many. I suppose the one thing I refuse to do is to be beaten down into being joyless, which seems like a far too profound realization to have at the end of writing a blog post.

Anyway!