REID #146

Jul 18, 2023

I no longer live near a Cinnabon, but a bakery up the street makes these huge rolls… (hand was supposed to be for scale but simultaneously and rightfully evokes longing)

SHORT:

I’d really appreciate it if people on the street would stop looking like this 1 girl Natalie from my childhood, because I’m always like: is that that 1 girl Natalie from my childhood?

Natalie never did me any harm, in fact, I quite liked Natalie.

It’s just really hard to “focus on the now” when girls on the street who look like Natalie from your childhood catapult you back to the “then”.

MEDIUM:

Speaking of “then”, the new Troye Sivan music video* is out and perfectly resembles what would be going on in the back of an open mic in 2018 while I was trying to do my set.

I don’t miss open mics or being 22, but I do miss being 24. I had “Big Feelings”.

I haven’t had a Big Feeling in a long time. I feel like I’m due.

Big feelings are fuel. Big feelings are ancient. Big feelings are god, probably.

Every week, my therapist tells me that there’s “really no difference between 24 and 27” and I’m like well there definitely is otherwise we wouldn’t need the distinction.

LONG:

One great thing about being 27, is I now have Jess. Yesterday they got flowers for our apartment and our neighbor asked “what the occasion was”, and Jess explained there wasn’t one. Cute.

The flowers are helping me forget about the 900 emails per day I receive that all say something along the lines of, “Thank you for your interest in our job. Unfortunately, you’re a talentless loser with no experience or potential so we are not moving forward with your candidacy. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and we enjoyed reading your shitass application”.

Another thing that’s helping is Florrie Bagel.

There's a woman named Florrie Bagel in Parade on Broadway who I cannot stop thinking about. She’s a standby for one of the leads, but I saw her in the ensemble.

Florrie full-body-belted the Parade score with every fiber of her being.

I could not take my eyes off her.

I’ve started looking for Florrie Bagels wherever I go.

For example, Jess forced me to go see Mission Impossible this weekend, and every time Tom Cruise was in danger, the man next to us would go, “oyoyoyoyoy!”. Midway through the film, he got up to use the restroom, and was gone for a notable duration. When he finally returned, he announced “I got lost!” to all of us.

Textbook Florrie Bagel behavior. Living out loud.

I appreciate that all of y’all continually take the time to read this.

I’ve been feeling a little burnt out lately, but I always try to crank something out for my devoted Reiders. Try as I might, my life still involves shooting myself around the city to a billion different activities and gatherings. This fragmentation fucks with my self-perception and gives me strange half-bursts of energy that result in strange, half-bursts of creative work. I whine about needing to re-write, slow down, really think things through, but the second I decide to do that, I get a text or a phone call that someone has a half-interest in something else I half-wrote and I need to haul ass to the train and take it 45 minutes to half-talk about how I need to half-finish the other half.

To make matters worse, I just learned about the word “nibling”. Why are all gender-neutral terms so unbelievably Oompa Loompa coded? Can’t we just have a normal word that falls solidly and unremarkably on the ears and tongue? I’m tired of whimsical queerness. Queerness is not whimsical. It’s hell that you can transcend and turn into something powerful and campy and flamboyant. Whimsy is weak. Whimsy is flimsy. It’s cutesy capital. Hasbro. Mattel. Easter Bunny. “Girls, gays, and theys” — okay! Ur selling me a car.

Anyway,

C U Next Tuesday.