Hi!
Big week for me, in that I drank a lot and ate a lot and had a really nice time. How was yours? LMK when you get a sec, I’m worried about u.
Anyway.
🌺 SWEETIE RATES 🌺
Ageing
I used to hate my birthday because, quite obviously, it meant I was getting older. To me, to age was to become uglier in society’s eyes, to put more pressure on myself for being what I (confusingly) considered unsuccessful, and to beat myself up for being chronically despondent. The higher and higher my age climbed, the more listless I felt. It was like a fingertrap, the more I thought I needed to fight against my life, the more stuck I became.
When I turned 30 last year, many, many people, perhaps too many, asked me if I had been freaking out over the milestone. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. In all honesty, I felt relieved. My twenties had been so fraught, full of so much struggle and marked by the feeling of treading water, to leave it behind was its own gift. To turn 30 was to look my future in the eye, many lessons tucked under my belt, and know that I would be OK, no matter what came my way.
This past week saw the arrival of my 31st year. I am aware that many people, including past versions of myself, could look at my life and project a sense of panic onto it. I don’t have a lot of things you’re ‘supposed’ to have at 31, I don’t do a lot of things you’re ‘supposed’ to do. I’m still discovering what I like and don’t like, what kind of person I want to continue growing into. Every birthday, each new age, it’s all a reminder that I’ve made it so far, and I have, I hope, the privilege to still venture so much further into the unknown.
My birthday was beautiful. I did what I liked and I spent it with people I am lucky to have in my life. I ate my favourite food. I drank margaritas. I am happy, happier than I’ve ever been by a country mile.
When your birthday comes around, do not panic. You made it around the sun one more time. That’s no easy feat. Ageing is a gift, and if you’re lucky, you are its constant recipient.
I’m Like a Bird by Nelly Furtado
Sometimes as an adult you rediscover something that dominated pop culture in your adolescence, something you’d completely failed to grasp the meaning of at the time, and it suddenly hits different.
When I heard I’m Like a Bird by Nelly Furtado the other day, I thought about how, as a very literal child, I found the premise stupid. She’s like a bird? She’ll only fly away? Humans can’t fly, you idiot, you absolute moron.
I listened closer. It has a nice little beat, I realised. I’m bopping away. Then I started listening to what she was actually saying, and I got goosebumps. Nelly you crazy lady, I completely understand you. Now I get it! It’s about having a disorganised attachment style. What a banger.
Reading random Google reviews
Bored of the internet? You’re not trying hard enough. Pull up Google Maps, look up, for example, ‘Subway’, click reviews, sort by lowest to highest rating, and read the tales of woe that strangers have left for the franchises closest to you.
I am trying to get into the psychology of the people who order Subway and decide to leave a rage-filled review. It’s not good. Just think about where you have to be, emotionally, for that activity to occur to you as a good use of time. Though, the spectacle of it all is too enjoyable for me to want it to stop. The passion, the drama!
As a species we used to have to hunt with spears and start our own fires and try not to eat poison berries and now we can walk into a building with photos of gigantic vegetables printed on the walls and get someone to make us a sandwich we know is terrible, with a choice of a million combinations of flavours, then, when it does not please us, we run to our phones and poo-poo the people and establishment that made it. It’s amazing what modernity has done to the human brain.
Personally, I’m here for it. I’d kill to be a fly on the wall in the interaction between Forhad and that reviewer. First Jared, now this, how will Subway recover?
👹 SWEETIE HATES 👹
Harry/Meghan/The Royal Family’s issues
Please. I am begging. I am on my knees with my hands clasped in desperate prayer, I am looking to the sky with tears in my eyes. How can we escape the reality in which this drama unendingly drags? I don’t support the monarchy, I abhor the abject racism and sexism that has been torpedoed at Meghan Markle, and I really, really do not care for Spare and the circus surrounding it.
On the one hand, it’s rare now to see an incredibly internationally famous person absolutely wilding out and spilling secrets you couldn’t waterboard out of most people. After all, celebrity has become too sanitised and curated for anyone else to be this transparent. On the other hand, the whole thing now just makes me deeply and spiritually sad. Enough!
I cannot hear about all of this anymore. Short of locking yourself away like Ted Kaczynski, I don’t know how anyone who is even a casual reader of the news is unable to avoid this press cycle. It just won’t go away. Boomers are positively foaming at the mouth. The world’s biggest loser (Piers Morgan) must have a permanent stiffy. It’s not interesting anymore.
Australia is wider than the moon
Did you know this? Australia is wider than the moon and I have never been more unsettled by a ~fun fact~ in my life. Why is it wider than the moon? Why is my sweet moon so skinny? Who found this out? Why not keep it to themselves? We as earthlings shouldn’t know how wide the moon is!
It’s not even smaller in the way that it’s an apples-and-oranges difference, Australia is 600km wider than the moon. That’s too much! ARGH!!!!! I’m scared!
Conversations about writing
I don’t know if it’s because my family would find and read my journal when I was growing up, but I am extremely cagey when telling people what I’m writing about.
If I tell you I’m spending the day writing and you say “What are you writing about?” The conversation is over. Just… things, OK? Leave me alone. That’s my business. And I’ll write about you if you’re not careful.
Bye for now!