Hey you,
It’s time for the SWEETIE Weekly! These are the highs and the lows of the week that was.
🤠 SWEETIE RATES 🤠
The downfall of Harry Styles
Every year, hell sometimes even every six months, I will have a dream that Harry Styles and I are in love. It’s a love I’ve never known before, deep, intense, utterly spellbinding. This has been happening since 2017 and I don’t know how to make it stop.
Despite this unshakeable dreamscape, I am not a Harry stan. I can already feel myself being doxxed by chronically online children for admitting this publicly, but I have to speak my truth; I think his music sounds like it was made in a lab to soundtrack Kmart commercials, I think his outfits are ugly as sin and I think it’s dogshit that his fans send death threats to the women he dates and he doesn’t do anything about it. This does not count.
His downfall is coming. It could have even happened by the time you read this. You may have already seen the seeds being sown, here, here and here. I have been watching and I have been waiting, just know that. The facade is falling away.
Take a break, Harry! It might do you good.
Act Up by Day Day
Whenever I find myself loving a song from a TikTok trend, I feel immediately awash with a red hot shame, furtively looking both ways before I add it to my Spotify likes. But not this time. Act Up by Day Day is now equal first with my other favourite song called Act Up. It’s just too good to care.
Why this song (released in 2020) didn’t blow up faster blows my mind. You can hear space for a verse from every single one of the main rap girlies of the mo on this and it would make perfect sense, including Day Day’s references of City Girls and Nicki Minaj, but also Monaleo, Rico Nasty, Flo Milli, CupcakKe for God’s sake!!! Ugh. I could listen to it again and again. And I will.
Reading
Not to brag but I read almost ten pages of a book this week. And I read it in a PARK. Yah, sorry for being so freakin’ cerebral. My relationship with reading fell off shortly after the invention of Instagram, and I have averaged about 1.5 books every year since.
Reading is cool, though. Even though my concentration has been shot to shit, I’m feeling confident and brave about getting back into it. I already feel ensconced by a newfound superiority complex.
Though I do have to pause every few pages to marvel at how smart I must look to other people.
“God, she’s so smart…” that’s what they must think.
😡 SWEETIE HATES 😡
The coffee in London
As the first ever Australian person to move to London, it’s my duty to very originally inform you that the coffee here is pretty bad. Like, I-don’t-know-how-they-do-it-bad. It’s mental, innit, how desperate things could be.
Before you fervently hit the reply button, YES, I did go to an Australian cafe… and there was not one Australian barista in sight. The coffee was just like the others I’ve had, weak and sweet, but it had a special twist — clotted clumps of milk. Curdled milk in my £5 iced latte, unearthed halfway through drinking it, like those human remains that keep popping up in Lake Mead. Oy vey.
At last, I thought I did find the holy grail. I was becoming a regular, everything was going so well! And then I ruined it. I took the wrong coffee from the barista, and instead of taking it back I just kept walking. It was too late. I was physically unable to relent. I took a sip of what as now my coffee, but was actually an iced matcha latte with oat milk. Not a good one either. I can never go back.
The search continues.
The Instagram algorithm
Remember when Instagram used to be, dare I say, fun? I’m struggling to remember exactly when that was, but I know for sure it was before the introduction of Reels. Christ on a bike, nothing has ever made the gulf in Instagram’s understanding of its audience clearer than Instagram Reels.
I don’t habitually watch Reels, because I’m not a huge loser, but I recently checked on my recommendations out of pure curiosity. I was horrified, truly, at what the Instagram algo thinks of me. First up, a video by a gristly, muscular man with a potential eating disorder waxing lyrical about the beauty of eating plain chicken and rice every day. Um, sure.
The next video? A young landlord complaining about missing out on six months of her mortgage payments because someone dropped out of a 28-day Airbnb stay in her home… I couldn’t take it. I felt my face mottle with rage.
TikTok may harvest all my data and sell the core of my identity down the river in exchange for a few funny videos and a host of new insecurities, but at least it knows what tf it’s doing when I open my FYP. Zuck, babe, be for real. I mean, landlord content? Jesus.
The male gaze
Stop that!!!!!!!!!!
That’s all 💗
Love you.