What noise am I canceling out anyway?
Big Society is out to make you forget you have taste
September was one of those months where I was out of town every weekend. It’d been a while since I’ve blogged anything, so I was looking for something to write about. My first idea on Tuesday morning was to rank the billboards for tech companies up and down the 101—I can tell you they change a lot, which I know because I commute on it three times a week so I spend a lot of time judging the copy they approved to go up there for all those eyeballs. (I am the eyeballs.) Sometimes there are good ones, but the current bunch are all bad (except, as always, for the Airbnb billboard that appears right at the crest of the city as you drive back North. Airbnb is bad for the housing crisis but their ads are always clever.) But basically that’s all there is to say. They’re terrible. I don’t want to give these asinine SaaS companies more advertising, so I don’t want to name them outright, and then I’d be left with very little content.
Later at work that afternoon, I had an idea to write an essay on how the cool clunky headphones aesthetic may soon be gone as quickly as it arrived, coopted by tech bros. I saw my most boring and drink-the-corporate-coolaid coworker’s manager, who I can only assume is even more boring and drink-the-corporate-coolaid than my coworker, wearing the same over-the-ear headphones I have, and I thought noooooooooooo this is the beginning of the end for the the Bose QC 45s I fear!!! Pour one out. I mostly got them because they’re cute—they look like big earmuffs!—but also for the noise canceling. Then I started wondering about what I was really looking to cancel out. If the tech bros are wearing them—and those are the guys who are famously most excited about selling out humanity—then maybe canceling out the real world with over-the-ear headphones for the sake of aesthetics goes against my values. Maybe I should take them off and live in the real world, listen to real world sounds.
But then I was in the backseat carpooling back from my boring and corporate job, watching those stupid billboards go by overhead, listening to group-friendly muzak and to my coworkers complain that the sunrise was in their eyes, and I remembered why I wear the headphones, and I decided giving the wrong signal was worth the actual resistance.
My lovely friend Alex went on her honeymoon on Sunday. She’s in Japan. On Wednesday she sent me a photo of a scrapbook-y travel spread in her bullet journal. I told her I had also been thinking about bullet journaling again and that she should post it on bettabujos. She did—our first post in a year and a half. (I used to be very much in the bujo community. If you don’t know, now you know.) By then I still hadn’t found the energy to sit down and write something about what it was I’d been swishing around, about how much I hate tech and working in tech and the people who enjoy working in tech. I guess laying out everything I hate about it did not seem fun enough to energize me. But the thought of bullet journaling seemed fun, so I decided to do that.
At the airport on the way to Alex’s wedding last weekend I bought Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True, which I’ve been recommending to everyone. I’m only at the part where he’s at Berkeley, and while I’m sure he figured out his career since here I am reading his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, he talks so much about making zines and being alt and off the beaten career path, and I love it so much. Hua Hsu couldn’t get anything published in Berkeley’s newspaper, but from what he says he didn’t really dwell on that—he just accepted that he probably wouldn’t be widely read so he decided to go niche. Why didn’t I think of that? I grew up so white and mainstream and coastal elite, circling the Hollywood drain, the New York Times drain, that it always seemed like knocking on that door and hoping they’d let me in was the only option. I wonder what my life would be if it didn’t take me so long to realize no one was forcing me to do any of this, if I’d found myself in more alt spaces earlier on, without one foot always in the world of the ultra rich. What it would be like if I had started making zines earlier or blogging earlier or if I was more brave about being looked at, even now? Stay True makes me think that going to an establishment journalism school and then not taking an establishment media job with upper class social capital doesn’t mean I couldn’t cut it. (And what would I be cutting, anyway? Conformity? Performing wealth?) It just means it’s what happened. And now I’m where I am, and now more things will happen. A morally neutral sequence of choices.
It’s a cusper class, the Striving Class. It’s where I’ve always been, on the fringes of these intense spheres of power, begging them to say I’m cool, too. It’s what I know, and rejecting all that always seemed permanent and scary. There’s a whole gendered aspect to it, too: Beauty is all tied up in power, so turning away from power might make me the weird girl, and all my friends would still be hot girls, and I could never quite commit to that. But you know, every time I really lean into what I’m really into, my true aesthetic, I never feel ugly. I always feel hot when I’m being me! hehehe!
Figuring all that out earlier would’ve been chill. I wish I knew then what I know now: A tale as old as time. Oh well, I’m still kickin’. Why not do things I actually think are fun, like bullet journal? And if posting it seems fun, I can write one of those cute NPC captions that fanpage admins write, like
On Wednesday evening I cut up a peach that is so past season that it became remarkable to me as the last peach I will eat until next summer. I sat down to bullet journal and listened to my daylist. Those silly titles just get me! I feel like I’m in this brain-on-low-battery-mode space this week, this fugue state on the verge of coming down with something, and seeing my music data, which perhaps is the cutest data of all the personal data, written up like that with vibey little gradients in the back is just so funny.
That said, I did consider, don’t daylists just keep us running in circles? Shouldn’t we branch out? Isn’t it good to find new music, listen at different times, switch it up once in a while? But I keep listening to it anyway, because that’s the music I listen to! It’s the music I like to listen to, the music I’ve already been listening to, artists whose voices sound like my own thoughts at this point. I ate my fruit and thought to myself, it’s important to know what inspires you, what music sounds like you. Might be good to keep a note, to refer back to it when you forget you have taste.
I guess what I’m saying is figure out what makes you go like
because that’s literally who you are! Unique vibes! Crazy crazy. ₊˚⊹♡ lmk what you put on yours ♡⊹˚₊
I agree. As both a writer and musician who has busked in various places, it's pretty apparent how people, especially the "younger generation," have increasingly been programmed to tune out everything in their environments that's not already controlled and pre-programmed, thereby missing sounds, serendipity, and real life inspiration. Even many years ago, the Washington Post did a now famous experiment where they got the world famous violinist Joshua Bell to busk in their subway, and predictably, because he was "just a busker," almost everyone ignored him and walked right by him, due to the context..even though he was actually playing magnificently. Finally, after many minutes, a single woman recognized him and lost her shit over the fact that a world famous violinist was playing right in front of her, by the subway, for free. Be present.
i go thru ur things, i read them, I screenshot walls of texts that speak to me knowing they will sit in my screenshots folder with all the other random Reddit comments that spoke to me but that I will never “go back and mull over” —all of this to say, ur work speaks to me mad, im so excited to have this stuff to read.