Hello close friends new and old. I didn’t do much this summer except play improv, which –embodied as it is– felt like a summer fling with an old flame. Now it’s unofficially fall and I feel energized and perfectly equipped to tackle my many many projects and see them through to completion. My brother’s calls from the throes of freshman year confirm my suspicion: the academic calendar still has a strong hold on my body. It’s a new year!
For an optional interactive reading experience, cue this song at the beginning of the penultimate sentence, indicated by an *asterisk. As always, skip to the end for the fun stuff.
She takes a break from restocking the shelves to smell the soaps. First miel, then citron, then lavende and finally argile, taking in the waxy, earthen scents and imagining a new life with them. She’s always somewhere she’s not. This time it’s an all-white bathroom, and she’s sinking into a bath, and the light is streaming in, and her feet are soft. It’s her afternoon off, and her husband has taken the kids somewhere autumnal.
None of this is real, she doesn’t even like baths. But the images are so clear she sometimes wonders if they are not daydreams but premonitions. She wipes the condensation from the shower glass and sees the lady in the bath and tries to send her a message, visualizing golden beams reaching across the room and into the future. She feels herself as the lady: ten years older, deeply breathing the scent of argile soap (or maybe lavende, she can never decide), eyes sleepy and then suddenly alert, receiving the missive from the past. She acknowledges the shabby girl with grace and care, nodding gently as if to say, “Yes, we are finally living in the moment.”
Lately, she’s been getting a sense of that thing adults have been talking about for years. “Oh, you won’t care about any of that when you’re older,” “You’ll see, none of this will matter to you one day,” Sometime very recently (perhaps last week?) she became one of them. The cable-knit lobes of her pre-frontal cortex finished their last stitch and suddenly she didn’t care about any of that anymore. This is mostly a good development, until an old sad song comes on the store playlist and she feels nothing but a small and detached sympathy for her younger self, compulsively sobbing in her freshroom dorm bed before pressing repeat. She thinks of the eggs in her fallopian tubes, a finite number of them set since birth, and wonders if the same principle applies to tears. Are her sobbing days numbered?
At the store, she professionally stewards the liminal space between want and have. A man sees a mirror, and suddenly he is in two worlds: The near future – where his wife is happy and his rental property is more valuable – and the present, where he feels powerful and in control of this easy decision. The girl spots a calm-before-the-cigarette expression on his face and ferries him forward: The mirror is $220, looks great in a red room, would you like the dimensions? It’s easy, he buys it. She is paid to get involved like this. For the older women, she speaks softly and with confidence. For the girls and gays, she babbles and compliments. For the men, she laughs at the women.
The day is long and full of questions (Sterling or plated? Grey or dark grey? Where is this from?), and after a while she is no longer impressed by her own cunning. One too many people asks for a paper receipt and she begins to lie, saying everything is imported from Morocco. Finally, it’s evening. No one has come in for an hour, and now no one will until morning. She turns off the playlist – Clean Retail Pop Hits 2022 – and turns off the lights. She locks the door and pulls down the grate, then locks the grate and pulls out her phone. Outside: the wave-like sound of passing cars and chatter at the pizza restaurant across the street. Some machinery hums in the distance. It’s almost too cold for just a blouse, but the subway isn’t far. *The girl taps her thumb against the glass of her phone until she finds the song she wants, and soft guitar fills her ears. A woman’s voice, the lyrics just for her.
Today’s Emoji: Slimy Yet Satisfying
I was recently admiring the bugs in my emoji keyboard. Several columns deep in the animal section, these critters are distinguished by their fine details. The hair on the caterpillar 🐛, the antennae of the cricket 🦗, the translucent exoskeleton of the cockroach, the beetle straight out of Pumba’s lunch. It’s a wonder to see this attentive treatment of God’s smallest creatures.
But how did we get here, from the veritable ZooPals of earlier generations? Language is a mutable tool, made useful by its ability to adapt. The first emoji set features a smiling dog, a smiling cat, smiling poop, and an angry dumpling. These were emotional cues, meant to buoy the new world of text-based communication, a world without facial expressions or tones. Smileys were the stars of the show.
More modern editions favor detail, realism, and specificity. Emojis are no longer just the emotional sidekicks to sentences, they are something like words themselves. Consider new additions: how better to convey 🙃 than 🙃? The longer we spend with these icons, the more meaning and history they take on, and the more we demand of them.
Let’s return to the bugs. While I appreciate the artistry, I’m suspicious of the turn from symbolic to material. Part of me thinks Unicode has capitalistic motivations: an Instagram caption is more eye-catching when there’s a picture for every word! I’m also concerned that the Emoji Rennaisance will lead to more intergenerational misunderstandings, as old people and young people struggle to create shared definitions (See also: my deepest sympathies 😂).
Worries aside, I’m excited to see what happens next. Emojis feel like a completely new frontier, and an excellent earmark for the century of text-based communication. There’s so much more I want to say about this; I didn’t even mention the unnecessarily sassy seal! Luckily, this section is a feature, not a bug 😉.
The Gossip
I have feelings about the Taylor-Swift-is-bisexual fan-theory.
As a bisexual, I’m always excited to discover a celebrity is one of us (hello, Susan Sarandon!) Oft stereotyped as messy, wallet-losing, promiscuous, glittery bitches with mustachioed boyfriends, we are a legion united in a sexuoliminal space, and we’re only growing in numbers. For the record, I think the stereotype is rooted in sexism but it is also very fun. I could see Taylor fitting the mould.
I also think it comes across as pathetic and invasive for us to lay false claim to someone who hasn’t even asked for a welcome party. But with the announcement of Midnights – her 10th studio album – is that exactly what Taylor is doing?
As a songwriter, I’m game to hunt for double-meanings in lyrics. I write easter eggs into my own songs all the time, references only that person would understand. Taylor favors a simple pop vocabulary, leaning heavily on Americana sentimentality and the rhymability of “2AM”, decorated with an abundance of unsubtle details from her own life. For years, fans have successfully matched her lyrics to some relationship or another.
Such fans have speculated that the evermore bonus track, right where you left me, is a metaphor for Taylor remaining “in the closet” after a breakup. The strongest evidence: “I swear you could hear a hair pin drop / right when I felt the moment stop.” Not a particularly impressive lyric, with an awkward syllabic structure bent around the hair pin detail. Go ahead! Google it! That’s right, it’s slang for dropping hints that you are gay!! The song’s narrator also bemoans that she is “still 23, inside her fantasy,” 23 being the only age Taylor Swift was not in a public relationship, and the year she had a well-documented friendship with model (and rumored ex-lover) Karlie Kloss. There are many, many more hints. But I digress!!!
As a lifelong Taylor Swift fan, our parasocial relationship has had its ups and downs. I remember feeling frustrated by her silence throughout the 2016 presidential election. When she “came out” as a Democrat by way of wearing a shoulderless sweater to the polls, I just saw it as a coy play to score points with her liberal fans without upsetting her conservative fans. On the flip side, I recall spending entire afternoons lying on my friend Kate’s carpet, poring over the liner notes for Speak Now and decoding the encrypted clues she was leaving by way of random capitalization. Taylor has a long history of speaking to her fanbase in riddles. Politics and the pushy, invasive atmosphere of the 2016 election is one thing. A stranger’s sexuality is something else entirely, and we are not entitled to it. Coming out has consequences, and for someone as famous as Taylor, those consequences would be on a global scale.
That being said… if she is bi, and if she plans to come out, it follows that she would want to control the narrative as much as possible. And what better way to tell the story than with an album? Look, I started this summer a Gaylor skeptic, feeling put-off by groundless fanaticism and bit too old for puzzles. But if Tik Tok user @swiftieplanntika’s dedicated research got me curious, Taylor’s own solemn, wistful alto on Carolina convinced me. If Midnights comes out and it’s not gay, I’ll eat my words (and be angry at her marketing team for all the queerbaiting). And if it is? There are things that only Carolina will ever know.
A Song
While Taylor Swift wallows in a vague longing, Carl Carlton is leaving nothing to the imagination in his 1981 R&B hit She’s a Bad Mama Jama (She’s Built, She’s Stacked). This jam is so good I have compromised my stance against parenthetical titles.
Credit where credit is due to Leon Haywood, who wrote the song and gave us this incomparable verse:
Her body measurements are perfect in every dimension
She’s got a figure that’s sure enough paying attention
She’s poetry in motion, a beautiful sight to see
I get so excited viewing her anatomy
With lyrics equal parts drooling wolf and Dr. Frankenstein, the way Carlton effortlessly flows lets you know: he’s saying exactly what he means to say.