The Trend Report™ 🍌 Shop Sick

Reflecting on the post-holidays and the only social network that matters to me.

Town Mourns the Loss of Five Lives After Shooting
Club Q Patrons Fought Back and Subdued Gunman
"The hero of Colorado Springs was cuffed"
“Unarmed queers”
“Joshua was inside Club Q”
Right-wing media attacking the LGBTQ community
"was previously responsible for bomb threats"
“also had a tumultuous upbringing? The queer and trans people”
The more I read about the Club Q items, the more I just cry, for both the sadness and the strength of the community. It’s very awful, but there is a lot of brightness despite the death. (A related item is this story that predicted queerphobic attacks based on conspiracies.)

"It is all about family."
"explain how you appeared in this world?"
"Qatari police seized this flag… it resembles the rainbow"
This week in queerphobia, via Canadian Russian Embassy tweets and the World Cup. Wild theory: these flagrant anti-LGBTQ+ behaviors will spark some sort of cold war (or literal war). It will be interesting how things like “fuel efficiency” or “sponsor money” eclipse human rights.

'Bodies drop' as Walmart manager kills 6 in Virginia
1 person killed and 5 wounded in downtown Atlanta
Sad.

Disney Shares Soar on Iger Return as CEO
This is so funny to me, someone who does not care at all about Disney.

Musk will restore accounts banned for harassment
Musk’s dismantles Twitter's ability to police content
Twitter has lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers
Musk will create 'alternative' smartphone
“this is all about his kids not speaking to him”
”restoring hate speech accounts while suspending indie journalists”
This week at flop ass Twitter.

"I did a…a tweet two weeks ago. Something about insulin."
Remember the Eli Lilly insulin parody Tweet? The person who did it is actually a news producer and breaks down why this is a big issue. Very informative!

Trump criticized for dining with Nick Fuentes and Ye
A big story this weekend. The tl;dr is Kanye somehow “got int” Mar-A-Lago and brought along a 24 year old white supremacist and Holocaust denier.

Herschel Walker’s Tough-Talking ‘Erection’ Gaffe Goes Viral
lol

I looked up “sick of shopping Japanese word” followed by “German word for being sick of shopping.” I was curious if there was a wabi-sabi or schadenfreude adjacent expression for the feeling that comes with feeling like you have to spend money, or the guilty feeling from shopping too much, from feeling like you have to buy things in order to feel like you are “doing something.” One doesn’t exist.

Growing up, my dad would always tell me that money “burns a hole in my pocket.” I would earn money by mowing the lawn or doing little acting jobs, or it was gifted money for a holiday. I always wanted to spend it. I was very bad at saving, instead drawn to buy an Abercrombie sweater or Calvin Klein cargo pants. Such was my childhood obsession: clothes. I always wanted to buy more, to look a specific way I saw myself being. My dad took me and my brothers to open savings accounts one holiday while visiting his parents, my grandparents. I never used it. I didn’t understand it and, as an adult, had to figure out why one saves money after amassing nearly $10K in credit card debt, only to pretend that the debt didn’t exist.

I remember talking to a friend who bought a house a few months and their biggest take away from the experience was how tiring it was buying stuff to fill the rooms. “I don’t want to shop anymore,” they said. “It’s exhausting looking for things. It’s exhausting feeling like you’re never done.”

It’s getting colder outside and I wear shorts. I think about organizing my closet to stow away the lighter, shorter shorts, to see which shorts are truly my “winter shorts.” Maybe I will buy some pants from a second hand store and mend them into longer shorts for winter, I think. Can I teach myself to sew, to hem? Or maybe I just buy pants? What did I do previous winters and why is this winter different?

Maybe we should invent a word for how it feels to shop right now. I’d call it “Krugerian,” as in “I’m feeling a bit Krugerian.,” inspired by the artist Barbara Kruger’s 1987 I Shop Therefore I Am. Is there a more apt piece of art that captures what it means to live under capitalism?

A few friends, a group of writers who I share work with, were talking about a poem someone in the group had written. It was about shopping, about the feeling of wandering aisles, the confusion of browsing items for meditating. We talked about the differences between gratefulness and satisfaction. Can we ever be satisfied by shopping? “Grateful is getting the plate of food,” I wrote in the chat, as the concepts were being discussed. “Satisfied is being done eating.” But is there ever enough food? Why do we always want seconds?

I buy one shirt and then I buy another. I try on shoes, knowing that I have another pair at home that this pair is solving the problem of. I think about buying a table for the kitchen, even if I have ample counter space. I think about replacing a shirt that has a stain on it, fighting with myself about if I should spend the money or dye or paint or patch up the clothes. I could go to Uniqlo. Their Marni collection is coming soon! Is it fast fashion if I keep it as long as I can? Or is it fast fashion because the entire company is quickly, exploitatively crafting clothes that you don’t actually need?

Since the middle of October, holiday decorations started to appear in Barcelona. Christmas trees in windows, strings of lights framing doors, smiling pieces of wood – but none of them were “on.” It was as if everyone was waiting for the “right time” to commit to being festive, to turn everything on. Without Halloween or Thanksgiving, when is the official “start” to the holidays? The streets were lined with snowflakes and stars and bulbs crafted from strings of lights. They didn’t turn on until the last Thursday of the month, the eve of Black Friday. All month, signs had been going up about the day, all to celebrate “Black Month” and “Black Week,” “Black Weekend” and “Black Friday.” It doesn’t seem like the holidays start until you can shop at a discount.

“What do you get for the person who has everything?” we ask each other, thinking about the friends and family and people in our lives who do not need gifts but still should be gifted something. We say this every holiday, every birthday. “Do we just give them money?” At the same time, we tell friends and family and people in our lives to get us nothing. We don’t need anything, we say. This is true, even we still go out to stores, to look at things, eventually coming home with bags of stuff we didn’t know we “needed.”

Thanksgiving tradition by mistaken text lives on seventh year
The Thanksgiving update you needed!! I can’t believe it’s been seven years.

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion
While this is technically a news-news story, I’m putting this in the culture section because…it’s a surprise, as this is largely a big pop culture item!

Naomi Biden and Tiffany Trump Weddings
I’m so fascinated by these dueling weddings and think they are both excessive and cheesy and pointless. Both bad!

Raf Simons Announces Shuttering of His Namesake Label
Alessandro Michele leaves Gucci after seven years
These were both major news items! While seemingly different, to me they signal the end of an era in fashion, the canary in the coal mine being Ricardo Tisci’s ousting at Burberry, and Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent much earlier. These are now people in their fifties who, while fashionable and with an audience, are not cutting edge or that interesting anymore. What’s coming is something flashier (a la: Michele launching his own brand.) without the capitalistification of fashion (a la: Gucci x Adidas, Louis Vuitton x Lego). More on why Michele left here.

Lourdes Leon Never Thought She’d Drop a Record
I have long been obsessed with Eartheater but I do not like that she’s working with Lourdes “Madonna’s Daughter” Leon.

“Well, Damn!”
One of the best takes on the conservative gender dynamic.

"Every year I will share this cute  @Etsy  commercial"
The comments on this post are wild, because they don’t think it’s sweet. I think it’s sweet!!

“Mother’s Mercy”
“C O N T E X T O”
“Ella es mexicana”
Reminder to follow cultural norms and, you know, to not offend local customs and traditions. More context here.

“That’s great, David.”
I’m ready for round two of canceling David Dobrik.

“Have you heard of Produce Pandas?”
Why China’s Produce Pandas Are More Than Just a ‘Big’ Deal
What do we have to do to make this chubby, gay-appealing, old-man J-Pop band a success?

The most reliable, the most steady, the most supportive, the most creative social media site? Last.fm.

Twenty years ago, the site launch with a simple goal: to help you track your music while discovering music. Aspiring neither to become a streaming service nor to fully become a social network, Last.fm has been a quiet player in an uneven landscape. Certainly not a replacement for venues like Twitter or Instagram, what Last.fm does is something other sites make you think you’re doing: performing for yourself. The posts you make aren’t even “made” as much as they’re experienced, as the basis for your profile is a log of the music you listen to (or “scrobble”), creating a time capsule of all the things you listened to over time.

I started scrobbling in June 2006. It was the summer after my sophomore year in college and I was very into minimal house and music you’d probably hear at an Urban Outfitters (New Young Pony Club, Girl Talk, Robyn, The Presets, The Sounds, Van She), amongst other things. I was in between Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia and Washington, DC, transferring colleges and living at home before fully building a new life in a big city up north. I was “straight,” but eagerly awaiting for American Apparel to launch their “Slim Slacks” after months and years of hype. I was very active on Facebook. I had a Sony Ericsson phone that couldn’t text message. I just got my first Apple MacBook. I planned to take on the world via Los Angeles as an actor and writer.

In 2022, my life looks very different – I’m gay, I live in Spain, I don’t wear pants, I’m a writer – but the music is still being scrobbled, which is largely neo-trance, minimal ambient, and a band I’ve been listening to since high school. I have a Pro account, to help keep the site going as a “veteran” member. This website is the longest tech-item I have had a relationship with outside of Gmail – and that’s cutting it close by a handful of months. Last.fm has seen me through multiple computers, through multiple music library crashes, through music streaming services from Rdio to Apple Music. Like any relationship, there are ups and downs as far as our interactions and, while we’re both very different, we’re still the same. The reason I still use the service is because it does one thing – Log your music history! – really well. Without boxes of photos to look through to see my life, no longer having a Facebook to revisit what I was posting on people’s walls, the closest I have to a window into what life was like from age 20 to now is what I listened to.

It’s easy to forget the value of our own history when looking forward. Rarely do we have the opportunity to wander our pasts when we’re living in the present. Like an old friend, Last.fm has done that so effortlessly for so long. There’s a simplicity – maybe even a stupidity – in the service. There aren’t big aspirations to take over the world or to be bought by someone who can “make it better.” It just is. Everything seems so exaggerated right now, to grow as big as possible or to reach as many people as possible. Sometimes, all you need to do is reach yourself and I appreciate Last.fm for helping me do that. Happy birthday, friend.

"give thanks for rita ora’s iconic thanksgiving day parade"
"most chaotic way ever to announce paula abdul"
“Paula Abdul fake tap dancing”
"El Corazón"
“The Bug Bugs are back”
All your Macy’s Parade posts.

“not gonna lie”
“Before you cut your cranberry”
“Thanks for having us”
“wild af”
“Can you serve?”
” great time to check in on the tvtoohigh subreddit”
All your Thanksgiving posts.

“this is you”
“you as a baby”
“this is you”
“that’s you, as a baby”
“do you remember that?”
“this video popped up”
I am obsessed with every Mestre Ensinador post and the “That’s you!” prank.

“your kid could hit their head there”
Speaking of kids and pranks.

“I was born in 1994”
“I was born in 1997”
“I was born in 1999”
A great Twitter trend about time and context.

“worst paragraphs”
“I think the answer is yes.”
A wild story about a New York Times boomer report and rap.

“Is this a fairytale”
Thank you for the best take on Love Is Blind, Patty Harrison.

"Mexico needs the blessing"
Abuelitas can save the world.

"what is and what is not parody"
Unsubscribing to all of these items.

“Harriet Tubman or Spiderman?”
Bob’s got a point! Harriet would kill Spiderman!!

“questionable wallpaper”
I want to know more about this vaginal wallpaper.

“bottom on bottom crime”
Stay strong, Tyler Oakley.

“chili is ableist.”
Beware of what you eat.

“can’t stop thinking about it”
A mystery about cheese, with a twist ending.

And, finally, how I feel as a 36 year old gay man.

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