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Table of Contents
Hi friends!
It’s suddenly a gloomy night in Brooklyn that I’m sure will be another Monday of me not leaving the house. I have zero pictures on my camera roll until the weekend aside from blood test results, a FaceTime screenshot, and a screenshot of a TikTok posted by a girl I used to know dancing with a friend in saris in a parking lot with the caption “#indiantiktok #engagementszn” and that one stereotypical Indian song that plays at straight parties (when there are so many other fun bhangra songs to dance to). Obviously this is screenshot-worthy because neither of them are Indian, so I just had to send it to a friend who would care.
Anyway, I was busy working all week to prep for a big launch we had today that went fine but I’m still on a bit of a rush from. Other than that, I went to a new friend’s going away party (so much for making new friends!) on Friday and spent Saturday gallivanting around Fire Island, strengthening the alliance between beautiful queer men and women.
Now, onto something dumb!
I ran into my favorite influencer yesterday
Yesterday, I walked through Williamsburg to meet up with my friend Clara so we could walk along the water and eventually end up at a bar in Greenpoint. It was a hot day, and I’ve been severely slacking in the physical activity department these past few weeks. I queued up my podcasts I’ve been behind on and sweat through my shirt as I walked through the neighborhood.
I can’t explain why I felt this way, but I had this feeling that I was going to run into my favorite influencer. A lot of her videos end up in Williamsburg or Greenpoint, two neighborhoods that I spend a lot of time in, but I felt like this would be the time I would see her. Oddly enough, I thought I would actually say something to her because I think she should know that her content is good.
Lo and behold, as Clara and I were a block or two from Domino Park, her words trailed off and I looked to the street next to me. This influencer happened to be on her bike. Clara and I probably stared and looked weird, but we didn’t say anything.
After she passed, Clara went Sorry about that, I just saw this one influencer I really like and we both freaked out because we realized we were talking about the same girl. Neither of us love an influencer or care to talk about them, but we both really enjoy her. We laughed and carried on, discussing why she, of all internet people, is someone we like.
What makes someone on the internet worth caring about when you don’t want to care about anyone there that isn’t someone you know in real life
I consume so much internet. Most of this tries to be news, friends, or random people that are funny once. I don’t follow influencers or want to. However, TikTok knows which videos I like and pushes some people at me over and over because I like them. These are usually young people ranting from their bedrooms or sidewalks and making me laugh. I don’t like to see idealized versions of life from the same people over and over.
That being said, I have a fondness for food influencers. When I say food influencers, I don’t mean cooking because I don’t care about that; I mean people that eat out all the time. I like seeing people genuinely enjoy and be grateful for all kinds of culinary experiences both rare and common. There are a few around New York that show me places I want to try, and I like seeing what they think of places I’ve been to. I don’t think of them at all in my life unless their videos pop up on my feed or I want to remember a restaurant they recommended.
If you’re a girl in my demo and get food videos at all, you’ve probably seen videos from Kaitlyn Lavery on TikTok or YouTube, who I used to call that one girl influencer I like and now my girl Kaitlyn. She first got on my radar by eating through last year’s New York Times Top 100 restaurant list, and the algorithm started feeding me more of her videos, which are other restaurant reviews or What I Ate in a Week videos.
Now that I’ve been watching her videos for a while, I know enough about her to have a parasocial relationship. She is around my age, grew up in some Philly suburb, and lives in North Brooklyn with her boyfriend she’s been dating since high school (who now appears more in her videos and is actually charming in how subdued he is. We don’t need a man to steal the show!). Most of her video comments are non-New York basic girls saying My show is on! or the occasional older Karen complaining about her voice.
I like her because she seems like a real person, despite filming and showcasing parts of her life. She isn’t a full-time influencer and does not make as much as she should from her content because of a TikTok account setup mistake that prevents her from monetizing her videos. She pays for her meals out of pocket aside from the occasional influencer event.
She doesn’t seem stuck up, mean, or appearance-obsessed the way I see most influencers. She just comes off as a girl that likes food and edits videos with the help of her boyfriend. She reminds me of myself and other 20-something transplant girls I know living in New York and just trying to have fun by really appreciating all the city has to offer. It’s not like I know who she truly is inside, and she doesn’t showcase every part of her life for me to know. She just seems like a nice girl that likes to eat, just like me.
Clara and I agree that these qualities are why we, as pop culture aficionados (and chronically online people), like this girl when we loathe most others. We both talked about how weird it is to have that kind of parasocial relationship but settled that at least it’s not with someone evil.
I’ve never been much of a fangirl. I remember forcing myself to care about One Direction because I wanted to understand what the girls in my grade were talking about. I don’t even really like looking up to people or caring about authorities. I don’t think I’m capable of joining a cult lead by a charismatic leader. However, I do love learning, gossiping, and understanding big pictures. I know a lot about celebrities but don’t usually fawn over them. Just because I know about something doesn’t mean I am personally invested in how they make me feel.
Even writing this entry feels like such an eyeroll because I don’t really want to give more thought to influencers and social media culture, but this is what you get when I didn’t do a lot of scholarly thinking this week. I genuinely feel bad for people that actually do care about these influencers or expect them to speak to them and care about things on their behalf. I especially feel for girls that follow conventionally attractive, Aryan, unapproachable women that flaunt luxury and sincerely think they’re something to aspire to — and especially when these girls encourage disordered eating.
On the other hand, super-haters of influencers are often just as bad. I am a lurker but will never post on r/NYCinfluencersnark, which despises these influencers so much that they pick apart and criticize everything about them down to their foundation (literally and figuratively). They care about these influencers almost more than their fans.
A healthy internet consumer knows these adoring and dissenting voices and chooses not to care much one way or another. Actually, a healthy internet consumer probably doesn’t know about these people at all, but in my thirst for knowledge of all kinds I’d find it a disservice to not at least have a working understanding of these people. The internet’s gift of showing us people we might never cross paths with in real life educate us on different ways people live their lives, but it also curses us with parasocial tendencies that lead to creepiness or ignorance.
I think my compassion comes in, especially for these food influencers, when I see them as people doing a job that they are passionate about. I could not imagine putting my whole life on display (I say as I write my newsletter to 235 of my very best friends) for people to scrutinize, but they do it because they find some sort of joy in sharing what they love. It’s also a lot easier for me to like someone who peddles wholesome content and isn’t highly personal or vulnerable, showing a corner of their life but not the whole house.
Please tell me if you, like me, are someone that has one or two influencers you genuinely follow and like. I want to know if it’s for the same reasons I have and if the kinds of creators are the same.
This week’s photo is from the end of my Friday night when I was feeling myself. I started taking selfies after leaving the bar and realized I looked like a sweaty mess, not to mention the sprouts on my head that my fellow party attendees donned. My friend Elaine taught me a trick of flipping the photo so it looks like how I assumed it did when looking into my camera.
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Current fixations I want to mention
Food & Drink
When you take a ferry in or out of Fire Island Pines, you’ll see Blue Whale as you wash ashore. The indoor-outdoor, bare-bones bar sprawls steps away from the dock, usually blasting gay hits and filled with people dancing and chatting. When the boat comes in and out, people dancing outside at the Blue Whale wave to everyone on the boat, and the boat waves back. It’s a beautiful way to welcome yourself in and out of Fire Island, especially if you’re a beautiful homosexual man. “Tea” happens there every day, which started as a discreet way for gay men to dance and drink together on the island starting in the 60s. It’s a lot less revolutionary now and I imagine feels might feel like the Olympics of gay guys being mean girls if I were a gay guy. For my friends and I, though, we had the best time. Drag queen DJing, Pines Punches packing heat, and plenty of room to run around. Some gay male spaces do not feel like the place for queer women, but my crew definitely did not have that experience, although we were also with their target demo.
Music
Shygirl and SG Lewis just came out with a new song this past week called “Sugar,” and it’s the perfect summer party anthem. This is great to groove to while working, have as background noise for a pre or postgame, or to blast at the club. I love Shygirl’s low, breathy voice in a cocktail of SG Lewis’ progressive poppiness. It makes me want to dance on a rooftop or anywhere with a window.
Internet & Pop Culture
I have officially had my fill of labubus. As if I didn’t already. But now…come on. They aren’t even cute! I hate to Back In MY Day… but Webkinz, Littlest Pet Shop, My Little Pony, and Beanie Babies are all cute. I don’t understand collecting something so ugly. I’m not even saying they need to be cute, just not ugly.
Television & Maybe Movies
Spoilers ahead!
Sigh. I finished The Ultimatum: Queer Love season 2 at the end of last week and have talked about it enough because it had the same conversation chokehold Love Island did but for gay girls. I think Marie’s anger at the reunion was completely justified and also made for great television. Even though I think AJ and Britney are a gorgeous couple, I enjoyed Marie’s attempt to shatter their image. I’m so happy Marita and Ashley aren’t together because they could clearly find better partners that maybe won’t scream and cheat. Mel is terrifying, but tell me why I felt a little bad for her when Dayna switched up! They got matching tattoos! Dayna is the worst of any of these women, and it’s unfortunate that the Lebanese lesbian representation we got this season was from wayward Magan who is no saint but clearly can’t unstick herself from this manipulative, almost heterosexual dynamic. Kyle and Bridget are fine. Did you know that Bridget was on The Bachelorette? If Pilar and Haley are looking for a friend or a third, they know where to find me.
Journalism & Literature
I literally just finished The Autobiography of Malcolm X before typing this passage. Wow! What a book. As I dive back into being a reader, it’s important for me to find and read whatever I think of as essential texts, and this is one of them. I picked this up at a bookstore, considered it for a while, and put it back down because it was over 400 pages, and I wanted something lighter. The next week, I kept getting reminders of this book in my daily life and decided it had to be my next book once I was done with something lighter. If you’re like me from a few weeks ago and haven’t read this yet, I really recommend changing that. This book reminds me a bit of The Power Broker in that 1. it’s a nonfiction book I like 2. that reads like fiction because it’s so gripping and clear 3. that has greatly impacted the world 4. and was written by someone who deeply cares. The autobiography was written by Alex Haley (writer of Roots) over two years of interviewing and spending time with the man born as Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X when he joined the Nation of Islam and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz after making his pilgrimage to Mecca. I liked to think I knew stuff about Malcolm before reading this book but realized I knew very little other than how controversial and “militant” he was. Malcolm’s life story could fit a ton of lives, starting from his turbulent childhood in the midwest to dropping out of school and moving onto Boston and Harlem before spending years in jail, emerging as a Black Muslim. Malcolm comes off as charming, resolute, but complex as his beliefs change throughout his life. I don’t need to recap this book because you should be reading it or have already read it anyway, but it’s an easy read despite how big it is because Malcolm and Haley tell a story that anyone can follow. The two things that struck me the most about his book are how pivotal Malcolm’s experiences were 1. when he fell in love with reading during his prison sentence and 2. how his ideologies changed when he immersed himself in Islam (very different than the Nation of Islam) and traveled around Africa. He was way ahead of his time in some ways and strictly in the present in others. It’s almost jarring to read about how others, even the people that loved him dearly, spoke about him as this larger-than-life figure when he spent much of his life diminishing himself as a messenger instead of some savior. His story ends with eerie statements about how he thinks he will be remembered when he soon dies and is followed by Haley’s epilogue first discussing how writing the book went followed by a newsy recap of the events surrounding his death. Afterwards, I read the intro written by his oldest daughter in the 90s about the great honor it was for the U.S. Postal Service to put his face on a commemorative stamp. I wonder if Malcolm would have appreciated the stamp or not. Maybe it makes sense because he was constantly pushing the envelope. For real though, some of his words are more prescient than ever, and he was unafraid to say things that people still refuse to grapple with today. The book cuts through sensationalized headlines about how much of a hater he is and shows Malcolm as a thoughtful, sincere person that truly advocates for the downfall of white supremacy and empowerment of Black people to take action in making a more just world.
Something I Saw in the Wild
Walking through Brooklyn’s desolate industrial blocks sometimes yields silliness. When you’re somewhere with little foot traffic, people do things that they would when they assume no one is watching. I’ve seen garages open with a Domino formation of huge marble slabs or metalworkers blasting cumbia and dancing while they work. Sometimes, they do things to show a sign of life for the few pedestrians around them, though. I knew I was coming up on Wandering Barman on Meserole yesterday when I saw a bubble machine out front whirring. Most of the bubbles seemed to fly back, but some of them caught my path. It’s just nice to be around bubbles.