05/09/21 - Husk
The idea of being plain used to be unbearable to me but things are chill now.
For the past couple of months I’ve been taking an online class on digital marketing, which is a sentence I never thought I’d utter, if you caught me in a specific period of my life when ice blasts were tolerable in a pinch and ideas of disruption were much more tangible. But I’m here. I enrolled in the program in the hopes of finding work, after over half a year of unemployment in a job market run into the ground by Adam Smith’s invisible bulldozer. Employers baited and ghosted. Surely my resume was looking boring. Surely it’s my fault and prerogative.
So the first few weeks have been modules, Zoom classes on Saturday afternoons, and a terminology crash course—unique visitor, key performance indicator, buyer’s journey. I treat it like readings. I told myself, buddy, if you can weather brocialist conversation about Žižek and not bleed out the eyes, you can handle equivalent headassery on the opposite end of the spectrum. They’re just words. Nothing more.
It’s been chill. For all my life, I’ve constantly rushed to disavow aspects of my personality that age the poorest, and this time around it’s the part of me that wouldn’t fuck with an office job. What’s that Bible verse about putting away childish things? It is a good time to lean into cliché. My most tremendous, fantastical dream right now is to purchase a crochet tank top without eating into my life savings.
Alas, capitalism will just not let me vibe—a statement filed under Things That Are Annoying to Hear But Entirely Correct, like “Yes, I would like 60k for a starting salary please!” I too would have liked that.
I still have to finish the program but I got a new job, sooner than I thought, as a copywriter for a creative agency. I lucked out on this one, gang. Deadlines don’t stalk me on weekends and the company’s work culture discourages overtime. I can say stuff like “oh, I’m on the so-and-so account.” I was talking with a friend a few years younger than me about this, who observed that the millennials in my particular contingent are turning into squares. This is kind of true. I can feel my coarsest edges getting sanded down.
It’s hot as fuck out, man. Sometimes I’ll look out my window in a semi-fugue state and see the light that breaks through the trees crank up their saturation by a hundred points, splotches of solar glare looking mean as hell on the road. In this summer that dismantles what it touches, I feel like a facsimile of base mechanisms—earn coin, drink water.
I’ve heard the saying “the more money you make the more conservative you’ll become,” and I disagree. I make more money than I did before (my salary is entry level but my side gigs are legion) and I’m a bigger malcontent than I ever was. But I’m also a little more chill. My patience is longer. One day I snuck off to run 6k and got back to my desk just in time to type my clock-out.
The most attractive narrative here is that I set the terms for my own zombification, but let’s leave hackneyed metaphors for the undead to the late 2000’s. The truth is I’m relieved—relieved to be working and alive at all, relieved that I didn’t grow up to be a James Franco caricature hotboxing in a studio with bead curtains. What’s the opposite of turning into the Joker? I imagine it’s something like this.
Still, there was this one digital marketing class where the guest lecturer was like “You see these community pantries, people volunteering to help medical frontliners. As a brand, how can you be in this space?” The answer is you don’t. As a fucking brand? Hoo boy. That almost turned me into the Unabomber on the spot. Here’s this newsletter’s media Rx:
CAPTAIN YAJIMA BY WORTHIKIDS, THE MAN NEVER MISSES
Hanif Abdurraqib’s interview with Julien Baker! Dream crossover. It’s this thing where you put two people who admire each other’s work in the same room and they’re so nice to each other you’re practically engulfed.
I finally finished Crying in H Mart! It’s as good as early readers say it is. Hurt me more than I thought it would. I also wrote a review (relatively spoiler-free, but what are the rules for spoilers regarding nonfiction anyhow?) of the book. You can read it here.
Hold. :]
The Question of a Stagnant Marxism: Is Marxism Exegetical or Scientific? I’ve always wondered why the proposed first step of political awakening is trudging through a back log of dense texts that apply to contexts distinct from current lived experiences. This essay gets at that.
There’s such thing as a vertical computer mouse? You hold it in like, a handshake position? The fuck?
