Blog # 05: CLEAR EYES FULL HEARTS CAN’T LOSE

I haven’t been here in a year and a half. So much has happened. 

I started working out. I started having sex again. I started recreationally taking 5mg edibles to relax and sometimes, to sleep more than four hours. I wrote 104 pieces for the magazine I edited as my full-time job. It’s really more like 115ish if you consider the ghostwriting, but that’s neither here nor there. Sometimes it's fun to see your voice come out of someone else’s mouth, even if digitally. And then there are the six pieces I wrote freelance. 120s. If clips were years, my career is the age of a young wizard. 

I’m gonna focus on the sex part a bit, because it’s really funny to be a 20something and admit that once I didn’t have sex for almost one calendar year, and then have people old enough to have babysat me, but young enough to have been seniors in high school when I was a freshman assume that I’m a part of the loneliness epidemic. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the term, a really weird phenomenon (that apparently is a public health issue now?) to describe and group the youth who aren’t fucking. I think about what youth means. How, now that I am 26, I am on the other side of it (is the quarter century the cut off?). During what I would consider my adolescent youth, I was taught that fucking was power, that because women were taught that we weren’t allowed to talk about it, we should do it, and do a lot of it, and make sure it is the only thing we talk about because sluts are powerful, and shame is bad, and you can’t use the word prostitute anymore because it erases working people’s labor, and she/theys with 1/4 cup of white girl ass drop out of RISD, shave interesting patches into their already bad hair cuts, don a pair of Pleasers and try and match the snowbunny mania of soft ghetto blogs they once trolled on Tumblr, and you can’t tell them that they smell bad or that the movements they perform pole-adjacent are not, in fact, making it clap, because then you’re sex negative. And no one wants to see a woman be negative. Especially a young woman. I used to say that I wished a lot of self-proclaimed proud sluts had a more damaged relationship with sex so they’d shut up, because, I mean, there’s definitely a threshold where enjoying sex as an activity becomes your entire personality. I would watch the capacity for hyperbole exit the chat, so to speak, when I said those words in defense of being labeled epidemically lonely. And then I would become socially trad. Somewhat a prude. Not just part of the loneliness epidemic, part of the pendulum swing away from sex positivity and back to shame. So the people around me in their late 20s and early 30s would say, or at least allude to, but I mean, a lot of them still say “I did a thing,” so. Grain of salt. Are we lonely, or are we just tired of people complaining about swinging pendulums? Are we always careening back and forth between opposite ideologies, sex positivity or negativity? I kind of refuse to think so. To categorize the zeitgeist into such linear back and forth motion feels reductive to all the wonderful craziness that exists mid-swing. Or could exist mid-swing. I can’t say if it’s there for sure, I haven’t gone looking for it yet. Maybe if I were five years older I’d have an answer.

But I once didn’t have sex for almost one calendar year, and then in July it started happening again, and I think I became a better person just because I was less defensive about late-Millennials reminding me of how I’m actually lonely, and that it’s actually an epidemic. I wasn’t not fucking because I was lonely, in fact I’d argue that in densely populated metropolitan cities like New York, the first thing lonely people do is have a lot of promiscuous sex. I simply didn’t have hoes. Hoe drought. I find myself in a similar boat at the time I write this but that’s just a fun detail I’ll look back on and laugh at. I will probably never talk about my sex life on the internet ever again after this. 

I quit my job last Thursday and at the same time I realized how hard it is not start a sentence with ‘I.’ My friend Whitney—I neglected to mention in the first graf that I also made, like, so many new friends since I’ve seen you last, blog—invited me to an appointment she made at Greenpoint-based archive book store High Valley Books for a hang and a chat about a screening-salon she also invited me to participate in. (If you are in NYC and reading this before 6pm on Saturday, February 15th, 2025 you should buy tickets to see Coffy (1972) at Metrograph because it will be very fun.) Our bibliophilic afternoon was the subject of her column with Family Style. Post-books I went to the Collina Strada show, and Fall/Winter 2025 was fabulous. A quote from some of my last fashion coverage as an editor at Document Journal: “Spooky, swampy, swanky: these are the best three adjectives to describe this season at Collina Strada. The eco-conscious designer re-approached her trademark sustainability-as-material aesthetic from a point of historicity: frilly 19th century-esque bustles attached to hand-dyed sweatpants styled with massive alien bug-eye shades make equal reference to the days of yore and the days to come.” Post Collina Strada, I went to Fanelli because it’s close to the Prada cocktail party happening in, like, an hour and I realized I was hungry. Kelsea (my pal and a waitress at Fanelli...dap her next time you see her) hooked it up with a table for one during rush as well as tarragon aioli for my onion rings, and I remembered that I quit my job, and that everything was about to get glacially slow. My body of work, which was now wizard-aged when considering a pieces published as a year passed, was done with its growth spurt. My gray hairs, which I admittedly liked, wouldn’t pop up with such stress-related spontaneity, just the genetic one. My journals would reach the fore of my desk, cracked open and bleeding fresh ideas, rather than remaining relegated to a far corner, collecting dust. My life would have to revolve around routine to be fungible—optimism and fear. You could say this is growing up. At Prada my writing friends congratulated me on quitting, and the next day at Pilates and Amplified Vinyasa my classmates congratulated me on quitting, and the lady selling funky hats at ******** congratulated me on quitting when I told her I couldn’t afford one of her funky hats on account of the fact that I quit, and it felt like New York was giving me a hug even though financially it—as a city, and entity, a concept—is about to beat my ass. 

During our books date, when I told Whitney I quit my job just hours after I did, she told me that this week, I’m effectively hard-launching myself as freelancer, as writer, as editor, as critic—all of these words I thought I was too evolved to ever call myself in public—and that it’s a wonderful thing. And it is. I am coming out as myself, to Earth and to...myself. 

I’ve been watching Friday Night Lights (the TV show) per a mention from my friend Marta during a Super Bowl watch party, and have been thinking about the gray-cast color grading, the heavy accents in Dillon, Texas where the show is set, Matt Saracen’s skinny, arched, and naturally blonde eyebrows. (Zach Gilford really acts with those brows. I love it.) There’s a lot of hand-held camera work and indie music choices in the show, like in “State,” the last episode in season one, the outcome of the Dillon Panthers’ battle in the state football championships is delivered with a moody montage of Panthers fans in the streets, their expressions scored by “Devil Town” by Dirtie Blonde. It’s an overwhelmingly emo show that, while based around the hope a local high school football team instills in the surrounding small town, is really about the secret din that lurks behind potential. The fear of something new. The heaviness, literal and figurative, of taking initiative. Maybe I’m reading too much into it given my circumstances. 

I’m excited to be in it alone, though. I am wonderfully without 10 brolic fools ready to go to battle with me on the a 120-yard-long field that is now my life. I become a lone team, wrapped up in a woman. It’s hardly an epidemic.