So, I don't know, I just felt like rambling in long-form again and that Instagram wasn't gonna give me enough space so I'm back here. Are we back?? We're so back?? This is a joke, I'm just joking. Last weekend, I went on another very enjoyable date, with a completely different person. This time, this man took me to see the World Series baseball game at a bar, which I did not care about because I generally do not care about sports, but it was the finals (or whatever the final game is called), between the Toronto Blue Jays and the LA Dodgers.
There hadn't been a Canadian team to make it so close to winning in ages, so pretty much all of average Canada was watching it and rooting for the Blue Jays. I didn't understand any of it, I had to keep asking what inning it was at, where in the inning we were at, etc, but he explained it gently, and also in between bites of my quesadilla and me pretending to be interested, he would kiss me and it was enjoyable, so I let him be.
This man works in a scientific lab, doing cancer research, which is fascinating, and I've always loved dating people who work in the scientific field, because I guess I'm more philosophical and arts-inclined. Whenever I meet someone who works in a field I know nothing about, I get to learn more and it's more interesting to me. He says he'll try to take me to his lab one day on a weekend so I get to see the work he does, and thus I will not be able to say where he works, because he might get into trouble. Do you think it's hilarious how many workplaces I've been sneaked into just by dating men in different careers? I think it's hilarious. One time I got sneaked into a nurses' lounge because my date was a doctor on night shift. The number of people I could get fired is astounding, tbh.
This week, by virtue of being chronically online and following the right people (ie. all the best people) online, I was treated to some major positive and encouraging news re: the US, which was so needed because the US is a miserably failing empire that's crumbling in on itself (this week they cut SNAP benefits?? what in actual fuck???) but again! This week there was massive hopeful news!
Zohran Mamdani became the mayor of New York City, where the mayoral race hit two million votes for the first time since 1969. This happened despite Cuomo being backed by hugely influential figures (but all of whom are berserk) and big money, making Mamdani's win even more historic. Gun safety won in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, became the first female governor of Virginia. In Cincinnati, JD Vance's half-brother, Cory Bowman, suffered a resounding loss to the Democrats. Every county in Virginia shifted blue. Ghazala Hashmi is Virginia's lieutenant governor, and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office in US history. Maine (!!!) killed voter restriction and supported gun restriction. Mary Sheffield is the first woman mayor in Detroit and she's a Black woman, and Johnny DuPree, a Black Democrat is elected to Mississippi Senate, flipping it from Republican.
All of that is of course very superficial and surface-level news, Democrats aren't even quite the progressives they think they are, and are fully capable of being incompetent and reprehensible, and we have to wait and see what all the aforementioned candidates do with their platforms, etc, but I think it bears celebrating some significance that Americans are fed up (to put it mildly) with the current administration, and they want change.
Something else that Instagram has seen, but I haven't quite rambled about over here just yet, is my growing disdain for Taylor Swift. Buckle up, because away we go (oh also, another thing that my date did last weekend was he listened to me rant all about Taylor Swift, and then he asked to watch one of the TikTok academics that I had been raving about as one of my sources, too). I have consumed so much TikTok about Taylor and particularly about her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, since October 3, and I believe I have become disillusioned (yes, I know most of you are like, “fucking finally???”). I could curate a playlist of all the TikTok videos that have analyzed it in much more comprehensive and eloquent ways than I do here, so if you'd like the playlist, let me know and I'll share it with you.
So, firstly, she released at least ten different variants of the Showgirl album, to encourage diehard Swifties to consume and purchase more units of her product. She also then released extremely shoddy, embarrassing voice memos of herself recording the album with her producers Martin and Shellback, and she sold these (mind you, she never needs another dime in her life and could have released them for free). Some of the songs on the album have been deemed problematic, and whilst the TikTok videos have talked about them at length, I will only mention the ones that I feel surely about. Olivia Rodrigo was pressured to share credits and royalties for her song Deja Vu, because it apparently was inspired by Taylor, and you can tell it wasn't a pleasant situation because Olivia used to be a very big and expressive Swiftie, but she's gone quiet since the credits (and royalties) thing happened. On the other hand, Swift's songs, Actually Romantic sounds exactly like Where Is My Mind by Pixies, and Wood absolutely samples The Jackson 5. Neither of those mention the original song credits on her album.
Still song-related, the track Actually Romantic also disses Charli XCX and calls her out for having a coke addiction problem, which is apparently in retaliation to Charli's song, Sympathy is a Knife. I've seen this analyzed threefold. One, Charli herself lives in her truth of using coke, and it's all over her own album, Brat. You can't embarrass someone who owns their truth. Two, it's ridiculous that Taylor is making an actual diss track about Charli, who only just got her deserved limelight with Brat after many years of not quite making it big big. Taylor is a billionaire, and she's punching down at another woman artist who's finally getting her flowers? Get the fuck out of here. Three, Sympathy is a Knife is not even a diss track about Taylor, it's about Charli's own insecurities, which she's being vulnerable about. Ms Ma’am Taylor Swift, for someone who claims to be our English teacher, you need your degree checked. Oh that's right, she doesn't have a real one.
Then there's the song Cancelled. In it, she sings “good thing I like my friends cancelled”, and she honestly has been sticking around people who have been involved in scandals, or basically the MAGA crowd, and definite Trump supporters. Those people don't hold themselves accountable, and therefore nor does Swift for herself. Also, there is The Fate of Ophelia. In the lead-up to the album launch, Swift said on the podcast that she was teaching Kelce about Shakespeare, because it's like an inside joke that he's a jock who doesn't get her references and all, right. Well, her lyrics in The Fate of Ophelia have been dissected by my current favourite TikToker (@kaicfox), who is an actual Shakespearean academic. Ophelia was written by Shakespeare to symbolize how women had absolutely zero agency except for what the men in their lives decided for them. It's insinuated (in Shakespeare's drama, Hamlet) that Ophelia kills herself because she recognizes this, after the rebukes by her father, her brother, and in conversations with Hamlet. Her act of suicide can be interpreted as possibly her one real act of agency. Swift then sings about being saved by a man (obviously Kelce), and therefore escaping “the fate of Ophelia”, which is exactly not what the character was about. And it would be one thing if Swift herself had said, oh I like the name Ophelia, I wanted to take my own creative liberties with it and write a romance, but no, she heavily suggested that she understood the play and the character, and was then trying to be smart about it in her song, which it wasn't.
Then, when she got wind that her album was being disliked on TikTok, she appeared on a Zane Lowe (for Apple Music) interview, and said “the rule of show business is if it's the first week of my album release and if you're saying either my name or my album title, you're helping,” which, what???? She'd never struck us (the Swifties, I mean) as being this person who's just cold and calculative and only in it for the business? All I can say is, yuckkkkkkkkkk.
In the past month, even Taylor's longtime friend, Hayley Williams, performed a song from her new album on a late night talk show, and the track she performed was about racism in the US. Billie Eilish donated $11.5 million, and when Taylor did a late night appearance, she described Kelce's job (playing football) as putting his life on the line, whilst there are literal genocides happening in the world, at this moment. It's just now striking me as god-awful how asinine she is, because she's a billionaire (meaning she obviously has a level of success backed by legions of fans), and how she will still say “people hate me because it's cool and popular to hate me.” No, we don't? People hate you because we live in a society with massive and growing wealth divides and you're a billionaire who refuses to redistribute your wealth or use your platform for good. Taylor Swift is tone deaf and out of touch with reality.
I've done a lot in support of Taylor Swift, you know. I don't want to hate her. I loved her earlier songs, I've gone to three of her concerts (one 1989 and two Eras Tour shows), but I honestly cannot in good conscience ever stomach any more of this woman.
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the Jonathan Safran Foer quote: You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. I've liked it for a long time, and I wonder if I've actually mentioned it here before, though I can't be fucked to look for it. I think I quite embody the quote, in a way that I allow myself to be very sad and vulnerable, but I also have extremely happy and meaningful moments, and I think they're all real and authentic. However, I think the society I live in, mostly do not.
I think a lot of people around me are comfortable and also very scared of ever bursting the bubble wrap that surrounds them. I think they're scared of having uncomfortable conversations, and they're always chasing the next high, and nothing about their lives seems to be as particularly important nor meaningful nor authentic. Of course, I understand and am not calling out people who may not go to therapy because they're financially strapped, or I'm not even talking about people who do go to therapy but keep it on the down low. No, I know who I mean, and it's many, many people, who would never ever face up to the reality of their lives (therapy or not), because then your entire worldview might come crashing down on you.
It's the same people who'll say, yeah, there's racism and colonialism and imperialism, and they think that just saying it and saying it all happened in the past, and that they would never engage in such a thing, makes it all okay, makes the past all go away. Babe, every single thing that's happened in history has led us to this moment, to this eternal rat race that I have to run to prove my worth while you coast through life, and you think it's enough for you to say “it's over now”? No, babe, I need more anti-racism, I need you to help me dismantle the structures that have been built by undeserving old rich/white men, because I do not want the next generations to have to go through the same goddamn struggles that I did and am still going through. And you know, I say babe, and I don't know if you (whoever you are that's reading this) will think I mean this personally, but I don't. If you feel called out, trust me, it's only because it is a majority of you in this society who do these same things. You are all part of a club, and you need to let the rest of us in.
Perhaps I should get myself a cake to celebrate my fifth winter in Canada/life. I think I shall.