Leandra Medine's Blog, page 79

What Do Today’s Teens Aspire to Be When They Grow Up? We Asked Them

One of the most thrilling aspects of being a teenager is vision-boarding the rest of your life. All sorts of imagined futures are possible—with each new career one considers, an entirely different existence comes into frame. Geology might lead you to fantasize about a double life where you spend the school season as a tenured professor in the Midwest and summers conducting field research in South America. Law? Non-profit work? The arts? They each present different lifestyles, different communities, different adventures.

These thought experiments are a timeless tradition—but our cultural ideas about what’s aspirational, urgent, or even possible change as the culture does. So we surveyed 64 teenagers about what they want to be when they grow up right now in 2019.

What our survey revealed is that teenagers are big-hearted and hopeful. They’re afraid of the world that older generations are leaving them, but still excited to play their part in it. They see their future selves being happy, fulfilled, loved—and, in more than one case, married to Timothée Chalamet. Read more below, in their own words.

Top priority: making the world better, not worse

“After learning about the humanitarian crisis at the border in Arizona, I became determined to know more and become involved. I’m working on collaborating to get an exhibit at my school that memorializes the thousands who have died. It’s a silent issue and I want more people to know, hence the exhibit.” —Lila, 18, Louisville, future anthropologist

“I see so many problems in our society today that I believe have a root in a general lack of empathy and education about each other. I want to help bridge gaps between cultures and our understanding of each other.” —Meredith, 18, New York, future museum curator

Climate change denial is not the vibe

“I’m scared of the world dying and still being around when it happens. We have TEN YEARS to make change before irreversible damage is done, and I want more than ever to get into the world and help make real change to save our planet.” —Ella, 17, Edina, MN, future lawyer or professor

Creativity and fulfillment are a big, big deal

“I love theatre and writing. I could never do a normal office job. I have so much respect for the arts and want to be a part of that community for the rest of my life!” —Sydney, 18, Los Angeles, future TV writer

“As a published author I’ll finally accomplish my life-long dream and perhaps experience the feeling of being successful, even if I don’t sell any copies of my published work. (However, I’d be lying if I said a little fame wasn’t also an appealing factor.)” —Sarah, 19, Howell, MI, future author

College feels important, but it definitely isn’t everything

“I’d love to find a mentor. All my life I’ve been searching for guidance. I’ve tried school and I don’t think it’s the path for me.” —Zoe, 19, Spokane, future sustainable fashion designer

“A four-year degree is definitely important to me, but I view it as more of a stepping stone. Alongside college I’ll need to get a few internships under my belt, network with people in the business, and write whenever I have time (even if I don’t feel like it).” —Sarah, 19, Howell, MI, future author

Their friends aren’t all on the same wavelength

“Whenever I express that I’d like to be a mom to my friends, even if I mention it offhandedly, the majority protest that it’s not something I need to care about for years to come. They have the dreams they’re supposed to have. Wanting to be freelance journalists, lawyers, architects, and so on. I usually sit there quiet, wishing I also wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor because that would be simpler to explain.” —Agnes, 19, Göteborg, Sweden, future mother and literary worker

“A lot of my friends don’t know what they want yet, but my best friend wants to be a child behavioral psychologist, another wants to break into the African entrepreneurial market in Rwanda, and the rest want to go to art school. My ambitions don’t align with anyone else, but that means our reunions are going to be crazy.” —Renata, 18, St. Petersburg, FL, future POTUS/environmental policy maker/founder and CEO

And, actually, every teen we surveyed should become a novelist, based on these exemplary fanfics they wrote about a random Thursday in 2034

“Thursday is coffee day. Well, every day is coffee day, but on Thursday morning I meet my sister for coffee at our favorite cafe. Of course, I dress as if I’m Diane Keaton in a pair of thrifted trousers. After coffee, I walk to my office space, where I write freelance pieces for various progressive online fashion publications. Lunch will be drunken noodles from a nearby Thai restaurant, and I gaze out of the office window to admire Chicago. A few hours later, I return home and throw on a pair of sweatpants before settling on my couch to continue writing my latest manuscript. A small poodle is curled into a ball at my feet to keep them warm, and to keep me company. A bookshelf against the wall of my living room holds all of my favorite novels along with many that I’ve written. To end the day, I turn on a movie with my partner and I’ll most likely fall asleep halfway through it. I dream that I’m Sally Albright, only to wake up and realize that I’m something even better: myself.” —Sarah, 19, Howell, MI, future author

“I get up and make myself breakfast in my cute little apartment in West Hollywood. I drive to Sunset studios in my electric car and listen to NPR as I commute. At work, I go over the next couple week’s scripts with my writer office buddies. It’s probably a lot of work, but it’s fun work. Then we go to the stage and film part of an episode. A scene isn’t working, and I swoop in and save the day with a super awesome suggestion. Hours later we’re done and I go get a yummy LA vegan dinner to celebrate my contribution that fixed the script. Then I go home to my cute and quirky girlfriend and we watch TV together and fall asleep to the sound of some cynical animated show for adults.” —Sydney, 18, Los Angeles, future TV writer

“I toss back my curtains to reveal the rosy glow of sunrise streaming into my Manhattan penthouse and begin to brew the strongest coffee known to mankind. I dress from my closet filled with The Row and whatever Tracee Ellis Ross generously decided to hand down to me after an intense session with Marie Kondo. I bike to work at the Met and eat yogurt on the steps à la Blair Waldorf. Then I walk into the doors and oversee whatever new collection helps to illuminate cultural nuances and to help strengthen people’s connections with one another. Then after a long day, I walk into my apartment where my darling husband Timothée Chalamet will be cooking me dinner. He will let me taste the risotto he’s been laboring on because he has blossomed from a teen heartthrob into a verifiable Sauce Man.” —Meredith, 18, New York, future museum curator

“‘It’s 12:30, time for my next appointment!’

I walk out of my office to head toward the waiting room, a smile on my face. As I look around the waiting room searching for my next patient, I recognize two men sitting in the corner. Seven months ago, the brothers were in a car crash and sustained serious injuries. As the lead nurse practitioner, I helped them regain strength after the incident. Today, they are coming in for their last checkup.

‘Tony and Alex?’ I say excitedly.

Today is the moment of truth; today decides if they get to resume normal life. I love that I get to be there every step of the way. From ER visits to follow-ups to clearings, my care for patients lasts their entire medical journey. I am reminded of that every day.” —Kalor, 17, Columbus, OH, future nurse practitioner

“I’ll be thirty-four. I have two children: a daughter, age nine, and a son, age six. Let’s say their names are Greta and Gabriel. Since Thursdays are schooldays the day would start fairly early, around six o’clock. My partner makes breakfast while I wake up the children. We eat breakfast together: croissants and orange juice, before walking the children to school. During the day, my partner and I work, and I’m doing something in relation to literature.

When children get home from school I make fika, usually chocolate milk and sandwiches with cheese and cucumber. I help them with homework at the dining table while simultaneously answering emails. My partner and I make dinner, and we all eat together. After dinner it’s tea time, with cookies, of course, and we read aloud to the kids. And then it’s pretty much bedtime. Voilá.” —Agnes, 19, Göteborg, Sweden, future mother and literary worker

“I wake up at 7 am with my tumeric-ginger-oat-milk latte already in my hand. I put on my pantsuit with a tee and white sneakers. I work in a tall, green building with trees and shrubs covering the sides that is reminiscent of Bosco Verticale in Milan, and my 24th floor office looks over a garden and a mural of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Today, we are testing denim that is made out of ocean plastic and organic cotton, while discussing possibilities of buying land in Indonesia to make into a nature reserve for orangutans, tigers, elephants, and more. I get a call from Amal Clooney, my mentor, to discuss suing conglomerates in southeast Asia for their destruction to their natural resources. After I hang up, my phone buzzes again from a text from my second husband, Timothée Chalamet.” —Renata, 18, St. Petersburg, FL, future POTUS/environmental policy maker/founder and CEO

 

Abbey Maxbauer is a NYC-based writer who loves astrology, movies, teens, and the internet.

The post What Do Today’s Teens Aspire to Be When They Grow Up? We Asked Them appeared first on Man Repeller.

From Paris Fashion Week: Celine Reflects a Change in Approach

When we accuse someone of being “out of touch,” we’re saying they’re not with the times. This was a common criticism of Hedi Slimane’s first collection for Celine, which I would have omitted from this review out of respect for brevity and resentment for redundancy had it not been for an interaction I overheard between a salesperson and his colleague while I was in a store in New York at the same time that Vogue Runway was streaming Celine’s show in Paris. The salesperson expressed that if you want Celine, what you really mean is that you want Saint Laurent, so what you can do is just “go to the YSL outlet,” and bring it to back to the Celine store “in exchange for cash money.” This may have been true following the first collection, but Slimane has subsequently proven in fairly finite terms that his Celine is not his Saint Laurent.

Celine Spring/Summer 2020

His Celine, in fact, is so distinctly Celine (sin accent, to be sure) that it doesn’t waver. The jeans —narrow and high rise with a slight flair down the leg and a long enough length that extra denim melts into the ground as if to create faint puddles—are the same as they were at his recent men’s show. The saturated, blue wash is the same as it was last season and the one before. They might as well be Levi’s. The virgin wool jackets are rich but simple. The shirts are silk, the sweaters are shrunken. It is all so ordinary and yet, the clothes disarm the hell out of us.

Why? Because Hedi Slimane is not out of touch. As we talk about the streamlining of fashion as a political response to consumerism and the way the desired outcome of a show is perhaps no longer to make you want to shop but instead get you excited to simply get dressed–as we celebrate Miuccia Prada for shepherding essentialism and consistently hear designers express their newfangled approaches, harkening “back to basics,” Hedi Slimane serves up the most crystallized version of a reflection of the times.

His collections are a showcase of ideas for how to wear clothes you already have or can easily acquire in a more affordable form. At this point in fashion, we are not ready for, or in need of a radical new idea. We simply want for creative ways to reinterpret the stuff we’ve amassed. Let us look to what we already have, and with his help, see something different.

Celine Spring/Summer 2020

But what does it mean if you can be a Celine girl without owning any Celine? Better yet, what does it mean to be a designer who sells a vision you don’t actually have to buy? Is it a clever and pressure-free approach that provokes a reverse psychology effect? I’m not really sure, and I feel kind of far-for the first time in a long time I’m not in Paris, and therefore party to the whiff of energy that circumvents his shows–but ultimately, for all the ruckus Philo-fans caused following Slimane’s appointment, it appears the brand continues to be a mirror for how women want to feel.

Images via Getty Images and Vogue Runway.

The post From Paris Fashion Week: Celine Reflects a Change in Approach appeared first on Man Repeller.

18 Women Disprove Clichés About the Most Mythologized Decades

Popular culture bombards us with milestones to reach by the time we age into a new decade. Big dreams by 20; a strong sense of self by 30; a new lease on life by 40. Many of us absorb and internalize these tropes, using them to imagine and even determine how our lives should look and feel. Did you write angsty poetry or experience your first love as a teenager? Did you stay out late partying and dating your way through your heartbreaks and career crises of your twenties? Did you get your shit together in your thirties? Stop caring what people thought in your forties? These ages, in particular, are vulnerable to the cultural mythology of what it means to grow older.

It’s easy to get lost in this kind of storytelling—to compare yourself to how your age is depicted in books and movies and memes. But are these markers useful in real life? And maybe more importantly, are they even accurate? I asked women leaving or entering a new decade about how their experiences compared to some of the most pervasive clichés of the most clichéd decades. Here’s what they answered:

Myths About Your Teens: Emotional & Dramatic

“I was the complete opposite of a ‘teenage dirtbag’. I did my homework at least two days ahead of the due date, never skipped a class, or partied much until I started college, and I was usually responsibly in bed by 10pm. I didn’t even have my first kiss until March of this year! That being said, emotionally I was all over the place and very in-line with the mental health issues a lot of teenagers experience. I definitely struggled with depression, school, and social related stress, and had the biggest mood swings of anyone ever. And the worst cliché of them all: I was so mean to my mom!”

—Aleksandra, 19

“High school drama; thinking I know everything at 16 years old; lots of crushes on lots of people; driving around with friends blasting music because we had nothing else to do; tension with parents over the amount of freedom I was given; sneaking around; learning more from my friends about life than I learned in the classroom. Idyllic in a sad, small-town way.”

—Mariel, 20

“My teenage years were incredibly easy. Happy family, popular kid, good grades, good college, everyone liked me and I liked everyone. Yet in the last two years I entered my first serious relationship with a girl, resulting in me coming out as bisexual. Each year I look back and say ‘that was the most fun year of my life’, yet this year I am looking back and thinking ‘that was hard, and scary, and stressful, and painful’. Am I looking back at my first adult year? At my first year when I am no longer responsible for simply getting good grades and being well-liked, but responsible for another human being’s happiness? I look back on my teenage years and thank them for the smooth sailing, and for my ability to conform and perform the Western mythology of teen popularity and party culture. I am now experiencing another Western mythology of ‘coming of age’, and although it has already taken a large bite out of my naïveté, I am intrigued to see what the next decade has in store.”

—Kiera, 20

“In high school I was so determined to figure everything out and have my life together. Control was the ultimate goal. Now, as a semi-adult, I’m finding small ways to make up for the mistakes I didn’t make before. I’m more emotional and more out of control, but I’ve found strength and maturity in that feeling, rather than fear. As a teen I needed to be put together, but entering my twenties, I’m rediscovering and learning to love the messy parts of myself.”

—Maya, 20

Myths About Your Twenties: Lost & Messy

“I’m endlessly thankful that I’m not the same person I was at the beginning of the decade. But as opposed to feeling like I have it figured out, I’m just more comfortable owning that I don’t. I’m also shocked by how youthful I still feel. I think city life adds longevity to that feeling. I’m not afraid of 30 at all.”

—Hannah, 29

“I feel like I didn’t do enough in my twenties. Now that I’m 30, I feel like I should have everything figured out, but I’m actually going through a crisis because I don’t feel like I have enough success at work and I don’t make enough money or have enough savings. I know that in reality it’s OK that I don’t have things figured out and I have plenty of time, but I cannot shake that feeling that life is passing me by.”

—Auriel, 30

“I’m not usually a believer in astrology but everyone told me about the ‘Saturn return’ years of your mid-late twenties and the big changes that follow. I didn’t want to be a cliché but here I am living in Europe after six years in New York, halfway through a portfolio program (after quitting my job of five years) and two years into a new relationship. My mid-late twenties were really life affirming and made me feel more ME than ever before and I cannot wait for 30, when all of that becomes even more true.”

—Julia, 29

“I’m about to turn 30 in five days. And yes, the overused and oftentimes overwhelming clichés rang true for me. Like burning bridges by quitting a dream job in New York at 23 because your ego thinks you can make it in LA. Or the sexcapades that force you to hide from your college professor in broad daylight because you’re sleeping with him. Or losing your best friend over something so trivial you can’t even remember. Been there, done that.”

—Chani, 29

“I found my twenties to be a confusing, whirlwind continuation of my teenage years. I was in no way an adult, yet felt like I had to pretend that I was, trying out everything to see what would fit. I had no sense of the importance of money. I honestly thought I could move to London with $800, no job, and be perfectly fine for a while (spoiler alert: it wasn’t fine). I was shocked to discover that I had all this new freedom that I couldn’t do anything with. I feel a more fitting term for your twenties would be ‘Teenager: the later years’. You’ll still be working crappy jobs, going to school, and trying out this whole ‘adult’ thing. I’m turning 30 in two months and still feel like an imperfect adult. I’m still learning, and still discovering who I am and want to be. But slowly, I’m learning the power of ‘no’, realizing age is a privilege not a curse, and leaning in to the idea of being ’30, flirty, and thriving’.”

—Ashton, 29

Myths About Your Thirties: Together & Settled

“Leaving my thirties behind gave me the chance to formally dropkick my expectations that had hung around since my late teens. I got married at 22 (amazing decision) and my twenties were about adjusting to marriage and establishing a biomedical career, then having two babies and becoming a stay-at-home mom. I woke up out of a fog at 35 with two school-aged kids, opening up the age-old question of ‘now what?’ I just kept caregiving because I could. I watched the lives of others via social media and pined like everyone else. Then life happened—my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at 39. This completely changed my perspective of life, love, and my role as a caregiver. I’m now three years into this new ‘normal’, and they have been some of the most heartbreaking yet joyous ones ever. Not to say I don’t fear or lament lost expectations of what this decade should look like, but that they pass through my mind a lot faster than usual.”

—Mary, 41

“I became comfortable in my own skin, quit a high-paying job to live in a basement working as a part-time nanny, had great sex, loved being single, and made true, life-long friends. It felt like I was finally having [what was supposed to have been] my carefree twenties!”

—Heather, 38

“My thirties were a mess. Though I had two beautiful children, I also one day realized that my life and marriage were a complete sham. So, now, I’ll have to spend my forties to build my life from scratch. It’s exciting and terrifying.”

—Mekhala, 39

“It seems like everyone I know has children, and my husband and I spent a few years deeply, incredibly sad that we weren’t able to. But I’ve managed to leave behind a lot of emotional baggage, learned to let things go, and decided to enjoy my life. My husband and I have a very loving marriage and I’m getting laid hard. My basic takeaway is: You only have one life; it should be appreciated and honored.”

—Bianca, 40

“It’s hard to say whether I got my shit together because shit is relative. I will say that in the last year or so I’ve stopped giving as much weight to what other people think and I feel more content and less restless. I was told to expect this so I’m glad that cliché came true. My thirties were way more fun than most of my 20s. I hope the trend continues into the next decade!”

—Adria, 40

Myths About Your Forties: Enlightened & Actualized

“I was an early-starter and landed my first job as a managing director in my early thirties and had three kids under my belt. This means that my midlife career crisis had an early onset at the beginning of my forties. I decided to open my own practice and recalibrate my life goals in my mid-forties before returning to a ‘regular’ management job. At 48 I quit the corporate world entirely and started writing, and I am now publishing my first book after recently turning 50. The decade has been full of soul-searching and crises from which I now seem to be emerging. Thank god I left my forties and found my new life!”

—Malene, 50

“I feel young and energetic sometimes and ancient other times. My kids are older and able to be on their own so I finally have time to take care of myself. I weigh the same as I did in my twenties—I’ve always been tall and thin—but now my wrinkling face and age spots on arms and legs show my age. My neck is crepe-y and frankly it’s depressing. I feel like my days of feeling desirable are numbered. This will not be an easy transition. What gives me solace is the group of younger women around me who look up to me for my wise old age and years of experience. This is the hardest decade transition yet.”

—Jen, 50

“My forties looked more like I thought my thirties would in that I got married, had a baby, bought a house, and settled down. Six months ago I started my own business. I’m tired all the time, living in a peri-menopausal brain fog while craving chocolate in the throes of PMS! But I’ve never been happier.”

—Frances, 48

“Every time I leave a decade I consciously realize the good of it. It’s like eating the entire cake and only at the end realizing how good it was. It happened when I turned 30 (recently divorced) and I didn’t know where I was going nor where I was coming from. When I turned 40, I realized how much I had enjoyed the party.”

—Francesca, 50

How did your experiences compare?

The post 18 Women Disprove Clichés About the Most Mythologized Decades appeared first on Man Repeller.

How One Boot Got Me Through Three Weird Weather Days in Style

In partnership with Blundstone.

What’s in a boot? By that I mean, like, a very good boot. The kind of boot that makes you call home to say, “This is the one. I’m bringing her home for Thanksgiving.” A pair of boots that has durability and versatility and oomph. For the sake of science, I tested one such pair from the Australian (née Tasmanian) brand Blundstone, who have been crafting fine leather shoes since…wait for it…1870. And they’ve been on my radar for a long time, too: My roommates own them, my best friend owns them, my brother owns them—around New York they’re lauded as the holy grail of boots for maintaining that alchemic combo of genuinely utilitarian and actually cool. When the opportunity came to put them to the test, my bid was so aggressive that the partnerships team felt they had to oblige. Below, my boot diary:

Day 1

Dearest Diar-ella,

Today I woke up and looked at my weather app and it called for rain. Ah, rain: The perpetual New York inter-seasonal forecast, always rearing its dour face. Rain manages to put a damper on the construction of almost any outfit both literally and figuratively, but I’ve learned that with proper preparation, the day can actually pass in peace.

First, I selected a jumpsuit I’ve been loving of late and notched it around my waist. Then I added a headband and some cuffs for good measure because I am no one if not for my accessories. I pulled on my pair of black Blundstone boots (and I mean I truly pulled: These gals have two tabs that are intended for doing so, which is, in my humble opinion, a peak boot feature, and also a Blundstone calling card), happy to know their weather-resistant leather lining would save my feet from getting wet today.

It was a casual day at the office, just post-fashion week. I still found myself running around outside for important things like lunch, a press appointment in SoHo, a candy bar. My feet were incredibly comfortable around mile two on my “Health” app. Around mile four, with an umbrella overhead and a drizzle, the boots look unfazed by the precipitation.

With showery salutations,

Amalie

Day 2

Sweet Diar-ina,

Today called for rain again, but I woke up feeling eccentricity running through my veins. Time to throw a little caution to the wind!!

I pulled on a floaty dress with a Renaissance-core collar and sleeves that really likes to move with the wind, which means a pair of shorts are required underneath. I followed that with a rainbow sweater wrapped around my shoulders just in case I felt the *chill*, but mostly for the sake of style. And of course, sans doute, as they say in French, my Blundstones were required. The way the boots grounded the whimsy of the outfit were imperative to make it feel more “me.” It’s a trick I’ll be adding to my book.

The boots stood by me today like Horatio to Hamlet, much to my joy. I made it to dinner with a friend at which I ordered Mapo Tofu and managed to spill neither on my lap NOR my shoes, which I’m calling a triumph (though unfortunate because I have an inkling these boots would show no sign of silky tofu).

With good tidings from my short-shorts,

Amalie

Day 3

Dear Diary Queen,

I woke up and it was Friday! A revelation! I had plans to sign a lease and celebrate with a festive homemade zucchini pasta dinner for which I needed to pick up the provisions. And guess what? NO RAIN!

This morning I wanted to go with full denim after being inspired by Leandra’s fashion week outfit anatomy. My version was bound to include matching washes, though, and a thick cut bacon cuff to highlight my Blundstones, baby. The cradling of my underfoot had been too sweet to pass up for a third day, and so I pulled the tabs onward and upward. Comfy feet, comfy life, they say.

Today passed blissfully. I did manage to skirt the puddle of who knows what green-ish brown-ish liquid on the corner of Crosby and Houston, but I did so knowing that even if I stepped in the sluice, I would be safe. I could dip my foot in the Gowanus Canal and I’d be safe.

With two tabs’-worth of love,

Amalie

Blundstone 558 Boots





See All 1

After three days of boot-dom, I’m happy to report that these shoes have wormed their way into my heart and my shoe rotation. I’m excited to sport them through rain, shine, sleet, and snow, with the awareness that the wear will only increase their rugged appeal. A shoe that has the patina of road salt and loved-in age is my favorite, and I look forward to a future of greeting these as old friends year after year.

Styled by Elizabeth Tamkin; Photography by Sabrina Santiago.

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Do You Have to Leave Your Hometown to Grow Up?

I was born and raised in New York and that may very well be the most interesting thing about me. The city was home for me before I knew it was this glossy thing—before I clocked the huddled masses and sort-of actors waiting to gain entrance. But once I did, the city became a matter of identity rather than a place of origin; I didn’t need to be so much of anything so long as I could wear this place like a personality.

“I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you,” Coleson Whitehead wrote of New York in 2001.

I, too, am ruined for everywhere else—or at least, I hear myself declare this often. I say it to refute the common charge that I’ve been here too long, that no person can feel whole having spent a lifetime in just one place. But for all my readiness to brandish my native status like a badge, beneath it is the fear that I am particular in a way that only this city will cater to—that in fact my development has been arrested by my modest mileage. Can a reluctance to leave one’s hometown—location notwithstanding—preclude one from properly growing up?

Moving as a Rite of Passage

“I didn’t really have a moment where I had to pause to figure out where I was going to go or what it would be like here,” says Emma, a friend who moved from Asheville to Bushwick four years ago, arriving at Newark Airport alone with an address tucked in her pocket. “But now, I get this very real sense of pride from knowing that I made a life here on my own. I get to look at my friends and my job and my apartment and I get to know that I created this—none of it fell into my lap.”

To build a life from the ground up is an indisputably admirable thing. It requires a sort of nakedness—demands that you strip yourself of historical context. And in turn, it allows you to lay claim to a city in a different way, one that is perhaps more warranted than the kind you earn simply on the merit of birthplace. For Emma, that version of freshman anonymity was a gift: It insisted that she be assessed as she was, rather than as some sort of palimpsest, charting everything she’d once been.

For so many city dwellers, this is part of the magic: New York is crawling with people for whom the world began at the airport. Likely this is true of any transplant in-the-making—it indicates that cutting ties with the older, archival versions of ourselves is essential to the process of growing up. On the contrary, I often take company with people who are relics of a prehistoric version of my world, who knew me in the pubescent era of my girl band, when my affinity for knee-high converse was a signature of my sartorial personality.

Whereas in most places, the procurement of a driver’s license acts as a definitive hallmark of adulthood, in my neighborhood, most of us never touched a steering wheel.

“But think about it: We had rites of passage that were unique to us too,” says Emily, one of the two women with whom I share an apartment. We met in kindergarten—all three of us—and our childhood homes are nestled mere blocks from one another’s in South Brooklyn, just on the other side of Prospect Park. “We had to cross certain barriers that were specific to here.”

She’s right: Whereas in most places, the procurement of a driver’s license acts as a definitive hallmark of adulthood, in my neighborhood, most of us never touched a steering wheel. Instead, we memorized the tangled nest that is New York’s subway map, eventually trading our subsidized student metrocards for the more senior, unlimited version. In large part, we never took to the stands for homecoming games, instead spending our Saturday afternoons spread out across old bath towels at the very end of the F line on the Coney Island beach. And these are just the most tangible details; our charts of growth probably looked as different from one another’s as they did from those common to other cities. Maybe my version of “moving away” will look different, then, too.

Growing Up Isn’t a Formula

“The young are not so young here, and there is no such thing as midlife,” Toni Morrison writes of city-living in her novel, Jazz. Perhaps there’s no “adulthood” either. By nature, “growing up” is a strange, amorphous process. It looks less like an arrow than it does like an ink stain on a bed sheet. A seeping. For all the ceremony to crossing the definitive line between adulthood and everything that comes before it—a bar mitzvah, a first period, a graduation—there is no declarative, holy moment of transition. Rays of light do not beam down from the heavens to deem you fully-formed. It happens in gradients, along shaky, tangled lines, not unlike a subway map.

Maybe transformation often dovetails with new degrees, first loves, trips overseas—but these benchmarks are not mandates.

“There are eight million naked cities in this naked city— they dispute and disagree. The New York City you live in is not my New York City,” writes Whitehead. And in much the same fashion, my version of aging cannot mimic yours: We’re all growing up, yes—but the very shape of that term is poetically vague. Growing towards “up” encompasses so very many directives. And it would seem that the impulse to wrangle and label and impose on one another our “rites of passage” is merely driven by the ordinary human desire to communicate what it is to grow older when our trajectories are not symmetrical. Maybe transformation often dovetails with new degrees, first loves, trips overseas—but these benchmarks are not mandates. Instead, they are a grasping, from separate vantage points, at ways we can make the thoroughly rhapsodic, nebulous experience of growing up into something universal. They’re valuable for their intention, but utterly useless when contemplated as a recipe for adulthood.

So then, I am still here. Still stationary. But my New York is mine, and with it comes the F line and the deli on Washington Ave and the massive hole in the sky where the Kentile Floors sign once stood. Just as yours is yours, whether or not your New York is even New York at all. It’s not really about the context, anyway.

Illustration by Molley May.

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Celeb Look of the Week: A Young Royal Masters Transitional Dressing

This installment of Celeb Look Of the Week is less about a lewk and more like, “Look! Baby Archie, formally known as Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, made his big face-showing debut in South Africa this past week.”

The good news is he’s cute.

The best news is he’s cute and he’s wearing overalls.

Our big beautiful bouncing boy met Desmon Tutu in a pair of seersucker overalls from H&M, the stripes of which draw the attention to Archie’s perfectly chubby and occasionally flailing legs, an indicator that he already knows how to use what he’s got to make an impression. He is truly a tiny man of the people. It is currently spring in South Africa, so Archie, or “Bubba,” as his perfect mother calls him, has mastered transitional dressing. All you need to do to get through the in-between weather is pair a crew neck shirt with a bottom of a not-too-heavy material and you are good to go.

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Thanks Cape Town for another impactful and memorable day! A few more highlights of this very special visit with Archbishop Desmond Tutu #RoyalVisitSouthAfrica Video ©️SussexRoyal

A post shared by The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (@sussexroyal) on Sep 25, 2019 at 12:06pm PDT

As with any simple outfit, accessories are key. Archie is sporting a perfect amount of baby drool on the collar, some spectacular joie de vivre, and a perfect chubby babyface. And in a stunning show of five-month-old grace and refinement, he kept his booties on the entire time. While he sported no visible makeup, he looked freshly moisturized and completely unbothered.

He was also joined by his parents, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, dressed in plain yet stylish clothes, clearly knowing better than to pull focus from the true star, Perfect Baby Star of Our Hearts, Archie. At one point on the tour, Meghan referred to him as an “old soul,” which must be why he looks so dapper.

I am unable to offer much context around the political goings-on of this magnificent bebe, his stunning mother, and his red-headed father, as I know very little about the Royal Family. Not because I don’t want to or think it’s trivial, just that I only have time for one horny/messy British dynasty right now and I have chosen Love Island.

Comment below with your favorite thing about Archie, the human version of the sweet feeling you get when hearing the Downtown Abbey theme song, even though you stopped watching after season three.

Photos via Getty Images.

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Learning to Plan for Next Year, Right Now

I’m sitting in the garden in the heat of the late summer sun and dreaming of all the beauty that could be here next spring—the tiny tendrils of hopeful sugar snap peas, the gentle dapple of spotted trout lettuces, an ocean of peppery nasturtium, riotous in color. But right now, everything is thirsty, including me. The few stalks of corn left unharassed by raccoons have maybe three ears between them. The color is good, but they never really filled out. One pepper plant still has all its fruit, now shriveled up. The eggplants all look healthy and happy, but no flowers and no fruit. Maybe they flowered and I didn’t see? Maybe the flowers got eaten? Maybe they’re supposed to bloom late? I have no idea.

This is my fourth year of keeping a garden in the backyard of our apartment building in Oakland, California, and I am still very much a beginner. There are four raised 4×4 beds and a small army of plastic pots fenced off for garden use. A gift from the landlord. Each of the beds is supposed to be dedicated to one of the apartments, but no one else has put them to use, so now they’re as much mine as anything rented can be. Most mornings I spend less than 15 minutes watering and pulling the odd weed or two, then spend the rest of my day chasing the peace of those short moments.

If the garden comes up in casual conversation and I list everything I’m working on growing—like tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, corn, lettuce, beans, and swiss chard—the listener will often laugh and say, “You must never have to go to the grocery store!” And I know then that they have never kept a vegetable garden. I have killed more plants than I can count and failed in ways too numerous to list. But at least the failures of a garden are never complete failures: What dies becomes compost and fuels the next venture. In a garden, even failure is an investment.

To achieve that bite of perfect liveliness, you often need to start with something dead or rotten. Compost, bone meal, ash.

Last fall, my husband Win and I hosted a feast for Rosh Hashona, the Jewish New Year, and because our apartment is tiny, we did it in the backyard, lining up folding tables and mismatching tablecloths. I tried to make the garden look as presentable as I could, but aside from the tomatoes (bless them), it looked, well, sad. It’s new years, I thought, why doesn’t anything feel new? Even though I’ve practiced it my whole life (the Hebrew calendar and the academic one agree at least) it still seems odd to be thinking of a fresh start when everything is shutting down, but I’m starting to notice that fall is the best season for planning next year’s garden. It’s when I choose which plants to harvest and which to let go to seed so I can plant their progeny next year. Which varieties thrived in this climate and which struggled. Which surprised and delighted me so much that I want to devote more space to them. It may be invisible, but that time of planning, choosing, and setting new intentions is the fresh start, and it happens long before the seedlings of spring peep up their heads.

The incomparable delight of biting into a real tomato, the kind that drips the tang of sunlight directly onto your tongue, is the product of a year’s worth of work and attention. And that’s just the start. If you count the seed savers, that work goes back for millennia hand in hand with the whole human experience. You may think that you can start in spring with the shining sun and a patch of fertile ground, but everything is dependent on what came before. Are there nutrients in the soil? Where do your seeds and plants come from? How are the pollinators doing? Think ahead to what you want and plan all the way back to how you’ll get there. To achieve that bite of perfect liveliness, you often need to start with something dead or rotten. Compost, bone meal, ash.

It’s almost too easy to find life lessons in a garden: If you want flowers, you have to plant seeds. Pick the fruit when it’s ripe. Don’t water the weeds. No matter how insulated we may feel from the natural world, our survival as a species has always been dependent on our ability to negotiate with it. Of course there will always be elements that are out of our control; for all our work as a civilization to have clean water on tap for nourishing crops, we can’t force the sun to shine. But we can give pole beans a trellis to climb, avoid planting brassicaceae in the same bed two years in a row, choose a shady spot for cucumbers. We can start with what already exists and see what we can grow. And when we fail (not if, when) we can always try again.

Trying again is the whole point of the High Holy Days, the ten-day period between Rosh Hashona and Yom Kippur, which is alternately characterized as a festival of the new year and a somber time of reflection and repentance. It is a time to pay off debts, repair relationships, make amends. Over these days, with leaves falling and animals preparing for hibernation, we are asked to consider if the choices we made throughout the year are making us who we want to be. And in order to do this, we must first confront the places where we have failed, times when we “missed the mark,” like an archer would, aiming for a target and the arrow landing elsewhere. Or like a gardener who overcrowded the lettuce bed, or neglected their watering, or sowed a plant out of season. Next year, we pray, will bring more chances to get it right.

The measure of me is not how “good” I can be, but whether or not I can learn from my mistakes. The garden, at least, agrees with me on that.

It is so much easier for me to confront the failures within my garden than it is in the world or in my own heart. If the cucumbers are bitter and tough, it is not because of their own meanness, it is because I didn’t give them enough water or I left them on the vine too long. If the lettuce bolts in the heat, I plan a shade structure for next year. If the birds eat the berries, I remember a local vineyard that festoons their plot with bright metallic ribbons to discourage aviary marauders. I get frustrated of course—I have no shortage of choice words for whatever creature nips all the flowers off the squash and doesn’t even eat them (seriously, wtf?!?) and I have certainly shed real tears over a flat of seed starts that fell out of the bathroom window to their doom—but in garden failures, there is a noticeable absence of guilt or shame because frankly, neither is of all that much use. You simply take the lesson and make a plan. You start over. I wish that I could meet the rest of my failures and shortcomings with such grace.

We won’t be hosting a feast this year, but I’ll still go to temple for the comfort of old words, which, like heirloom seeds, have been passed down from generation to generation. And every year I am reminded that the measure of personal growth is not repentance or regret, but reformation. When met with the same challenge, will I make a different choice? The measure of me is not how “good” I can be, but whether or not I can learn from my mistakes. The garden, at least, agrees with me on that. Spring is too late to start over if I wasn’t paying proper attention in fall. I have to take a moment first, with all the successes and failures right there in front of me to think about what I want next year.

It’s tempting to think you can change your life in an instant. That we’re all only one new year’s resolution or cute bullet journal spread away from living our best life or growing the juiciest tomato. But most change, I’ve found, is glacial until it sneaks up on you. It’s making a decision to invest in something and then making that decision over and over again. It’s days and days and days of watering and weeding, and feeding, and trellising, until suddenly, there it is, the bite you’ve been wanting to take all along.

Graphics by Coco Lashar. 

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Ask MR: I’ve Taken a Leap and Can’t Find My Footing. What Do I Do?

Hello and welcome to our advice column, Ask MR, where we answer your burning questions, hoping we’ll become the ointment to your life rash. Ask us a question by sending one of us a DM, emailing write@manrepeller.com with the subject line “ASK MR A QUESTION,” or simply leaving one in the comments.

“I’m 23, recently graduated from a creative field and I’m moving to Chicago without a job or much money. I’m taking such a leap, but at the same time I feel like I’m just floating and unable to find my footing. Growing up to me means leaving behind the established structure of school or your parents rules and attempting to build your own. How do you build your own? How do you balance between ambition and security?”

My first reaction to your question—which expresses what must be one of the most fundamental conflicts of the human experience—is that I think you might already know the answer. It’s right there in your words: You’re taking a leap, and now you can’t find your footing. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? That you can’t be airborne and grounded at the same time? It’s an apt metaphor, because ambition and security share a similar mutual exclusivity. To leap or not to leap? It’s not the question, but it’s always its own kind of answer. One or the other, never both.

I think it’s right for you to feel untethered right now. You’re leaving something you know for something you don’t. You’re suspended in uncertainty, one of the squirmiest, most unpleasant emotions. I’ve made similar leaps myself, ones that have changed my life for the better, and I’ll still go to great lengths to avoid the feeling. In particularly dark moments, I’ll even hope for someone or something to decide my fate for me just to save me from it. Which is to say: Learning to maintain your wits right now is good practice for life. You can try to level your unease with a truism like “everything will be okay” (impossible to prove), but I think you know this is what you’ve chosen: to lose your footing and float a little. Sometimes it’s the only way to move forward.

Freedom says anything is possible when safety says only some things are. Freedom implies a kind of lawlessness while safety favors order.

I understand your desire to establish a sense of structure though. It’s by laying the foundation of your new world and putting up the proverbial shelves that you’ll find your way back to the ground. I think this will come naturally: You’ll sign a lease, find work, meet a new friend. You’ll develop affection for a particular street corner, memorize the peculiarities of your commute, buy soap. You’ll try, fuck up, do better next time. Imbued with the learnings of your previous life, these are the new rhythms and habits by which you’ll live, and they’ll give you the sense of certainty and security that looks so attractive to you right now. Of course, these are also the tenets which, when overemphasized, can make you feel stuck. This is the tension inherent to safety versus freedom.

Safety is knowable and certain, it makes us feel secure and protected. But it can also be suffocating, making us yearn for the expansiveness of freedom, openness, and adventure. Freedom says anything is possible when safety says only some things are. Freedom implies a kind of lawlessness while safety favors order. Too much of the former incites fear and insecurity, too much of the latter can inspire an existential kind of dread. These two notions are connected like joy and pain, each emphasizing the other in ways important and cruel. To me, a life well-lived entails a constant negotiation between both.

There have been times in my life where too much of one sent me running toward the other, like when I was 25 and felt so urgently stagnant that, in the span of a week, I started five creative projects and deigned to change all the habits I believed were nurturing my complacency. In instigating a flurry of change, I felt inspired, energetic, and a little afraid. And for a while, this harkended a unique era of fulfillment, but within six months, I was burned out. I’d become so tapped into the life I wanted, I’d come to resent the life I had. I forced a period of calm reclusion, a return to stability, which then stretched into months until, of course, I felt itchy again.

I rode that roller coaster for a long time, never quite sure which one was “correct.” Hustle or relax? Want more or be grateful? But the answer wasn’t in committing to one or the other, it was in learning to let these parts of me cooperate rather than fight to the death. Maybe not day-to-day, but at least week-to-week, or month-to-month. This balance looks different for everyone, but for me it means being careful to balance routine with risk, deadlines with creative freedom, long days with time off. It’s decorating my comfort zone while also stepping outside of it enough to remember why I have it in the first place.

This leap will teach you about yourself, about what you want, what makes you feel good and wrong and attentive and fearful.

As you set out on this new life in Chicago, I suggest you embrace the inimitable perks of freedom you’ve unlocked by leaving your established structure: the sense of movement in your body, the breath-taking number of possibilities on your horizon, the unknowability of your next move. They may give you vertigo, but what good things don’t come at a cost? And when you eventually spin a safety net for yourself, that security will feel all the more satisfying for what came before it.

And remember this emotional binary isn’t reserved for life’s most significant peaks and stalls. We pursue and avoid the trappings of freedom and safety every day. We seek solace in maintaining habits, pursue adventure in breaking them. We’re drawn to what we’ve always done in one breath, yearn for something different the next. We cling to what we know then resent it, lust for something new then grow sick of it. Your question as to how to balance security with ambition might be the enduring quandary of life itself.

So what I can offer you—and who knows if it’s enough—is the consolation that what you’re grappling with today isn’t so different from what you’ll likely grapple with forever: the delicate dance between tending to what you know and courting what you don’t. This leap will teach you about yourself, about what you want, what makes you feel good and wrong and attentive and fearful. It will show you what makes you feel safe and what makes you feel free, and if you’re anything like me, these will become some of your most useful emotions tools.

Best of luck in finding your footing (and then staying light on your feet).

Ask MR Identity by Madeline Montoya. 

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Contemplating the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ Reboot (+ More Movies to Watch This Month)

When I was a kid, my friends and I would assign each other characters from Charlie’s Angels. I always claimed Dylan, Drew Barrymore’s badass, loud-mouthed rock ‘n’ roller with questionable taste in men. She was my favorite, but I also knew that if I didn’t act quickly, everyone would try to assign Lucy Liu to me—after all, that’s, like, the older, sexier version of always getting cast as Mulan in your friend group if you’re the token Asian. Nineteen years later, I’m starting to accept that I actually probably am most like Liu’s Alex (or at least an Alex rising?)—the brainy babe who couldn’t bake a muffin to save her life, but has an expert ear for the chirps of rare bird species. (Okay, I’m not a bird person, but I feel like I could be.)

I am haunted by this leather mommy look (?) at least once a week.

Too bad Netflix wasn’t around back then, because my parents were forced to take me to Blockbuster so I could obsessively rent the DVD until they finally caved and bought it for me for my 11th birthday. Charlie’s Angels, and its slightly inferior but still-great sequel, Full Throttle (2003), are kicking down doors and launching themselves onto the Netflix carousel on October 1, a month before Elizabeth Banks’s reboot. I’m not sure if it can ever live up to the 2000 version, and sadly, dream casting (K-Stew as an angel, whewwww) doesn’t necessarily make a great, or even good, movie (see: Ocean’s Eight). But more on that in a future column, after we all go see it.

Sweater weather—is she here? At Metrograph wearing my dad’s old sweater (New England Trademark), Dior scarf, Marc Jacobs skirt, Prada bag.
Ready to Get Spooky? Of Course You Are!

Despite my penchant for dressing up for minor occasions and my love for horror movies, I’m weirdly not a big Halloween costume person. So this month, I’ll probably skip the parties to stay home and stream something vaguely spooky, like Scream 2, which is coming to Netflix next month. It’s probably the second best Scream movie (they’re all great IMO), and features Sarah Michelle Gellar in an especially harrowing scene because you half-expect her to go full Buffy on Ghostface before you realize she’s a defenseless sorority girl. If you’re looking for something more thriller-adjacent, Along Came a Spider (also hitting Netflix October 1), was weirdly on heavy rotation for me when I was younger and obsessed with those ’90s/early aughts crime movies along the lines of The Fugitive and Double Jeopardy.

There will be no shortage of Halloween programming this October, but it’s still a great time to sign up for Shudder, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is the perfect streaming site for horror buffs. They’ve got subgenres for basically all your phobias, and you can do a seven-day trial if you’re unconvinced. If you want an underseen slasher to double feature with Scream 2, try Slumber Party Massacre, which is unabashedly ’80s camp and unexpectedly feminist, featuring female characters that know how to work a drill. It’s what AHS 1984 wants to be but waaaay better. Shudder’s got your back with the must-see classics (like Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but they also have a robust collection of should-be canon flicks, like Black Christmas, which is a slasher favorite of mine, featuring one of the most progressive final girls (played by Olivia Hussey). Yes, bish, you leave your anti-abortion boyfriend!

My one gripe with this movie is that the beret is way too big, girl.

If you’re in the arthouse horror mood, Criterion Channel has the staples: the 1960 face-transplant fantasy Eyes Without a Face (starring Edith Scob, the French actress who passed away this summer) and the 1977 Japanese cult film House, which will absolutely make you see your cat in a more demonic light. There’s also Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, a colorful homage to vintage sexploitation—this is an especially good choice if you’re bad with scary movies but want to tap into your witchy energy.

Your local cinemas will certainly show haunting selections next month. New Yorkers, stop by Metrograph at the end of October for a trio of murderous Hitchcock films (all streamable if you’re not in New York). It’s not horror-related, but Metrograph’s coinciding series of NYC movies from 1981 features a Halloween fave that ends with a costume party: Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, a rape revenge thriller that gave us one of the baddest nuns on screen.

Here I was introducing a Terror Tuesday screening of ‘Crawlspace’ at Alamo Drafthouse a few months ago, wearing an ’80s United Colors of Benetton suit.

And if I may plug my own programming, I’m presenting a 35mm screening of The Faculty on October 29 at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse as part of their Terror Tuesday series (tix on sale here). This was another childhood staple of mine—I probably used the prospect of aliens taking over teachers’ bodies to try and skip school. Come hang out with me if you’re in New York! I’ll be the one eating fried pickles.

Thrills From the Far East

Two masters of Asian horror/thriller have new movies coming out this fall. Takashi Miike, the director of the quintessential J-horror, Audition, the date-ruining, body-mutilating classic, will release a new movie called First Love on September 27. It’s far, far less disturbing than Audition and definitely a lot more romantic (bringing together a terminally ill boxer and a woman on the run from the yakuza), and includes an incredible, extended set piece within the aisles of a hardware store. Then on October 11, Parasite, the much-hyped, Palme d’Or-winning thriller from Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, Snowpiercer) will come stateside. Parasite, about a poor family that scams their way into the services of an extravagantly rich family (or, rather, leeches onto them, you know, parasitically), was the first Korean film to win the Palme, the highest award at Cannes, newly opening up the conversation about whether this might finally be the year Korea gets its first Oscar nom. If Korea doesn’t get nominated this year, I SWEAR TO GOD.

But the Real Horror This Fall Will Be…Tortured Male Egos?

Unfortunately, the talk of the town this fall will be Joker. It hasn’t even come out yet and I am already exhausted by the discourse, which is mostly centered on whether the film casts a sympathetic light on incels, or the kind of bullied lone wolf types who turn violent (see: this country’s epidemic of white male mass shooters).

On a less troubling, but more pretentious note, is A24’s The Lighthouse, the black-and-white followup from The Witch director Robert Eggers, in which two lighthouse keepers (Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe) start losing their minds and, uh, yelling at each other. It looks great—black and white and shot on film—but it’s ultimately all style, little substance, unless you count hallucinatory dreams of R Patz humping a mermaid. Consider my boat not floated.

Taking advantage of the few weeks we have left of tank top and wool skirt weather. Wearing Benetton blazer, Reneevon shirt, vintage skirt, and Gucci bag at Lincoln Center.
Take a Break With Female Filmmakers This Fall

Thankfully, there’s a lot of counter-programming this October. A cool new festival you should be aware of: FFFest (Female Filmmaker Fest), which launched last year and will now be hosted by Quad Cinema in New York, from October 25–27. There will be screenings of underseen women-directed or shot films (like Kei Fujiawara’s Organ and Bette Gordon’s Variety), along with panels about making movies and screening them. (Tickets on sale soon!)

This year’s FFFest poster, designed by Laurie Simmons.

Over at Film Forum, they’re celebrating the 100th birthday of filmmaker Shirley Clarke with select screenings. Her best-known work is Portrait of Jason, a biographical documentary about a gay, black entertainer in the ’60s. The film, which is also rentable on Amazon, is a seminal text for shows like Drag Race and Pose.

Love to pair a sexy dress (this one from Theory) with sensible grandma accessories. At Film Forum literally wearing my grandma’s wool jacket with vintage Ferragamo loafers that have a bit of a Cinderella story behind them.

If you want to take a chance on something super underground, may I draw your attention to The Eyeslicer? It’s an omnibus TV show comprised of shorts from the coolest emerging filmmakers, most of whom are women. There’s ASMR (I attest to tingles), animation, and so much more, and lucky for us all, the first two episodes are streaming online for free here and here. The rest of the season is available to order on a beautiful 7-inch.

Lastly, Can We Please Talk About J.Lo?

Okay, I know we are all collectively re-obsessed with J.Lo right now, especially after she lit up a cigarette and invited Constance Wu to climb into her fur in Hustlers, but I let out an audible gasp when I saw she closed out the Versace show with an homage to her Google Image-inventing green Grammy dress from 2000. I thought everyone on the Internet was collectively appreciating a nearly two decades old photo, but then I realized she had recreated it. J.Lo is genuinely one of the greatest actresses. I wonder if she actually has a chance at the Oscars or if I’m too high on Hustlers right now?

Can I climb in THIS?

And speaking of J.Lo being iconic, the film that originally made her a star is slated for a restoration run. That’s right, Selena is getting a weeklong engagement at BAM from October 4–10. We simply must stan.

Feature photos via Sony. 

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Is This Weird? I’m Still a Passionate Fan of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

Does the name “Denny Duquette” mean anything to you? How about the quote, “He’s not the sun, you are.” or the phrase “wedding vow Post-It”? If you vigorously nodded your head in response to these three questions, welcome, kindred sister. This is a safe space for the both of us, a corner of the internet where it’s not only okay but also welcome to ask the following question: Is this weird? I still watch Grey’s Anatomy on Thursdays at 8pm.

Of course, the answer is complicated, because yes, in 2019, it most certainly is weird to tune into a show at the time it actually airs on television sets, instead of binge-watching it on a streaming platform. It’s weird to feel so much affection for said show, which is now entering its SIXTEENTH season, while also admitting (within trusted circles) that at least half of these seasons have been thoroughly mediocre. It’s weird to adore a cast that has drastically evolved more times than Meredith Gray has been in a plane crash (an ever-so-slightly unrealistic number). It’s weird to feel a tingle of bone-deep comfort during the signature intro music, a mere snippet of the full song that used to play at the beginning of every episode during the earlier seasons (“Nobody knows where they might end up/ Nobody knows”) I have chills.

We were all charmed by Christina Yang and annoyed by George.

Watching it now reminds me of being in ninth grade, when I first started the show. I had also just started at a boarding school, and my eagerness to make friends was promptly facilitated by weekly common room gatherings to witness Mer, Der, and the rest of the Seattle Grace Hospital crew engage in various shenanigans. We bonded over the eternal debate (McDreamy vs. McVet?) and the revelation that Doctor Bailey was all bark and no bite. We were all charmed by Christina Yang and annoyed by George. We collectively gasped when Derek’s wife showed up in the Season 1 finale, and were collectively perplexed when she turned out to be a lovely person (yes, I did watch all six seasons of her spin-off, Private Practice). We all found “dark and twisty” Meredith equal parts infuriating and endearing, naturally.

Is it weird that I’m still thoroughly entertained by all of it? That I’ve rewatched the entire series multiple times? That I feel a deep sense of nostalgia whenever I do? Perhaps. But like I said, this is a safe space, and if you, too, still watch Grey’s Anatomy, then I’m sure you understand my impulse behind watching it: not because it’s prestige television, but because it’s the adult-appropriate, entertainment equivalent of a kid’s blankie. It’s warm apple pie. Staying inside on a snowy day. The smell of my mom’s neck. Comforting, in every sense of the word.

I plan to keep watching for as long as Meredith keeps saving lives and making questionable decisions.

I credit Shonda Rhimes’s signature approach to the plot of each episode and her talent for writing characters that are the perfect mix of “complicated” and “easy to digest.” I’m addicted to how soothing it is, and to the predictability of the emotional rollercoaster that plays out season after season, making you chuckle when a character does something that is sooooo them and making you cry when they have yet another near-death experience, or spew an impassioned, impromptu speech about humanity (happens like every other episode).

Today, season 16 premieres on ABC, and I’m thrilled to report that Rhimes has already signed on for a 17th season to follow. I plan to keep watching for as long as Meredith keeps saving lives and making questionable decisions. How about you?

Graphics by Dasha Faires.

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