trivial pursuits

how we doin’ ants¹ ,

comments 💬 

Comments are collected in person, via text, and through replies to these emails. Get featured and enjoy the smallest amount of internet celebrity possible. Without further ado, some comments from human I love (hils).

• hil #1: “I read it, I just remember nothing.” -JL

• hil #2: “you are a people who makes their dreams come true lol” -CI

JL, after looking you actually didn’t read it BAHAHA.

CI writes for a living and studied linguistics. Good English-ing dude.

update life 📈 

I got some feedback that my life updates at the top made my newsletter/blog/written thingamajig feel different. To accommodate that, I’m adding this section. I’m not committing to it being a weekly thing, but I wanted to see how it felt.

This week in the life of me:

• Watched an indie movie with some friends and talked about how we like to experience movies. The movie was 1 Girl Infinite and it was an intimate peek into the director’s life.

• I took a nap and decided to walk around. I ran into a volleyball tournament and a friend on the street. I gave her back a jacket she left at a picnic, accidentally crashed her date, and got gelato.

• My place is fully furnished and I feel as if an invisible weight has been lifted.

• I am ordering pieces for my lego wall this week! Tentative modular brick designs shown below.

• I got drenched twice - in the rain and when I tried to hand wash my button up shirts. The story is lightly unhinged, please inquire about it.

• I hung out with a certified badass and dear friend.

• I tried out a weekly artists meetup at my friend OC’s suggestion.

• I had a reunion with an old coworker before catching a bus to VA last night. It was lovely 💗.

• And more, but this feels too long already.

break ice ⚒️ 

We are looking to eliminate Sid and Manny.

icebreaker: “What’s your favorite Disney song?”

The different responses lined up to different generations of Disney. Most people picked songs from movies that came out when they were a kid or the movies that their kids watched. It was fun hearing about the memories attached.

words 🗣️

read 📖: if you want to feel intense, I have a poem for you

Last week BF mentioned that he was eliminating the word try from his vocabulary. I ran into a poem, written by Charles Bukowski that reminded me of BF’s thought. It’s called Go All the Way and it’s worth a read.

watch 📺️: unhinged streamers drop a cube on things

If it isn’t clear yet, I like to do things because they’re awesome. That’s enough of a reason for me. Michael Reeves also appears to share this sentiment.

In this Mythbuster’s style video, one of the OG Twitch streamer groups, breaks random shit. It’s pretty awesome!

write 🖋️ 

a classic case of nostalgia tripping

I begged BF for a comment last week. This is one of them.

“This has nothing to do with those topics but something I’ve been thinking about a lot this week is: how much of my perception of early 2000s media is influenced by nostalgia?

Music that I see as timeless, movies that I see as classics, games and activities that I see as fun Are they just the things I like cuz I experienced them as a kid or are they actually good?”

I don’t know.

I was a kid. I had a lot of time to consume stuff. I hadn’t seen a lot of stuff. When I saw awesome stuff, it was new and it stuck with me.

What’s cool to me is that what we consider classics can bond us. People who consumed the same movies, shows, songs, and books are fast friends. Communities form over these shared experiences that happened in so many different places. I remember looking at people’s Facebook walls judging whether we’d get along based on the movies they’d Liked.

I think some things I consider classics are definitely a case of nostalgia tripping. But to me a real classic isn’t something that stays the same. It’s something where my relationship changes with it over time that contains some kernel of truth about the human experience. It’s something I can rewatch, because my experience of it will be different.

What do you think? What’s your idea of a classic? Why is your music better than the music I grew up with?

water, earth, fire, air,

1  Ants are in a hil. The hil in question? The humans I love category ❣️