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Albums and how they changed me: Part One — Coragenesis
My aesthetic was army/pony/eyeliner

I was going to call this list my ten favourite albums, but I felt they needed context, because how I feel about them is laden with caveats. Then, I realised the better story is in the caveats themselves. I have a lot of complex feelings about my music taste – there’s defiance, nostalgia and shame mixed in with a simple love for bangers.

I was also going to make this one post, but I found myself with too much material, so I will split it into two (or more) posts.

Before we get into this, I’d like to just thank you for coming to read this, and invite you to subscribe below if you would like my new posts linked straight to your email.

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So, rather than I “here’s why I like these albums from a purely artistic and musical perspective”, here’s “the albums I have loved throughout my life and what they meant to me then and how I feel now”.
1. Girls Aloud – Sound of the Underground: The writer’s sincere beginnings
It’s 2003. I am ten years old, converting from a dedication to tomboyishness to a full and firm embrace of girliness. I am obsessed with watching Lizzie McGuire on TG4 and reading The Babysitter’s Club. Due to the constant plots with “cute boys” I am programmed into having lots of crushes. This onset of adolescence also encourages me, suddenly, to get into music. I poll my acquaintances, and Girls Aloud is a band that is having a moment.

I save up my euros and treat myself, eventually, to Sound of the Underground. Despite a glaring lack of experience in this area, I am transfixed by the depictions of “disco-dancin’ with the lights down low” and life getting “cold, it happened many years ago/when summer slipped away”. I had not even lived many years, but I certainly enjoyed angst even though I had yet to experience it. I had also been to London, so I felt I knew a thing or two about the Underground, thank you very much.

This ability to relate in strange, somewhat literal ways to songs exemplifies being that age, where experience is limited but you are still feeling very big things. Take “I’m With You’ from Avril Lavigne’s debut album. There’s a lyric “Isn’t anyone trying to find me/Won’t somebody come take me home/It’s a damn cold night/I’m trying to figure out this life/Won’t you take me by the hand, take me somewhere new” that hit me so incredibly hard, on a very literal level. We had found my cat, Scout, dead on the side of the road around that time, and in my mind the lyrics sounded like how I imagined her final moments. In retrospect it doesn’t really apply (she didn’t have hands, she wasn’t trying to “figure out this life” as much as she was trying to cross a busy road) but that was the first time a lyric penetrated in that way.

‘No Good Advice’ was Girls Aloud’s second single from SOTU, and it, alongside ‘Life Got Cold’, heralded my emo days to come. “I don’t need no bedtime prayer, cos frankly I don’t even care” snarled my idol, Nicola Roberts. As a child who regularly prayed, and felt a kind of compulsion to do so or risk inviting death to anyone I forgot to pray for, this attitude was intoxicating. So began a lifelong admiration for rebellion, tempered by my constant fears that doing so will cause me strife or loss. Unlike Nicola, frankly, I care a lot. But it feels amazing to pretend that I don’t.

On all car journeys, I petitioned for SOTU to be slid into the CD slot. What followed was 53 minutes of audio bliss, apart from one bit in “Some Kind of Miracle” where they sing “But my reaction is chemical/Somethin’ kinda sexual” where I would try to think of something to say loudly to my parents to drown out the bad word.

‘You Freak Me Out’ was another favourite of mine from the album, mostly because I loved the “woo”s. “WOO/You freak me out/I’ve got to scream/I’ve got to shou-ooh-ou-ooh-out” the ladies whooped multiple times. “My feet don’t fit in your sensible shoes/But you just won’t quit til you’ve killed my groove” helped to foster a healthy annoyance at my parents for not offering me more pocket money. Zero consideration for the potential ramifications that this might have on my groove, they forbade belly tops in perpetuity, pierced ears until I was twelve, and a mobile phone until I was 14.

A rebelliousness, albeit a purely internal one, is born.
1. Green Day – American Idiot: The writer gives up impressing men with her music taste
I wore out my patience on the janky hand, had nothing in the tank for the lettering, so let’s pretend it’s cute.

I’m walking past my brother’s room. ‘Holiday’ is blaring (‘blaring’ in my household meant audible from more than two metres away). My likely-embellished memory has me stopped in my tracks, slowly walking in, and saying suavely to him, “What…is this?” like a music executive in a film.

It’s American Idiot, by Green Day (“Green…Day? What is a ‘green day’?” I ask my brother. “I think it’s to do with when you smoke a lot of weed” he replies, faux-knowledgably. “Ah yes, weed” I faux-knowledgably respond). I am baffled as to why the song is called ‘Holiday’ as there is no mention of the seaside, or taking a ferry to France. It is my first exposure to music with a message, let alone an ambiguous message. A bit older now, it is a bit mad to think that the messaging on American Idiot could ever have seemed subtle to anyone, but I was probably about 11 years old, and not entirely sure what a government is. So it felt very grown-up to sing along to “Pulverise the Eiffel Towers/Who criticise your gov!-ern!-ment!” I wasn’t sure whose side I was supposed to be on, the Eiffel Towers (plural?) or the government. But it sounded very cool.

Hitting me at 11, this album, and the rest of Green Day’s discography, gave me enough to chew on until I was about 14. It also gave me the first lesson in boys and music.

I don’t blame my brother for this, as younger siblings’ admiration can feel mortifying to a teenager, but I immediately embraced and became obsessed with this album that he, supreme commander of cool, had deemed cool. This very quickly soured him on the album. I chalked it up to a sibling thing and perhaps a response to the sheer inescapability of my obsessions in our household.

At school, my Green Day obsession gave me a cool factor with the proto-mosher boys in my class. I traded CDs with my crush, then his best friend seemed interested so I immediately transferred my affections to him. We proceeded to “go out”. At twelve, this meant hanging out once over summer, kissing chastely on the lips exactly once until a devastating breakup in first year of secondary school (I would remain a “fridget” until I was 16).

Suddenly, this boy sneered at the music that I liked. Green Day, System of a Down… these had all been cool bands to him until we broke up. Then it went global: as girls all over the world began embracing pop rock and then emo music, all the non-emo (read: straight) mosher boys began to shit all over this genre.

I learned that lesson early and I learned it well – that music’s coolness to men will sharply decline if it appeals to women. So even as the long-haired boys in big hoodies sneered at the things I liked, deeming Green Day to be posers, I’m proud that from the start I always knew that the real posturing was from the boys who were afraid to like what the girls liked.

Don’t get me wrong, I still engaged in a lot of not-like-other-girlsing. I still tried to impress boys with my music taste and other interest, and to shit on things that were too girly. But I held a suspicion from then on, however privately, that male approval was capricious.
1. Taylor Swift – Fearless: The writer leans in to inciting disgust from men
If there’s a diss track on the next Taylor album about me for this monstrosity, it’s well deserved.

I’m glad to have had my experience with Green Day, System of a Down and even Dead Kennedys proving to me that boys will pretend to hate anything if they know that a girl loves it. I’m glad to have had this experience before I was introduced to Taylor Swift when watching YouTube at a friend’s house. As ‘You Belong With Me’ got stuck in my head and my teenage heart, I had thankfully already discarded the notion of a guilty pleasure. Here was an artist who wore her heartbreak and shame on her sleeve and turned it into success.

It felt a bit punk to me to openly adore this singer that seemed to get under boys’ skin – or at least certainly more genuinely punk than pretending to hate something I liked. Of course, in a way I was still feeling some type of response to how my male classmates felt about her, but it felt refreshing to acknowledge that response and feel exhilarated by it, rather than limited.

It was actually another mosher girl in my year, who had impressed me on the first day of secondary school with her thick curly hair and Ramones hoodie, who played us those first few Taylor hits on YouTube. In 2024, she and I actually attended the Eras tour together. In our teen years, she never felt her punk cred was diminished by her Taylor fandom, and she inspired me to be the same.

Taylor is also one of the few interests that I think my sister and I developed independently of one another. It’s as if we both woke up one day as Taylor Swift fans. Fearless is one of the last CDs that I remember playing over and over again. She’s the first artist where albums felt like incredibly good value (please note this is how it stood back then – I think her current modus operandi of releasing twenty thousand different variations of albums is predatory of her more parasocially obsessed fans).

When me and my sister got our hands on a new Taylor album, there would be two or three standout tracks immediately and the rest would be kind of a shrug for me. But next time I listened, there would be two or three more standouts. The album would open slowly to me, petal by petal, month by month, giving my teenage self a lot of mileage for the €15 I (or, more likely, my sister) had spent on the CD.

Fearless has the same charm as her first album, but it is already more mature. You see the constraints of the country dreamgirl already starting to wear thin as her anger and pain pushes through the upbeat songs. You get the sense that she is not a straightforward girl. She is wealthy, pretty, talented, but there is something warped. There’s a running theme, beginning with ‘Change’, and continued in subsequent albums (‘Long Live’, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, ‘Anti-Hero’ and most notably in ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me’) where Taylor seems to see herself as an underdog, fighting for acceptance, or even trying to accept that she is seen as a villain.

Rather than spin into a big tangent here about her most recent egregious attempt at “clapping back” at her “haters”, I’ll let Laura Snapes of the Guardian do it better.

All I’ll say is this – as an artist who’s made her career writing songs about her life, and often about how (specific) people made her feel, why can’t she let other artists do the same? And on that note, why does she dedicate an entire track on TTPD to shitting on a music journalist from back in her Nashville days? It is difficult for us to see her as the victim of bullying when she blows up every perceived slight to be a public spectacle, causing her fandom to relentlessly attack her enemy-of-the-hour.

She’s the biggest popstar in the world and she feels like she’s ‘a monster on the hill’. Perhaps she would feel less monstrous if she didn’t go on a rampage whenever she feels slighted. She thinks ‘Actually Romantic’ is coming off like a witty brush-off, a “why are you so obsessed with me?”, but it’s a lot more like Mr Burns calling to release the hounds.

To be clear, I don’t believe that Taylor is deliberately leveraging the sympathy of her audience to relate to a fake underdog image. I think Taylor has always felt out of step, wrong, off, disliked. Every time she is criticised, her reaction seems outsized because, to us, she is blatantly doing absolutely fine. But to her, every criticism makes her feel as if her deepest fear has been realised: that she was never really loved, or part of the gang, or accepted. I find the lyrics in ‘mirrorball’ to be incredibly telling and poignant: ‘I’ve never been a natural/All I do is try, try, try.’ This is what I find compelling about her.

I think this is what has always resonated for her fans. Taylor can make all the money in the world, but she has this feeling of wrongness and otherness that will always rear its head despite her successes. It’s like the feeling in primary school when you’ve finally been able to buy the cool runners that the other girls have, but when you wear them, the girls say they’re now out of style, or you’re try-hard, or you’re wearing them wrong.

These days, I find it hard to like her as much as I used to, because I find her selective mobilisation of her fanbase to be weird and vindictive. But I will always feel for her, and I think she is always going to write songs that resonate for me.

Despite my complicated feelings about her, I grew up with Taylor and her music. I look back with pride, not shame, at how I took an ex-boyfriend to task at the age of 17, sending him Taylor songs that I felt were relevant to our situation. That’s objectively quite embarrassing, and I did cringe in the immediate years following that, but today I’m glad I was emboldened to share my feelings, and not compelled to be cool to win him back.

Taylor taught me a lesson which still resonates today: it’s not embarrassing to try to be understood, as long as you act in complete sincerity.

Big thanks to my sister, for (A) going through these obsessions with me way back then and (B) proofreading this for me!

Next post: Cora learns to cry, and navigates her twenties – with the help of Neutral Milk Hotel, The Smiths and Frightened Rabbit.
6 October 2025
The Real Housewives of Wherever
Why can’t I quit my women? My harridans, my blatant capitalists, women who would cannibalise me if a plastic surgeon promised them that it would buy then ten more years of a a youthful-ish appearance?

Who are these women of which I speak? They are the Real (debatable) Housewives (sometimes) of [city]. They are a stable of women who have access to some form of high status in the area where they live (or where they rent for the duration of filming, see: Meredith Marks who resides permanently in New York but films as part of the Salt Lake City cast). They form the casts of multiple reality shows, all owned and produced by Bravo, which is run by executive Andy Cohen.

People who don’t watch these shows don’t understand why they occupy so much of my mind. In the interest of informing you, as this is my blog, let me try to provide you with an introduction to the Real Housewives.

There is a strange certainty to a Real Housewives show. Some common threads:
- 15-20 episodes per season (if Season 1 of a franchise, normally 8-10 episodes to see if the series works)
- 5-8 “housewives”
- An intro where the women say taglines about themselves. For instance: “There’s nothing grey about MY gardens!” says Sonja Morgan, who lives in a crumbling townhouse and is growing increasingly eccentric, like the documentary Grey Gardens. “If you don’t like my shade, step out of my shadow!” says Kenya Moore, who regularly eviscerates her foes with words alone.
- Several parties. These can be exceedingly random: a bra party (a slightly baffling RHO New York event), or cliché: a vow renewal (often swiftly followed by a divorce announcement). These can also be expected: birthday parties and book launches, or they can be blatantly shoehorned in: launches of launches of books (Heather, RHO Salt Lake City), and fashion shows (sometimes with no fashion, see Sherée, RHO Atlanta).
- A plotline for each housewife. If things get interesting enough, this plotline gets overshadowed by the way the season develops and conflicts emerge. Like when Luann from RHONY was delirious with joy about her impending nuptials only to find that her wedding plotline became a “He’s cheating on you regularly in your favourite watering hole” plotline. If things do not get interesting enough, you may find yourself painstakingly brought along to every step of the housewife, say, designing and launching a line of statement necklaces or some such thing.
- 1-3 “friends of” – these are friends of the housewives, who may have been tested as full housewives but who ended up on the cutting room floor, or someone who emerges throughout the season as being somewhat relevant to the storyline(s). They can later become housewives, or housewives can be demoted to “friends of”. A demotion often follows a season as described above, where a housewife has no emerging plotline beyond remodelling their kitchen or launching a skincare line. Sometimes a true star emerges, like Britani from RHO Salt Lake City, who cemented her place in Bravo history by interrupting every conversation that didn’t involve her asking why nobody cared about her.
- Talking heads/confessionals, where the ladies, the “friends of” and sometimes the husbands, react to the scenes. Once, Lisa Rinna of Beverly Hills drank from her drink through a straw in an emphatic manner to signify a kind of “I’m not gonna say anything but the moment speaks for itself” kind of way, so now all of the wives do that all the time, and it’s annoying.
- One or two cast trips, where the ‘wives, often accompanied by their “friends of”, travel somewhere. Hopefully, this is an international location but sometimes, as when Jen Shah was awaiting sentencing for defrauding the elderly in RHO Salt Lake City, they must settle on a domestic destination.
- The season ends on a party, mostly, ideally where one or more housewives have a big fight and storm off, then the audience is treated to freeze frames of each ‘wife with a little bit of text to resolve their storyline.
- A reunion, increasingly released in 3 parts, but in earlier franchises and seasons it would be one episode. In this reunion, the housewives all come to a Bravo soundstage where Andy Cohen (mostly – once it was Nicki Minaj, and some international franchises have a different host) holds their feet to the flames for their actions throughout the season. It is typically filmed when most of the season has aired, then it is released the week after the finale has aired. In the reunions, Andy reads definitely real texts from definitely real viewers reacting to the season. This can be very cathartic for the viewer. Sometimes (at least twice), a housewife will unveil a new music career in collaboration with their new surprise girlfriend. It’s not that weird, but it’s weird that it happened twice, with Kim Zolciak and Danielle Staub.
On average, I watch about 4 episodes of Bravo shows per week, most often of the Real Housewives variety. I have a mental rolodex of women who wield power through their businesses, husbands or horrible tempers. Every so often, I zone out and flicker through them, wondering who would be better in real life, who would be worse and, weirdly, who would like me. Because, as much as the show revolves around “lifestyle porn” and excess, it is a lot more about social dynamics.

The ‘wives think that they are signing on to do a show where they shock audiences with their diamond-encrusted toilet roll holders. Mostly, they think that the worst they will have to endure is our disgust at their material excess. They think that their castmates will make disgraces of themselves, but the housewife herself? Infallible. Rich, excessive, otherwise infallible.

What we actually get from them is an oblivious performance of their foibles. For instance, a HW might think it perfectly reasonable to demand silence to tell a birthday party full of 7 year-olds, at great length, about the traumatic birth of her two daughters (Alexis, Real Housewives of Orange County). She might think it appropriate to bring protection in the form of Hell’s Angels and a recently released convict named Danny to a cancer benefit for a little baby, then proceed to threaten attendees because she was told she was in for “a surprise”, and to be outraged that her donation of zero dollars did not net her a table for her and her biker gang (Danielle, Real Housewives of New Jersey). She might think that filming a scene in her church where attendees break down in tears at the pulpit and call her their mother and an aspect of God will bust those nasty rumours that she is running a cult (Mary, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City). The through line here is that, to these individuals, they are coming across as normal and relatable.

I have always wished to know what it is about me that would make viewers cringe in the way the above scenes made me cringe. If Real Housewives is to be believed, all people are walking around life thinking that they are being perfectly reasonable while acting absolutely batshit. Even the sane people in RH have moments where you remember “Oh yes – these are the type of people who would agree to be on this show.” No amount of apparent sensibility can outweigh that fact.

As a generally anxious person, I would like to know what is my “bringing a Hell’s Angel to a child’s cancer benefit”. We all have our blind spots, and in our real housewives, we get to see these blind spots performed and platformed and underlined. There’s a strange comfort to that.

We can tell ourselves that our blind spots are not bad, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe you interrupt people accidentally. Maybe you are always late. Maybe you phrase things inelegantly. But there is a comfort to knowing that, however annoying you suspect you are, you will never interrupt a Black Shabbat dinner to talk about how Jewish people have always seemed to conspire to make you, a white Christian woman, feel unwelcome (Ramona, Real Housewives of New York).

The curse of being a real housewife is every season, you must reckon with that which you had no idea was an issue. There are different ways that housewives deal with the revelation of their blind spot.

The Camille Grammer approach: Switch the bitch

Season One of the Real Housewives of Beverley Hills was incredible. Camille, then-wife of Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer, was the villain of the season, clashing early on with Kyle Richards, a seemingly innocent and sensible LA native.

Kyle often gets a favourable edit, as she is generally quite sane, and can competently deliver a quip or two. She is also very much in the Hollywood mix: her sister and fellow castmate Kim is a troubled former child star and their other sister, Kathy, is mother to Paris and Nicky Hilton. Above them hovers the constant spectre of their mother, the ominously-named Big Kathy.

Back to Camille. The conflict between Camille and Kyle began when Kyle said, off-camera and according to Camille, that if Camille went to Hawaii without her husband Kelsey, nobody would be interested in that. Kyle vehemently denies this (the clip repeats for the rest of the season: “You’re such a fucking liar, Camille!”).

As the season progresses and the feud deepens, Camille does a number of infuriating and entertaining things. She compares herself to Jesus, she demonstrates a wonderful vocabulary in calling Kyle “pernicious”, slightly lets down that vocabulary by also calling Kyle “Machiavellic”, and she flirts in a weird, arch way with her married friend Nick.

She tops it all off with a deranged dinner party featuring Allison DuBois, the psychic who inspired the show Medium. Du Bois spends the dinner vaping and threatening not to assist Kyle if anyone she loves ever goes missing, and promising Kyle “Your husband will never emotionally fulfil you”.

An attempt was made to emulate Allison DuBois’ famous vape suck

Camille kicked off the brand new franchise known as RHOBH with great style. The downside is that she set up a long tradition of intangible, offscreen feuds founded on unprovable things which continue to hound the show to this day. Did Lisa Vanderpump tell people to tell people that Dorit abandoned a dog? Eh, probably, but we’ll never get the satisfaction of a reveal onscreen.

Side note: if you like insane feuds and rumours which always come to be fully revealed in all their horror, watch Vanderpump Rules, a spin-off of RHOBH following Lisa Vanderpump’s desperate oversexed restaurant employees.

Back (again) to Camille. Her arc comes to a sad end, as it became clear to the audience and to her that Kelsey had no interest in their marriage. It’s later revealed that he was having an affair the entire season.

If we were to summarise Camille’s blind spot, it’s a flair for the dramatics that goes beyond the realm of normalcy. If Kyle’s original sin were, in fact, true, Camille certainly overreacts to it. She slinks around sexily like a Disney villain for her friends, and she summons strange allies to eviscerate her foes. Part of what makes her so compelling is imagining how mortifying it would be to be Camille, watching her behaviour on S1.

When Season Two rolled around, viewers were treated to a humbler Camille, almost penitent. The other women pitied her for her marriage breakdown and seemed to have chalked her insane S1 behaviour up to that. She became a fan favourite, no longer the centre of attention but held in affectionate regard by viewers and ‘wives alike. She got the best of both worlds – an iconic season of jaw-dropping reality tv moments and a gentle landing into being more of a fun occasional addition. In a sense, she villained so hard in S1 that she earned an eternal place in the hearts of RHOBH fans, and she ceased it so crisply for S2 that she managed to avoid the general viewership thinking she is a fundamentally bad person. She still has her moments, though.

The Ramona Singer approach: Never stop never stopping

Ramona – the Christian jewellery self-described “maven”, who says she looks like she’s the sister of her teenage daughter Avery, who starts her own brand of Pinot Grigio and brings it to every party she attends by the crateload, who pretends to get trauma flashbacks if she’s stuck on a girls’ weekend and finds out there’s a great party happening back in the city, who throws wine glasses at the faces of her frenemies, who has defecated multiple times on the floors of holiday rentals and expects the staff to clean it up, who speaks ill of a recently deceased man to his former partner because he was an addict. Ramona, who has basically always been a nightmare of a person.

Ramona has claimed repeatedly, season after season, to be learning from her mistakes. She has claimed to be a different person now every time a new season begins. Every season, she continues to be this exact way. But why would she change?

Ramona still has friends, she’s invited to events, she lives a life free from shame for the litany of horrors that she has released upon on the world. Her Bravo career finally ground to a halt after she allegedly called a producer the n-word, to the surprise of nobody. But still, she perseveres!

She is not just incapable of change, she is uninterested in it. She doesn’t need it either, because she is a wealthy white woman who spends her spare time a Mar-a-Lago, trying to hit the jackpot by catching the eye of some vile slug of a man. When her friends have finished destroying the world and climate change has wiped humanity off the planet, she’ll still be there, pooing on the floor of a hotel room bathroom and looking for a staff member to clean it up. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as staff in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

What would I do?

OK, so let’s say I’m a real housewife. I’m me, but I’m very thin and have had some ill-advised filler. My husband is a billionaire and he spends most of his time working in another country. I have two children and perhaps too many pets.

While filming my first season, I would think that I am perfectly reasonable and nice and normal. Upon watching the show, I see that my castmates and viewers find me to be:
- Occasionally foul-mouthed or purveyor of “too much information”. I’ll curse a lot, I’ll overshare about bodily functions and things that I get up to with my billionaire husband. This will certainly alienate some of the housewives and some viewers, but equally some viewers will find my critics to be prudish and prissy, and will rally to my side.
- Untidy – my home will be lavish but cluttered and messy. One of the women sits on my couch and frowns. Seconds later she pulls a Louboutin stiletto out from under a cushion, a quizzical expression on her face. Unfazed, I say “That’s where it went!” Cue a confessional from the housewife who sat on the shoe, advising me to hire a cleaner. I will not (unlike other housewives) have dog shit on the floor, but, having too many pets, there will be hair everywhere and always a cat or dog underfoot.
- Two-faced – Housewife A tells me that she thinks Housewife B was rude at the luncheon. I agree, and list all the many times that I found Housewife B to be unconscionably rude. Later, Housewife B talks about how Housewife A is always singling her out and being judgmental of her. I let B cry on my shoulder, reassuring her that she is perfect and flawless. I will argue at the reunion that I sincerely am just easily talked into people’s point-of-view, but I will be shouted down and will have to admit, tearfully, that I am two-faced.
Following my first season, I will attend therapy for my two-facedness. My tagline for my second season will be “I may have two faces, but I keep them cute”. When people bitch to me about others, I engage with it but I constantly, annoyingly, walk back my statements immediately and provide alternate points of view. I find myself saying “but then again” a lot.

I start selling a line of storage solutions for homes, having become (at least publicly) incredibly tidy. They’re called MessyGirl boxes. I also unveil a miniature version of my home where my pets live, named Chateau Animal.

I continue my foul-mouthed ways but I have not forgotten the judgment of my castmates. Pretending to be light-hearted, I never mention it, but viewers can see through my façade to the seething rage below.

It all unleashes itself on a booze-soaked trip to the Bahamas. Following my humiliating breakdown in the Bahamas, I become sober but I’m super condescending about it, especially at the reunion. In the interim between my second and third season, I am arrested in the Hamptons, drunk as a skunk, for public indecency and vandalism.

Clearly this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this.

I hope that this post served as a kind of intro to a pop culture language that I am proud to be able to speak. When I meet someone new and find they also watch the Real Housewives, you instantly have hours of conversational inspiration. The Real Housewives franchises are probably bad things, overall, for and about the world, but they are cultural artefacts and deserve a place in the annals of television history.
10 September 2025
Sober and over 30 at a music festival
I recently went to All Together Now, marking my third festival with zero alcohol or tobacco and my second festival with no alcohol, tobacco or drugs of any kind (I had a hilariously bad experience with a brownie at Another Love Story last year). Since quitting alcohol two years ago and smoking last year, I honestly thought that experiences like music festivals would not be the same, and the effort of going to one would be heavier than the potential joys I would experience.

I don’t want you to go into this article thinking I’m some joyless freak, who probably gets off on not doing anything fun. Let me rhapsodise briefly, because I really want to impress upon you how much I appreciate the joys of smoking and drinking, especially at a festival. There is nothing I can romanticise harder than lighting a rollie in a sunlit field, sitting on dry summer grass. Cracking open a can of beer as you begin that stomping trudge to the next stage. When you have a Deep Meaningful Conversation (DMC) with your best friends at 2am, lying under the stars and somehow avoiding getting stepped on by your fellow festivalgoers.

In recent years, these moments had petered out, even with alcohol and tobacco in the equation. I couldn’t stay awake long enough to get drunk enough to have a 2am DMC, but I could certainly get drunk enough that I battled horrific anxiety and sickness the following day (or two).

As for smoking, I began to notice that the romance of lighting a rollie was almost instantly extinguished after my first inhalation. The nicotine craving now quenched, all that remained was a dry throat and a bad taste. As I looked at the ashtray on my balcony, at all the half-smoked rollies, 5-10 per day on the balcony alone, I realised that I don’t actually like smoking anymore. However, there was more to that decision, as there was to my alcohol cessation (that story involves several days of diarrhoea).

In summary, I’m not a joyless freak, but I could no longer pretend that there was any joy in drinking or smoking for me anymore. I hate to be the one to tell you, but generally being alcohol-free is the best thing ever. If you’re wondering whether or not it has made me smug, it absolutely has.

So, those decisions brought me to All Together Now 2025 with no alcohol and no tobacco. What’s that like?

In short, grand. If you’re feeling generally grand, and if you enjoy festivals, then it’s grand.

Big if true!

One great thing is that being sober doesn’t stop you from being “Festival You”. One reason that people go to festivals to be released from their normal social inhibitions. They often assume, as I always did too, that this will require a bit of Dutch courage.

Most people are drunk or high, and so assume that you are as well. Their judgment is impaired, therefore you lose your fear of being judged. You can do your silly wavey dancing and show off what I referred to as “ass cleavage” (actually, more of an “underboob” equivalent, wearing a skirt short enough that the bottom of your cheeks is just about visible. “Ass cleavage” would be showing crack, and I’m too millennial to wear anything that isn’t high-waisted). Essentially, you get to be drunk without the hangover, and you can instantly snap out of it the moment it stops being fun.

Being sober is the best cure for anxiety, and not just for straightforward chemical reasons. When you’re sober, you can clearly see how little anyone else notices or gives a shit (in a good way) about you or what you’re doing. And, after a certain point in the night, you see how most people don’t seem capable of seeing anything at all.

It’s a bit disconcerting, seeing hordes of beautiful twenty year olds with glassy eyes and legs like baby foals stomping towards you, clutching big cans in their tiny hands. You feel that, if you don’t dodge, they will bounce off your stolid thirty-one year old body and, before you know it, you have created a twenty-child pile-up. They will lie in their pile of jerking limbs, still staring with giant pupils, thinking they’re still stomping their way to see Bicep, until someone comes and untangles them. Or lads lads lads, in one great shoving mass. Trying for big man energy but they are striding for all the world like Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte on the streets of Manhattan.

Turlough, Ferghal, Jack and Eoghan making their way through the festival

However, with the vast majority of your fellow attendees being totally legless, you realise that you could do all the things you want to without fear of judgement. For me, that involves taking my annual Wild Wee, barely visible among some trees. Dream big, you say? You’re underestimating how much I love an outdoor urination. And how long festival toilet queues are after 9pm.

All of that nice stuff said, there is a definite feeling of disconnect for the sober festival attendee. Because that thing about people not noticing or giving a shit about anyone else has a bad side (as you might have suspected).

Now, what a lot of people feel at a festival is togetherness, community. This festival is literally named All Together Now. To be fair, you do feel it sometimes. You feel it when you’re lying out at the bandstand, half-listening to the performer but mostly just dozing off in the sunshine with hundreds of other people. You feel it when you turn to the person behind you in the toilet queue to first roll your eyes, then loudly complain about the person taking upwards of ten minutes to take a dump or do a line of something, neither of which need to take ten minutes.

But you start to lose touch with your fellow man when you see that someone has taken all the fresh toilet roll out of the portaloos and strewn them on the grass. Or you pass the tent where shit music has tinnily been blasting for 12 hours, with five or six people sitting in a circle of camp chairs, near comatose except for a guy in a weed-patterned bucket hat who is almost shouting. Or the dreaded 11pm influx to the festival grounds of people who have been in those camp chair circles for the entire day, only now surging to see whatever is on, dead boys and girls walking. Now, that’s what I call joyless.

“AND THE THING IS THAT LIKE THEY LITERALLY HAVE TO TELL YOU IF THEY’RE A GUARD…”

Or, horror of horrors, the final morning. People clear out, leaving vast scatterings of rubbish in their wake. Tents, cans, waterlogged pillows, boxes, camp chairs, vapes. Fuck these people, fuck them five ways to Sunday and comfort yourself with the thought that the skag they are about to experience is worse than anything you’ve felt in years. These specific people are the worst, and if you’ve ever done this, I hope that you are suitably ashamed, turned your life around, and now volunteer with young people who are at risk of becoming as shitheaded as once you were.

But I’m being unfair to the vast amounts of drunk young people who do not leave their shit everywhere for someone else to clean up. The vast majority of these babies are good, normal people. My own personal baggage around drunkenness is mine and not theirs. I’ve noticed a puritanical tendency, even a compulsion, in me since I quit drinking, and a feeling of panic at the thought of inebriation that is certainly a sign of this being my problem. In short, these kids are triggering me.

One morning, I lay in my tent trying to nap as I heard a young lad approach the tent beside mine.

“Well lads what’s the fuckin’ storEEEEE!” came the voice. I rolled my eyes and got ready to listen, to try to remember all the heinous things that this young man was about to say so that I could repeat them to everyone for the next few weeks. What I heard instead was a pleasant conversation, and weirdly his chatting comforted me so much that I dozed off.

It’s clear that there is something addictive for me in judging these kids. Maybe it’s as intoxicating as alcohol used to be. Intoxicating in the sense that it stimulates me, and it poisons me. It makes me meaner, less charitable. In the tent, listening to the young fella, I stopped trying to be outraged by him. A comfort descended, soothing me to sleep.

As an aside, I remember once telling my therapist about two separate issues that were bothering me. One was that I was feeling incredibly insecure and felt as though people were judging me everywhere I went. The other was that other people were really irritating me, especially strangers, everywhere I went. My therapist brought me to the now-obvious realisation – if you’re spending all that time hating and judging others, you assume that they are doing the same to you. Your meanness towards others makes you mean to yourself. After all, you’re the only person actually listening to your internal vitriol constantly.

Two items on today’s agenda

What I see at the festival is a mob, off their faces and rendered totally antisocial. What I neglect to see is that this mass of arseholes is made up mostly of individuals who are temporarily messy, and who are not permanently these people. (TW: mentions of getting sick until end of paragraph) I have certainly puked at festivals (even as recently as my Another Love Story whitey, though I actually managed to get every single drop into a bin bag). In my twenties, I gurned and I chomped my jaws and weaved through crowds, bumping gracelessly into indignant people, pausing occasionally to chunder. What I remember about those messy times were the sweet strangers, often people in their thirties, who rushed over to pat my back and make sure I had friends or I knew where I was going. (End of getting sick TW)

This brings me to my biggest learning of the weekend. Perhaps it’s age and not sobriety that is the greatest contributor to my feeling of disconnect. Generally, people in their thirties and older do not have to spend too much time in the company or sharing the same resources as people in their late teens and early twenties. It really isn’t much fun having to do this. I find myself wishing there was some premium ticket where I could choose to be in a different plane of existence from twenty year olds.

I had already had a taste of this intergenerational clash in June, at Charli XCX at Malahide Castle. On the train, two teenagers were charitably saying to one another “It’s nice that there are so many older people going to this”. They then began talking about who in their friend group would be “on the bag” at the concert (spoiler: most of them. Except “Aideen. Aideen never does coke.”). At the concert, it appeared that all of the infant worshippers of Miz XCX had been raiding Urban Outfitters. Bedecked in sunglasses that looked like something that would have come free with Sugar Magazine in 2005, with giant belts on tiny skirts, mixing their 00s references bafflingly (you can be boho chic OR you can be Playboy bunny on her day off in Von Dutch, you have to pick just one), these children thought they were the cat’s pyjamas.

As Charli flung herself around the stage for an energetic hour, several what we call d’young peeple near us were unable to stand, and others were coke-ignorant of personal space. My bitter millennial brain had an epiphany: being brat is only subversive if you’re too old to really be a brat. brat is about the tension between wanting to grow up and wanting to stay young. It’s about liberating yourself from the maturity of this seeming next stage of life, unsure as you are to embrace it just yet.

A photo I took of one of my fellow Charli XCX gig-goers

A young person trying to be brat is literally just a brat. They stomp around in tiny skirts, thinking that they’re being subversive by being ignorant, when in fact they’re acting as God intended. Also, when discussing the youth, I keep invoking a God I do not believe in. I keep saying “God love them” or “God be with the days”. I never felt older than I did overhearing someone that night, as we surged through the crowds in Malahide to get the Dart home: “It’s giving queue.”

The age tension is the real difference here. Kids will overdo it, get legless, say stupid things. They also might not, but they will still be treated like a potential mess by the older people around them. Their elder festival attendees judge them to be drunk babies whether they are or not.

But this is not fair, and, young as these people are, they’re not idiots (or, at least, they have similar idiot-to-non-idiot ratios as older demographics do). They sense the underlying and sometimes blatant disrespect. I always sensed it. I remember, years ago, you’d get chatting to an older woman in a bathroom or a smoking area. They’d pretend for a few seconds to listen to whatever you were saying, then interrupt and ask your age, only to laugh ruefully and give you some shit like “Oh my God, you’re twenty-four, you don’t even know anything yet.” You are instantly dismissed.

I resented them because I had silently chosen not to judge them for their blatant out-of-dateness. I had thought that I should be chatty and respectful in a “respecting my elders” kind of way. Maybe they sensed that. Just as I sense it now, when a young person is very chatty with me. I feel my hackles raise slightly, at the thought that they think I need this.

We’re all just trying to protect ourselves. So here is my solution.

As an over-30-year-old, I hereby vow:
1. Not to act like your age is somehow an insult to my age
2. To see you as a distinct person rather than a “young person”
Please allow me to continue mocking your weird Gen Z/Alpha fashion.

The kids are all right.

Will all young people please vow:
1. Not to give me compliments solely because you think I’m sad to be older than you
2. To sometimes consider the volume at which you speak
I will allow you to continue mocking my weird millennial high-waisted clothes and matte makeup.

I’ll leave you with another moment that stuck with me from the Charli XCX concert.

That night in Malahide, as a train finally approached, a girl near me said, to the general agreement of her peers, “It’s giving train”.
12 August 2025
“Skinnily, I sadly and hotly…” A self-indulgent five-year retrospective on my brief Twitter fame

Please excuse my lack of interest in realistically rendering a GAA jersey.

On 24 July 2020, I was walking to St Stephen’s Green for a Tinder date. To set the scene – Taylor Swift had just dropped folklore and it was about to lash rain. Before leaving the apartment, I had rattled off a few tweets summing up my feelings about Conversations with Friends and Normal People. I had recently read Conversations and was in the process of reading Normal People. I had never seen the TV series. I still have not. Unbeknownst to me, I had caught the Rooney zeitgeist at exactly the right time.

As I waited outside the gates of the park, I noted that a few people I knew who didn’t normally retweet much had retweeted me, with great enthusiasm. Then their friends joined in. By the time I was sitting down on the grass with my date, the thread had well and truly popped off on Irish Twitter.

Before we get into this, I’d like to just thank you for coming to read my first blog post, and invite you to subscribe below if you would like my new posts to go straight to your email.

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Here is my famous Twitter thread:

13:17, 24 July 2020

Sally Rooney novel generator: Skinnily, I sadly and hotly forgot to eat for 7 days and I only realized when I fell over in front of trinity college and everyone was worried about me. Then a horrible man fed me something and we had sex. It felt good, and bad.

14:15, 24 July 2020

I stared at Emma. She was talking very loudly and I could tell Joseph was attracted to her while also despising her. I visualized throwing wine at her but instead I poked my hipbone into his side and raised my eyebrows. He fingered me in silent agreement.

14:17, 24 July 2020

“in case you hadn’t noticed, Joseph, I’m flawed. I’m not like Emma with her humour and her obnoxious breasts. Sometimes I think the only think I’m good at is cumming vaginally. And writing.”

14:22, 24 July 2020

I don’t know why I go to parties anymore. Everyone just talks about refugees and human rights while playing soft jazz. I feel at nineteen we’re all too old for that. I stood there awkwardly in my very flattering black negligee that I’d paired with a beret from Urban Outfitters.

10:04: 25 July 2020

Where’s Bronagh tonight? I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice. Politically, I love other women but in practice it’s hard. She’s home for the weekend in Meath, he laughed humourlessly. I wish I could go home for the weekend but it’s harder when you’re from the west, I sighed.

10:08, 25 July 2020

The doctor slammed my chart down. Tough luck, lady, he smirked, your womb is no bueno. Wait I can’t parody this cos it’s way too close to the truth of women’s healthcare and I really like how she represented that.

A few initial thoughts:

I’m pleased to see that it’s still funny, five years later.

I’m particularly proud of “He fingered me in silent agreement”.

I enjoy how you can see my date was probably at 14:30/15:00 and that I then took the thread back up the following morning to crank out a couple more jokes. Remarkable restraint, as all I wanted to do that day was continue making sweet love to Twitter.

Now to the deeper musings.

“Skinnily, I sadly and hotly…”

Feminist icon “guy who feeds woman”

Most of the main female characters in Sally Rooney’s works are thin, and it is made explicitly clear that they are. Now, Rooney is not at all the worst offender for compulsory skinniness in main characters – it tends to be the norm. Predictably, heroes in fiction tend to fit into societal beauty standards.

But I can’t help thinking that Rooney is deploying a writing trick where, if you want your character to be fucked up in a sexy way, make them someone who frequently forgets to eat, who simply doesn’t even have time to remember their own health.

Seldom do you have a heroine who overeats due to stress, or who doesn’t have time to plan to eat in a more healthy way, unless the novel is explicitly about the main character being overweight. Even then, quite often these are Bridget Jones-type heroines, kooky and messy and cute, but always striving for thinness (spare a prayer for teenage me, reading the weights that Bridget would note at the start of her diary entries as being heavy when they remain unattainable for most women).

No Bridgets in the Rooneyverse – you’re sad and thin and that’s that. Bigger people must not exist or must not feel things to the same intensity as the Rooney women do, or they would be too depressed to overeat.

Writing this, I was worried that I am being too hard on the Rooneyverse, and that maybe some of this is hypersensitivity on my part, but this Vogue article from 2024 convinces me that this criticism is not just projection of my own body image insecurities. (Also – apparently in Beautiful World, Where Are You someone rubs “the fin of someone’s hipbone”? Jesus Christ, I would’ve dismissed that as overdoing it if I’d come up with that). These sad, fragile women with extremely limited caloric intakes make the reader feel as though being depressed will make them slender, make them catnip for very sexy men who will, every so often, make them eat but in a horny, controlling, BDSM way. The following day, it’s back to the usual diet of a glass of water and a paragraph describing one’s own clavicles.

“in case you hadn’t noticed, Joseph, I’m flawed. I’m not like Emma with her humour and her obnoxious breasts. Sometimes I think the only think I’m good at is cumming vaginally. And writing.”

The “Emma at the party” section of the thread deals with a few things. The hipbone of it all, which I have already discussed, but also the collision of supposed awkwardness with the absolute narrative certainty that is always present that the main character is hot, don’t worry. Rooney heroines are never comfortable in themselves but are always sexy. Sexier than the men’s actual partners, and smarter and meaner too.

However, you can read the meanness as important character flaws for these characters, rather than an endorsement of their mindset by the author. I find criticising characters for their explicitly bad traits to be an example of media illiteracy in action. “Patrick Bateman is such a misogynist!!!” Yes, babe, that is the point!

Am I doing this? Am I depriving Sally Rooney of her god-given right to write horrible people? Why does the characters’ meanness annoy me so viscerally?

I think this is a “me” problem. I’ve always disliked when women in novels seem to hate cheerful, sociable women. Women like the Emma from the thread. These women are funny and loud and large, and, to whatever extent that I project this, heroines in fiction are always waifish and only funny in their silent inner monologue. They would never be so vain, so excessive, as to make loud jokes or be fun at a party.

I see myself as the opposite of a Rooney heroine. I used to visualise myself in social situations as if I were one of those barwenches in pirate films, bawdy and ruddy, or an innkeeper’s cheery wife in Victorian London. I’m always imagining some Rooney-esque woman skinnily and hotly hating me. In a way, me and heroines like Marianne and Frances are natural enemies, but that doesn’t make the writing bad.

But take another book where a slim main character spends most of the book skinnily and hotly hating people. I adored Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, and the antihero Irina is very mean and extremely toxic (spoilers ahead, and trigger warning for some topics that touch on eating disorders). Boy Parts takes pains to note how Irina fits and even exceeds female beauty standards, but it reveals that Irina has undergone cosmetic surgery, exercises constantly, wore a waist-trainer for years and lives on undressed Tesco bagged salad and wine.

The book takes pains to show how very small Irina’s life and her aesthetic joys have become in pursuit of this standard. She begins to feel a kind of obsessive anxiety when doing anything she enjoys, linking it mentally with the loss of control she associates with eating substantial food.

(end of TW) Boy Parts is a rare example of a book that mentions how unhealthy the pursuit of beauty standards is while not making it the entire point of the character, or making it a book explicitly about body image. Her dislike and distrust of others is also slowly revealed to be much more about her than about them.

Maybe I’d enjoy Sally Rooney books more if they were horror stories?

I think, whether it’s worthy of criticism or not, what I find when I read about Frances or Marianne is that they seem to think that they are the only sentient and meaningful people in the room, and I don’t know if the narrative pays this off in any effective way. To me, they’re Chekov’s asshole, except at the end they don’t go off, they just anticlimactically roll onto the next thing life has in store for them.

Finally, I’m a bit embarrassed at the “cumming vaginally” part. I basically lifted the joke from the song “I’m So Good at Yoga” from Rachel Bloom’s incredible tv show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. What I wanted to represent was my annoyance at how very easy sexual satisfaction was for these otherwise very complicated characters (though I’m trying to remember if Frances experiences a lot of pain during or after sex? So maybe that’s not entirely fair). It used to irritate me when I read Fifty Shades of Grey as well, how Annabel/Christiana/Bella (??? I will now Google her name…) ANASTASIA STEELE would have an earth-shattering orgasm if Christian so much as raised an eyebrow at her nipples.

I don’t know why I go to parties anymore. Everyone just talks about refugees and human rights while playing soft jazz. I feel at nineteen we’re all too old for that.

This may not be entirely fair, but I did have fun making it.

I’m not sure to what extent Rooney is gently ribbing her characters when they go on pretentious political screeds in the middle of a café or house party. I suspect she is poking a bit of fun at how students do go on like this, but she does also put some actually insightful political stuff in there as well. I don’t think my satire quite works as the main character here would probably be in the middle of the refugee/human rights discussion rather than scorning it, but I did just want to make fun of that tendency in her novels.

Also, and this may be because I’m not nineteen, but the youth of the characters sometimes didn’t ring true to me. True, I didn’t study at Trinity, so maybe I didn’t witness this level of pretention. The only Trinity nerds (I use this term with affection) I knew were studying music, and they used to entertain themselves by humming a note in unison after banging a tuning fork they’d whipped out of seemingly nowhere. Is that the music equivalent of what Rooney’s students do? Actually, it might be.

“Tough luck lady, your womb is no bueno”

Fun with healthcare

I really enjoyed writing a doctor saying this and imagining how these novels would be if people said things like “tough luck” and “no bueno”. He’s kind of a ’90s dude from American Pie or something.

Sometimes the callousness of Frances’ medical interventions felt overblown, but when I remember my own experiences with period pain in my teenage years, I think Rooney’s representation of this is fair. I used to writhe in pain, feeling as if my internal organs were being ground up like in Sweeney Todd, being actually certain that something must be horribly wrong. Pain is supposed to be a sign that you are taking damage (OK gamer), but when I spoke to GPs about this, there was no interest in scheduling a scan, or checking out my organs. They simply diagnosed me with dysmenorrhea. This is a disorder which means you have bad period pain.

At the time, it felt like I went to a doctor with a hole in my head only to be diagnosed with hole-in-the-head-itis and charged €60 for the pleasure. Thank god for the pill, which calmed it all down (though of course now I have to deal with the fearmongering about if the Pill is secretly destroying me too). I remember having an ultrasound in my mid-twenties for something else, and being so relieved to finally get confirmation that I actually had a reproductive system in there, since my agonising teenage periods had made me feel as though it must have been converted into some kind of chamber of horrors.

I think Rooney solidly represents how painful and farcical it can be trying to have your ob/gyn needs taken seriously.

So, yes, the thread was funny. But why am I still talking about this?

One of the reasons I wanted to write this is because I will delete my X account soon. I hate the idea that funny stuff like this is still hanging in suspended animation while 20% actual weirdos and 80% bots say the most heinous shit imaginable to one another, all while Elon “le epic win, you win the Internet today sir, have my updoot” Musk feeds it all indiscriminately to his pointless AI “Mechahitler”.

He looks like he should be named Grok.

I want to delete my X account, but I’m embarrassingly very proud of this thread and the Twitter fame that it afforded me. I remember in the weeks following, my friend sent me a tweet that almost word-for-word copied my opening tweet,. I posted a reply: “Very funny – it was also funny when I first said it on 24 July”. The person deleted their plagiarism. But it hit me that my most famous piece of writing is in a very precarious position on the Internet, and it is not attached to my name.

Do I want it attached to my name?

In one cowardly sense, no. I am infinitely more comfortable with the idea that strangers on Twitter hear me talking about vaginal orgasm than people in my real life. Of course, my parents have read the thread, as have my family and friends, and thankfully we all ignore the parts that are on a TMI level.

In another sense, I am very proud of this, even though it was not actually that huge a thing. Currently, post-mass-Xodus from the platform, its first tweet has 15.45K likes, 1.27K RTs and 93 comments. It has 1 million impressions, 197K engagements and 162K detail expands. I don’t really know how big that is in the grand scheme of things, but I was never asked to sell vibrators in the comments below as other viral Twitter users were, so it can’t have been that impactful. But to this day, people like it. Since yesterday, two people have liked the first tweet. In all likelihood, they are OF bots or future mass killers, as is the main userbase of X, but that’s something.

In the days following the viral moment, I removed Twitter from my shortcuts because it made it feel like my heart had crawled up into my throat when I would see the piles of notifications. There was a small bit of not-quite-backlash, of people thinking it was begrudgery and negativity to criticise Rooney’s work. I could never deny a level of begrudgery, as I am Irish. Luckily, I think the silliness of the parody kept the majority of people from thinking I was being totally horrible.

I will also say that Rooney deserves the praise and success that she has received. Even though some parts compelled my eyes to roll, I kept turning those pages addictively. I also felt like Conversations with Friends had a real skill in not lingering too long on any particular scene. It trips along nicely, and you get a real sense of place. I also love the first part of Normal People where Connell and Marianne are teenagers, which mirrored a similar situation that had happened to someone close to me. I think Rooney’s way of showing how Connell hurt Marianne, not through malice but through fear and social expectations of masculinity, was really impactful.

Fundamentally, a good writer is someone who keeps you reading, and Sally Rooney does that with apparent ease. Whatever problems I might have with her writing, she is not overrated and is very deserving of her success.

Oh and want to know how the Tinder date went?

Well, would you call a wonderful marriage and four beautiful children a success?

I’m joking, we didn’t procreate, marry, or hang out again, but the date was nice.

It lashed rain but we stayed under an umbrella in the park, sipping cans until our bladders demanded shelter. We went to his place, it was nice enough, and I apologetically had to keep checking my phone in disbelief as the thread continued to blow up.

Neither of us felt a great connection to the other, but it was a very nice date, especially as it was the first time since the pandemic that I’d met someone new.

And as for this blog…

The purpose of this blog post is to save my tweets somewhere that is not X. The point is to have some evidence of having owned this viral moment. It’s a bit self-indulgent but maybe I need to lean into my inner Rooney heroine. At least they (and Rooney) actually have the discipline to get things written and published.

The purpose of this blog generally is to write. I have missed getting my words out there like I used to with Twitter. Unlike Twitter, this blog will force me to develop said words to something more than a pithy blurting of a thought.

I’m going to write about media, mostly, and how I feel about it. I keep having ideas for podcasts, then not doing anything with them. I suspect a blog will suffice for now.

Goodbye, Twitter, you were great and awful.

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29 July 2025