Staunchly, vol. 35: Thorstein Veblen Hates Your DIY Margarita Bar

(Originally posted: 10/13/17)

Hi Staunch sisters (and brothers!),

It’s finally starting to feel like fall here in Los Angeles. By that I mean it’s 77 degrees as I type this but there’s enough of a nip in the air to order my latte hot.

It’s good the weather has cooled down, albeit slightly, because I’ve decided I’m wearing a turtleneck every day until Trump gets impeached. I’m looking forward to blaming Paul Ryan for my inevitable vitamin D deficiency, among other things—like the disintegration of our democracy.

I like making a bucket list at the start of each season. It’s something a lot of lifestyle bloggers recommend, and who am I to turn my nose up at the guidance of our modern leisure class! (Before I forget, please buy advance tickets to my one-woman show: Thorstein Veblen Hates Your DIY Margarita Bar).

Anyways, here’s my bucket list for fall! What's yours?*

(*asking a question is a way many lifestyle bloggers fake reader engagement)

Read some Gothic lit
Watch the Addams Family series
Visit the LA Arboretum (and maybe meet my soulmate in the botany stacks at the Arboretum Library, which is a very erotic combination of words)
Master a green eye shadow lewk that doesn’t make me look like Shrek
Drive up to Lake Tahoe to meet my best friend Kat for a weekend of girl talk and foliage
Cook something soup-y, stew-y, & overall autumnal
Dismantle all institutions of white supremacy and systemic misogyny

This morning, I was at the bookstore café Stories in Echo Park with my best friend Erin (don’t @ me—best friend is a tier not a person), who’s visiting from New York. Erin wanted us to read poetry to each other. We’re both straight but she’s just like that sometimes!

I picked up a slim volume by E.E. Cummings, the OG Instagram poet, and flipped to a random page. Welp, of course on the day our myopic, inverted-chia-pet of a president threatens to back out of the Iran nuclear deal, I stumble on a poem about the pitifulness of blind patriotism and the jingoism buried at America’s core.

Next to of course god America
by E.E. Cummings

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

And that’s all I have to say about politics this week.

Eminem has had a super problematic career rife with vigorous misogyny and homophobia, but I’d be lying if I said his angsty white boy rap didn’t get me through the nihilism of the early Bush years/8thgrade.

It’s refreshing to see him use his working class cred and white male anger for good, in this scathing, viral rebuke of our predator-in-chief. As someone who is constantly drawing lines in the sand (which mostly go unrespected), I loved that he drew one: you’re either a fan of Eminem or you stan for Trump. You can’t be both. (A lot of people will probably continue to be both, but it’s a start).

Also the lyric, “You don’t got the f—king nuts, like an empty asylum,” had me giggling with delight.

Between Trump’s reign of terror and the repulsive Weinstein story that continues to unfold, this felt like a good week for me invest in a Beboe vape—as much as one can invest in a $60 disposable, rose gold weed pen (that Sharon Stone apparently loves!).

The New York Times called it the “Hermès of Marijuana,” which is a bit much, but it does deliver a nice, lowkey high (bright and buzzy from Sativa blend THC and CBD). The rose gold vessel makes me feel at once utterly fabulous and tragically ridiculous, but I can’t pretend I’m not loving any minute of it.

(I’ve been merrily smoking my Beboe while moisturizing with a juicy sheet mask and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. We’ve entered the time of year when all I want to listen to is “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” which, quickly, can we just talk about how thotty that song is?? I’m sorry but the lyric “I'll sing to him, each spring to him/ And worship the trousers that cling to him” is, adjusted for inflation (hehe), thirstier than any line in “Truffle Butter.”)

- If you haven’t read Ronan Farrow’s excellent, industry-destabilizing investigation into the misconduct of alleged sex criminal/established dirtbag Harvey Weinstein, you should do so right now. Everything in it is nauseating, but this detail messed me up:

COULD YOU IMAGINE IF A DUDE MOLESTED YOU THEN OFFERED YOU TICKETS TO FINDING NEVERLAND??? ISN'T THAT THE CREEPIEST THING YOU'VE EVER HEARD!!

- What I love about NBC is that it wouldn’t publish Ronan Farrow’s Weinstein exposé but it’s faithfully standing behind white-Santa-purist Megyn Kelly.

- Fuck Matt Damon.

- You guys we absolutely have to talk about this list of famous women and their strangest habits. I came away from it thinking Anna Kendrick was a full-blown, cold-blooded, rabbit-boiling sociopath. She saves a body lotion from every film she works on and keeps all the body lotions in a closet so she can smell them anytime and take herself back to the experience of when she wore that body lotion.
YOU.
GUYS.
Doesn’t that make you think of trophies?? Doesn’t it make you think of trophies because most Anna Kendrick movies are kind of like crime scenes :/ ?

Also, holy shit Adriana Lima. Poor, sweet Adriana Lima who applies her mascara just to feel it run down her cheeks in the shower, the inky black streaks reminding her she’s alive/occupying her human form that day. Why is she stuck in a looping analogy of patriarchal beauty standards and female despair and how do we save her?

Staunchly yours,

Carey