‘How very banal to ask what I mean.’ Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig.” I am asking you to tell me what you really mean. I am asking you to lean into banality because, sometimes, to risk sounding boring is the bravest thing of all. I watched the Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana on Netflix last week. I was a huge Swiftie growing up; I have listened obsessively to each of her albums and started wearing red lipstick—now a staple of my makeup routine—in large part because of her. But, for the sake of honesty, I have interpreted every new release of Swift’s through a carefully hung veil of irony. I still like her, I will hastily admit! And yet I’m uncomfortable leaving it at that. I feel like I need to levy some sort of critique. She has to be a problematic fave. This critical eye proves—to others, but really to myself—that I have grown up and can view Swift affectionately as a relic of my middle and high school years, that I listen for nostalgia and nothing more. This critical eye also obscures how deep some of her songs still cut, and how much I still want them to. “We’re happy, free, confused, and lonely in the best way,” Swift croons on “22.” I am about to turn 22, and can think of no better sentiment to blast from my laptop speakers at midnight. I started watching the documentary in a voyeuristic way, ready to shore up my belief that I no longer need a pop star to articulate my feelings. For instance, I know now, having read it, that Romeo and Juliet is not the pinnacle of romance as Swift croons in “Love Story,” but a tale in which teenage hormones run amok and everyone dies. But, at the end of the documentary, Swift says something that made me change my mind about her. “I just want to have a sharp pen, a thin skin, and an open heart,” she says in the final scene as the camera jump-cuts between triumphant shots of her on the tours of the past decade. While watching the documentary, I started to recognize the hoops Swift has had to jump through in order to speak her mind as the adult she has become, and to appreciate the very real emotional truths that, however mediated by the celebrity machine, she still manages to sneak into her songs. That last line hit home because, sincerely, it’s what I want, too. I am not trying to assert my authenticity by positioning my fandom as a quirk, a chink in the armor of detachment, a way to prove that I don’t care about being cool because I can embrace something uncool. I like Taylor Swift, always have, even when I was trying my best to only like her ironically. If not the exact turning point, Miss Americana solidified my conviction that I, too, am built with a thin skin and an open heart, and that I care— so, so deeply—about keeping it that way. I have started telling my friends that I love them. I dance awkwardly in front of them, tell them about my dreams, and make stew for my whole apartment. I am corny as hell, and this is something I don’t care about changing—it makes what I say feel more true. I am saying thank you every day, scribbling a sentence of gratitude in my planner next to the date. I am opening my heart up and praying that it does not hurt as much as I fear it will. I am reminding myself that, even if it does, it will be worth it. It is worth it not to hedge my bets or dance around my meaning because, when I’m 80, it won’t matter whether or not that kid in my poetry seminar thought I was smart. What will matter is that I spoke up for what I believed, at the risk of looking stupid, and said it anyway. As I write this essay, I am listening to a live concert
by my favorite musical artist, Julien Baker. Toward the end, she pauses to thank the audience. One of her favorite things about performing, she says, is the “inevitability of mistakes.” She says she has been fortunate in her life to make mistakes while performing “and daily be reminded how important it is to practice mercy with yourself, and use your mistakes as opportunities for growth, and opportunities to display graciousness.” Such vulnerability is an integral component of earnestness. Baker does not brush off her mistakes or shroud them in calculated humor; she owns them and, in so doing, facilitates a uniquely intimate connection with her audience that would not be the same otherwise. As she strums the intro of her next song, cheers erupt from the crowd before the whole theater submits to rapturous silence, secure in the understanding that Baker’s earnestness has brought them all closer together. Earnestness means approaching our lives with the fullness of our bodies. Earnestness means not thinking that using the heart to represent emotion is a cliche, because I really do feel my emotions in my chest. Leslie Jamison, in the last essay of her collection The Empathy Exams, writes, “I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open.” “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out all right. Oh, I know that it’s not, but I have to believe that it is,” Baker sings in her song "Appointments." I know that, objectively, bad things will happen—that is a part of being alive. Writing in Jezebel earlier this year, Megan Reynolds discusses her own initial hesitancy toward earnestness. “In my mind,” Reynolds says, earnestness "is a relentless positivity, a near-delusional Pollyanna who really, really believes that everything will come out in the wash when all signs indicate that it will not.” But regardless of how terrible things may get, I also know that I cannot live my life trying to detach myself from sincerity. I know that climate change will drastically alter the landscape I’ve grown up in; I know that I cannot trust the political process to accurately represent my vote, not when elections can be hacked. But I also know that it will do me no good—it will make me feel more hopeless—if I shroud myself in irony. Irony, to me, represents a way to pretend that I don’t care about much of anything at all, to live defensively and cynically even as I pretend to be living humorously. I think irony has a place in art, but I don’t think I can live my life like I’m the protagonist of a novel. Life is far messier than that. Reynolds revises her definition in this light, writing that “earnestness is about the conviction and not the message.” I can be earnest without abandoning the knowledge that not everything is sunshine and roses all the time. Maybe earnestness is about faith: believing that it is worth it to be sincere and fail rather than relentlessly dodging hurt through ironic living. I have to believe in things. I want to believe in them. That is my point.
What's The Buzz? reflections on nature's worst bastard BY CHARLIE STEWART ILLUSTRATED BY RUIHONG JIANG
I was at my now ex-girlfriend’s cousin’s wedding in upstate New York, looking at a wasp.
The wasp, dehydrated, was dragging itself across the tarmac toward the guard rail overlooking a small waterfall by the venue. Every time it tried to take off, its wings would sputter to life for a moment until, like a car engine failing to start, it dropped the half-inch back to the ground. I’ve never been good at killing insects. Each time I kill one, a pang of guilt hangs over me for three or four seconds too long to ignore. The exception to this rule has always been wasps, because they’re bastards. You already know this. The house I grew up in would get wasp nests in the attic, which was where my dad kept his old work computer. It was the only place 10-year-old me could play online video games and continue my early education in Russian insults, delivered to my ears in bit-crunched screams through a knotted pair of headphones. Every time a wasp got into the room, you'd better believe I bug-sprayed that yellowjacket motherfucker until it froze over, caked in white insecticide like a tiny Han Solo frozen in carbonite. In this version of the series, instead of being rescued by his heroic comrades in the next movie, each little smuggler had his petrified corpse flicked under the radiator by a squeamish Jabba the Hutt—out of sight, out of mind. Back in New York, the wasp was making slow progress towards the guard rail overlooking the water. Looking out over the barrier at the running river below were two men in gym clothes who must have been staying at the hotel. I didn’t know their names, but they looked like a Gary and a Paul. While I’m naming people, I’m also going to call the wasp Randall—which, as Recess and Monsters, Inc. have taught me, is the name of bastards. Paul was wearing neon blue sneakers. I watched Randall waddle under Gary’s right heel as he stood on his toes to get a better look at the wedding party. I was sure that any second he would lean back, putting the heat-stroked insect out of its misery. Instead, as his foot descended, Randall found a burst of fight-or-flight energy and managed to lift off just long enough to avoid becoming a grisly paste across the pavement. Exhausted, Randall dropped down on top of Paul’s shoe, and, perhaps looking for shelter from the sun or any passing colossi, began ascending toward the sneaker’s open top. People love bees. I think, had this wasp been a bee, I probably would have made some effort to nurse it back to health. I would have at least used a leaf to prod it in the direction of some shade. Alright, in reality I would have looked at it and felt mild pity before banishing the thought from my mind, along with any disturbing associations the death of one bee might summon in me: climate change, crop failure, man-made mass extinction, Jerry Seinfeld. But Randall the wasp wasn’t a bee. Randall the wasp was a wasp—king bastard of the insect world, a class of Animalia so rife with bastards that standing head and shoulders above the rest is sort of like being awarded the medal for least agreeable member of the entire Sith Order. I think it was because of my initial detachment from Randall—the sense that, of all creatures, this
“I just finished reading all of Dear Blueno…I guess it's time to work.” “How do you make a chicken-banana smoothie?” february 21 , 2020 5
