This Girl Is On Fire
2021, am I right.
It's been a year, I guess. I don't know. Now we're having a new one, 2022. The names of years feel less important these days. Like what even is a year bro.
A lot of this year was some real teeth grittin’ bullshit. I mean COVID really did stick the hell around. The broad strokes of my life were pleasant this year, and I acknowledge how lucky I am for that. However, to make sure things weren’t 100% great, the universe dealt me a predictable hand consisting of all sorts of small and medium inconveniences and frustrations.
For example, I had a very new experience a couple weeks ago and that was accidentally setting my fingernail on fire.
I'm not sure why I felt the need to specify "accidentally" but I want you to understand the shock I felt when I let the lighter go out and looked down to see a flame still coming from the vicinity of my digits. It felt like a momentous, if bizarre, milestone- my nails have grown long enough that they can be on fire without me immediately noticing. While they are my real nails, they are coated in multiple layers of UV hardened gel, which makes them impervious to anything, I thought, until I got flames involved. I love my nails. I love that they are construction-grade tools. Needing to be overly cautious of open flames feels like a small price to pay for getting stickers off of things 250% faster than I used to.
I love the sound they make when you type. I love that tapping a single finger on the counter is audible. It's the best of all the subtle indications of boredom. I was always a small-yawn-with-a-hasty-apology-where-I-tell-them-it’s-not-that-they’re-boring-me-I’ve just-been-working-a-lot girl but this is much sexier. Speaking of which, I love the way they look when you're holding a can, or an iced coffee. Makes you feel like you’ve traveled back in time to 2006. You wonder how putting on a shapeless Olsen-esque frock and slipping a tacky handbag over the arm attached to those nails would be received in 2021. I mean, I’ve seen it work, but only within the confines of the Selling Sunset cast. These bitches wear non-ironic logos on their clothes and the highest heels they can buy on the black market and while most of them are terrible people they really rock these things that I would personally be horrified to wear. I bow down to them, and simultaneously, I’d like to make it clear that am available to adopt Christine’s baby if you can’t find anyone else because she should simply not be a mother.
I admitted to myself this year that I like to buy expensive things LEMME FINISH I like to buy expensive things in order to artificially tempt myself so that I can feel really good about myself when I decide not to spend the money and ultimately return all of it. It's perverse. The people at the Free People a block away from my office know exactly who I am and I gotta give them credit for still being absolutely lovely to me. I guess they don't care, it's not coming out of their paycheck, and every minute they spend helping me return something is one they don't spend helping the high-maintenance women of New York pick out mega expensive clothing that makes them looks like part-time yoga teachers with shitty taste.
I hate, but I‘ve accepted, that I love pumpkin spice stuff. Come fall in New York City, me and my comrades appear on the streets wrapped in something plaid we saved up for from Anthropologie and we buy everything we see that's pumpkin spice. I’d love nothing more than to buck the stereotype but I simply can’t. Trips to Trader Joe's become a nightmare for me. The second the weather turns I don't have enough room in my reusable shopping bags for milk or coffee for all the pumpkin Jo-Jos and brioche (and probably something gross like pumpkin tuna, I am powerless.) We brew our coffee with a little bit of cinnamon. We don't actually buy the candles that smell like baked goods because there's no way that wouldn't get old after 15 minutes but we sure as hell stop and sniff them in appreciation whenever we come across one in a store.
I’ve been spending some time this year watching beauty tutorials on YouTube, a new mid-pandemic pastime. I’ve always really liked messing around with makeup, but it’s always been to wear bright colors, be ballsy, MAYBE attempt to enhance something I’ve already got. I’ll wear a vibrant wash of color to look pretty, and if I also shock my enemies into a confused retreat then good.
The idea of using makeup to fix some sort of facial flaw is exhausting and I’m uninterested in it. It’s entirely possible there is some detailing work I could do to make me a more beautiful me but I just can’t go down that road. So, while I've been hearing about foundation for as long as I can remember, I have worn it basically never. When I could've used it, circa age 16, no one had really told me how. I lived in the eye of a storm of hair scrunched within an inch of its life and coated with gel to make sure it would break in half if we ever needed something sharp really fast, like for example the zombie apocalypse. Unfortunately, come the apocalypse I'm pretty sure I'd have a difficult time telling a carefully nonchalant Danielle circa 2006 from an actual zombie. I understood it in theory- it was something you put over your face to make it look as close to as perfect a canvas as possible. But before science caught up to women's beauty standards, it was better in concept than it was in actuality. My young adulthood took place in a sea of faces with makeup 2-3 shades darker than their neck. Viscous liquid, applied with a little brush, pooling in the sad crevices around your pimples, actually bringing more attention to your imperfections. I bet this is about the time of life when other people started popping pimples. You could just pop it to get rid of the redness and cover its deflated carcass with your Covergirl. I've never been a popper. I'm of the opinion that pimples are a medical thing, and I am not a doctor. I wouldn't do my own heart surgery, and this is on the outside of my body and gets right at the heart of my vanity. Surely I would make things worse.
A couple of weeks I thought to myself "I should try foundation." Now let me be clear- my face is fine. Good even, sometimes. I get the occasional pimple but they are the exception not the rule. But I must have realized that it'd been awhile since I disliked something about my body so it was time to pick a new target, and my face was just, you know, there. So I picked up something recommended by the single makeup artist I actively follow on YouTube (despite a year at Conde Nast I still only subscribe to four channels) and a Beauty Blender, which is something that was just called a sponge back when I was a teenager. So between my sunscreen and my primer I applied what was billed as a "light coverage" foundation.
I diligently put it all over my face for a full week. At the five day mark things started to go downhill. My skin has always had what I feel to be an appropriate amount of attention from me- daily care, but no crazy 15 step routines. It was shocked, therefore, when I started plugging up my pores with something I got with my Beauty Insider points. I don't even know what liquid foundation is made of. I assume anything that came from nature is there for scent purposes. I didn't even care, I just put it on. And my skin was not happy with me. It spurned a breakout the likes of which I hadn't seen for years (#blessed). Never. Again.
Toward the end of this year, I started doing some copywriting work on the side for a creative agency. I’m constantly talking about trying to have more of a work/life balance and so I thought the best way to work toward that would be to pick up freelance writing work in addition to my full-time-plus job.
Seriously, though, it’s been extremely cool. Copywriting is like a puzzle, it’s an exercise in concentration, in logic, in creativity and patience. It reminds me a lot more of former life as a sound designer than it does my current full time job. I genuinely love both. See above re: this year really not being so bad.
I’m not big on New Years resolutions, which I’m sure I’ve expressed before. I generally feel like if you need to wait for a specific day to make a change in your life, you’re probably not ready for that change. That said, it’s undeniably a nice moment to put some thought into what you want out of the next year. Most of these things are Beeswax, Not Yours, Inc. but in case you’re interested (you did make it this far), here are a few things I’d like to do:
Write more fiction
Continue skating
Plan, and save for, a 2023 trip to Antarctica
Make the perfect croissant
Continue to keep the fucks I give to a minimum
Make out, like a ton. Agnostic as to whether it’s one person a lot, or a lot of people