Tag: Aesthetics

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Aesthetics

Day 694 and Buy Everything Day

When I was a hippie kid growing up in Colorado I was a fervent believer in a “holiday” called Buy Nothing Day. It was a campaign heavily promoted by a magazine called Adbusters which saw itself a culture jamming organization.

It felt cool and hip and maybe even a bit new to protest excess consumption in the era when globalization hadn’t yet experienced the bitch slap that are the last twenty years of history not actually ending. Teenagers are obviously a bit prone to over simplifying the world and I was no exception.

Now as a jaded veteran of the retail and luxury wars, I think it was the height of white girl naïveté that not shopping one day of the year meant shit. Now I pile all of my shopping into Black Friday. Instead of it being “Buy Nothing Day” it has become “Buy Everything Day” for me. I know how much brands are riding on my choosing to spend and I hold out the bulk of my shopping to extract maximum value.

I bought 2 tee shirts, one cardigan, 3 cashmere sweaters, one pair of silk pants, one cotton robe, 2 slips, 2 bras, and 3 pairs of tights. I bought a jumbo size shampoo and conditioner as well as travel sets. I also bought a luxury face cream, highlighter and other sundry cosmetics even though most of the cosmetics I prefer aren’t even on sale today. We also bought 4 scented candles for the house. Alex bought a pair of Chelsea boots, a new gun safe and a hunting jacket. In other words, we shopped till we dropped. We went full American on the day.

We’d hoped to buy new dishes and a few pieces of furniture as this has also been the year of outfitting the house but alas we just couldn’t figure out enough deals ahead of time. Black Friday is often a mess of confusing offers and marketing bullshit. It’s been made dramatically worse by the wave of direct to consumer brands who claim to give you better deals but often do little more than obfuscate where you are getting ripped off. It’s lowering trust by insisting that you are getting something better when you know you are not.

It’s with that knowledge in mind that I’ve come to terms with the reality of American consumption. I’ve come full circle on Buy Nothing Day. I recognize that shopping is the full contact sport that drives everything else around us. And so long as I’m embedded in that system it serves little purpose to be obstinate or contrary. But equally it serves no purpose to be taken advantage of by these brands either. Getting a deal is a very American kind of battle I’d rather win. As of yet there is no option to remain off the battlefield. But one day it may be gone for good. Until then I’ll buy my cashmere in discount.

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Aesthetics

Day 691 and Ready to Shop

For well over a decade I didn’t get to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. I was one of the “ lucky” few for whom Black Friday is the most important day of year. I did time in the trenches of retail.

When I worked in fashion and then later cosmetics, Black Friday was the all consuming event that dictated whether your year was a success or a failure. I slept in my office more than once. I pulled all nighters. And that barely scratches the surface of the long hours leading up to the main event. Having a good Black Friday is a make or break affair for brands and retailers.

I love shopping. A well executed customer experience is one of America’s crowning achievements. A beautifully merchandised store (in real life or online) that has exactly what you want along with everything you didn’t know you wanted too, is one of the great joys of civilization.

One of the downsides of knowing retailers’ rhythms intimately is that it changes how you shop. Now that I no longer work on Thanksgiving and Black Friday I am able to participate as a customer. But I know too much. I know pricing, discounting and if SKU counts are bloated or constrained. I can sense how deep a sale will go with a glance at merchandising and a quick perusal of the last 10-K. Shopping is now an exercise in arithmetic.

And this year is shaping up to be the best Black Friday since before the pandemic. For the last two years brands have struggled to keep items in stock due to supply chain crunches and pandemic era labor shortages. But this year they did not want to be caught flat footed. At the height of the stimulus that placed deep orders. Optimism has returned.

But now interest rates are rising to combat the inflationary pressures that has loomed over an economy demanding to buy more just months ago. But now no one is so sure about spending. Prices have risen. Layoffs are spooking folks. And it sure seems like brands and retailers bought way too much for the current mode of America.

I’m planning on buying quite a bit as the discounts will be steep, the inventory is available, and I don’t like to shop unless I’m getting what I want at a price I like. We will be focused on clothing and footwear as well as basics like good wool socks. We also have a few electronic gadgets we’ve been waiting to buy including a humidifier and a chain saw. I’m also hoping for a few surprises from cosmetics retailers as well. It is hunting season.

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Emotional Work

Day 682 and Almost

My original handle. The very first one I took into social media. Which today couldn’t function as a signifier in 2022 given the acute gender essentialism culture war. The handle was AlmostGirl.

I began writing in university (maybe 2005) about my deep deep deep ambivalence about adopting any culture or identity symbol of consensus success. How I continued to be offered entry into luxury spaces and class identifiers I couldn’t stay. I continued to fail at being part of the status quo. I could only ever be “almost” the thing. As you can tell I’ve been painfully earnest most of my time online.

When I was younger I regretted my inability to fully commit to what I was supposed to want. I’ve really always failed at attempts with adopting conventional status symbols. I always craved being at the norm of whatever was high status. But I just won’t commit to the bit.

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Aesthetics Emotional Work

Day 681 and Boob Tube

In a sign of how emotionally over this week this week I am, the first thing I thought when I woke up was “I’ve got so much good tv to watch!”

I wasn’t allowed to watch television as a child. So it’s a bit ironic that it is my personal view as an adult that television is America’s best developed art form. While one can’t deny that impact American film, music and fashion, it is our television that moves global culture. Only Bollywood and anime have even come close to its impact in the last several decades.

I truly love television as a cultural mirror. I don’t think you can work in any of the culture industries (including Silicon Valley) without being aware of the mythology of television. Our archetypes and tropes are reinvented and reimagined over and over as references become anchors. No art is so naturally effective at reinvention as television returns episode after episode and season after season. No story is ever finished.

I’m particularly pleased that so many stories are returning this weekend. I’ll be watching new seasons of Mythic Quest, the Crown, Yellowstone and the Good Fight. Which is quite a lot of television for one person even on a weekend where you want to do nothing but tune out to the boob tube.

I’m only adding two two show new to my rotation this season and one is the absolutely excellent William Gibson project on Amazon called Peripheral. No one has ever done the near future as well as Gibson and his take on the Jackpot is already playing out. My last public event before the pandemic hit was a reading of one of the books that this shoe is based on It absolutely deserves wider recognition.

The other is a show I just began is called Reboot. It is an is oddly not at all solipsistic look at making a sitcom from the vantage point of formerly estranged father daughter pair of show runners. As someone who also followed in the footsteps of her father and has complex feelings on abandonment and family legacy it has been quite a comfort over the last week. As I look at history repeating within the context of my own family and within the wider financial markets, I appreciated considering that perhaps we are capable of overcoming our traumas. And that maybe all our parents ever wanted was for us to learn from them.

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Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 679 and That Escalated Quickly

My week started out great. I was focused, energetic and on my game. And well, I think we all know how the last 72 hours have played out. Chaotic as hell.

Twitter is having a meltdown. Crypto keeps discovering how badly centralized over levered balance sheets can go. Fuck you very much Sam Bankman Fried for setting back the cause. Really the only bright spot is America’s swift decline into a regressive reactionary right wing state is in its entropy and reversion to the mean phase. Guess no one felt like rewarding Republicans even though we all kind of hate Joe Biden.

And lest you think I’m happily sitting pretty having mostly predicted we’d be entering a newly chaotic age, I woke up this morning covered in hives. That haircut I was so excited about yesterday? Turns out I was allergic to all the styling products.

And because we had some as yet unresolved issue with our well pump, I couldn’t even shower it off immediately. I woke up to the water being out. Neat. Thankfully a hacky solution got me a hot shower before noon to rinse off all the itch inducing salon products. I might still be a little high from all the Benadryl

The funniest part is I knew I might have some trouble with products at the hair salon. I just didn’t want to be that white lady that comes in with all her own products and a sob story about allergens.

I thought how bad can it be if I just let the stylist use the salon products? And boy do I regret that. Let that be a lesson to everyone to always take up the space and resources you need to stay healthy. It may be cringe as fuck to explain an allergy but you know what is even more cringe? Giving yourself hives and Benadryl brain because you didn’t have the energy to be a little bit of an asshole and insist on protecting yourself.

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Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 668 and Health Multitasking

I didn’t take my own advice recently. When folks ask me how to begin biohacking I tell them to take it slow. You should change only one variable at a time.

Biohacking requires that you don’t change up your variables too often or too quickly. You need to establish trend lines. The biggest mistake you can make is being “noisy” as you will never isolate the meaningful variables. And you won’t stick to it. So it’s a double fuck up. Clean reliable data matters. Don’t change too much too fast.

Day 91 and A Beginner’s Guide to Biohacking

My biohacking has been focused on improving my core inflammatory markers for several years. Secondary metrics like pain and energy got better as my erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C-reactive protein went down.

What I did to improve those metrics was complex, time intensive and expensive but it was pretty clear what outcome I was pursuing. My broad goals were simple. The tactics merely a function of one overarching strategy to lower inflammation.

Recently I’ve been a bit sloppy about my goals as my SED rate and CRP approach normal. I got excited that I might be stable enough to pursue some new goals. I am always looking to lower my doses of pain management medications. But the real shiny object for me has been fat loss.

I’ve struggled to stay lean as several medications that improve inflammatory markers have weight gain as a side effect. I struggle with shame about my weight. So much of popular culture portrays weight gain as a function of poor impulse control. It embarrasses me on some deep core level that others might think I’m lazy. If immediately trigger’s defensiveness for me.

I can rationally know I was pursuing a responsible health by taking prednisone during acute phases of my illness, but a part of me is still so embarrassed by the side effects. What must people think of me? Even if I explain that it’s a side effect of medication I fear that it’s still perceived as been slovenly.

So I decided to go back on metabolic drug called ozempic because I just hate carrying excess fat. I thought I could add it into my routine. But I am not doing as well as I’d like with the side effects of the injection. I’ve now vomited two Sundays in a row and been unable to eat. That is destabilizing enough that it is impacting my other goals like a slow dose down of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Maintaining low inflammation rates with lower pharmaceutical intervention is obviously a huge goal of mine and far more crucial than dropping a few pounds of fat. Especially because my metabolic markers are all in the clear.

I just so badly want to put behind some of the visible markers of my disease. It was hubris to pursue ozempic when I know I have other metrics that are more important than my shame about having steroid fat. So next time you see someone who is overweight I encourage some empathy. You never know the whole story of someone’s health.

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Aesthetics

Day 666 and Mark Of the Bedeviled

Signs, signifiers and semiotics are a pastime and also a professional obligation, so naturally I’m excited to have arrived at day six hundred and sixty six (666) of writing every single day.

While I’d like to think it’s been a positive experience, shadow work tells me a little bit of the devil is as surely responsible as my better angels for this project. So I might as well mark the occasion.

While I enjoy a wide range of woo woo pastimes (white girls love Tarot) I cannot say that end times Biblical fire and brimstone is my jam. But I presume just about everyone in America is vaguely aware of 666 as a signifier for end times Book of Revelations full on evil. 666 is the mark of the beast.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Revelations 13:18 King James Version

I’m not much for millenarian prophesies, despite being a card carrying doomer, so I can’t really interpret why the Mark of the Beast means diddly squat. Even though I enjoy a Ronald Emmerich piece of disaster porn, I cannot claim to have done more than skim the Book of Revelations. I once spent an entire quarter reading the Old Testament in Aramaic which is surely enough to put even ardent scholars off their Bible study for a bit.

But I have been revisiting Yeats’ Second Coming lately so perhaps I’ve been exposed to the general energy of revelations. Ben Hunt of Epison Theory has written most eloquently about the Widening Gyre of moment. Anxieties and disagreements have frozen some of us and unleashed the worst passions in others. It feels right for the moment.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats “Second Coming”

It’s hard not to recognize the Widening Gyre in our moment. But perhaps it has been ever so for humanity. We search for signs and signals and find them because we want to. We see evil all around us and perhaps we should be grateful for it as it’s surely saved our ancestors from being eaten.

So it’s hard not to look around when a culturally significant number like 666 crosses your transom. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? I wonder if Yeats had a particular vision for the end of the world. And I wonder how much it matches mine.

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Aesthetics Startups

Day 659 and E-commerce Returns

It’s been a minute since I posted about the mild annoyances of shopping to outfit a new house. Because we have upgraded the amount of space we live in by two or three times and we are hoping to use some of the space for hospitality we’ve bought a lot of shit recently.

I have shopped a large assortment of direct to consumer retail brands. Included in the list is Brooklinen, Havenly, Italic and Merit in the last month or so. And the varied state of quality and service in the venture funded retail space is such a mixed bag. The most pleasant experiences have been from older brands and retailers like Carharrt, Ariat and Sephora.

I would entirely recommend Havenly as an intermediary service for both design and furniture shopping as the returns are relatively simple and they consolidate a ton of retailers into the interface. But they are so good at their jobs you mostly don’t need to return stuff. We bought a cheap fake antler chandelier to see if it could be pulled off (against the advice of the designer) and were promptly told by everyone to return it. Which lets be honest was good advice all around. We did have to dismantle it which I’m told was quite the IKEA style effort.

A fake antler chandelier acquired from Wayfare. It was still $500 so we returned it.

I cannot say I have the same praise for direct to consumer brands that are still attempting to make margins happen in the middle market. I’ve had some amusing fails on that front and it again reminds me of the danger consumers are beginning to feel when they shop brands with less social awareness. This is a real issue for direct to consumer brands as they fight it out with less venture dollars compared to the past. It’s going to hurt their lifetime customer values.

Merit is a much covered cosmetics brand which has some star products I liked (their foundation is terrific) but some really low rent packaging. So I wanted to return a couple items. Merit made returns so challenging I might just eat the cost of half the products that I don’t want to use. Merit’s customer care team literally wanted me to write reviews of each product I wanted to return to begin the process. Damn girl but ain’t nobody has time for that.

An assortment of Merit Cosmetics including foundation, blush, mascara and a brush. I wanted to return about half of them for being a poor value.

Ironically I had already done that on their Yotpo product review prompts a week earlier but didn’t save them (why would I) so when it came time for returns I just said fuck it as I didn’t want to retype my 500 word a piece reviews again just to return the items. It’s been sitting in my inbox for so long I’m afraid they won’t accept it. A huge and amusing fail to integrate basic customer retention tactics and your order options. I expect it will hit their lifetime customer value and require a fix soon. I literally haven’t overcome the inertia just to get my $70 back and perhaps they know that. Which is a dick move.

By far the most clever return mechanic I’ve seen is from Italic. I’ve loved their cashmere and their sheets but some of their other odds and ends were just bad fits. And it turns out they know it. They offered a 50% store credit on an item if I just gave it to a friend. Alas it is a dress that doesn’t work if you have breasts. Which is clearly a challenge to hand off to anyone.

Text messages between Alex and I about returning a dress from Italic that does not fit my upper body

The other irritant that Italic had though is that it shipped in four separate orders and insisted that we ship it back in four separate orders which is wildly wasteful even by e-commerce standards. And it has the unexpected effect of me accidentally returning a pair of cashmere pants I didn’t even try on as I forgot I bought two different cuts and ended up returning both as they came in separate orders over the space of a week. Oops! That’s $150 they won’t get from me. I frantically texted my Alex asking if he had them still but nope I might try to rebuy them but now I don’t trust I’ll be able to even figure it out.

Shopping is going to get extremely weird over this holiday season as brands have significant depths to overcome come past supply chain issues. But as the economy struggles with inflation I’d expect to see more tricks like Merit on the negative end and clever loyalty gambits like Italic on the positive. So keep that in mind as Black Friday approaches.

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Aesthetics

Day 657 and Introvert Season

Montana has been having an extended Indian Summer. I’m not entirely sure if we are allowed to say that anymore but the alternative term Second Summer seems less apt to the actual weather.

We’ve barely had a first frost and one needs a First Fall to have a Second Summer presumably. Farmer’s Almanac suggests you need a killing frost to have a true Indian Summer which I don’t think we’ve had. Either way, it’s been a pleasant mid sixties for six weeks and before that it was fully summer weather. Nary a chill to be had.

But this weekend there are rumors of some snowfall. Not much more than a few inches but enough that I’m excitedly organizing my sweaters. The hints of fall I was thrilled by in September might actually be coming to pass.

I don’t know why I’m so excited for cold weather as it’s been beautiful in the Gallatin Valley but I do love being cuddled up next to a fire with a warm drink and a heavy book. There is less pressure to be doing things like go out and socialize in cold weather. I myself am always more productive in the winter. Winter is introvert weather.

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Aesthetics Community

Day 650 and Reaching

Yesterday was quite a day. I decided to commit to doing a fundraise for chaotic my fund in public as it was my 39th Birthday

I would like to raise $5m for chaotic.capital’s rolling fund before I turn 40 next year. #5Before40 has a nice ring as a hashtag right?

If you would like to be a part of the fund grab a spot on my calendar and let’s discuss!

But lest you think I only thought about venture funds on my birthday I promise I did some celebrating with my family and friends. One of my favorite girlfriends came up to visit. She went straight from the airport to the food cooperative and stocked our half empty fridge with a full harvest of food.

A well stocked fridge

She then proceeded to cook a gorgeous dinner with grilled chicken and roasted cauliflower along with kale chips and a big mixed green salad with a shallot and fresh fig dressing.

Gorgeous, health and nourishing.

And lest you think the most important part of a birthday was forgot here is a picture of the most impossibly beautiful chocolate cake I’ve ever seen.

A chocolate birthday cake

I had a wonderful day filled with love and support. It’s only taken a couple decades but I am finally feeling like I’ve built a life where I feel secure, loved and cared for by those I’ve chosen to be in my life.