Trying To Look Up At The Stars
Or, looking for the silver lining even when it's overcast.
For a refresher on what JFT is, you can click here. Thanks for indulging in everything that’s been rocking around in my noggin’ lately.
Did you know that The Little Mermaid statue is one of the most vandalized pieces of public art on display?
Perched on a little rock in the waterside along the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen sits the bronze statue by sculptor Edvard Eriksen. Commissioned by art collector and philanthropist Carl Jacobsen in the early 1900s and based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson from well before, the humble and incredibly accessible statue has become not only a major tourist attraction but a symbol synonymous with Denmark since her unveiling in 1913.
And because of that aformentioned accessibility, she has been vandalized, defaced, blasted from her rock, and even decapitated multiple times since the 1960s.
Often this is tied to political movements and commentary. The first time the head of The Little Mermaid was sawed off in 1964 it was done so by members of the Situationist movement. It was never recovered and a new one was built to ultimately fix the piece. On International Women’s Day in 2006 she was doused in green paint and had a dildo fixed to her hand. A few years later in 2017 she was once again drenched in paint (this time red) with the words, “Denmark defend the whales of the Faroe Islands” in front of her, referencing the whaling that occurs of pilot whales, dolphins, and porpoises seasonally in the the waters of the Faroe Islands.
While the statue has been restored each time, the frequency to which it occurs has had the nation of Denmark consider moving her further out into the harbor (in order to maintain the concept of her being on a rock in the water) but making it harder for individuals to reach her. However this has never come to pass. The most recent vandalisms occurred in March of 2022 and then almost exactly a year later—the first in response to Russia’s invading of Ukraine and the latter in support of Russia.
I don’t have some groundbreaking opinion to add to this. It’s just a piece of trivia I think about not infrequently. Maybe because The Little Mermaid was my favorite movie growing up so the lore surrounding it and its many iterations have always stuck with me, or maybe because I genuinely love art so examining people’s response and interaction *with* said art is something I find deeply fascinating.
There’s also a melancholy to the story, to the piece, to the fact that the statue has never really existed peacefully, that is…haunting. And I’m always going to be attracted to things that feel a little haunted. Relatable, I guess!
Much of The Little Mermaid is not particularly beautiful or happy. It’s certainly not layered with Ariel sauntering out of the water in an iconically shimmery, glittery ocean dress into Eric’s arms with her mer-family’s approval. In the OG fairytale she not only does not get the credit for the prince’s rescue as she watches him alone from the shore as depicted with the statue, she actually ends up dying and melting away into sea foam at the end.
It’s almost oddly fitting that a statue to commemorate the story would be met with little respect or reverence. I don’t know.
Anyway! Now you know something that will probably never come up while you’re at trivia. But if it does, you’re welcome.If you could exist forever, would you?
The indisputable best episode of Black Mirror is “San Junipero.” I will not be taking questions, debate, or commentary about this fact at this time.
The extremely simplified premise without all of the heart-wrenching then warming, sapphic yearning? In a futuristic world hospice patients and the elderly can inhabit a simulated reality and even upload their consciousness to exist there after death.
I think about dying a lot.
Not in a morbid way…although I don’t know if there is another way. I just think a lot about permanence and what lasts and what we leave behind. And unfortunately no amount of philosophical and scientific reading can completely shake the whole “16 years of Evangelical indoctrination” from the back of your head that makes you intensely wonder about the afterlife. About what else there is, what else there could be, and what happens after it all.
Something I always struggled with when I was wondering why I could not conceivably connect with the church growing up is I always saw my “fellow Christians” using being a good person solely as a reason to get into a heaven. There was never a selflessness to it. It was always about getting to heaven, getting more jewels on your potential crown at the gates, always about being rewarded. It never felt right. It felt contradictory. It felt like being lied to by my “fellow Christians.”
All of this to say is even as a kid I never really longed for heaven. It wasn’t something I sought out. I wanted answers to my childhood obsessions (the main ones being what happened to Anastasia and who killed JonBenét. again: haunted. ) and wanted to see my passed family pets again, but the rest of it felt superfluous. I wanted heaven because I was told to want it, if that makes sense. I was told that was the goal; it wasn’t one I came to on my own.
So despite having somewhat of a never-ending loop playing in my head that says, “Make sure you leave something behind that matters,” I don’t know how I feel about forever. Eternity, whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t something I really thought about in those terms when I was growing up, and it’s still something I don’t know where I land on today.If given the option to put my consciousness onto a server to exist indefinitely (even in an indefinite that includes 80s denim, wire-rimmed glasses, and Kelly) I’m honestly not sure I would be able to take the offer. I don’t know that I need an ever-extended amount of time to think about all of my moves, my choices, my grief, my losses, my regrets, my shame, my this, my that. And as a bitch with certifiable anxiety, I would have to assume that even in Utopia I wouldn’t be able to escape that album that’s continuously on repeat in my own head.
It is an interesting question though, isn’t it?
If you, or a certain version of you, could exist forever, would you do it?
“San Junipero” is perfect because it gives us the ultimate, completely idealistic version of the scenario. You get to ride off into the sunset with the love of your afterlife while “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” plays you into the perfectly digitized sunset. The blinks of your algorithms are perfectly aligned and you get to live out an idealized life for literally ever. And on a beach, no less.
There is a certain appeal to it all, but ultimately I think I’m just always left with too many questions to be able to get past it.
Anyway when we start hearing about AIs of our consciousness I will still maintain this is the best Black Mirror episode but I am very ready to debate about why it’s maybe not a good idea. Or at the very least, maybe not for everyone.Some thoughts on a morning routine:
I wake up without an alarm clock but I hear my neighbor’s go off every day at 7:30. It’s late fall, bordering on winter, so it’s still dark until close to 8. The bedroom is chilly with the damp, October air since I prefer to sleep with a window open under multiple comforters. I’m trying to get better about scrolling, about not immediately letting the media illiterate voices that comment on TikToks be the first things I see in the morning. Instead I let the soft glow of a Kindle Paperwhite and words by Britt Bennet, Fredrik Backman, Stuart Turton, and Gabrielle Zevin usher in the light behind the curtains. I’ve almost completely eliminated coffee, only occasionally picking up an iced latte that inevitably makes my heart feel like it’s going to Hulk its way out of my chest within six and a half sips. I have a new moisturizer, it’s really thick. Perfect for the dipping temperatures. I’m also unfortunately now a person who will walk her dog in socks and Birkenstocks. It’s called fashion, look it up. Despite hearing leaf blowers all day every day the sidewalks are still blanketed in red and orange and brown edges, sometimes crunching underneath the sandals I’m not ready to put away for the season, sometimes slick with dew and the Pacific Northwest of it all. I’ve become an earlier and earlier riser. I’m always up before the sun these days, and never from the sounds of an alarm. I like the slow, quiet, lull of the morning before everyone starts waking up and going and going and going. I like this little part of my day that feels soft. A little soft goes a long way. I think I could use more soft. I think we all could.Whenever I want to make myself cry I read this poem:
“Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.”Sorry for inflicting it on you now, too.
When it rains it pours, and when it pours sometimes it ruins all your stuff.
A few weeks ago I got a call from the storage facility that has held approximately 75 square feet of my belongings letting me know that there was “potential water damage” to my space. Old books I’ve had since middle school, a bed and cool topped mattress I saved and saved in my twenties to buy, cashmere sweaters and leather jackets were all stored there for safe keeping until I was in a bigger place where they could fit without being on rotation. I didn’t check the news about flooding; if I had I likely wouldn’t have held the optimism that it “probably wasn’t that bad” that I kept in the back of my mind until last weekend.
Let’s not dance around with metaphors or pretty words because it was that bad. While several boxes in the front were saved thanks to the queen sized mattress soaking up the bulk of the mess from a broken water main, more than a few were completely water logged. Wrapped in now completely disintegrating cardboard, speckled with green and white dots of mold. A wooden bed frame had the same fuzz growing up its now completely damp and warped legs. T-shirts from the first websites to notice my writing were now smelly, soaked wash cloths. A box filled with some of the first original art I bought from a market in Georgetown was a mess of nothing salvageable.
All together I think I saved maybe 50% of what had previously been in there. The rest was left to head to the dump. Memories, furniture, and what I can only estimate to be thousands of dollars worth of my things are all gone. All thanks to a contractor not doing his job well enough to, you know, not flood an entire city block while testing out some sprinklers.
In the grand scheme of things it is not that big of a deal. I probably needed to KonMari myself anyway, this was just the universe forcing my hand. And I know that ultimately, I can replace things.
But also, it feels like a big El-Oh-Fucking-El being sent my way from that same universe that apparently decided I needed to downsize. Historically when things start to go wrong in my life, all of the dominoes fall at once. When it rains, a water main will also bust open and put several feet of water over the things that are important to me.
I’m sure this is not a “just me” phenomena. I’m sure when you’re going through a stressful season it can make any inconvenience feel like a complete hell hole. But it does kind of feel like when everything unravels it unravels all at once.
And I, for one, would just really like a break. And not one in the form of a city water main.
That, however, is just not how it goes.
Instead, sometimes you have to just suck it up and and find yourself elbow deep in soaked things that were once so important to you that now you cannot save, take a breath and just keep going. Sometimes you have to throw away the dresses you used to love and the cable knits you still really do, and just remember you can always build a new closet. Sometimes you have to try and dry out the memories you cannot bear to let go of, and accept that while things might be shit now, eventually they won’t be.
Sometimes you just have to be thankful you can look up in the hoodies you still have, on the furniture that made it out, and you can see a semblance of stars through the clouds.
Sometimes that is all you have. Sometimes you have to be thankful for that.
One Last Thing: I highly recommend reading or re-reading this essay from a little over a year ago by my friend Heidi. I re-read it today and felt very held. Okay bye. ♡
