A newsletter is a blog, stop kidding yourself
Adverts for prescription drugs, men's gymnastics, and norovirus
My friend sent me a newsletter that she reads every week, and said she thinks I could/should do something similar. In my current semi-depressed, completely torn and confused over various life-impacting decisions, totally uninspired and uninterested in work state, I’m entirely ready to be told I can do anything creative and believe it will somehow be a success, even though ‘newsletter’ is basically a euphemism for ‘blog’, which in itself is a euphemism for ‘diary you force people to consume even though diaries were invented as a vessel to carry private musings, not to be shared on the internet’, and blogs are supposed to be embarrassing now, unless they’re about cooking.
I think I hate those ones the most, even though they always have the best recipes, because they’re inevitably prefaced by an essay about how the writer’s life somehow aligned with this recipe in some Hallmark-esque fashion. For example: ‘I can’t believe Halloween and a good pumpkin crop magically happened at the same time this year. I was sitting on the porch of my unattainably expensive house in some Midwestern state that people think is devoid of culture, sipping a cup of tea made from teabags I sewed myself and filled with compost from my vegetable garden, having just bade farewell to my two Scandinavian-looking children as they head off to the school that has a 100% success rate of turning pupils into future world leaders or start-up owners, when I caught sight of a perfectly plump, juicy pumpkin. It was at that moment I decided to cook this recipe I came up with on the spot and have not been developing for months, since Halloween and the pumpkin crop happens at the same time every year so I’ve had 364 days to think about this since last Halloween.’ The essay is always punctured by pictures of said porch, said children, usually a glossy dog airlifted from a commercial for antidepressants. (I still think it’s wild that prescription drugs are advertised on national television in America. It’s even wilder that the audio and the visual are completely divorced from each other in these commercials. Airbrushed adults and the child actors who look similar enough to them to feasibly be passed off as their children frolic in a garden (with a dog), or toast champagne glasses on a boat, or run marathons, while the voiceover extols the endless list of side effects at warp speed. Warning: Tylenol may cause acne breakouts, brain hemorrhages, and loss of limb.) (Side note: I spelled both Scandinavian and hemorrhages wrong in that last paragraph, and then spelled hemorrhages wrong again when I wrote it just there despite copying it from the spellcheck-corrected mention above. My Creative Writing degree is laughing at me (while everyone else is laughing at my Creative Writing degree).)
I digress. Which is the most amazing thing about deciding you’re going to publish a newsletter, or a blog, or your diary. You can digress. I never managed to break a first class mark on an essay in college because I would make a point, dissect it ad nauseam, and then just leave it there while moving on to the next one, before penning a conclusion that had nothing to do with any of the points. So far I would award this newsletter intro a solid 68, again.
Anyway. I’ve been told over and over again as I throw myself constantly into new and doomed creative pursuits that you need some kind of niche, that you can’t just vomit your thoughts into the universe under the guise of a podcast or a novel or indeed a newsletter and expect that people will want to read it. You have to write the world’s first anti-penguin newsletter, or an ode to table salt; that’s how you ensnare a loyal following. But I just don’t have that kind of imagination. I can in fact see both a stuffed penguin and a small container of table salt from where I’m sitting, which is how I came up with those ~kooky~ examples in the first place. So, no niche, beyond the vague structure of: one good thing I saw/ate/experienced/walked past this week, and one bad thing I saw/ate/experienced/walked past this week. That seems to encapsulate both a niche and also a medium that allows me to write about whatever the fuck comes to mind, with endless opportunities for unrelated tangents. Also, chances are that at least one good and bad thing will happen every seven days, so I’ll never run out of material. Lucky you. There are a lot of good things this week because I’ve been having a fucking great time in London, but chances are that the good thing will eventually devolve into ‘I saw a dog that looked like he was smiling at me today’. I might occasionally extrapolate these good or bad things into lengthier diatribes on the human condition, but I might not.
Side note: it wasn’t a penguin, it was a puffin. Believe it or not, that actually came up in conversation since writing the first draft of this and putting it on the internet.
Don’t ask me why there is a gigantic white space between the puffin picture and the puffin caption. There’s only one reddit thread on this particular issue and it did not contain the answer.
It takes a huge degree of self-absorption (or a rare paucity of self-loathing) to believe that people would be interested in reading about good or bad things that happen to a mostly unexceptional person. I have to believe that the first person who created the notion of a blog/newsletter/diary actually had something interesting to say, which then spawned a legion of copycat followers who had less and less interesting things to say until everyone was doing it. But I spend the majority of my time consuming details of the lives of people who are mostly unexceptional and who are not in my immediate circle of friends or family and therefore should not be important to me in any way, and I find it completely engrossing. For example: reading articles about the a day in the life of various normal New Yorkers based on the salary they earn, or a girl reading her diary entries on a podcast which are essentially just bars she drinks at and dates she goes on, or the intro section of a podcast where the hosts just talk about their weeks, which I find more interesting than the actual interview with the ‘sexpert’/tarot reader/wellness coach. Why do I then go on the hosts’ Instagrams to look at pictures of the events they’re describing? I don’t know. Why do I frequently scroll through Facebook ads for apartments with spare rooms in cities I don’t live in, and then click on the profiles of the current roommates to see if they’d be fun to live with? I don’t know. And while I don’t think the fact that I find random people’s lives interesting necessarily works in reverse, I have to do something that implies creativity or work that I’m interested in, because if I have to send another email that starts with ‘Hi! Hope you’re well!’ to someone I do not know and whose wellness I do not care about, with no other outlet, I’m going to blow my brains out.
One good thing:
My flight to London was cancelled two days before I was set to leave – I actually found out while I was in the queue to get a pre-departure COVID test and saw a news item through the window about Spirit Airlines cancelling a bunch of flights. British Airways would never, I thought, and then tried to check in to my flight, only to discover it no longer existed. After much screaming which I won’t elaborate upon here, I managed to re-book it for the same day at gross expense, and with a six hour layover in Madrid. When I landed, after discovering that ten years of Spanish lessons still rendered me unable to understand the phrase ‘Prueba de COVID negativo?’, which I feel like probably doesn’t need translating here, I went through security and found that there was a giant TV showing the Tokyo men’s gymnastics finals, which for me is second only to Tokyo women’s gymnastics finals. There was an empty row of seats right in front of the TV so I sat in them and watched the gymnastics for six hours and that was the good thing that happened this week.
One bad thing:
Post-Madrid, in London, after a train and a tube and a walk from Brixton station, I found myself outside the door of the friends’ house I was staying at, friends I hadn’t seen in eighteen months, thanks COVID. I banged on the door and after a minute I heard someone shuffling down stairs so I stuck my face through the letterbox to look; it was my friend, looking like absolute shit and like she was crying. My heart! I thought, she’s overcome with emotion at the sight of me! She opened the door and immediately backed away from me. Some welcome, I said. I have norovirus, she said.