Totally bananas!

Anyone even mildly possessed by the culture has cottoned on: polka dots are in. I think they started making a comeback last summer, but their resurrection was cemented by Lily Allen’s West End Girl’s album cover, and the spotted USB butt plug merch she sold. Suddenly every girl who looks like she’s never opened a PDF in her life is wandering around SE London in spotted summer attire and Amy Winehouse ballet pumps —all that’s missing is the blood splatter! That being said, I don’t surmise self harm has fallen out of fashion just yet…

I’m holding my banana like a cigarette as I eat my way through the bunch I bought in M&S because I felt sickly from pills and matcha on my infinitely empty stomach. Remember that 2010’s vegan banana bitch on YouTube? I feel like her right now. 

For the last decade I thought of polka dots as twee and retro, veering into uncoolness. They’re eye-catching and grabby in a sort of obnoxious way. Honestly, I didn’t know I liked polka dots until I bought a cute bubble-skirted mini dress from Abercrombie in cream and black polka. After that, I started accumulating dotty garments as though they were going out of fashion. Which, obviously, is how you know something is officially in fashion.

I’m wearing off-whites today: a spaghetti-strap pointelle top with baby blue bunnies bouncing across the fabric, paired with a skirt dotted with navy polka. It’s a delicious thirty-degree Thursday in London, so naturally I took myself off for a matcha in the sun. I’ve already had to swap seats twice because the sun was beating down on my shoulders as though I’m still in a circa 2019 abusive relationship. Thank god that’s over! 

Though my period ended two days ago, after going back on my “the pill”, I’m still having these residual cramps that force me to catch my breath with their sharpness. I ponder the normalcy of pain in a woman’s life, and how we’re all supposed to act like periods just don’t exist, as though half the population isn’t bleeding into bleached cotton tampons that are supposedly leaching bleach inside our wombs. I’ve always written about my period because I like talking about it, not to be grotesque, but because it feels feminine and nothing is really off the table in conversation with me. Unless you ask me what I do for work.

“I write,”

I’ll say defensively, while pursing my lips slightly, as if I were applying Chanel Rouge Coco Gloss in the backseat of an uber going over a classic residential London speed bump.

Writing is a job I get paid very little to do, but a job nonetheless. Not that pay is ever my incentive to write. I lament; being a woman is hard enough without a job; so much of my energy already goes into keeping my mind, body, and exterior healthy and alive. Moisturised. Hairless. Radiant. Thin enough to be iconography on a 2014 tumblr thinspo mood board . That kind of work will kill you if you’re not careful.

I laugh.

I still take Ambien a couple nights, weekly. Like it’s a glass of wine, or some other vice considered more socially acceptable than pills.

I’m susceptible to this overwhelming feeling of inadequacy, so intense I want to cry like an erratic combustion. Something inside me breaks, so I break an Ambien in half and I don’t have to feel like that anymore. Phew! I fall asleep with YouTube playing on my stupid giant TV, mounted inches away from my bed, and wake up at 3am to the loud glow of some twink explaining every episode of Gossip Girl in a three-hour long video-essay autoplay selected specifically to infiltrate my dreams.

This happened last night!!

I haven’t had good matcha in a while, so now I’ve got caffeine jitters —Lol, how uncool am I?

Though matcha is labelled a gentle stimulant, sometimes it still aggravates my nervous system. Not great if I get stuck, all paranoid about some horrible little thought rolling around in my head like a spare eyeball. But the adrenaline keeps me hammering away in the notes app, pouring matcha into this blog of mine as though my only hobby is sipping milky green liquid faster than my paper straw can dissolve.

Most matcha you buy in cafés is shit. If I don’t feel on the verge of a panic attack after a cup then I know for certain that it was watered-down green tea, which is allocated to my to avoid list. I am, after all, the self-proclaimed matcha snob. I’ve been toying with the idea of making silly arty videos where I try matcha from different places and tell the camera, deadpan, exactly why it’s so bad —with editing that makes the whole thing feel like surrealist wellness satire. I like the idea of having a video project to work on. I do not like the idea of going back to work, so instead I’m betting on a creative distraction. Or perhaps I’ll just take up smoking again. Or take Ambien and have a bath.

Skinny is back. I’ve noticed so many skinny girls drifting in and out of the matcha café this morning. Maybe I’m filled with the concern of someone happily existing in recovery, but I swear they’re making girls even skinnier than they used to! Tiny little waifs floating around in rip-off Margielaesque Tabi’s.

Seeing a skimpy midriff makes me feel jealous and competitive for a moment, before I console myself with the things I tell myself instead of being jealous of other women:

be yourself. That is your best asset. There is no point wishing you were somebody else who already exists. Embrace the things that make you you, because those are your biggest strengths.

Why would you want to be someone else when you’re already the totally unique person you’re meant to be?

Of course this advice only works if you are already a smokin hot skinny blonde bitch. But lucky for me, I am. So it works wonderfully, and I sit the fuck back down and stop yearning to be someone else who would probably yearn to be me.