Hello! I’m writing this on the train again. On Friday I had lunch with Emily Sundberg of
and three of my friends from Yale. We talked about podcasts, our media consumption habits, beauty brands, New York, LA, dating, bosses, career trajectories, and contentious magazine articles about women joining Yale fraternities and Skull and Bones. It was refreshing and stimulating and we left feeling like we were at the beginning of something (our adult lives? a new group chat?). Emily linked my letter in hers, and I’m excited to be writing for new people!*The ADHOC categories of the week are Amused by, Doing, Humbling, On Repeat, and Consuming. Thank you Andres and Everett for your contributions. Text or email me if you want to be in the next one.
*By way of introduction: I’m Arden, a junior at Yale studying Cognitive Science. I like pop culture/reading/the internet/food/fashion/business, and this letter contains my thoughts on the aforementioned topics as a Gen Zer/student/New Yorker/WOC/consumer. I also share my friends’ takes.
A: Amused by
I designed a hoodie with my friend Andres and we convinced 9 of our friends to get one. No one knew what it meant, but in his words, “It was a vibe captured.”
The idea was actually born brainstorming Ad Hoc categories, but that isn’t the point. There is no point. That’s the fun!
D: Doing
My friend Ore and I recently went on a 32-mile bike ride up the Farmington Canal Trail. We listened to Beatopia and Stranger in the Alps front to back. The path gets super pretty once you get far enough out of the city—the trees start to close in above you, and there are no strip malls or cars or very many people. Though we did meet a man who approached us on his bike and informed us we were going to develop arthritis for riding in 30 degree weather with our knees exposed. We thanked him for telling us, and then we rode side-by-side for 10 miles. Here’s what we learned:
He’s run 5 Boston marathons and biked over 150,000 miles.
He used to be a surgical tech at Beth Israel New York (which happens to be the same hospital I was born in, near Union Square).
He went to Beverly Hills parties in the 90s and did every kind of drug with the movie stars, including gasoline (?). This led to four stays in rehab.
20 years ago, he met a Vanderbilt at a party on December 24th, asked her out on January 2nd, and married her in July. That summer, she told him that when her parents died they were set to inherit 14 “big ones.” He’d never had money before.
His bike cost him $10,000. The gears shift automatically.
He can’t stand his 18-year-old niece because she’s pretty and she knows it. She’s always taking pictures of herself (Ore and I were like…what’s the problem here?).
Europe is terrible in the summer and winter. Paris especially. Skip the Louvre.
The most valuable intellectual pursuits are epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Technical skills are less impressive.
Sometimes a boring life is a good one.
At a break in the road, he told us that it was nice to meet us, but now he was going to turn around and smoke a joint on a bench. He’d been smoking weed since he was 11—it’s the only drug he hasn’t given up. Before he left, I asked him his name: Raoul. He didn’t ask for ours. And then he was gone.
A little under a mile from campus, I collided with a white van at one of the narrow intersections through the bike path. I fell onto the road and cut my knee up, but I went to Yale Health and a nurse cleaned it up. It was an experience I can only describe as Type 2 Fun, which means it was not fun in the moment but very much so in retrospect.
H: Humbling
I was at a high school reunion dinner (affectionately referred to as Trin Din) when I was informed that I am a geriatric.
I think I spend a fair amount of time on the internet, but maybe my interests have become so specific that I am totally oblivious when new words are added to the lexicon. I had never heard gyatt, skibidi, Fanum tax, looksmaxing, mogging. Have you?
I read this awesome article in The Cut about what tweens are wearing, buying, and doing. The girls in the pictures look so young I was almost surprised that they are allowed to leave the house and do things independently. But then I remembered being in middle school and wearing the sunflower crop top and the black plastic choker I had seen on Tumblr, taking the 6 train downtown to the Brandy Melville and Glossier stores in SoHo, and trying the Sephora tester products directly on my face. Some of my own tweenhood has been preserved for these Gen Alpha girls (balm Dotcom, high-top Converse, Brandy hoodies) some of their consumption mirrors mine currently (serums from The Ordinary, ballet flats), and other trends are completely new to me (Stanley tumblers, shorts-over-leggings).
I guess I must accept that there is a new wave of style, language, and behavior that I will not be in on or be able to claim as my own. Though I think it’s ridiculous that some twelve-year-olds are buying retinol, I am heartened that internet culture has not totally stripped tween girls of the joys of experimenting with makeup and clothes, and figuring out (for the first time!) what they like and how they want to exist in the world outside of their phone cameras.
O: On Repeat
I cannot stop listening to this song. In Between by Gracie Abrams is unreleased but a grainy version is available as a Spotify podcast. It sounds a bit like Fearless/Speak Now era Taylor Swift, and her voice comes off less whispery than her current music.
I’ve been thinking more about the not-so-secret collections of unreleased songs that artists possess. Gracie’s in particular have been blowing up online, and I wonder how they would perform commercially if she decided to record and officially release them. Is the treasure hunt part of the allure? Would the sonic inconsistency of past versus present throw off her fans? I don’t know, but it would be nice to be able to add this song to a playlist.
C: Consuming (Everett Yum)
Last week I took my brother to Book Trader for the first time. We were talking about our writing styles because I feel like Everett sounds so different when I hear him speak versus when I read his prose. He described some of his writing as belletristic (a word I didn’t know, from the French belles-lettres, meaning refined and aestheticized). I think his words sound very high-contrast and consequential. Like very tight dialogue in a play. He gave me the names of two essays he likes, and I read one of them. “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho” is by Wesley Yang and you can read it here. Cho was a South Korean mass murderer who killed dozens of people at Virginia Tech in 2007. I asked Everett to explain why he feels so drawn to the piece:
“Firstly, I think Yang’s prose is really captivating. Dr. Anderson described it as ‘crackling,’ and I think that’s the most apt word. He’s very dry and witty in a way that he’s sort of above it all, but he’s also very self-deprecating at the same time.
The second reason why I love this essay is because it’s eerily relatable. It’s entirely based in Asian male aggrievement, which is something we’re not supposed to have, but we have it anyway. He looks straight in the face of the worst culmination of that aggrievement — a mass shooter — and somehow related to him. It’s such an uncomfortable essay.
‘For these people, we have nothing but options. Therapy, serotonin reuptake inhibitors… all of which are modes of survival as opposed to forms of life’…like that’s an insane quote to me.
I do think he has some blindspots in the essay. I think he delegitimizes the concerns of the women Cho pursues, assuming they were brushing him off because he was a lame Asian kid, and they were overreacting by reporting him to the police, when there could’ve been a real concern for their safety.
But overall this essay just hits me every time. Loneliness in a society where, allegedly, we have every resource at our disposal to find someone else and not be lonely.”
You’ve reached the end! Have a wonderful week, comment if you agree or disagree with anything I wrote.
This was such a nice read
the toby x gyatt pic is actually unreal