Hillary Rodham Clinton and I share a birthday, which means, according to a new astrological system called Birthday Twin (™) that I just invented, we are cosmically bound. This is a system designed for contrarian nerds who are obsessed with pop culture, aka me and Sasha and the handful of friends we become magnets to.

As the view goes, you are, love it or hate it, inextricably linked to the celebrity who shares your birthday (date and month, not year). True, there are many celebrities born every day. So how do you know which celebrity is your birthday twin? It’s pretty simple: I decide.

For example, other people born on October 26th besides me and my step-dad are: Bootsy Collins, Rita Wilson, Napoleon Hill, Natalie Merchant, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Out of all those humans and many others, my birthday twin is Hillary.

Why? There is so much friction there. Everyone has an opinion about Hillary. She is one of the world’s most well-known and also hated women. This substack is not the place to litigate HRC. I’d like to stay 300 feet away from that discourse. You can argue about that amongst yourselves. I voted for Bernie in the primary and then Hillary in the main in 2016 if you must know, now please leave me alone. What is not controversial is that: 1. She Leaned all the way In. 2. She is my birthday twin and 3. It’s my job to figure out why.

Hate her if you wish, but that girl has ice in her veins (complimentary). Like HRC, I, too, can be a polarizing, dominant, and stubborn person. Like her, I love hard. I am loyal even when I shouldn’t be. Like her, I can emotionally compartmentalize unhealthily. I know how to get shit done. I know what I think is right and wrong, so much so that I accidentally wrote a dissertation in moral philosophy on blame. I, too, love my job and have never been accused of being lazy. Like her, I believe in spite. I feel smug when smug is called for. I would, if I had time, write a What Happened treatise about every failed relationship and job I’ve ever had. I guess I already do that, in unsolicited voice notes to Sasha and Meredith and Frances.

In 1992, HRC made the comment “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life,” which was an exasperated response regarding accusations that HRC’s law firm benefitted from her husband Bill’s presidency. Claude and also common sense tells me that this was seen at the time as extremely dismissive to stay-at-home mothers. Bill, as always, did not take the heat.

There’s this person on the internet who updates us on what inanimate objects match with celebrities. She says that Tom Holland is a reusable grocery tote. Sandra Oh is a tropical fishtank at the dentist’s office. Billie Eilish is the type of glass often found in MCM homes called crown glass. This person is, to be clear, my idol. She hasn’t done HRC but I must know so I tried to have Claude watch all her videos but turns out Claude can’t watch TikToks, so I described the bit and made it answer anyway (dogmatic, insistent, very HRC coded behavior). It suggested: A 3 ring binder, a laminated index card, a pressure cooker, or a swiss-army knife. I don’t even have to ask Sasha which of these I am. I am definitely a pressure cooker: sealed for years, occasionally exploding, ultimately nourishing, reliable and extremely useful despite also being a literal loose cannon. Self-awareness is something I do think both HRC and I have, despite us both also being extremely delusional.

If anyone reading this wants to text me celebrities born on their birthday, I’ll tell you who your twin is and why you’re cosmically stuck with them xox.

One more note is that upon reading this, Sasha suggested to me that Bootsy Collins, Rita Wilson, and Natalie Merchant need to start a supergroup which is extremely true and I am all in. So if you want to help us with that, or my other new sidequest which is making the Ryanair booking platform less 2002-coded and less excruciatingly painful to navigate, let me know. I am going from Berlin to Budapest in a few months and it’s unclear whether the two identical tickets I’ve already bought despite not receiving confirmation emails for will work.

SSKR

At work, back in the days when work was work and work wasn’t something more vague and undefined and oppressive in its non-workness, my teammates were a bunch of former sales guys Because of this everyone in the team needed to have a nickname From everything I can tell, sales guys are comprised in equal parts of protein, references to wild nights going out with former sorority girls, making fun of each other, and nicknames Their nicknames were bestowed before I knew them, and I could only sort of piece together their origins retroactively Jane was one A nickname that is Given that these were former sales guys, fratty and obnoxious and overfamiliar, I assumed that calling one of them Jane was barely disguised misogyny Not knowing the actual origin story I wish I could give them the benefit of the doubt but I can’t because I’ve been a woman my whole life Another one had the nickname of Ted Maybe it was a Ted Bundy thing God knows any of these guys could have been serial killers They would always talk about an HBO show about a washed up former baseball player that somehow felt like a subconscious metacommentary on their own lives so it’s possible it had to do with that Or it was probably a skit from Funny or Die That’s what these boys were like I’m not sure I understood a single thing about their interior lives I’m not sure if the concept of interior lives even applies here Ted only ever talked to me about mountain biking It was legitimately the only thing we had in common L was the only one of them who I actually sort of liked I’m not even sure he had a nickname He would talk to me about a coworker he was dating She was from LA and tried to be a pop star in a girl group before she gave up and started working in the salt mines of big tech He wanted me to be friends with her One day she and I went to one of the quiet rooms at work and sang Hold On by Wilson Phillips together It was her idea and a song I barely know despite being an xennial We were more of a Peter Gabriel family growing up I attended the wedding of L and the girl group coworker It was almost two years after I had left the company and I went in a cropped little corset top and a crocheted skirt and said hi to Ted-Teddy and Jane, wearing their identikit blue suits, and my old boss who was a Mormon and went on his mission in the Philippines Whenever he and I went to the Philippines for work which was a lot he would break out his Tagalog and all the Filipinos would be gagged at this goobery white guy speaking their language One time over dinner but no drinks just a coke, he told me that he saw two men machete each other to death in rural Mindanao Maybe it was because one of them sang My Way badly at karaoke in their village or maybe I’m compressing two different stories Anyway I went to L’s wedding and saw my boss and the boys after two years and they said Sasha Fierce! the way they always did when they saw me at work This was the nickname they had given me Beyonce’s album had already come out by that point so Sasha Fierce as a concept - as a combination of words - was already in the public consciousness Also this was an easy nickname because it didn’t require them knowing anything about me at all They just had to be alive in 2008 when I Am … Sasha Fierce came out and have enough brain cells to remember that my name was Sasha If they had known anything about me they would have known that Beyonce and I share the same birthday so I actually am Sasha Fierce I have to admit I never really listened to a lot of Beyonce; I merely absorbed it through the cultural ether Less ether, more like a cultural swamp that I was forced to wade through in the aughts, burning both celebrity upskirt photos and the entirety of Bey’s Baby Boy music video into my brain pan But I am Beyoncé’s birthday twin and therefore her alterego which means I don’t try to purge the memory of the mangy vole that sat atop Sean Paul’s upper lip in Baby Boy I just make room for it If being birthday twins with Beyonce makes me her alterego then I guess Beyonce is my alterego Like two sides of the same coin Does she see my face when she looks in the mirror or do I summon her when I get on stage Which is never But I think the answer is yes It might explain why I get up and dance on tables when I’m drunk Is she stuck with some frightful memory from my past like I am with Sean Paul’s non-moustache Maybe she is tormented by a forgotten dick pic that I received in my 20s It makes me think of Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein, a book that I have recommended to everyone I know and yet can remember no details of whatsoever but I think it has something to do with this The looking glass The branding of identity that becomes a substitute for the actual self In my case I could never find a way to accept the branding; I always preferred the real world to the mirror world So I left the sales boys and their nicknames and our work which, by chance or not by chance, was constructing the selfsame mirror world where everyone could have internet alteregos and doppelgängers and comment on music videos on youtube and develop parasocial relationships with their celebrity birthday twins Now I live underneath tamarind trees and spend all day barefoot But I’ll still always be Sasha Fierce

On my most recent visit to see my grandmother, I arrive, as usual, to a closet in the guest room full of cardboard boxes and shipping bags addressed to me. At this point everyone in the family just calls it “Sasha’s Closet,” even though I live 2700 kilometers away in another country. The closet is wide, running two-thirds of the width of the room, with fully mirrored sliding doors. Sliding the right door reveals the half of the closet that is full of extra linens and terry cloth robes and is off-limits to my excesses. But sliding the left door opens the portal to the magical kingdom of Sasha’s Closet. I strategically leave things there even after I go back home: half a bag of cotton ankle socks from Target, a dusty guidebook to dustier Baja California from 1985, the perfectly preserved 1960s-era paper dress gifted to me by a friend’s mom that would rot within weeks if I brought it back to the tropics with me, the sandals I wear to go to the pool every morning with grandma, a J.W. Anderson dress I found on consignment for a steal but is too big and now I’m undecided whether to sell it or take it to my seamstress and I’m putting off needing to make the decision for at least two more visits.

I leave these things because I love my grandmother more than life itself and I like the idea of my random assortment of proxy objects keeping her company. I also leave them because the life of a fayuquera - a smuggler of contraband from the States to Mexico - requires Ph.D levels of strategy, weight management, and ruthless prioritizing. I could pay for extra bags, but I try to keep it to one 23 kg checked bag, and I stuff anything that might technically not be allowed, like a piece of fresh galangal to sprout or seeds for the garden, inside vacuum packed bags of clothes where they won’t rattle or register at customs. Sentimentality lives in every corner of my grandmother’s house for me, but in zero corners of the giant duffel bag I roll up to bring in my carry-on every time I fly to see her. What is more important? This 5 kg hardback tome about fermentation from an obscure Barcelona food scientist or the secondhand flower-print Vilebrequin pajamas + an illustrated chapbook on the birds of North America found in a used bookshop? My husband Francisco’s favorite paleo chocolates or 3 kg of tigernut flour? Do I strategically leave out the fat packets of Central Asian melon seeds since the garden in my home in Colima is too reluctant, too damp, too tropical to entertain such interlopers, and bring only the envelopes of tiny, shivering onion seeds? I have learned to become ruthless. And when you happen to be a devotee of the infinite circular economy of used clothing, as I have been since age 12, ruthlessness is a requisite.

On this trip, the contents of the closet are several bags of old silk dresses that I found for $10 or less on used clothing sites that I am planning on taking apart and putting back together as tapestries. Grandma has warned me ahead of time. “Dear Granddaughter, Please pack as light as possible since some of these packages are pretty heavy. Know you are probably already aware of this but just being grandmotherly. love” If grandma is writing this, it means that there are over 20 kg of ugly silk frocks in gray plastic bags awaiting my arrival. She has received many other heavy items on my behalf in the past, including entire sets of cutlery, multiple Vitamixes, a juicer that could double as a blunt murder weapon, wool duvets, and vintage glassware, so she has developed a kind of internal measuring system for weighty packages.

Grandma’s pre-arrival messages can be divided into two categories. Category 1: what are you eating now, and give me exact names and brands because whatever you write that isn’t “cow milk,” “eggs,” or “strawberries” won’t be identifiable as food to me. Category 2: warnings of the packages in Sasha’s Closet. These warnings are a kind of code that only grandma and I speak. If there is no warning, it’s less than 15 kg. This never happens. If there is a commentary on “many packages” having arrived, but no packing advice, we’re probably looking at 15-20 kg. If there is any hint of anxiety or horror at the quantity of things awaiting me, we’re over 20 kg and I travel with only the clothes on my back. Which is fine, because most of the time the packages contain clothing.

I first discovered vintage clothes in middle school. My mom would take me to Canal Street in New York City and we would trawl the racks of vintage warehouses for perfect, high-waisted bellbottoms and gauzy disco gowns. In 1997 you could still get a pristine, three-piece corduroy suit from the ‘70s for $20, which was within my babysitting-funded budget. Since mom was unwilling to go to New York every weekend just to sit in Holland Tunnel traffic and give herself respiratory disease from inhaling decades of dust on my behalf, I discovered the many thrift stores of Central New Jersey. My favorite was one called Red, White, and Blue, in Hamilton, which I have only just now discovered is a small chain. But of course a store with such treasures would be successful enough to multiply! Where else could a barely pubescent slip of a girl find bright yellow, terry cloth gym shorts in toddler size 4+ to wear as booty shorts? Where else would sell a blue, star-spangled mini skirt with attached spandex underpants that was practically designed to be worn with my vintage red-and-white striped tube top (red, white, and blue indeed!). Where else were there racks of deliciously worn-in children’s t-shirts proudly proclaiming membership in a distant district’s youth soccer league or for figure skating camps in Lake Placid or past participants in the Maccabee Games?

I would pair these little boy’s t-shirts with neglected grandpa pants from the ‘70s that slouched forgotten at the back of the store and which I would wear hung low on my hips. Conventional clothes bored me. I still get twinges of nostalgia looking at old Delia’s catalogues online; I wasn’t immune to the power of a chunky shoe and erratic capitalization. But by the time I was 13 I had decided that trend-chasing was not Me. What was Me was a tiny white t-shirt pledging allegiance to a fire-fighting station in North Jersey.

It’s still not clear, however, to what extent this sartorial choice that was to become Me was dictated by money. I’ve always loved old things: the patina they acquire, the stories they tell, the way they act as portals. This has been true for as long as I can remember. I wore my mom’s old peace sign necklace from the ‘60s until the metal loop that the chain fed through broke in half. I collected old typewriters and rotary phones. At the same time, I remember sitting with my much wealthier friends as they flipped through J.Crew catalogues in their palatial homes, casually marking all the items they would buy with their parents’ credit cards, and wishing I could afford the patch-pocket jeans or color-blocked bikinis. With only babysitting money filling my pockets ($4 an hour!), my options were more limited. Since the mid- to late-‘90s were a revival of ‘70s styles, true to the old 20-year cycle adage, why not buy the originals for a fraction of the cost of the new flares being trotted out by stores at the mall? This would allow me to still be vaguely on trend and yet also totally distinct from my peers (the dream of most teenagers), all while surrounding myself with my beloved portals to a past era. Thus began my life as a disciple of the circular economy of used clothing.

There are a lot of things that people are weirdly precious about that have zero impact on me: eating with my hands, using public toilets, snatching a fallen pea off the floor to pop it into my mouth, toenail clippings, wearing other people’s clothes. I can understand being squeamish about some of these, but aversions to the last one have always bewildered me. We touch or rub up against things with our bare skin that other people touch all the time. Just wash whatever you bought at the thrift store when you get home and you’re good to go. I remember the faces of distaste that some of my friends’ parents would give me when I preached the gospel of thrifting or, worse yet, brought their well-heeled children with me to Sunday service at those temples of abandoned garments. Fortunately my baseline temperament is contrarianism, so this hardly dissuaded me. Also, by that point I was an addict.

They warn you about alcohol, drugs, sex, and gambling, but they don’t tell you that finding needles in haystacks is addictive. The cross-stitched, apron-bodice, full-skirted, denim jumper I found for $15 at the bottom of a trunk in a random antique store in Lambertville is one such needle. As is the Japanese silk shift printed with abstract faces that I discovered in a thrift shop in Ann Arbor. The $10 Plein Sud spaghetti strap dress from an overstuffed consignment store in New York. A translucent swimming cover up from the 1960s printed with constellations dug up in Long Beach. A diaphanous ‘20s flapper dress, down on its luck and spraying seed beads onto the floorboards of a dingy vintage shop in Philly. What is that frisson that comes with the thrill of a find that becomes its own kind of high?

Everyone loves a bargain. It’s that feeling of beating the system; we’re filled with the Upton Sinclair-tinged righteousness of the little guy Consumer poking their finger in the eye of Big Business. Beyond that, however, is a sentiment more vague and enigmatic and almost maternal. It is not dissimilar to the feeling of rescuing a baby bird that fell from its nest, or carefully rotating your stuffed animals when you’re a child so that each one has a turn at the head of the bed, or calling a dear friend after they’ve had a bad day. It’s a way of showing something, anything, that it has value. Our world is filled with discarded objects, to the tune of billions of tons per year. We suck up ancient phytoplankton to make infinite plastic garbage - garbage before, garbage after - that arrives at our door after being ferried on ships from the other side of the planet, their passage across the ocean fueled by the same ancient phytoplankton. Things break, they go to the landfill, leach into the groundwater or enter the bellies of ocean animals, and are forgotten.

Most people are bothered by the ecological impact of our modern disposability culture, and of course I am too. But what fuels me most in this life are human stories, and in the macro sense, the story of humanity. With each belonging jettisoned onto the literal trash heap of history, we lose a story. Objects contain within them thousands of stories, both personal and cultural: the stains on the outfit you wore to your first school dance after you sweat half moons of excitement and anxiety into the armpits; the cinched waists of post-war womenswear as a statement that now that the soldiers were home it was time to leave the workforce and move back into the hobbled, domestic sphere; the all-white faces of the original Guess Who? board game; the empty jar of the overpriced face cream you bought when you turned 40 and saw a melting oval of slack skin in the mirror. Anything we know of pre-written history is thanks to objects. Archaeologists and historians have cobbled together a record of humanity as best they can in large part thanks to the things we leave behind. In all things there is value, because all of those things tell us who we are.

This is what I tell my grandmother, as she wrings her hands over the piles of ugly, forsaken silk dresses that I am painstakingly taking apart on her couch, one stitch at a time. The circular economy of used objects is not just about minimizing waste through extending their lifespan. It’s not about saving money (necessarily). It’s about honoring the invisible lives contained within: the lives of the people who made them, used them, left them, renewed them. I swooped in to save these dresses before they were relegated to rot on a mountain of food and plastic waste in some exurb. When we make objects disposable, we make humans - the producers of these objects - disposable as well. And no one wants to have their lives and work turned into chum for the capitalist feeding frenzy of these modern times. Maybe Sasha’s Closet isn’t a magical kingdom so much as it’s a sanctuary. There, in my grandma’s house, my own sanctuary of sorts, I give refuge to a collection of forgotten stories that are waiting to be told.

SEG

Sasha says my #1 talent in life is folding the origami corners of the world towards each other to make a boat for myself. By this she means that everywhere I go, I manage to run into someone I know, or have an uncanny connection to. I grew up outside of the second largest American city and then spent ten years in the first largest American city. I can’t decide if it’s despite this, or because of this, that the world has always felt small to me.

I’m never trying to run into Kathy’s psychotic ex, or the dude I boned one time in 2017 on the other side of the world. Sometimes I’m convinced there are only 1,000 humans in the world and the universe just keeps rearranging them around me.

Call them coincidences, synchronicities, or just the way the law total probability works. Whatever it is, I don’t understand why it’s so comforting to run into that deadbeat dude who dated Katelyn in high school while I’m standing outside the Louvre taking touristy thirst traps, or to go on a blind date with someone who, it turns out, was in my same graduating class at my same college on the other side of the country, or to go on another blind date with someone who, it turns out, was once Sasha’s best friend Karthi’s roommate. One time I started dating someone who happened to have spent Thanksgiving with one of my exes in Gowanus ten years ago, before either of them knew me. There is safety in the known, however many Kevin Bacon degrees removed someone is from me, my town, my family, my best friends. This seemingly random circular economy of acquaintances has always been the foundation of my life, my work, and my relationships. I’ve always viewed my life as a group project. I thought everyone else did, too, but after asking approximately twenty people it is clear that is not the consensus.

This isn’t rational. Oftentimes, the person I have in common with a new person is not fully vetted. They are acquaintances who, for all I know, could have vastly different morals, values, and senses of humor than me. I guess it’s the same line of reasoning people use to stay in dead, bad, hopeless relationships. Or why networking is the way to get jobs. There is perceived safety in the known. I think my brain is subconsciously seeking it. When I swipe right on someone who doesn’t list their college or hometown in their profile, is there something in them, their features, their smile, the sadness in their eyes, that I’m recognizing as familiar?

I went to a meeting recently that is for helping people to stop doing a thing that is bad for them. It was my first time. I was nervous and weird and shy. My friend Sharon hadn’t arrived yet. I couldn’t decide what seat to take. Close enough to the exit so I could bail if I wanted to, but not so close to the exit that I’d be overly tempted. I decided on a seat two rows from the back. As I sit, I see, across from me, a dude I used to work with, two jobs ago. That thick mustache, baseball hat, plaid shirt, and brown work boots is the unspoken uniform of the straight men of my town but also, unmistakably this specific guy. I try to remember his name. Connor? Dustin? Jeremy? Blake? Devin? I considered texting Anna who would remember immediately.

Before he caught my gaze, I skirt my eyes in that way that happens when you know you both have recognized each other but are pretending it’s not happening. I kept my eyes focused on the floor one foot in front of my chair the whole time. But I heard his laugh. He laughed at the same things I thought were funny. I felt safe. When it was over, I ran out immediately to avoid any chance encounter with him. But I’ll go back next week.

I am also extremely loyal to a Thai place in town that is honestly not one of the top five best in town. But I went there when I first moved here, and it was fine, and I’ve never stopped going. I know the owner, I’ve come to expect mediocre pad see ew, and when they see my name pop up on the order, they know instinctually that I’m vegetarian and will not give me fish sauce.

I feel like I’m making myself sound like a very cautious, play it safe person. Maybe I am? But I also travel widely, moved across the country twice, both times to towns where I knew no one, and have changed jobs every 1-2 years my whole career. I did a PhD in a field I never wanted to stay in because at the visiting students day, one of the professors was super kind to me. Maybe it’s just that for me, safety depends on being around people who are, however loosely, touchpoints to other parts of my life. And I have come to rely on being able to find this safety in places as different as the outskirts of Vihar India, northern Ontario, or Orlando, Florida.

My friend Amy has an uncanny ability to read stranger’s insides by looking at pictures of them. I recently showed Amy a picture of my hometown friend and her boyfriend, neither of whom she’s ever met. Amy said: That’s a youngest child if I’ve ever seen one. That girl loves her boyfriend, and he doesn’t love her, I can tell by their eyes.

I don’t even want to ask Amy what she’s seeing in that photo because it’ll take away the magic. I also think there’s no words for this kind of knowing.

My other friend Meredith is a psychic medium. When I first met Meredith, she said, unprompted: You are giving me extreme New Mexico vibes, have you ever been there? At that point, all Meredith knew about me was that I am from the Los Angeles area and currently live in Oregon. Had she spent another ten minutes with me before blurting that, she would have heard how my dream is to spend half my time in Portland and half in Albuquerque. What did she read in me that showed that so clearly?

I have no answers for why Amy and Meredith can read vibes and deep desires and why I am an unintentional magnet for finding friends of friends wherever I go instinctually, but I’m just glad this is how my brain works.

A mere two years have passed and Sarah and I have already forgotten how to spell “Moo Deng,” the world’s once collective obsession. Now, when we search for photos of “Moo Dang,” we’re presented with plates of crisp-skinned pork served over rice. Even the internet has forgotten that a misspelled search term should be corrected to produce photos of an adorably chubby pygmy hippopotamus, not a formerly adorably chubby pig now sliced and lacquered with sweet soy sauce and red food coloring.

The timeline of Moo Deng’s inevitable obsolescence was much faster than two years. Within weeks of Bowen Yang’s genius Moo Deng-inspired water hose skit on SNL, she had been replaced by another viral animal, and her once ubiquitous, toothless maw was sent down the rapids of the river powered by human rage that is the internet. Maybe capybaras came next, maybe they came before, it’s impossible to keep track. Right now, in early 2026, a baby monkey desperately grasping onto a stuffed orangutan from IKEA has the collective nervous system of internet-users in a death grip. In an age of dizzying fragmentation and an attention span that is measured in milliseconds instead of minutes, we have shoehorned the dazzling complexity of the natural world into facile categories like “unlikely animal friends,” (dog plays with raven bestie) or “moving stories of human-animal connections,” (man reunited with rescued lion cub after ten years). Non-human animal life, in the age of endlessly shared images and short-form videos, has stopped being part of our shared world and instead has become a fetish.

A fetish, according to the Google AI definition that pops up when I input the word in the search bar, is “an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.” Yet in the bleeding borders separating the internet from reality, everything can be fetishized now. Memes have become a viral spillover event, jumping from the inanimate screens of our computers to sweat-stained throngs of IRL visitors hovering over Moo Deng’s enclosure for the three months following her sudden internet fame. But memes as fetishes really only make sense mediated through the digital realm. As soon as they translate to undeniable corporeality and the messy anima of life (and Moo Deng, plump little diva that she is, is nothing but corporeal in real-life), they lose their power, because they are meant to be representative, not visceral. Moo Deng contains multitudes, and we just want an image onto which we can project all of our garbage.

If a fetish must be inanimate, how did we get to this perverse irony of fetishizing animals, members of the biological kingdom Animalia that is literally named for being animate? In the early days of home computing, the first UI designers needed to organize the desktop to resemble real life objects and systems so that people could comprehend and use this new digital interface; hence “folders,” “files,” “trash can,” etc. Now, however, the majority of our existence is mediated through the internet. With lives increasingly lived online, the real world-digital translation is turned on its head. The virus that has jumped the digital border is the disease of two-dimensionality coming for us in our heretofore 3-D life.

We need to apply the logic of the internet to the real world in order to make sense of it. Reality now has to be flattened into the snack-sized, image-forward chunks of easily replicable information that we are familiar with from our days spent scrolling, because that is the only way we understand anything anymore. By optimizing our “real” lives for internet translation, we drain them of nuance and complexity, and the same applies for everything else without opposable thumbs and access to an endlessly refreshing feed of yacht holidays and women we don’t know painting their faces in whatever way we have arbitrarily decided looks good.

Everything we do and experience is seen through the filter of a future filter, or its potential for social engagement, or its visual stickiness. I’m not saying anything new, I know. But I wonder how people felt when they went to go see Moo Deng in person. I suspect they didn’t feel anything at all, past the anticipatory excitement of the dopamine rush that would be coming down the pipe once they shared a photo on social media. Have they ever thought about her again afterwards? Am I just trying to get justice for the gordibuenas of the world? But wasn’t the first gordibuena the venus of Willendorf, the definitional fetish of early human culture? I can’t tell whether I’m a snake eating my own tail, or whether that’s just the nature of being alive in 2026.

Unlike the Venus of Willendorf, Moo Deng isn’t a faceless fertility talisman. She’s a real tiny hippo with real needs; these animals that we become temporarily obsessed with are real beings that eat and poop and have feelings that we probably can’t understand and belong to fragile ecosystems and communities that we’re systematically destroying. However, once anything has been rendered into the pixelated constraints of 2D, the only solution is to fetishize it, because without doing so, it would literally just be an image of a hippo someplace far away from where we are consuming its likeness.

We need to imbue it with “magical powers” or spiritual meaning to justify its otherwise incomprehensible ubiquity. These memes become a stand-in, but not for anything specific; they don’t mean anything. The content of Charlie bit my finger or the spidermen pointing at each other or Tiger King or William Hung singing She Bangs are meaningless in meme format. Their only purpose is to unite us, to give us a false sense of connectedness. The magic, transformative, talismanic power of these memes is that they transmute this false connection into real connection, even if just briefly; we get fleeting moments of euphoric hivemind as we’re brought into communion over whatever the flavor of the day is.

Memes exist as a kind of haphazard, robot-brain attempt to salvage our own loss of community and connectedness (that ironically the internet itself has wildly hastened). It’s not just circumstantial that the animal meme themes I mentioned earlier such as “unlikely animal friends,” and “sad orphaned baby animal,” and “human-animal reconnection after a long time” are so popular. They are memes that hinge on a sense of loneliness, isolation, lack of natural community, and being forced to look outside one’s own species for connection.

What does it mean to have everything fetishized or available for fetishization? What does this mean for the erosion of real meaning? What happens when we forget about things? Does the magical power that we collectively, if fleetingly bestowed, remain embedded in them? What impact does it make to have all these objects/people/creatures moving throughout our world with the residue of our one-time bestowal of magic and spirit? Where does that energy go? Can it be taken away again or are we just summoning from an endless pool? I don’t have answers to these questions lol.

The wildest thing about the fact that we love baby animal memes is that we are the baby animals. We are sad motherless monkeys dragging around our comfort objects - in this case our phones and drugs and little treats - but it’s all too much to acknowledge that, so instead we continue buying our $25 Erewhon smoothies with South American berry powders and functional mushrooms and pine pollen and ionized electrolyte powder and creatine while we scroll on our phones, briefly double tapping a heart over the image of a baby monkey dragging a dirty stuffed animal behind it, all because we’re incapable of seeing that we’re the baby monkey. Or a gordibuena like Moo Deng. I hope she’s living her best life, away from the cameras.

SEG

In November 2024, the LA Times called Moo Deng a ‘global phenomenon’. The headline asked: How long can this love-affair last?

Given that now, in March 2026, I can’t remember what kind of animal Moo Deng is (or was?), I just remember that people, myself maybe included, were at one time enamored or at least performing enamorment, the affair couldn’t have lasted that long.

I click on the LA Times article not expected to be allowed to read it, but apparently the paywall is down when it comes to Moo Deng. I re-learn that Moo Deng lives in Thailand, looks very slimy and happy and was called by at least one internet anon, The People’s Princess, a title that I think perfectly fits Princess Diana and Hudson Williams, but probably not this 1 year old hippo, unless she has an insane secret aura that I’m not nuanced enough to pick up on through these pictures.

Why am I exerting most of my limited brain space on Moo Deng? Probably because Iran and El Mencho and ICE and oil and my inability to have a smart take about any of those things. But what I do have is my god-given ability to compartmentalize those things and any other unpleasant feelings so that I don’t combust and can instead obsess about about Moo Deng and Timothee’s comments about opera and ballet the week before the Oscars where he truly might pull a Kanye if Michael B. Jordan or Leo win.

Also Sasha made a very dumb joke about Moo Deng last week in Mexico which I genuinely forget the specifics of, but I’m positive we both laughed a lot at. And then we Google Imaged Moo Dang, forgetting that the animal is Deng not Dang, so Google returned results for Kao Moo Dang, Thai for red pork and rice. Then I tried to discern if there is a difference between Kao Moo Dang and Khao Moo Dang, the latter being a restaurant near me that is great. And then I order delivery from a different Thai restaurant called Kati that is near Khao Moo Dang, but has more vegetarian options.

When I correctly spell Moo Deng, Gemini claims she was born in July 2024 and is ‘Renowned for her energetic, sassy, and often “moist” demeanor’. Is that what all the fuss was about? Her moistness?

Then I remember that Sasha and I were literally in Thailand in March 2025. Were we talking about Moo Deng then? Did anyone I told about going to Thailand ask about Moo Deng? Have I ever talked about Moo Deng with anyone until right now? I actually think not.

But Moo Deng is a firm, forever phrase in my brain even though she means nothing to me or, as far as I know, anyone I care about. I try to think who else is a permanent fixture in my brain despite me having no real feelings towards them. The first thing that comes to mind is William Hung from American Idol, the dude who paid homage to Ricky Martin’s She Bangs during his audition and arguably killed it? Ricky Martin is a canonical gay elder but has been more removed from the public eye for the last many years, that is until he was featured in Bad Bunny’s halftime Super Bowl show last month.

Because of the internet, my brain now works like this: Moo Deng leads me to William Hung which leads me to Ricky Martin, then I immediately think Lance Bass (because they are both gay, duh), then I think of Lance’s bandmate, Justin, who is merely a person who dated Britney (though ok I will admit 20/20 and Future Sex/Love Sounds both rule), and then I think about Addison Rae, who Gen Z-ers have claimed is the natural successor to Britney, even though she is TikTok famous, which just leads me back to remembering Britney’s most recent DUI, which makes me wonder which celebrity has the most DUIs and Gemini tells me it’s Kiefer Sutherland with 4, and then I remember visiting my aunt and uncle in India in 2010 and them telling me their favorite show is 24, so we binged 3 seasons in 2 weeks.

But why do Moo Deng and William Hung live in me as a second layer of skin, begging to be brought up, discussed, nostalgized over? My queer friend, Joanna, who’s a bit older than me, recently wrote about how for her generation, none of them knew gay people when they were kids. Joanna says, by way of necessity, they “told their stories to each other with language they discovered as they spoke it.” When I read that, I thought it was the truest, coolest sentence I’ve read in a long time. It got me thinking about how maybe my generation (middle/late disaffected millennials) tells our stories through internet references. Maybe this is extremely sad and lonely and lame but also, I think, true. The internet is our shorthand, our third space, our shared language we discover as we speak it.

When I bring up William Hung in a random conversation, I am clearly signaling to my community that I am queer. When I bring up Taylor Swift borrowing from George Michael on her track Father Figure on her most recent and worst album, and then ramble on about George Michael’s platonic but loving relationship with Brooke Shields, I am again signaling that I am queer, but also that I am over 30 years old and aware of the ancient texts. Connor Storrie dancing to Like a Prayer has been the hottest thing on the gay internet this year. I bet most of his queer fans under 25 are not Madonna superfans. Does this matter? No, though it is obviously criminal. Do these young fans need to understand all the subsequent memes about Madonna passing on the torch of ‘cuntiest superstar on the planet’ to Connor to fully appreciate the star power of Hollywood’s new It boy? Yes. I think it’s my responsibility as a queer person to know and respect as many queer icons as I can. I’ll proudly teach my younger siblings one day about Tila Tequila.

For the past two months, Sarah has asked everyone she knows to rank the following carbohydrate staples in order of preference: rice, potato, corn, wheat. We have the same order because apparently it is simply too much effort for our one shared brain cell to produce variations in carb cravings: wheat, rice, corn, potato. For reasons I will get into later, I feel a need to prove why this answer is THE correct answer, but my argument will undoubtedly be to merely justify my personal preferences, as is the case with most arguments ever made. Sarah claimed that there are people she knows who put potato first, and I didn’t believe her until I also sent out a survey to a handful of friends in the name of Science. Five out of seven of them put potato first to my shock and dismay, making me question the very foundations of our friendship. So now I will also try to show - using HISTORY as proof - that they are mentally unsound. Other than the horrifying and disproportionate showing from the PotatoHeads, responses vary wildly across our friends and family.

In Cuisine and Empire, one of my favorite books of the past fifteen years, Rachel Laudan explains that grains - specifically wheat, rice, and maize - were the building blocks that facilitated the development of empires. Unlike tubers or starchy vegetables, grains are dry, energy-dense, and easy to store. Because they could be stored for long periods so easily, they became a form of capital which could be used to feed standing armies and non-farmers (such as abacus-pushing bureaucrats), both of which were necessary for the building and expansion of empire. The presence of large quantities of stored grain also allowed for the development of cuisines that in turn helped define cultures as well as hierarchies within those cultures: “our culture is a wheat-eating culture rather than a rice-eating one,” or “I belong to the class of person in this culture that eats white bread versus unrefined wheat bread” (hair flip, nails, crown emoji), or, in the case of Mexico where I live, “in all of our cosmologies humanity is literally formed from corn masa, and therefore our very identities are inextricably tied to the cultivation, consumption, and reverence for maize.” Several of my Mexican friends have listed potato as their most preferred carb, which is very worrisome for them indeed, as it means excommunication not only from the warmth of my friendship but also from their entire culture. Yet another reason to consider the error of their ways.

Current archeological evidence shows that wheat cultivation began around 9500 BCE in the fertile crescent. Rice cultivation happened nearly simultaneously but likely just after, around 9000 BCE in the Yangtse River Valley. Andean farmers began the process of breeding out the naturally occurring toxins in wild potatoes approximately a thousand years after that, around 8000 BCE. Corn was the last to become an “imperial staple,” because it took thousands of years of selective breeding to coax teosinte from a wild grass with a tiny column of seeds to the fat cobs rippling with a thousand starchy kernels that is modern maize. Or rather, this is the scientific explanation of maize’s cultivation around 6500 BCE. My husband’s explanation is that Quetzalcoatl, a giant, feathered, alien being, landed on the blessed lands of Mexico around this time with his perfect, alien knowledge of maize-based agriculture, and taught the favored mesoamerican races about the holy union that is the milpa. So, choose your version.

I risk this becoming merely a recap of Cuisine and Empire which, if you’re a food nerd like me, you should read cover to cover. But for the sake of my argument about why I am right about the correct order of carbohydrate preferences, let me just summarize two other relevant observations from the book. The first is that wheat and rice are fundamentally different grains in one important regard: in order to be edible, wheat requires a whole lot of mechanical intervention, whereas rice only needs to be husked before it can be consumed. Wheat, needing to be milled, not only created the class striations based on flour quality that I referenced earlier, but it also created an entire infrastructure around its processing. Millers, oven builders, bakers, and pastry chefs grew out of the need to extract nutrition from the fields of hard, reluctant seeds on which these wheat-eating civilizations built their culture. A rice farmer, on the other hand, can harvest, husk, boil/steam, and eat the rice themselves, with no specialized machinery or intervention needed. Over millennia, this means that wheat has found wildly diverse culinary applications, from bulgur and couscous to gravity-defying panettone to thickly glutinous hand-cut noodles to the precision engineering of laminated pastry to the melt of a perfect bite of shortbread on your tongue. Rice has also found many ways to shine outside of the glossy polish of a bowl of expertly cooked sticky rice: toothsome mochi, pliable rice paper, the orbital beauty of a rolled dosa. But it does not carry the same burden of necessity which facilitated the galaxy of wheat-based foods. And for this reason, wheat and its seemingly endless variety must be placed first on the hierarchy of carbs.

Now that we’ve established the historical rationale for wheat’s supremacy (and why rice is a close second), I will show why the PotatoEaters are woefully misguided. Look, potato cultivation is impressive; Andean farmers developed thousands of varieties of potato suited to very specific microclimates. They also vaguely solved the primary issue of storage and preservation by inventing chuño, a kind of freeze-dried potato that makes the most of the natural climate of the high Andes. They would freeze the potatoes at night and then press out the water after it warmed during the day so that it could be dried in the sun. By removing the water weight, this process made potatoes portable and storable for up to 10 years. However, potatoes still lose out to maize when evaluated for energy efficiency. Imperial armies need to move over long distances and bring their food with them, and so optimizing for energy density per kilo is critical. Additionally, preparing freeze-dried potatoes is a much more complex, laborious process than just knocking off kernels from a dried cob of maize. This is why Laudan claims that, although potatoes are famously associated with the Inca, the empire was actually built on maize; this grain comprised the cuisine of the elites and army, whereas potatoes were the staple of the peasantry.

Peasant food is delicious, but because peasants did not enjoy the leisure time, access to ingredients, and idle frivolity that together give birth to hyper-diverse cuisine, the relegation of the potato to the peasant class historically limited its adaptability and culinary applications. My brother, brilliant and eccentric in equal measure, seemed a natural spokesperson for the PotatoEaters, so I asked him to make a defense of his placement of potato at the top of his list. His response was one word: “texture.” Perhaps it all boils down to this, even over flavor or variability. Texture really is what informs our likes and dislikes; it’s why my uncle lives for boba while my aunt claims eating it is like gnawing on eyeballs. Maybe the PotatoEaters would sacrifice the glutinous chew of a bagel or the ethereal fluff of milk bread for the crispy-creamy duality of a thick-cut, double-fried french fry; they would jettison the golden pouch of inari sushi or the slurp of toothsome rice noodles in favor of a forkful of molten potato gratin; they would walk away from the simple majesty of a rolled tortilla right off the comal or a bowl of creamy polenta if the universe presented them with a pile of Joel Robuchon mashed potatoes, mounted with a staggering amount of french butter. There’s no accounting for textural preferences in this world; it’s possible that if you had given a random cross-section of the Aztec empire access to wheat, rice, and potato, any number of them would have switched allegiances from maize (as all of my potato-preferring Mexican friends would demonstrate).

Lest you think that I’ve used texture to talk myself out of my original intention to prove the scientific rationale behind the superiority of my carbohydrate preferences, let me just say this: greater diversity in styles and techniques of preparation means greater diversity in texture. So, no. I remain correct in this and in all things. Also there is objectively nothing more delicious than bread right out of the oven, whether it be bolillo or naan or baguette or ciabatta or dense rye or lavash. It’s just a fact.

SARAH

Aviva asks me, Rachel and Sam to rank the following starches, in order of favorite to least favorite: Wheat, potato, rice, corn.

Rachel says: Wheat, Rice, Corn, Potato

Sam says: Wheat, Rice, Potato Corn

I say: Wheat, Rice, Corn, Potato

Three peas nearly in a pod. Because Rachel and Sam both have great taste, I feel smug and correct. The best and worst part of high me is that I want to be in touch with everyone I’ve ever met, so I voice note fifteen other friends asking them to immediately tell me how they would order the starches.

Sasha replies: Wheat, rice, corn, potato, duh. Drooling emoji.

I rest my case and put away my phone. Both Rachel and Sasha agree with me, so I am positive we are right.

But if I dig into it, I don’t really know why I automatically knew the correct order is: wheat, rice, corn, potato.

Unlike most of my friends, I am decidedly not a foodie. I prefer being in my senses as infrequently as possible. My world consists entirely of: jokes, metaphors, memes, pranks, celebrities, crushes, and gossip. Yes, this is bad, or fine, or borne of trauma, maybe, but mostly whatever, who cares. It works for me. I’m also not sure whether I was born with faulty senses or if I just never honed them. I can barely see well enough to drive, spent enough time in India to be completely immune to subtle good or bad smells, hate most textures, and would be happy to eat cereal with oat milk for a month straight. My best sense is my ears, but I actually can’t hear that well after fifteen years of dating musicians and standing too close to the stage.

So I truly don’t care which starch is my favorite or which is objectively best. Wheat and rice are maybe easiest to prepare? Just add boiling water. But I guess that’s true of basic corn and potatoes, too. In answering Aviva’s question, I probably just subconsciously did what I often do: think about what Sasha would say and then claim that as my own answer, because everyone knows she has good taste.

I usually eat whatever other people make me, whatever I can make in ten minutes, or get takeout from one of the four restaurants in town I love. I do of course enjoy making an elaborate meal once in a while, but it’s not the norm. In Europe, I go to Pret or eat croissants. In India, I get daal makhani or paneer masala. In Mexico, I eat nopal quesadillas, beans made without lard, and horchata. Everywhere else, I eat whatever the closest approximation to cheese pizza is.

But I’ve built a life surrounded by true aesthetes—chefs, painters, photographers, musicians, textile designers. I’m honestly not sure how or why. When we go on walks, my friends say things like: what kind of plant is that? Is that an egret? Look at the subtle pink to orange shading in that tiny sliver of the sky. I can’t even feign interest. I don’t know why. Being curious about the name of a tree feels as strongly outside of my perception or interests as being heterosexual would be.

I wrote about Hume’s Standard of Taste for my masters thesis. Why? I never really cared about anything Hume said, much less his short but firm treatise on taste, even though I was the one that chose that topic. I was dating a man named John at the time who was studying the philosophy of music, and publishing on what types of sounds do and do not count as music. But I don’t think it was John’s idea for me to write about aesthetics, either. Maybe I was trying to prove to myself I had both good taste and important things to say on the subjective nature of taste. Mostly I just remember being bored.

Both Sasha and I are compulsive travellers. A big part of travel for her is trying new food, learning the cooking techniques and historical contexts behind a given culture’s food. I’ve gone to cooking classes with her all over the world and enjoyed them fine. Last year in Vietnam, we did a three hour cooking class where we made some kind of crepey pancake, vegetarian dumplings, and pho. We got to tour a local food market and try unfamiliar berries, nuts, and candies. Sasha asked every question a person could ask. I was happy to find bottled water and linger in the one air conditioned stall along the way.

Maybe part of my profound disinterest in the world of the senses is a fear or phobia or maybe something even more self-centered in me that very actively tries to ward against seeming pretentious. But probably a bigger part of it is laziness. I mostly can’t be bothered to be curious about the slight difference in smell between these excellent coffee beans and those equally but differently excellent coffee beans. My single brain cell is wholly focused on looking for the punchline or making meta commentary.

Maybe another part of it is a deep fear of failure. As the baby of my family, I grew up around many people with pristine taste. That role was already taken. I knew I’d never win in the aesthetic realm, so I got into math and chess and sports.

But still, despite all that, I always date snobs with great taste. I have no idea why they put up with me. I am useless to them, except for the fact that I always seem to introduce them to each other. So maybe I do have good taste in one thing: people who have good taste.