The last time the world was ending, I started this website to write about the surrealness of waiting out the apocalypse amidst daily Amazon deliveries. And about the jarring compartmentalism of zoom meetings and email while multi-tasking a chronic panic attack. (Starting a new website has historically been my panic-driven, fight or flight response to many of life’s most stressful moments.)
I guess the end of the world is like a fireworks show finale. Just when you think the explosions are over, a new display erupts in the smoke.
As we’re faced with — well, here you can imagine I’m gesturing at the world — there’s much this new apocalypse shares with the previous ones: email, meetings, deadlines, mortgage payments.
I felt something new last night though, as TikTok began glitching and eventually stopped working entirely. It was that feeling you get in your basement late at night when everything’s dark and you hear a noise and in an instant, safety and comfort (that you took for granted so much that you didn’t realize you were feeling it) vanishes. One moment, you’re secure and unafraid in your own home, and the next you’re in pitch blackness surrounded by ghosts.
In the land of the free and the first amendment and the American dream where anything is possible, the government arbitrarily shut down the medium where 170 Americans get news, express themselves, organize, and make a living. And maybe they’ll let it start back up; maybe everyone will find another space. But it doesn’t feel safe anymore. It feels like maybe it never was.
The first real online “community” I was part of was a guestbook page on the WB website called “The Bronze“.
Guestbook pages were online versions of guestbooks you might find at a wedding or bed and breakfast where you, the guest, could leave a comment or a greeting or a review. Guestbook pages on websites had a simple form (name, comment) and displayed comments of anyone who had submitted the form.
The WB was a network that used to exist and that aired the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Bronze was the club on the show and the WB, in a cutting edge move for the time (1996), created this guestbook page so Buffy fans could leave comments about the show.
We Buffy fans did not use this guestbook page as intended and did not post comments about the show into the void. We used it as a discussion forum and since guestbook functionality does not lend itself to being a discussion forum, we had to make up our own clunky rules and shorthands. If you wanted to find a message someone directed at you, you had to scroll through the pages and see if you could find it. There were no users or logins — anyone could type anything in the name field of the form so if someone naively came along trying to post with a name that was taken by a regular, everyone would explain to that person that they would need to find a different name.
Week after week, we came together to talk about the show and our lives. We laughed, we cried, we met IRL (in the 90s!). And then the WB canceled Buffy and the show moved to UPN and suddenly The Bronze was gone.
We tried to find a new place to gather, but the community splintered and it was never the same. (I ran a Buffy fansite at the time and spun up a server to host a message board for bereft Bronzers that might even have some scafolding still running today.)
You’ve probably experienced your own version of the Bronze. Maybe it was a message board hosted by an online journaler or a corner of Tumblr. Or LiveJournal. Or the early days of Twitter that felt like real-time conversations and inside jokes with just your closest friends (aka the entire Internet). The right combination of factors came together and you felt like you weren’t alone in the universe.
But that precise set of factors don’t stay in balance forever. Things change and the moment is gone.
On TikTok, creators are trying to find the words to explain why that combination of factors can’t be replicated by getting everybody to move over to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts or Red Note (as hilarious as that would be) or an app to be named at a later date.
Maybe it’s that TikTok’s content moderation (that has spawned so many euphemisms to get around it that a new language has practically sprung up) keeps the toxic comments low so creators feel safe to post. Or maybe it’s that the algorithms are tuned to be less universal and more personalized so that the only people who see someone talking about how loud the air can be sometimes and how headphones aren’t always the answer because you can feel them too much are people who also hear loud air and feel too much headphones so creators don’t have to wade through hundreds of comments that say “wtf ” and instead only get hundreds saying “are you in my house right now watching me or did you take these notes earlier?”
It’s probably both of those things and a hundred other things, but it’s that personalization that really seems key. We all feel as though we built our FYPs brick by brick and who we see when we open the app are people who understand us, who are us, who make us feel less alone.
What would the last 5 years have been without TikTok? What would the Eras tour have been like? Would we still be wearing friendship bracelets and reminiscing about grainy live streams without it? Would we all have discovered Noah Kahan and Chappell Roan in some other way? Would we somehow have figured out our mental health diagnoses anyway?
What happens now? If TikTok truly goes away, history tells us that we won’t all find a new place en masse, that the moment will be gone. There may be other places and other times but it won’t be this one. Some of us may or may not find a new space for our news, our connection with humanity, our unconscious standard practice life hacks we saw randomly one day. But we’ll all lose what could have been.
Has anyone put together an explainer for those of us who enjoy T Swift but aren’t die hard “Swifties?” I just need like a quick 5-min article please. Lol.
The first thing to know, which may not be apparent if you mostly know Taylor Swift from her radio hits or her media coverage, is that she’s not still heartbroken over Jake Gyllenhaal and hasn’t been devising elaborate revenge strategies for the last ten years. As devastating as the newly released 10 minute version of the song “All To Well” is, it’s a love letter to her fans.
That’s the explainer, but maybe we should back up a little.
Taylor Swift’s music stands alone, but it’s also (like her) a mirrorball: it looks entirely different depending on the light and perspective.
When she was 15, she signed a 13 year recording deal with Scott Borchetta as his very first artist of his brand new label Big Machine Records. She was in high school. Her first album was a resounding success. She felt like she and Scott were in it all together. She wrote about it in the song “Change” in 2008, in which she framed her successes as “we” and not “I”:
“we’re getting stronger now, find things they never found; they might be bigger but we’re faster and never scared… these things will change, can you feel it now? These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down… the time will come for us to finally win”
At the end of those years after she unquestionably made Scott and his label rich (apparently providing 80% of Big Machine’s revenue), she wanted to buy her masters and instead he sold them to Scooter Braun, her fairly public enemy. She said at the time:
“This is my worst case scenario. This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept. And when that man says ‘Music has value’, he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it.
When I left my masters in Scott’s hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter. Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to.”
“15 years, 15 million tears Begging ’til my knees bled I gave it my all, he gave me nothing at all Then wondered why I left … Now he sits on his throne in his palace of bones Praying to his greed He’s got my past frozen behind glass But I’ve got me”
“All Too Well” was never a single. But it became like Billy Joel’s “Scenes from An Italian Restaurant”, not released as a single but the song that fans scream out the loudest in concert.
“Now, I play it and I think of the times I’ve played it in a stadium or an arena or my living room with you guys screaming the words back to me. And so it changed it, and I wanted to thank you for changing it, because it’s kind of nice to sing a song that you’re proud of, but not feel pain while you sing it. It’s very nice.”
The version on the original album is about 5 minutes long but there was a rumored 10 (maybe even 20!) minute version. Fans have been obsessed over this lost version for years. So she gave it to them. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone said of the song:
“The long-lost 10-minute original version of “All Too Well” turns out to be even better than we were all hoping. Taylor Swift takes her own masterpiece, tears it all up, breaks it like a promise, shreds her tapestry, and rebuilds it into a new heartbreak epic, twice as long and twice as mad.”
She turned the betrayal into a celebration.
Did you see the world turn red this week? The empire state building?
Even the Moon is a Swiftie! Tonight it’s turning red – re-eh-eh-ed, re-eh-eh-ed.
In tonight’s lunar eclipse, you’ll see the Moon turn a warm hue thanks to sunlight filtering through Earth’s atmosphere before reaching the Moon❣️☀️🌎🌕❣️https://t.co/YJWUAonI4ghttps://t.co/Iuti31wYGd
“And I still talk to you (when I’m screaming at the sky) And when you can’t sleep at night (you hear my stolen lullabies)”
So no. She’s not holding a grudge against Jake (although she may look back on how gross 30 year old Jake treated a 20 year old her). But she is reclaiming her past and turning the pain into a celebration.
“I’m still on that tightrope I’m still trying everything to get you laughing at me I’m still a believer but I don’t know why I’ve never been a natural All I do is try, try, try I’m still on that trapeze I’m still trying everything To keep you looking at me”
With this re-listening of Red, you can hear the lyrics “losing him was blue like I’d never known… but loving him was red” knowing how it ends: “I once believed love would be burning red but it’s golden, like daylight“.
But back to “All to Well”. Taylor doesn’t give all of herself to the radio singles. She keeps herself protected in track fives.
With the dusting off of the original 10 minute version though, she’s let everyone in on the celebration. Maybe you feel like you’re suddenly in the middle of a crowded party that you didn’t know you were invited to. Welcome. Enjoy the cake and the sad girl autumn.
For more than a five minute explainer though, check out Miss Americana, her documentary on Netflix, or her very sonically cohesive Folklore and Evermore, both recorded in quarantine and released as surprises.
Remember those young and carefree days of August when I naively put all of the skincare I found in my house all over my face and hoped for the best? And how I didn’t think I needed sunscreen since I can’t remember the last time I felt the sun and the outdoor air on my face?
Well, I’ve discovered skincare TikTok. And apparently I’ve been completely wrong about everything. I’m not sure why it took an app for people a lot younger than me to learn but here we are.
Turns out, I do need sunscreen even if it’s just a mocking reminder of the outdoors I never experience and I’m even supposed to re-apply it several times a day, although though I’m pretty sure we all learned that was just for when we swam around all day in the ocean.
It also turns out that using skincare products that are definitely more than five years old is a bad idea even when those skincare products were very expensive and for some reason you bought them and opened them but then never used them and let them pile up in a box.
Confusingly, I’m also not supposed to put 12 products on my face at once even if these same TikTokers extoll the virtues of all 12 products in various posts.
Yes, my face did eventually turn red and blotchy and burn a lot. So I guess the TikTokers are right.
The problem, of course, of realizing that the mages of a youth app hold the skincare wisdom that has eluded you is that the app is, by definition, for youth. The anti-aging advice begins with phrases like “once you’re in your 30s, you’ll want to switch it up to…”. I’ve found zero posts that begin with “now that you’re almost 50 and find those words nearly impossible to type because surely that can’t be true, can it..?”
In addition to learning through TikTok, I’m also learning by doing. For example, the TikTokers are very pro retinol and I do have both (expired I’m sure) prescription and over the counter versions so I have started using them a couple of nights a week.
I’m also attempting DIY waxing.
Last night, I tore the skin right below my eyebrows. Both eyes! Apparently, you’re not supposed to both wax and use retinol, although this also is confusing. Do all these retinol TikTokers not wax? I read that you’re supposed to stop using retinol two weeks before waxing but am I the only one who has to wax every two weeks? The math just doesn’t add up. Maybe frequent waxing needs is also not an issue of the young.
I’ve also discovered haircare TikTok. You may recall the time I almost poured a bottle of ketchup on my head. Things have escalated. Yesterday, I cut my own layers! And I think it doesn’t look terrible! Although to be fair, I can only really see the front of my hair.
I keep coloring my hair darker and darker, which is a pretty bad idea for someone who was mostly grey even before the stress of a pandemic. Grey roots are noticeable INSTANTLY on dark hair, so my hair coloring schedule is similar to my waxing schedule. This is also a terrible idea and yes, I am finding a lot more hair on my shower floor than normal.
Anyway, yes, I don’t ever see the outdoors or people in real life, but I have A LOT more Zoom calls than in normal times. I just try to pretend everyone is looking at video on their phones and not the huge HD monitors that they actually are using, especially since even the thought of makeup and hair styling make me so exhausted, I have to lie down. I can barely change out of my comfy warm robe before a Zoom call starts.
If you happen to see me on the screen, with my self-cut hair and my waxing injuries and possibly my comfy robe, just squint as though the picture of me is too small for you to see and we can all just be professionals about all this.
I have PTSD from the last election. Don’t you? Remember how Hillary had a 90% of chance of winning and how joyous it felt to vote for the first woman president and how the NY Times needle suddenly went 90% the other way? As you look at the ballot now and fill in that bubble for Biden, don’t you remember crying all night?
I have PTSD from that night and all the nights since as everything we feared came true (and worse) and no one with any power to do anything about it did anything about any of it. We all have watched and marched and despaired as no one has done anything again and again.
I live way out in the country. Which means that October brings in the delight of migrating geese and ducks and the constant sound of gunfire from hunters. Our state is solidly blue. The Republican running against the sitting Democratic governor is running on a platform of tearing down the twin tyrannies of mask wearing and gun restrictions.
He’s trailing significantly in the polls. And yet as I drive around the back roads near my house, you would think he was going to win in a landslide. Houses everywhere have huge billboard-size signs in their yards emblazoned with his name.
Sure, he’ll lose and Trump will lose (she writes hopefully) but so many of my neighbors are so passionate about supporting racism and selfishness and stupidity. And that’s not something that goes away with an election.
I feel the 2016 election PTSD every time I drive by one of those billboard-size yard signs for the anti-mask candidate. You would think that apocalypse anxiety would be all-consuming but, no. There’s always room for more anxiety, more sadness.
The country road I live on is more hopeful. A few months ago, a huge Trump sign went up in someone’s yard. One by one, the surrounding houses have been adding Biden signs, Black Lives Matter signs, any functioning adult 2020 signs. The house directly across the street from the Trump sign now has at least four signs supporting Biden.
I fill in the bubble on my ballot but I don’t feel joy, just determination.
Last night, as dusk became dark, and the sun slipped away in the quiet evening air, a bat started flying around in my house. Inside. It was flying around inside the house is what I mean.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this accurately. An actual live bat was flying around like you sometimes see them outside only it was inside. My house.
I can’t fully describe the terror one feels as a bat swoops around your kitchen and your living room and your head and your cat. Will it fly into your hair? Land on your cat? How will you get it out?
No, really. How can I get it out? Will I be up all night trying to get the bat out? Can one even get a bat out of a house? Or does it the bat live in your house forever and you just have to move? (“What’s that?” You say to a prospective buyer. “A bat? No, that’s just a ghost! Super friendly!”)
I hadn’t really eaten all day and was working late. Finally, I stood in the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator. I have so much food, but what do I have that takes 3 minutes to cook at 9pm?
Mostly, I only had vegan hot dogs and potato chips. As I closed the refrigerator, hot dogs in hand, I noticed something from the corner of my eye. A bat. A bat is what I noticed. Flying around my kitchen.
I think of myself as someone who is good under pressure, who can think on my feet, but it brings me no pleasure to tell you that my very first response was to quickly turn off all the lights inside, turn on lights outside, and open the back door.
The bat did not turn into a moth and fly towards the light.
Instead it swooped out of the kitchen and into the living room. Then down the hall. An open concept house full of air and light is all fine and good but no one warns you that you’re setting yourself up for a bat to hide out wherever it wants.
I spent some amount of time running away from the bat and screeching. This didn’t seem to help.
I opened the front door then ran inside to grab the cat and locked her in the guest room. Was the bat already hiding out in the guest room and I was only locking the cat up with the bat? Maybe!
I then closed the door to my bedroom. I reasoned that if I couldn’t get the bat out, I could still lock myself in my room and possibly sleep, although also, maybe the bat was already hiding out in there, snuggled in a curtain, waiting to fly out at me when I closed my eyes.
When I got back to the living room, the bat was gone. Or locked in one of the bedrooms. Or possibly looking at me from a secret hiding spot in a curtain or a plant or the chimney.
Did the bat fly out the front door? No way to know! It wasn’t flying around erratically around my head anymore, so that was a good sign. But also maybe it was under my bed or in a ceiling fan.
I turned on every light in the house and slowly crept around, all of my blood replaced with ice water, circulating around inside my body.
I tentatively checked behind curtains and in plants and under tables while my cat yelled loudly from behind the bedroom door. I checked on her. No obvious bats.
I decided against dinner. I let the cat out of the bedroom/possible bat hiding room.
I went to bed and turned off the light. And immediately turned it back on again. Would the bat started flying around my head in the dark? Probably.
After several hours of not sleeping, scary dark turned to lighter, scarier early morning and my ice water-filled body woke up. I tiptoed around the house and didn’t find any bats but I’m now on high alert. Could it still be hiding in the house? Sure. Could it get in again from however it got in before? Definitely! Several bats sleep in our patio umbrella when they’re not flying around in the kitchen. We gave up the idea of using the umbrella. Maybe we have to give up the kitchen too?
I know dusk is coming again. Later today even. Can I move before that? Probably I can’t, what with the pandemic and everything.
So it’s me, the cat, my anxiety, and the bat. Who hopefully is outside and not sleeping under my bed right now.
At the end of the world, we’re all caring for sourdough starters and planting gardens and spending time on skincare. It’s not that we have so much more free time. If anything, many of us have less time. Apocalypses are time consuming.
But what can you do when your very existence is threatened and you have no control over a danger that grows larger even when you look away? Normally when we humans are in some dire circumstance, we try to find a way out. Maybe we try practical solutions and maybe we just ruminate but we can usually do at least something.
But right now, the most we can do is stay home and hope everyone else somehow has some grand epiphany and stops going to Disney World.
Faced with our mortality, which is always there but which we can normally ignore, we turn to what can nurture us and help us live. Sourdough and tomatoes and moisturizer are battles against death.
“At my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Etc.
In the before times, I tended to buy wildly expensive skin care and then not use it so I had a lot stockpiled. Expired, sure. But what’s the worst that could happen? I’m already in the middle of a pandemic.
So I’ve been working my way through it and the trouble is that maybe some of it is working but I’m not sure what. And now that I’m running out of things, I don’t know what’s worth replacing. I should have been more scientific instead of just piling things on my face, I know.
Some other things are getting worse or maybe better but it’s hard to tell. I have a new dark spot on my nose and it feels rougher than the rest of my face. So maybe it’s skin cancer but also maybe it’s a spot that’s about to fall off and reveal youthful new skin due to some combination of Dr. Gross peel pads, P50, and retinal.
Maybe it’s just a new dark spot from the sun but believe me when I tell you that my skin has barely seen the sun since February.
Do I chance going to the dermatologist? Are dermatologists even open?
I should wear sunscreen even though I stay inside all day, huh.
The checklist of how to stay alive is long and it’s so hard to make sure everything is on it.
I always knew an apocalypse was coming. Didn’t you always feel it looming, too faint to pin down, always just out of reach? Maybe you didn’t. My therapist says that feeling is childhood trauma, not premonition, but maybe it’s both.
I thought the apocalypse would be different though. I thought we’d all be eating canned beans in underground bunkers and I was real concerned about the bathroom options. I didn’t expect that Amazon would still deliver and that we could wait out the end of the world in our normal homes with working indoor plumbing.
We all have a story of how we first came to know, to really understand something was happening. We’re all still coming to know it. In January, a reporter I follow who has covered a lot of stories from Asia posted her concern about a new virus she was hearing about in Wuhan. From what she was hearing, it could really be something different and impact everyone.
I started paying attention.
I didn’t know then though, right? We were traveling most of February and by the time we got home near the end of the month, I thought I did know. I got ready (I thought I got ready) and started self-isolation on March 1st. I’ve only been in buildings with other people twice since then, both for medical reasons.
As it always goes with humans, I thought I was prepared. I thought I knew what was coming. Only four and a half months later, I can look back and see how much I didn’t see, couldn’t see.
How much can I not see now? How much am I not preparing for? Anyway, wiring from childhood trauma sure. But also, on that last grocery run at the end of February, I bought toilet paper, of course. But just one pack. I didn’t foresee the world would run out. And OK, we haven’t run out. But isn’t that because once I realized the world was running out, I signed up for restocking alerts on every site I could find, even if the toilet paper was terrible? Yes. Do I have terrible toilet paper now, some of which even is lavender-scented even though I’m allergic to lavender? Yes. But did I run out? Exactly. I did not. Will I run out in the future? No, because I have a case of extra terrible toilet paper (worse than the lavender kind) intended for commercial purchase that is probably half-ply and made up possibly scratchy leaves and doesn’t fit on a regular holder stored in my garage.
I have a lot more to say about trauma responses to the world as we know it ending and also about how we’re all creating a new world in the waiting. I can’t actually say any of it to anyone right now so the next best thing is writing it down and maybe sometime someone will read it. That’s sort of like talking to someone, just slower and less certain.