…Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Mitski is currently on tour, and it’s spurred a lot of talk. Was anyone else at the L.A. show and it was. . . bad? Someone posted on TikTok. It was the audience, right? Doesn’t anyone know concert etiquette anymore?
Mitski tweeted the other week about limiting phones at concerts. It was lovely—beautifully written, poetic, the thoughts about connectivity and shared spaces so true and needed. As an artist, she felt a disconnect when she looked into the audience and saw a sea of lights. She wanted it to be two people sharing a moment, sharing a song together. She wanted the moment to exist without forced preservation.
Naturally, the internet exploded.
But this is how I remember things.
You shouldn’t police people on how to enjoy a concert. They can do what they want.
My phone helps me feel connected. It helps me relive moments.
Mitski has since deleted the tweet.
Someone noted that Clairo had to reprimand concertgoers recently. Girls in the front kept shouting comments up at her, and the person noted that it looked like Clairo was uncomfortable with the loud attention, the unnecessary comments that had nothing to do with her music. The irony! Being unwantingly objectified is exactly what Clairo sings about, the girl said.
the girls that get it, get it
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I’ve been thinking about Fleabag a lot recently. I think about Fleabag in the same way I think about Woolf, which is that they are a constant thrumming inside my head, a glint of obsidian in my subconscious, and in that way they are always there, always present, and I am not ever not thinking about them.
Have you ever wanted to punch someone in the face? One of the naturalists asks me at the turf while we wait for kids to arrive.
Kind of, I answer. I want to be the type of person who *wants* to punch someone in the face, if that makes sense. But I don’t really care about the actual punching.
This continues to be an ongoing discussion among the staff. J. would very much like to get in a bar fight. Everyone thinks she is crazy for wanting to punch and be punched, but on the second night of staff training, we bonded over our love for Fleabag and that shared mutual interest explains the punch lust wordlessly.
the girls that get it, get it
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I’ve never dissected my feelings about Fleabag with anyone else. In some ways, I don’t really want to. You get it or you don’t. Either something twists inside of you
when the guy walking past her coughs “whore” when she thought he was going to check her out,
when everyone believes her skivvy brother-in-law over her when she’s the one telling the truth,
when the Hot Priest says “it’ll pass” and the rain keeps falling and that damned fox walks by
or it doesn’t.
You’re either a pee girl or a piss girl, my staff tell me.
You’re either a mouse or a rat, they say.
How do you know? I ask.
You just *know*
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If you have to explain something to someone, it dilutes the meaning. Not as a universal rule, but in a Mitski lyrics, Fleabag, piss girl kind of way.
If I have to explain to you
why Olivia Rodrigo has every right to be mad that he’s singing Billy Joel with another girl
why Bella’s reaction in the second Twilight book is not melodramatic
why Call Me By Your Name isn’t just about first love, but about feeling that longing, that missing, 30 years later, and realizing that it wasn’t just a summer fling but that was your person, your person, and you fucking let them go
then it wasn’t for you.
the girls that get it, get it
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This is a conversation several of my friends and I have been having. It revolves around the idea that a gesture or a phrase loses meaning when you tell the person to do or say it. For example, if you are feeling particularly unloved, and you tell your partner “I need to hear that you love me,” why doesn’t it feel as fulfilling when they then say it? Why would it mean so much more if they said it instinctively, if they knew how to read your needs and meet them without being explicitly told?
I feel that this is asking everyone to have similar communication styles, which is unrealistic, but what I don’t feel is unrealistic is asking everyone to put in the appropriate emotional work. If I can read bell hooks and evaluate my own anxious attachment style and be reflective about my own needs and actions, why can’t you, Brad or Joe or Chrissy? Why?
Often I hate being the one to put in the work. I plan out confrontations in my head. I rehearse my lines before openly expressing emotions so I don’t upset or alarm. I reflect on my actions, my words, and make plans on how I can do better in the future. I try very very hard not to hurt the person’s feelings, even though they’ve probably hurt mine.
I don’t want to punch someone, not really, but I want to key a man’s car when I am sober and hurting and the night is there as an embrace, I want to key his car and then walk away. All actions. No words.
Once. Just once.
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the girls that get it, get it
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Someone called me jaded the other week, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I’m not sure they’re wrong, but I’m also not sure that being jaded is bad. Don’t we take our experiences with us? Doesn’t the world shape us as we walk through it, pressing scratching marring biting?
It feels too privileged to be 29 and not be jaded in some capacity.
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Don’t even get me started on the Cool Girl speech from Gone Girl.
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My senior year in college I went to a Rachael Yamagata concert. It took place in one of the converted churches in Pittsburgh, and a friend and I were seated in a row of collapsible chairs near the front. I was wearing my faux leather jacket that night and brown chunky-heeled boots. The venue was intimate and small, and I remember how Rachael would talk to the crowd before a song, her voice soft and soothing.
Have you ever hurt so bad that you had to leave? One time a partner and I broke up, and I moved. I had to move entire cities to get away from the memory of them, because the memories lingered everywhere. In the trees, in the river, everywhere.
I’ll always remember that moment. How she told that story before she sat down at the keyboard and played “The Reason Why.” The audience was hushed and attentive.
And oftentimes when I listen to “Night Shift” by Lucy Dacus I think about how she’s writing about the same fucking thing. And that’s just it, you know, nothing’s ever unique. Fleabag and Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski and Virginia fucking Woolf and those books that are hella popular right now that are all about women in their 20s and their messy malaise, they’re all in the same vein—Piss Girls and girls that want to be Piss Women— and I want to talk about this endlessly but I also don’t want to talk about it at all because
if you get it you get it
and if you don’t
then it wasn’t for you.
People in Parks 