Emchap's Shit from the Internet 10/5/22 🍠
My boyfriend and I spent the weekend in scenic Tacoma, the Newark of Seattle. We were there to attend the My Chemical Romance reunion show, which was supposed to happen in 2020 and was pushed back several times due to the Recent Unpleasantness. (I of course did not know my boyfriend in 2019, when the tickets were purchased, and am charmed that he was operating on the assumption that he might rustle up a date between now and then and—due to the repeated pushbacks—that someone was eventually me. Slow and steady gets you a date to the arena show.)
It was interesting attending the show as someone who first was aware of MCR around the time Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge came out, in 2004. I have a faint sense memory of listening to I’m Not Okay (I Promise) on the school bus on my iPod shuffle (first gen, back when they were just glorified thumb drives) in what must have been 7th or 8th grade. As I recall, I think my friends from Tulsa, where we had moved from a couple of years before, were similarly obsessed. (We were all on Deviantart an writing Lord of the Rings fanfiction and listening to a weird mix of MCR and Nickel Creek.)1
After Three Cheers, they fell off my radar as I began to devote more of my time and energy to getting really into songs about murdered 19th century sex workers/running French club. I circled back around to them in adulthood, and mostly bounce between The Black Parade and Danger Days. I engage with them as a band that I like, but in the sort of hindbrain sort of way that you like music you listened to as a tween—it didn’t imprint on me the same way that bands from my teens and 20s did.
My boyfriend, in contrast, got into them in his late 20s. They’re less of a fuzzy past memory for him and more of something that was the soundtrack to some formative years where his prefrontal cortex was firmly in place. The great joy of the show was less singing along to the songs I knew than it was seeing him have what appeared to be a religious experience while Joe Rogan’s cousin yelled at us in a crowd of 20,000 other people who were alive during the Bush era and who have disposable income now.
I can’t say that I recommend Tacoma (I do not!). But the show was pretty great, and it’s fun when music is very, very loud.
Shit to read
It feels like nobody paid attention to the puriteen discourse of the last 800 million godforsaken Pride seasons and the same cultural forces have now led to us having this absolutely bizarre tradwife Moment amongst the Teens.
Start to finish this essay on how the author’s mom married her father at 15 (her father was 36) made me sad. It’s a great piece of writing and I want to read the book that it morphed into.
My #highvaluewoman journey is making a bunch of money doing shit in tech and then being such a pain in the ass that dudes mostly don’t put up with me. (Again, the teens are just reinventing The Rules, somehow? We’re so fucked.)
Shit to eat
Go to H Mart.
Buy an assortment of items from the frozen section. Dumplings? Yes! Korean pancake full of taro that will turn out to basically be a croissant? Absolutely! Bite-sized taiyaki full of custard? Totally.
Puzzle out the cooking instructions from the Korean writing by finding the illustration of the air fryer and the numeral characters next to it, and just going from there. (Small range? Cook time. Big number? Oven temp. Rest of the info provided? Unknown.)
Make a little of each, and enjoy them on your couch, pleased with your new baked treasures.
Shit to watch
It’s motherfucking apple cider donut season.
Shit to buy
Charly Goss’s September “Cool Mom” plus guide—I will say I really liked the pieces I bought from her Pre-Fall plus guide.
Is this the year I buy duck boots?
And a wool baseball cap?
To really paint a word picture of my little thumb drive screamo tween self, in the same time period I also wound up getting really into The Decemberists and sewing myself a cloak. I had a painful crush on a kid who made duct tape wallets. There but for the grace of god goes me being a Cloak Girl (the girl version of a Briefcase Kid).