lori lightfoot is no longer the mayor of chicago, but that doesn't help my brooklyn L train not running situation
if the L train is not runnning two weekends in a row then there needs to be more citi ebikes available i have asthma and i will sue the city of new york if i can't breathe for more than 10 seconds
Welcome back to another episode of How Is It That There Are Over 10 Citibike Stations In The Main Part Of Williamsburg But Not One Open Parking Spot For My Citibike? I actually hate this show don’t watch it.
But actually, welcome back to another Circle Back! We’re all here reading and learning and maybe even just reading this first part and then quitting the Substack app or the mail app or the Zippo lighter app. The other day I was walking to the L train (when it was actually running) and passed by a public school when all of these teachers walked outside for lunch, and I noticed that they were all about my age. So you’ve heard it here first, folks. I am now teacher-age. Yes, there are people from my high school graduating class who are teachers today, but I still think that’s fake because I only see it on Facebook or something. Now, I’ve seen it all. Almost 26, and now I’m a teacher. I may still look 16, but I’m feeling old everybody. I was so sure that every teacher I had in high school was 55 years old — even the ones who said they were 26. Fucked up.
Speaking of being on a train, which I partake in almost every single day, I noticed the emergency break for the first time on an older Q train. It literally looks like this:
Like, they’re literally asking to be pulled. It’s just a dangly little balloon-looking thingy that is attached to a rubbed string, and I want to pull it. It takes every bit of control I have to not do that. And there’s honestly not that much control. It’s very difficult to ignore this super exciting toy that is there for us to play with. But it’s ok because none of us are actually gonna pull it. We’re not dumb. We’re not trying to make things harder for the passengers on the trains. That would be so silly. Pay no attention to the caption on that photo.
The 38th Independent Spirit Awards were last night, and it was also the first time in history that an award show had no gendered categories. Every best actor was nominated against every best actress and so on, and I thought that was pretty slay of them. It doesn’t make any sense to have gendered categories. Instead of being called Best Actor or Best Actress, it was called Best Lead Performance. The nominees were, Michelle Yeoh (the winner), Mia Goth, Paul Mescal, Jeremy Pope, Aubrey Plaza, Andrea Riseborough, Dale Dickey, Regina Hall, Taylor Russell, and Cate Blanchett. And whilst I am happy that Michelle Yeoh won, this was the only thing I was looking for last night:
So, really, everyone’s a winner.
The Indie Spirit Awards were as indie as they could possibly be last night — as in, the IFC (Independent Film Channel) didn’t even renew their contract to air the award show on their channel. So the only way you could watch it was live-streamed on Youtube or the IMDB website. And ya know what? That is true indie programming.
@ my mom, I will interpret what she said when you call me later after reading my newsletter because you are my biggest fan.
Just kidding I’ll do it now.
I’m just gonna say it. Hasan mentioned this a couple times, but when I hosted this show it was on television — it was televised. That’s right. And you know what? I just wanna congratulate this show on finally ditching all that corporate, commercial bullshit and finally becoming so indie that no one can even watch it! This is what I’m talking about, people! Indie spirit — that’s punk rock. That’s indie. Anyone who loves indie film knows that the only true sign of success is being told by someone that they really wanted to watch that thing they made, but they didn’t know how to find it.
And obviously, I watched the live stream. I love the movie and tv award shows that don’t take themselves very seriously because you get to watch these stars get humbled over and over and over by people like Aubrey Plaza or Hasan Minhaj or even Cate Blanchett when Hasan asks her to make a clickbait face for the award show video header and she instead crawls under the table. You can go look that one up, even though I just explained to you what happened.
Wow, I am just jumping from topic to topic today! But that’s ok because this is my newsletter, and I make all the rules.
This past week, I went to see Chappell Roan for the second time. The last time we saw her was at a sold-out show at the Bowery, and this time it was at a sold-out show at Webster Hall. And I’m telling you right now, you have not heard pop music until you’ve listened to Chappell Roan. I’m joking, but also I’m not really joking. This girly is a pop star. The first time we saw her, she showed a little more of her vulnerabilities and cried when she sang songs that affected her in a more meaningful way, but we felt it connected us even more, and she was so fun and exciting to listen to and watch. But this time, she did the same setlist (we thought her album would be out by the time we went to this show) and showed how much more experienced she was on a sold-out stage, even though it had only been several months since we saw the last one.
I’m not kidding; we were watching the movie A Star Is Born at this show. I mean, I am kidding, but we were watching the birth of a star. Chappell Roan is about to blow up. It’ll be so hard to buy tickets to any of her shows ever again. It’s always so exciting to feel like a musician or an artist belongs (not belongs, but you know what I mean) to a fan base that isn’t stadium-sized, yet. We have her now, but soon we’re gonna have to allow a larger community to take her in. You can tell she loves her music, which we love. When she dances on stage, we want to dance, too. And her audience-participation skills are already so good for someone who’s an independent artist and only just blowing up. Here’s an example from the Webster Hall show:
Chappell has a theme at each of her shows — it usually relates to one of her songs. She’ll do Pink Pony Club, where everyone dresses in Dolly Parton-esque cowboy costumes, or she’ll do something like So You Wanna Be A Popstar, which was our theme. The goal was to dress like your favorite popstar or just any popstar. Since there were five of us going, we did one of the most famous five-person pop groups:
Still don’t know?
When Chappell tells us to dress up …
… we dress up.
So you better remember the Missouri pop princess Chappell Roan’s name because she’s gonna be the biggest Gen-Z pop star very, very, very soon.
My roommate of about a year and a half just moved back home at the beginning of last week, and now I have the entire apartment to myself for a month until my new roommate moves in. This is very fun for me. Reorganizing, redecorating, replacing — I got a new simplehuman trashcan and have never been more excited about it — and doing cartwheels all over the place has been life-changing. But it’s also giving me the opportunity to finally go through all of the things that were sent to me from my childhood home when my parents moved to their separate living spaces. I still have a few boxes that I want to try to bring down to one or even half of one. I know there are things in there that I don’t actually need anymore, but I definitely thought I wouldn’t have to think about them for a few more years since it was all supposed to be in the basement of my old Chicago home. But now I just need to think about them sooner.
Living in New York means you live smaller and dream bigger. I need less stuff. All of the furniture in this apartment is mine, so I need to get rid of a lot of the smaller things that are unnecessary in this new part of my life. But there are some things I still struggle to remove.
My family is very musically gifted. Some of the members make music as a career, while others can comfortably play a few instruments and sing along at a family party or a karaoke birthday. It’s basically a requirement in the Cunninghams to know how to play something. And when I was younger, my dad paid for guitar and piano lessons that happened once a week. I hated practicing. Scales were boring, and I was tired of practicing With Or Without You by U2 in preparation for my next Tuesday class at Old Town School of Folk Music. I hated the music stand. It was so heavy, and I always dropped it on my foot when I was moving it. It made me hate practicing even more.
Today, I love to play music. It’s a way of decompressing after a long day or a way to pump me up before going out somewhere. I love it. But I don’t use a music stand to learn chords or lyrics; I use my computer. So I don’t really need the music stand, anymore. And wouldn’t you know that one of the things brought to me from Chicago was that violent music stand that bruised my toes until I thought homicidal thoughts (about the music stand, duh)? But in my spring cleaning and reorganizing, I can’t get rid of that music stand. I don’t even use it. But as I get rid of everything else from my childhood that’s been sleeping in these dusty boxes, that stand is the last thing I have from a time of my life when the only stressful thing was my next guitar lesson.
In two weeks exactly, I’ll be 26 years old. Health insurance is now up to me. April rent will be due soon. Adulthood will have officially arrived. This month’s cleaning and removal of old memories will make it all so much more real that my family’s lives have completely changed. But it’s important that I make new memories and not stay stuck sleeping in the boxes of the old ones. But I also don’t have to get rid of everything. As I said earlier, this is my newsletter and I get to make all the rules.
So I’m gonna find a place for the music stand.
movie rec: EVERYTHING NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE AND BEST ACTOR AND BEST ACTRESS AT THE 2023 OSCARS, WHICH ARE NEXT SUNDAY
music rec: Chappell Roan, you dummies
book rec: I’m reading The Master and Margarita, so I’ll let you all know how that goes … or maybe I won’t … my newsletter my rules
happy birthday shoutout to Lady Katheryn No Longer A Smurf St. Amant