Notes on September

IN NEW YOOOORK CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OF-

• I love a good memoir. It reminds me that all the impossible are possible. The craziest things you’ve ever heard end up in memoirs. That conversation you pass on your way to your table at Balthazar will absolutely end up in someone’s memoir. And what seemed normal to the experiencer at the time will become life-changing, extraordinary, and utterly cinematic in the minds of the reader a.k.a. me.

• My car is probably going to need its starter replaced. This is the second car in a row where I’ve had this problem. Maybe I should’ve gotten a Subaru…

• SHOES! Oh, how delightful are shoes! They’ve been top of mind recently. I know I’m getting older because my personal style is starting to head down a more mature path and I’ve found a new love of my life, heels. Specifically Givenchy, Prada, and OF COURSE the iconic Manolo Blahniks. I’ve had many dreams of these shoes, which have become my heart’s desire and my brain’s most adamant obsession. SHOES SHOES SHOES! Gone are the days of men, there’s a new ruler of my heart! This obsession has resulted in an addiction to online shopping and a significant uptick in my screen time on second-hand shopping websites. An embarrassing amount. I hope to find a way to soothe this addiction soon but there are worse things to be addicted to and if loving shoes is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

• I’ve started kind of working out every day, we’ll see how long that lasts.

• I predicted that New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams would be indicted sometime this year last December. I do an official predictions list every single year and it’s become slightly well-followed since I predicted the Queen of England would die in the fall of 2022, which she then proceeded to do ten months after I set my prediction into stone. I had twenty people call me at one time, five text messages, and a few DMs. A lot of my predictions happen every year and I’ve been called the modern-day Nostradamus more than once, unfortunately. Of this year’s thirty-one predictions, thirteen have come true so far. Which is a low year for me. Am I psychic? No. Am I psychotic? Maybe. But there are people that get paid to make political predictions and most of them did not predict Eric Adams would be indicted. I did and I don’t even have a degree in it, just a glass of wine and a hunch at the end of December. I’ll predict now that he’ll pivot and start getting into prison reform since there’s a chance he’ll be in there himself. He dumped money into the NYPD to get criminals off the street and I suppose they got their biggest one. I should say, everyone in New York HATES the guy. More than any other mayor I’d say which is really saying something for New York. I’ve never seen Twitter more united on a cause. His downfall has brought together the concrete jungle, and people who enjoy the concrete jungle such as myself, together in the most beautiful way. I’d say this is a way bigger prediction than the Queen dying because NO ONE is upset with this. Pictured below are some of my favorite tweets from that day. Please enjoy. I would wish him the best but I really don’t want it for him.

• Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium was top of mind this month I have no idea why. Maybe I should rewatch it.

• I went to Disney World this month but it seems like it was an eternity ago. This month was simultaneously stagnate and speedy.

• I remembered that Say It Right by Nelly Furtado existed this month and how incredible that song is. Earlier this month she said in an interview that when Timbaland played Maneater for her for the first time in the studio, the speaker caught fire. That is urban legend come to life.

• Speaking of Nelly Furtado, Fall is back and of course, I am rewatching one of the greatest shows of all time, Gossip Girl. There are two types of girls in this world, girls who rewatch Gilmore Girls every fall and girls who rewatch Gossip Girl. I am obviously a Gossip Girl girl. It is the thing I look forward to every year. Going onto Max and hearing Young Folks by Peter Bjorn and John while seeing sweeping scapes of NYC flash across my screen. Ugh- if you haven’t grown up with it you wouldn’t understand. My cousin is a Gilmore Girls kind of girl and I think our personalities really match which show we choose when autumn cranks up. You can tell a lot about a person by which one they choose. I might have to do a completely separate post on Gossip Girl. It truly revolutionized TV, fashion, and the 2000s. I think I will do that actually.

  

• I cut my bangs again on the first day of fall. I can’t tell if I like them or not. This happens every time I cut my bangs and I’ve had them for four years. More on that next month.

• I rewatched Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging this month and had the epiphany that it’s like Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer but for pre-teens/early teenagers. Aaron Taylor Johnson is adorable in that movie and I went on a light binge of his discography the week after. He’s gorgeous in Anna Karenina. Can’t wait to see him in Nosferatu. I’m honored to live at the same time as such impeccable artists, like true masters of their craft.

• I watched Atonement for the first time this month and this started a James McAvoy discography binge at the same time as my Aaron Taylor Johnson binge and I was really taking in content at an unhealthy rate. After watching Atonement I had to break down how I felt about it in therapy and it was the most I’ve cried in there in a year. It really broke me in an unhealthy way and I felt like I was going to be sick days after I watched it. Every time I mentioned it I would start crying immediately for a two-week span. I would post the two-minute video review of my immediate thoughts on it here but I say fuck exactly 20 times in those two minutes. I counted. And because my Grandma reads these I’m going to keep them to just my Instagram story. But I will add a grid of my face throughout those two minutes. If you really want to go see it it’s in my Instagram highlights here.

  

  

  

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• I had a moment of self-exploration last night where I asked myself Do I have Peter Pan Syndrome? Because on the surface it seemed quite likely. I haven’t really done that much in this past year but with some quick self-analysis and a few answers from some different forums, I deduced that though I don’t have Peter Pan Syndrome, I do have anxiety. Which… I’ve had since the third grade so that is nothing new but the side effects of my anxiety and overthinking overlap with Peter Pan Syndrome. I seem to still be standing in the shallow waters of adolescence for some reason, I just couldn’t figure out why. I pondered over it for a day or two and was finally hit in the face for the cause of my stagnation. I couldn’t help but wonder, am I greedy? You see, I have a fear of running out of time. I feel still as though I ran out of time with my Mom, she was taken away from me too soon and arguably, when I needed her most. I guess I can’t complain because it was her only instance of terrible timing in in her entire life. I obviously worry now about running out of time with the rest of my family now. I love them more than anything. I am them and they are me. And I hate the truth that they will all have to go one day, as do you and I. This admittedly, has caused me to distance myself from everyone. In the past, I felt that I would maybe miss a person less if they were further from me when they left. Boy was I wrong. But I want more time, I want forever. All of that felt like greed because, well… it is. It’s quite greedy on my part to want forever. I really want to have my cake and eat it too and not get sick after realizing there’s gluten in it. I tend to see things a bit negatively at first glance. I’ll say it’s like a photo negative on film. I need someone or something to add the positive, the nuance, the color to the photo and make it whole for me. My Dad says I can’t see the whole picture but I can, I just can’t see the color. And you miss so much of the beauty if you can’t see the color. So, for the first time ever, I decided to paint the picture for myself. I filled in the shades of lilac and filled my hazel eyes with the positives. Yes. Everyone dies, and it’s a deep crimson red. I will run out of time with the people I love. It will come too soon, but how lucky am I to have that time at all? Why waste it? You could do so much with so little. And suddenly my world became more vibrant than ever before.

XOXO,

Ansleigh