number four, with a secret
everything is gossip, crushing on normal people, and some small good things
This past week I have had a listless, wilting sort of feeling, only to be interrupted by spates of anxious restlessness. Waiting for nothing to happen. It is not that things are not happening, of course. It is just that for those of us whose most helpful course of action is staying put, there can be a sensation the world is moving in slow motion outside of your window. Like a Jane Austen heroine I have been lying about my house crafting clothing and writing and reading. Like Emma, my favorite of Austen’s protagonists, I am looking for something diverting to pull me into the world and away from myself.
I have always taken pride in being the kind of person that friends know to text when a good bit of celebrity news comes out. In office settings I can be relied upon to fill in the details about the day’s headlines. Get you a girl who can read The New Yorker while Keeping Up, I say. There are still celebrity news stories here and there and I could probably fill you in on them all. Yet, I am struggling to find enthusiasm for pictures of Ben Affleck jumping his gate or culinary celebrity feuds. This brings me no joy to report. I wish I wanted to talk about celebrity real estate and who they are dating. I am feeling so heavy, I would love something light to buoy me.
I am wondering why I have bothered to collect these little gems of information and what their value is. I like pop culture and drama, sure, but in the end, it is not really about those things at all. It is not the knowing of a thing that we treasure, it is in the sharing that life becomes rich. Gossip isn’t very fun when there is nowhere to gossip. I miss gossiping.
We all need to look outside of ourselves from time to time and take a break from the hard act of getting by. Once you have taken care of your needs for food and shelter and safety you turn to the matter of connecting. Even if we are struggling with those basic human needs, it is human nature to seek relief in the company of those who will give us an escape, however brief. The happenings within our social groups or community are as important to us as anything. We trade on the currency of what we know and who we know to build relationships, get ahead, and establish ourselves the communities we are a part of.
By definition, gossip is personal in nature. It is the trading of information about people. We associate it with relational matters and feminine spaces, which makes sense as women have been limited in their opportunity outside of the home throughout most of modern history. Women became masters of the areas of life available to them: their home, their neighbors, their relationships and romances. Gathering and leveraging knowledge behind the scenes has often been one of only ways we can exert power when shut out of official positions. Women are also raised to be more comfortable sharing their feelings and soliciting those of others. Intimacy is a survival strategy as much as it is a way of making our lives more interesting. There is no place safer than late night telling truths with your closest girlfriends.
In our own lives we have those nights that live on in our collective memory as legends. We generate our own infamous headlines to be read and debated the next morning over brunch. Right now, our personal lives are largely still. Every zoom hang starts with a half hour of everyone saying the same thing because for most of us, there just isn’t that much to say. There is nothing like eases your mind like going for a drink to catching up with a friend on all their annoying coworker has been up to or their latest crush.
Gossip concerns the things that transcend class, status, or education, and in pop culture the subjects transcend those things as well. Pop culture belongs to everyone, which makes all of us entitled to an opinion. We are all equal under the starry celebrity sky. A People mag is a lot cheaper than Vogue, but you can buy either alongside your toilet paper at the drugstore.
Gossip can sparkle like champagne or be as naughty as a shot of well whiskey. It all gets you to the same place. Everything is gossip, really. It makes the world go round.
At work gossip is its own kind of currency. We use it to build relationships with our coworkers and vent our frustrations. Last year the luggage company Away got in some hot water after being publicly called out as having a toxic work environment. Leadership had banned Slack messages between individuals and made it nearly impossible for coworkers to talk to one another privately, insisting upon an insane and counterproductive level of transparency. This kind of information control doesn’t make people better employees. It just eliminates the spaces where you would typically work through frustrations and build trusting relationships with your coworkers. In other words, they had nowhere to gossip.
Talking behind people’s backs gets a bad rap, but some things are meant for private consumption. It would make you feel really bad to hear every conversation your friends have ever had about you, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have those conversations. I have had many such talks that left them with more clarity on how to love a person better by seeing them through another’s eyes. When you get alone with your spouse at the end of the night and get to finally say what you really think about your friend’s new girlfriend, the honesty is a sigh of relief. This is because gossiping builds intimacy. Friendships have been built off of knowing glances across a group of people and bathroom confessions. The real secret is that it almost always reveals more about you than the object of your shared fascination. I am obsessed with your eyebrows but that is only because I am pathologically obsessed with my own eyebrows – don’t take it personal. Our best friends are those who seem to have been cast in the same drama and are always in on the joke.
Sports basically do not exist right now and I am very sympathetic to everyone feeling the loss of the daily story lines. Whole arenas full of gossips have gone dark. I didn’t care about sports for most of my life but when I finally did discover the world of sport I was motivated by equal parts boys and a desire to ‘be part of the conversation.’ I didn’t like that there was this whole sphere of culture I could not engage with and that people seemed to have so much to say about. When I started bartending to earn some extra cash in grad school, I loved the way people could not wait for the chance to spill out their takes and be a part of it. Men lit up when I asked them their opinion. If I simply listened enough I could construct my very own facsimile of a take on why the Bears sucked again this year, you know, just to have something to say. If two people sat down as strangers, they could be close to friends by the end of a basketball game.
As a bartender you are an essential part of an ecosystem of regulars and patrons and lovers. You hold onto secrets and gather intel to be metered out only as needed to keep things moving smoothly. I would look forward to the end of my shift when I knew a girlfriend was coming by so I could tell her what happened last night with that boy. I would join her on the other side of bar soon after. As the night went on our world would fill out and come alive as stories flowed with each three-finger pour.
One thing we do still have, blessedly, is television. We can escape into these worlds with no consequence, aside from maybe some very real tears (am I alone in crying to every show these days?). Even with our most lauded scripted shows like Game of Thrones, what does everybody always emphasize about why they like it? “I love the characters,” they say. When the last season went astray the most common complaint was that the creators misunderstood what it was people loved: people talking in rooms. Relationships might be the only things that really matter. We recognize that because it is so true in our own lives. Reality television has flourished because we cannot resist seeing ourselves reflected on screen with just enough difference and distance to keep things interesting.
Ah yes, sweet reality television. My husband calls them my “gossip shows” and I cannot argue. They exist in a world where the most important thing is who said what to whom and how they looked while they said it. The Real Housewives franchises have spun gold out of putting wild wealthy women together and letting the cameras roll. When you meet another fan, you can chat for hours about these women you have never met who have opened up their lives to you for the love of gossip. Underneath all of this there is the reality that nowhere else on television or film do you get to see middle aged women in their full selves living, laughing and loving. Like many subjects of gossip, we love them as much as we love to talk about them.
Whatever it is you love to talk about we are lacking in conversation starters at the moment. There is simply little to talk about that doesn’t feel horrible or mundane. I miss the feeling of having a whole afternoon ahead of you to waste shooting the shit over some cold drinks. I would like to say inessential things with essential people.
I look forward to feeling that the world is moving again. I want to get in the mix. I want to be in the know. I want to lean over and tell you a secret.
recommended for…
gossips: If you do still have an appetite for celebrity news there is no place better to look than Lainey Gossip. I have been a reader for years and rely on her for some of the most thoughtful and non-toxic writing on celebrities on the internet. She does have her biases, as we all do (I would not rely on her for impartial reads on Harry and Meghan, for example), but she does better than most not making it petty or personal. She is a true lover of the form.
something to watch: I cannot recommend a show more than I am telling you to watch Normal People. This is another very good book adaptations produced by Hulu and it is transcendent as a portrait of young love and the challenges of young adulthood and finding your place in the world (the other very good recent adaptation being Little Fires Everywhere, which I also recommend particularly if you read and enjoyed the book). The series is very faithful to the novel by Sally Rooney which, along with her other book Conversations with Friends, was one of my favorite things I read last year. The show is extremely intimate, wonderfully acted, and quite possibly the sexiest thing I have ever seen. Just brilliant.
a beauty moment: Life is about the little things, like pretty pink oils I can rub on my face. I have been using for a couple weeks now a pink plum elixir serum from a brand called Loli Beauty and am officially ready to declare my love. I have pretty successfully shifted to natural products and am trying to now be more conscious of the environmental impact of any company I support. Loli Beauty is really a leader in quality and sustainability. Loli’s plum elixir is made from recycled plum pits, manufactured with no water, is vegan and the glass container is reusable/recyclable. The product itself is an all natural hydrating blend of oils that will not break you out. <3
creative thinking: Phoebe Lovett’s Public Library is a newsletter that I love and would suggest you subscribe to. Her latest shared something in particular I wanted to pass on as well: prompts with strategies for getting your mind moving developed by Brian Eno. Doing creative work is always difficult but has its particular challenges at the moment. The usual things I would do to get my brain flowing and seek inspiration are not available. These printable cards are going to be my new desk buddy. Here’s the link.
a good read: On the creativity tip, I am suggesting a very different kind of book this week. Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg is just what the title implies except for being actually quite a lot of sentences about writing, a book length amount of sentences if you will. It has good advice on every page and is written in such a way that you can take away what is useful without being overly prescriptive.
with love,
caitlin rose