I will admit that in previous years I’ve been a user of gift guides. There’s no one harder to shop for than parents—not my parents in particular, but maybe parents of my variety, who, like me, already have everything they need and practically have everything they want—and I don’t feel bad about turning to The Strategist’s various mom- and dad-oriented guides for inspiration.
This year, however, I felt moved to avoid the gift guide, even to work against it. This is partly to do with the fact that I started thinking about gifts around October, while I was traveling, and therefore didn’t have to look for inspiration at the last minute. (Somewhat unfortunately, I gave almost all of the gifts I bought then away then, too. I am a believer in the spontaneous and random gift, and in pretending that I live in a gift economy, wherein a small occasion-less gift might bring me returns when I don’t need or expect them.) But I think my hesitance toward gift guides this year is also a reflection of my general feeling about the proliferation of Substack, how everyone has become the arbiter of taste in the short- or long-form in a matter of months. The number of gift guides this year felt infinite and needless. The truth is, I don’t trust most people’s opinions—on movies, or music, or on what to give my boyfriend or mom or sister for Christmas.
I realize I’m eating the shit and talking it, as I am myself a writer of reviews on this platform. But I’m never writing a gift guide, and that’s the good consumer:: promise™️. I never intend to influence anyone to purchase stuff for the sake of purchasing it, and that generally this project’s title and even general scope should be read facetiously. I don’t endorse outright consumerism, and don’t believe we should look to arbitrary lists (regardless of who they’re written by) to tell us what to buy so that our loved ones will like us more. good consumer:: is a project in critical consumerism, in what it means to consume more broadly, and in making real and visible the connections between the things I consume in the hopes that I might persuade others to draw their own connections.
With all of this in mind I’m writing to you with a list of favorites from this year. Some of these things are purchasable objects, but many of them are not. I don’t have a real plan to consume less next year, but I think it’s always worth it to think about why we’re consuming, and who benefits when we consume. This is a non-exhaustive list of things I loved and will continue to love, with it also in mind that I have terrible recency bias, and that I’d like to avoid repeating things from posts past as much as possible. It’s in no particular order. Bah!!
1. Friendship
Dylan and I took a road trip for Thanksgiving with our friends Riley and Hanna, and I’d intended to write a longer post about that for November, but instead I wrote a nice long journal entry and left it there. They’d never been there, and so I spent most of the trip pointing out various locales from windows of cars or as we walked, and saying, “That’s where I did ___” or “I used to eat there every week,” so on. This type of trip—showing new friends haunts of old, and also allowing new and old friends a brief crossover—is a chance at reorientation. How we took Hanna and Riley around is how I took my parents around when they visited when I was in college, a slice-of-Anahi trip that allowed them a peek into my world. It’s a highly personal and reflective activity, showing someone your old life knowing that you’ll all return to the present after a few days. When, some weeks later, I took a trip to Houston to visit a different friend (from high school), I was struck by her willingness to cart us around from favorite spot to favorite spot. It’s inspiring to know that the richness of a whole life, one you’ll never live and one you know only proximally, can be accessed in the course of a few days, if only you ask.
Take as another example of great friendship the movie night held at our place a few weeks back wherein I forced everyone to watch Challengers (another favorite of the year which I wrote about in June) over remarkably cheap Chinese takeout. What a perfect way to spend a Saturday night—squeezed onto couches and chairs thrown into the mix, eating off of paper plates and laughing, squirming a little, laughing, everyone’s houses close enough to walk home at the end.
I’m lucky to have great friends, and luckier to have this feeling in me that friendship matters as much as family. This is like realizing you’ve owned treasure all along, that you’ve been carrying it around in your pocket!
2. Reggaeton
One of the few ways I maintained my Spanish fluency this year was by listening to reggaeton. I got really into Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti around the time I moved to Austin (now over a year ago), and for a long time mine and Dylan’s go-to radio station was the Latino Hits station. It was devastatingly sold not once, but twice—I happened upon its second iteration totally by chance, only for that one also to revert to US American pop after only a couple of weeks.
I’ve written about why I love reggaeton and Latino pop before and don’t have much to add to that original statement. But I’d be remiss not to mention it here, as the genre is one of my mainstays and truly one of my favorite things about life. Lately I am addicted to Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso’s BAÑO MARÍA after watching their über-viral Tiny Desk. I guess because as a child I was somewhat embarrassed of my love of certain Spanish-language music, I’ve really come around to accept this part of myself. That, and I love to listen to dance music, even when I’m just driving around or at home. I love the thrill, the horny-sexy-dancy pining, how expressive and free and utterly misogynistic and capitalistic are the worldviews of reggaetoneros. I love the projected self, getting the girl, being rich. I love, too, that I am kind of in on a secret among others, as one of the few people in my friend group who can understand the lyrics.
3. Book Clubs
I have always wanted to be the type of person who started a book club, first when I was a child who imagined a group of friends connected only by their bookish qualities, then as a college student and adult who wanted the accountability and community of a group bound by a text. Thus I asked Riley to read A People’s History of the United States with me this year; thus it turned into a group of five or so who stuck it out to the end. A People’s History was an interesting choice for a first club read, being almost 700 pages and not a particularly easy read, emotionally. Mixed reviews on the end result; I read fast, calendars are booked weeks in advance, and it’s hard to know what to talk about (or how to talk about it) without establishing a clear leader, guiding questions, or real intent. I refused to emerge as such, being that I’d not totally intended a party greater than two readers to start with.
I also attended an open-invitation book club at a local bookstore to try on the community for size, unsure of what to expect, using the excuse that I’d been wanting to read Helen Dewitt for a while. We read Lightning Rods—“we” being me and five senior citizens and one college-aged boy. Well, four senior citizens who read the book, and one who attended to see her friends. I don’t think I can categorize this experience in terms of success or failure. I read the book, and I talked about it with a group of strangers who had quite different readings of it, and in total it was a fun and adrenaline-inducing night for me. It landed as something like a first date, worthwhile regardless of if it amounted to little for my future.
The book club is on my favorites list maybe precisely because of the challenge of it—what are we without the teacher-student structure, with an arbitrary calendar and no thought-leader among us? Groping our way through a conversation where we might disagree, or where one person has clearly thought about what they’re going to say while others are responding on the fly might have the flavor of a classroom, but it doesn’t ultimately reflect one. It’s fun to learn with others, and to do so outside of the constraints of a preimposed system. And, for that matter, it’s interesting to see how we recreate those systems, or push past them. Our people’s book club is evolving in the new year, with some hoped-for new members and a book that’s about half the length of our first read, and all of it fills a little hole in my soul that I’ve been slowly trying to recoup since graduating from all forms of school. (If you’re in Austin and would like to join, we’ll read Sarah Jaffe’s From the Ashes next, starting sometime in January. Anyone’s welcome!)
4. Buying Books with Some Hesitance
Some of you may know that one of my only goals for 2024 was to buy no new books. (This, as someone who has a relatively contained number of books to begin with considering my area of work and expertise.) I failed at this impressively, which has primarily to do with how much I traveled this year—to at least four states besides Texas, and to Japan—and that I like to stop into bookstores when I travel. More generally, I love to shop around for books, to find a copy of something I know and love that speaks to me, or to buy something I know almost nothing about but feel captivated by in a sea of others. As goes with all consumerism, I see a glimmer of my future self when I decide to buy a new (to me) book—the act of acquisition rather than reading becomes the thing that changes me into the person I want to be, and therefore buying the book alone gets me closer to my ideal self. This is, of course, a trap.
Still, I’m not so disappointed in myself for buying books this year, and in particular buying them from stores I love and am happy to support, like Alienated Majesty here in Austin. (They are, to me, the best-stocked bookstore in the US right now. Eclectic, hard to find books and zines appear there like magic, just when I decide I need them.) My 2024 goal helped solidify within me a more discerning book buying practice in general, where I actually pause and think before leaving with a book I think will make me look, not be, smarter. I’ll keep that up in the new year after a brief embargo on book buying for the first few months of 2025, at least.
5. Single Girl Seasons
Among the many, many joys that living with Dylan for the past year and change has afforded me are the brief moments I get to be alone, and relish in the misery and freedom of that fact. Despite my pleading—I hate when Dylan leaves, and make it known very annoyingly and for a long period leading up to his departure—I always find my stride in these weeks, which I’ve come to call “single girl summer” or “single girl winter,” depending, of course, on the season. [[FN All credits owed to Tess, who introduced me to this concept when she applied it to a weekend she had while her husband was away on a backpacking trip.]]
This year’s single girl summer entailed lap swimming, many cold treats, and a full calendar. I was making plans at every juncture, running from place to place and neglecting the cat to her dismay and my regret, also running from my own shadow and fear of being home alone at night. Single girl winter always proves much more isolate. The cold turns me into more of a hermit, which in turn makes me a de facto cinephile. I’m partial to romances, rom-coms, and bad Christmas movies. I make big meals to eat alone, and eat them sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, talking to the cat or the TV.
I’ve come to appreciate these short seasons-within-seasons as moments to reset, and to relocate myself to myself when Dylan’s gone. This is relatively new territory for me, approaching five years in the same relationship and having spent the larger part of my adult life in another. I’m sometimes prone to unhelpful thought spirals about what I do and don’t know about myself because of the fact of my relationship status over the course of my adult life; it’s nice to remember that I can pretty easily “be myself” when I’m alone, that I can shift to that mode at will when I have a bit of time on my hands, and that that “myself” resembles exactly the self that I am when Dylan is home.
Single Girl Winter 2024 featured walks in the coolish air before dark; Cinema Paradiso alone at the Austin Film Society (see no. 6) surrounded by other solo moviegoers who also cried; my first watch of Pride & Prejudice (2005), and second watch of Bridget Jones’s Diary; extremely rare cuddling with the cat, who usually steers clear of the bed when it’s full of two people; and a foray into cauliflower rice fritters. These are the sort of sublime activities I relish when I’m alone, not because I can’t do them with Dylan, but because I have no choice but to do them this way while I await his return.
6. AFS Cinema
Probably the best decision Dylan and I made in 2024 was forgoing big Christmas gifts for each other in favor of a pricey joint membership to the Austin Film Society, which granted us free access to most screenings at the AFS Cinema for the year. Despite the fact that the theater is probably the most uncomfortable one in town, we spent many combined hours at AFS, watching movies that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of or known to care about. Their selection is really wonderful, not too contemporary but neither too old-school, timed to make you, the viewer, feel smart and seasonally attuned, and their popcorn suffices.
Among the favorite screenings I attended this year: Days of Heaven (1978), which pretty immediately became an all-timer for me; Gummo (1997), for which I have a new appreciation and reverence; Seven Samurai (1954), a truly fun movie made better by the packed house and the intermission for stretching and snack-refilling; Eyes Wide Shut (1999), so unexpectedly funny and so incredibly long to sit through alone; and Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) in close conjunction, which were both so beautiful to watch they changed my previous hesitant feeling about old movies for good. I’m more willing than ever before to sit through old movies, slow movies, and movies I would otherwise skip with a click of the remote. And I’m much more of a snob than ever before, too, though I like to think that’s balanced by my attempt at an open mind when I go to the movies now.
As may be obviated by my recent lack of scheduled “content,” next year will bring yet another new iteration of good consumer::. I’m saying goodbye to the installments of monthly roundups, and to a posting schedule at all. I’d like, I think, to write about one or two things at once, and to feel less of a nagging in the back of my mind when I don’t post by the 30th or 31st. I’ve thought about going fully analog, using the home-printer to mail copies of an essay in zine-form every couple of months to folks who are willing to pay one or two bucks for the supplies and postage stamp, but for now I’ll stick around here and avoid collecting money from friends I’m sending mail to anyway.
This blog will become my primary connection to the social internet for the year as I’m hoping to entirely evade Instagram and Twitter, so that will be its own exciting foray, trying to write without the will of the masses chiming in every few seconds. Thanks for reading this year, for humoring my ego. I am excited to figure out how to keep writing for fun, for friends, for art, for joy. 🐁