Ladybugs and Bedbugs
In which I pit Lorde against Addison Rae
This week, the NYT ranked the restaurant on the ground floor of my building as one of the top ten restaurants in New York City. Four floors up, my apartment is infested with bedbugs. I came back from a trip and saw two crawling around on my sheets, probably emerging in the daytime because they were starved for blood, then flipped my mattress over and found the colony. You don’t know horror until you’ve seen a bedbug scurry across the slippery silk of your equestrian print Hermès, purchased at retail price at the Madison Avenue flagship by your grandmother who believes every woman should have one. Not even an hour after arriving home from my seven am flight, I found myself bagging up all of my clothes––some for regular wash, and a dizzying amount for dry cleaning––bags, and shoes. The bedding all got tossed, the books (mercifully, I mostly have paperbacks, and bedbugs tend to hide in the spines of hardcovers) got sealed away in airtight plastic bins, and I’m practically on the verge of a nervous breakdown. On top of this, I got chided by my paternal landlord: you girls no clean!
I’ve been telling everyone who will listen about my ordeal, and a few people have said things along the lines of, “take this as an opportunity to declutter and get decisive about the things that really matter to you.” Unfortunately, I really do like my stuff. I like stuff in general. I threw away all of the clothing and books I had set aside to resell, and I was sad, not because I had any attachment to them, but because it felt wasteful to me that these items won’t get another lifecycle with somebody else. It’s been a three day sprint to eradicate the infestation and I’m just about ready to collapse.
Before I was dealing with all of this, I was thinking mostly about new releases in pop music. In bed with a man, I said, “there are a lot of surprising things about me.” He said, “like what?” I said, “my top artist on Spotify has been Taylor Swift for the last two years.” He said, “Wow.” He said, “are you joking?” He said, “I can’t see you the same way.” I really like pop music. I listen to a lot of top 40 and I think this is one of my more attractive traits. I was an early Lorde listener (like, I was listening to The Love Club EP before Pure Heroine even came out), but thought “What Was That” sucked. Literally, what was that? What I did like is her new Spotify picture where she’s wearing a grey zip-up hoodie with a bird-shaped pin on it. C has been into brooches lately. I asked her what my professorial style should be, what I should wear in my headshot on the university website, and she said a cool brooch. I also recently acquired a gray zip-up hoodie. It says New York in navy blue letters and I bought it from a Canal Street vendor. I bought it because I’m leaving New York for grad school.
I watched this stupid Youtube video like, “Seven Artifacts That Inspired The New Lorde Album,” and one of the items she mentions is 5 Gum, which she said she associates with Vitamin Water, “sexy everyday products.” I remember someone telling me when I was a child that 5 Gum causes cancer, and my friend’s older sister who worked at Abercrombie chewing it and making me listen to If I Die Young by The Band Perry when she babysat me and my sister in our dad’s divorce bachelor pad. The babysitter would speak to her mom on the phone in rapidfire Russian peppered with “like” and “okay.” The 5 gum, Vitamin Water thing got me thinking about one of the funniest things M said to me, which was: “I drank Voss Water last night. It was an Entourage vibe.”
I’m feeling more encouraged about the forthcoming Lorde album since the release of “Man Of The Year” and the accompanying music video. Weirdly, I feel like I’m on the same wavelength as Lorde in terms of being in my masculine energy, favoring button downs, plain t-shirts, loose-fitting Levi’s, and no makeup. There have been some articles speculating, like, is Lorde nonbinary? Is Lorde coming out? Is the duct tape on her breasts in the video a gesture towards binding? I think it’s cool and brave that she’s just like, nah, I’m a woman and it can look like this too, we can also have these experiences of feeling less alienated from our bodies while presenting in this way, not even necessarily in a queer way. It just feels good to be in shoes that feel comfortable, not tugging down the hem of my skirt, fixing my tights riding down, hiding my body with hunched posture on the subway. Not about “resisting the male gaze” or whatever, just having freedom of motion and feeling like I could carry something heavy without having a wardrobe malfunction or run after a bus in the rain.
On the flip side, I think there is something to be said about glamor. Glamor is not having to carry something heavy, not having to chase down a bus, because you’re so beautiful that someone will do it for you. Sorry for libbing out and doing gender studies 101, but there’s power in that too, and power in artifice, in constructing an image so that people will see you exactly the way you want to be seen. I’m talking, of course, about Addison Rae. I was not paying attention to Addison Rae, until I was. I love her wide ribcage and puffy nipples. I love her thick legs. So many celebrities are being sexual, but so few are being sensual. Addison Rae is sensual. Her team understands eroticism. She’s a bendy freak shattering the foot stuff stigma. In a way, she’s sort of like the Russian babysitter who worked at Abercrombie. She looks like she smells like Victoria’s Secret body spray, like her jewelry jangles when she walks, her thong is peeking out of her lowrise jeans, and you just wanna rip out her belly button ring.
There’s something crude about Addison Rae, but also so advanced. The way her tits were spilling out of this unflattering Miss Claire Sullivan custom at the VMAs. I’m most obsessed with the “Headphones On” music video. The pink wig and purple hoodie are so flat and graphic and cheap and replicable; it’s like the outfit was engineered to become a Halloween costume. The look is, in the most literal sense of the word, iconic. She looks like a cartoon character, like some girl from Total Drama Island come to life, in the outfit she wears every day, in every episode. Her stylist, Dara Allen, also dresses this way, in primary colors with shiny pumps and leather gloves, her orange pixie-cut almost lego-ish. I’m reminded, also, of Mati Hayes (aka House of Iconica), with her asymmetrical red bob, and her propensity for leopard print, polka dots, lemon yellow, and teal. Hayes did the costumes for the New York City Ballet 2024-5 season advertisements.
As I consider my move to a new city for my grad program, I’m presented with this opportunity for reinvention all over again. The first day of school can keep happening forever. When I was visiting the place I’m moving to last weekend, a ladybug landed on my back and my father scooped it into his hand and I made a wish on it. I feel a certain degree of apprehension about leaving New York, but it sort of comes down to this: am I choosing ladybugs or bedbugs?