🥸Harry Styles got SET UP🥸
➕ Why you should date the person who makes you cringe, Mummy issues in Peru, & TikTok time limits!?
OMG angels, first things first let me make this about ME. My fave newsletter in the world (Embedded) covered me/ SYSCA in their newsy today and it’s like… huge for me. So you should read it! And you should read Embedded!
Speaking of newsletters you should read… tomorrow is my diary entry/ links & recs for our paying supporters, and it’s gonna be a goodie. Here’s a lil teaser of what’ll be in there:
A story about my wild night on the town (where I met a few of you and we got… messy)
A little question for you to think about: are you the weather forecaster or are you the weather?
Rubes and I are coming to New York!!
I nearly bought a cat…
SO many recs for you (and I watched the entirety of Daisy Jones and The Six so some thoughts on that)
Much, much more.
Harry Styles fell hook, line, and sinker, for a dirty joke
🌞 London Laura: A Case For Dating The Person Who Makes You Cringe 🌞
🗺Around The World🗺
Mummy Issues: Peruvian delivery man carried ancient mummy around in his bag, a train crash in Greece, and TikTok time limits?
Dave Grohl ditches guitar for meat smoker and feeds 450 people in need 🥺
Today’s mundane poll: what face do you make when you look in the mirror?
Harry Styles fell hook, line, and sinker, for a dirty joke
I feel like I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t talk about the trap that Harry Styles fell into, hook, line, and SINKER yesterday. As we know, Harry loves a lil bit of cheeky (but often low-stakes) banter with the people holding signs in the crowd. BUT, at one of his AUSLOT (Australian Love On Tour) shows he sparked up a convo with two fans that legit had the BEST interaction I’ve ever seen. Here it is in full (and you should watch it):
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What happened is (in short), one of the fans was holding a sign saying “bestie broke my nose at Melbourne night one” and another one said “broke my bestie’s nose at Melbourne night one.” Harry notices it, and they go on to have QUITE a long conversation, where they explain that one fan broke the other’s nose with her head while dancing to Satellite, which ends in Harry saying “how is your head?” Then, in an incredible move, one of them yells back “never had any complaints!” And the joke was complete. (Flo didn’t get the joke, and if you don’t either, that’s ok!)
Harry quickly realises what he’s done, shakes his head and says ”we are in Australia aren’t we?”
From what I can gather it was all a set-up (and an iconic one) and I cannot believe how fucking great the delivery was!! I can only imagine that now every fan is going to be trying to ‘get’ Harry with something like this, and he’s gonna be overthinking EVERY interaction from now on. God, I love fangirls.
🗺Around The World🗺
Peru
Mummy Issues: Peruvian delivery man carried ancient mummy around in his bag (BBC)
Postman Pat would never. A Peruvian delivery man was stopped by authorities after ‘acting drunk’ at an archaeological site, and when they searched his delivery van they found an ancient Mummy inside a cooler bag.
The man said that he had been sharing his room with the bandaged mummy and considered it "a kind of spiritual girlfriend".
He had put the remains in the bag to show them off to his friends, he said.
He explained that he kept "Juanita", as he had nicknamed the mummy, in a box in his room, next to the TV. He added that it was owned by his father, without specifying how it had come into his father's possession.
Also, the mummy is said to be about 600-800 years old and is actually a male and not a woman as the delivery man had assumed.
Greece
Greece train crash: What we know so far (BBC)
Two trains (a passenger train and a freight train) have collided in northern Greece, killing at least 36 people and injuring dozens of others. The passenger train, which was carrying about 350 people, was travelling from Athens to Thessaloniki and collided with the freight train when it emerged from a tunnel.
It is still unclear what caused the crash but the regional governor says the two services were running on the same track.
Everywhere lol
TikTok will limit teens to 60 minutes of screen time a day (but you can turn the limit off) (The Verge)
This is interesting (and will not work)!
TikTok has announced a batch of new features intended to reduce screen time and improve the well-being of its younger users. In the coming weeks, a daily screen time limit of 60 minutes will be automatically applied to every TikTok user under 18 years old. Teens that hit this limit will be asked to enter a passcode to continue watching. They can disable the feature entirely, but if they do so and spend more than 100 minutes on TikTok a day, they’ll be prompted to set a new limit.
🌞 London Laura: A Case For Dating The Person Who Makes You Cringe 🌞
Laura is our resident ray of sunshine and co-host of Culture Vulture (our weekly pop culture podcast!) She’s a new London dweller, chief of romanticising literally everything, and will definitely ask you all what your love language is at some stage.
Firstly I want to say how WONDERFUL and more importantly *relieved* I am to have that first Culture Vulture out in the world and in your lovely, supportive and kind ears!!! To be completely honest I came off the mic literally mortified at what my voice sounded like / hating my laugh / etc etc and swore to never listen back… but also just a WAVE of relief that the first was done and it’s only up from here right?? (Luce was right it is the best feeling)! So I am fighting my own cringe and leaning into feeling SO grateful to be able to be part of this amazing community, get on the mic with Luce and bring you a snippet of our conversations each week here in the newsy! I so hope you get something out of them even if it is just the occasional dose of trickle-down therapy <3
Which brings us to this weeks ep - A Case For Dating The Person Who Makes You Cringe! In one of my first-ever coffee dates with Luce & Liv, we were discussing Love Island and ‘getting the ick,’ and I brought up this theory I have that sometimes, you should push through the ick and date the person who makes you cringe. At the time, my friends and I had just been through a series of situations where we were going on dates with regular, kind people and yet finding ourselves cringed out over genuinely ridiculous things, like a loud laugh or being ‘too’ nice. We kept looking for a catch, which caused some less than honourable moments of us avoiding our way out of dating situations for no real reason other than a lack of butterflies.
Enter, 💥attachment theory.💥 According to the theory, your early experience of relationships in a familial or romantic space, can affect how you see love, and the types of people you are drawn to. To someone who is accustomed to a will-they-won’t-they just out of reach love (which I also think we have been fed as ‘normal’ thanks to growing up w Chuck and Blair, Ross & Rachel etc etc), it seems far more compelling to move towards the person ‘woven out of red flags’ a la Mr Big, than to sit in the (what we perceive as) slightly cringey, available uncomfortableness of a person who isn’t bothered about breadcrumbing.
In his book Attached (which has really brought attachment theory back into pop culture discourse over the past few years) Dr Amir Levine describes three attachment styles and how they may present themselves in relationships:
Anxious: crave intimacy, often preoccupied with relationships and long to get closer to their partner.
Avoidant: equate intimacy with a loss of independence, distancing self, the idea that something better is around the corner.
Secure: feels comfortable with intimacy, can remain independent and open.
Levine goes on to discuss the strategies that anxious and avoidant attachers subconsciously implement to turn off their attachment needs, and they sound a lot like cringing (pulling away when things are going well, looking for superficial shortcomings etc etc.)
With these in mind, the case for dating someone who makes you cringe is that if you are used to love that causes you to feel a bit anxious, that makes your stomach flip and gives you butterflies (or what Levine calls an activated attachment system 🚨), but then you start dating someone who makes you actually feel quite calm (or dare I say cringe a lil), there is a chance you could decide very early on it isn’t worth another date. And that may well be because you just aren’t into them! But it might be because they actually aren’t playing games and they have a secure relationship style that you associate with boredom and indifference, and you might be letting someone possibly great pass you by.
I will say, there is a LOT of critique of attachment theory - and like any theory we love to jump on to describe ourselves, I think it’s a helpful tool when we need rhetoric to describe things we are feeling but not as a box to put ourselves into! When it comes to putting this in context to who we’re dating, it’s a fine line to walk between ‘I’m a bit cringed out’ and ‘I’m just not into you’ (because without some ✨spark✨ it’s going to be hard to ever get past go.) But, if there is maybe something there, and if those who love you are saying this seems healthy - it is my prerogative to believe that the person who makes you cringe a little, the one who perhaps dances when you walk down the street or is maybe a bit too keen on organising a second date, is maybe the one that you should look at a bit more closely, at least once.
And to end I am going to leave you with a quote from another niche crush of mine - author Alain de Botton:
“The truth is, everyone really is a bit wrong from close up. The partner truly best suited to us, is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace.”
See you over on Culture Vulture!!
London Laura xxx
Listen to this week’s episode of Culture Vulture here:
Dave Grohl ditches guitar for meat smoker and feeds 450 people in need
Full disclosure - I don’t usually use TMZ for my sources for this newsy, but today I am (because it’s better than citing a tweet!) Dave Grohl is actually a LEGEND - the other day he showed up at The Hope Mission in Los Angeles around at around midnight “with some overnight gear and a massive meat smoker” to cook for the around 450 people in need.
According to TMZ Grohl was cooking for 16 hours (14 to cook and 2 to let the meat rest) “whipping up ribs, pork butt, brisket, cabbage, coleslaw and beans.”
They also said that Dave “handled all expenses himself and got some sleep here and there in the parking lot while the meat was getting smoked.”
There goes our hero.
Today’s mundane poll:
To get my Friday diary entry, a whole bunch of links and recommendations, and Bel’s Sunday morning newsy ‘No News Is Good News’ become a paying supporter 💌
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Did the postman think all mummies are women because otherwise they'd be "daddies"? 😅
I complete agree with dating the person that makes you cringe. When I started dating my partner, there was a lot that made me cringe, but I was in a very weird place in my life, and he communicated so well and was calm and adult, and after fighting it for like a month or two, I realised how truly great he was and let myself "give in" to it.
We've been together 5+ years and have a baby on the way, and the stuff I would've cringed at in the past is now what makes me die laughing 🥰 there's also a LOT we don't have in common, but the important stuff we are aligned on!