Meme Report 4/3
Slow Meme Week
David Foster Wallace
It’s long been said but it really is true that no one knows how to be normal anymore. There are two things I know for sure about David Foster Wallace. He wrote Infinite Jest, and he wore a bandana that covered his entire forehead. We can talk about his legacy as a writer, his work itself, and his iconic (literal interpretation of the word) fashion choices. The internet is an ongoing conversation about everything all the time. People are constantly getting yelled at for not having all parts of the conversation at once. This most recent iteration of the David Foster Wallace conversation was just supposed to be “crazy about the headband, right?” which I think is not discussed enough. I understand the desire for that to open up further conversations about David Foster Wallace but here’s the thing we’re just talking about the headband. Everyone else can talk about whatever they want whenever they want but the point of having nuanced multifaceted conversations is that there is also room for a meme about how he committed to those bandanas. We can have every conversation at once but one must understand what part of the conversation they’ve inserted themselves in. Sometimes it’s just about the bandana.
NYT Connections
Recently an easy way to get a decent handful of likes is to complain that the New York Times game Connections is too difficult. Everyone jovially agrees that the puzzle is too hard. Except some days these complainers show too much of their hand. They reveal that they might just be stupid. Especially on April Fools. Emoji day was not that difficult. It was fun! They should do it more often!
Listen I get it, the crossword is hard. It’s long and you have to devote time to getting better at it. You can’t just pick it up one day and be a part of the conversation. You have to do a lot of them to understand them. Wordle is fun but it’s easy. It’s mostly strategy and requires no understanding of the world beyond the game. Connections is a little bit more difficult. Of course, there’s the occasional bullshit category. You try coming up with 4 categories a day, every day. The secret to connections is that you only ever have to get 3 and they’re ranked by how hard they are to think of. What a lot of people seem to not understand is that the rest of us like the way it feels when we don’t understand right away. It’s fun for us that this is somewhat difficult, and most days it isn’t that difficult. We like thinking. It’s not for everyone.
TikTok
Fighting
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It’s interesting when a TikTok trend takes place in entirely the same kind of living room. Almost everyone participating in this trend lives in a new build and has Threshold by Target accessories in the background of the frame. It’s not Peak Millennial Cringe. It’s just the slop that fills the middle of Millennial Cringe. They make bland content for no one about nothing. None of these arguments strike me as real things the couples fight about but ideas that people might fight about to be relatable. It lacks specificity and everyone is giggling too much. I would love some real anger or details. This trend is just laying the groundwork for brands to use it between now and when they can start selling us the perfect summer. They’re manufacturing content.
Candid Girlfriend
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There is a great culling that happens in your 20s. People are sorted into categories of talented, influential, special and other. Some people are forced to face the reality that they are simply other. They are more or less normal. Some people are not normal but just not talented enough for mass market appeal. Maybe not even talented enough for a niche audience. This realization comes either slowly over time or as a nagging suspicion that is confirmed by some final rejection. This whole argument happening online about the candid girlfriend is everyone dealing with their own anxieties about entering the rest of their lives as one of the unspecial. Candid Girlfriend is a new name for the boogeyman awaiting us. A normal girl who is not special but gets all the good things the special girls are supposed to enjoy. The girl with the microphone is still attempting to be one of the special people and everyone yelling at her is defending their right to not be unique or interesting. Some people can’t help but be interesting, some people have decided to accept their fate as one of the boring people, and some people have just been boring the whole time.
This is a case where everyone is so wrapped up in their anxieties that there’s no one worth agreeing with. It’s all projection. The girl making the criticism is essentially piggybacking off of manic pixie dream girl discourse from ten years ago. I don’t think it’s even a popular opinion that men want to date artistic and expressive women anymore. The people criticizing her are so mad that she would dare go after boring people that I simply can’t defend them. There’s a whole world out there of interesting thinkers and you’re defending boring people? Come on. The only winner in this whole scenario is the girl who said that we’re going to get Candid Girlfriend inspired ads shortly. Get ready for the Candid Girlfriend collection from Anthropologie! The trad wife comes to Murray Hill with a nice harmless rebrand: The Candid Girlfriend.