how to leave your home

1. get the boxes out of your closet
2. take the posters down one by one
3. pull off the wall paint trying to get putty off
4. throw clothes in your suitcases indiscriminately
5. give up for the day, start drinking
6. find your best friend and walk in circles with her
1. go to the end of the world and take silly self timer photos
2. smoke a joint with the boy who has had crushes on both of you
3. sit on the dining hall porch blatantly drinking at 4pm
4. go into her house for the first and last time in 2020
5. sit at the edge of campus and reminisce about your ex boyfriend doing xanax there years ago
6. find your friends who are spiraling and take them to dinner
7. go live on instagram
7. go home and pack another suitcase
8. try not to think too much
9. put on your suit
10. draw on your mustache
11. try hard to believe this won't be the last time you'll get to do this
12. get even more drunk with your best friends
13. play a murder mystery game
14. paint stars on your face
15. put on your favorite jumpsuit
16. sit with your friend while she pukes
17. talk to her about her relationship and how you love her and how scared you all are
18. walk across campus
19. smoke weed in the art building
20. scream in the auditorium
21. arrive at a house in the woods
22. jump so hard you worry the floor will break
23. pass around a bottle of poppers
24. find out the people you've been in awe of were in fact in awe of you
25. do laps and laps and laps
26. scream along to young wild and free like it's 2012 again
27. sit with your best friend for a while
28. share a time that is private and real
29. enter a hall of mirrors
30. dance on the springboard floor to super rich kids on the piano
31. lie on the floor and feel very small
32. smoke a joint with your best friends in your living room
33. pass out
34. eat brunch
35. put books and sheets in boxes
36. write a long blog post that can't come close to capturing the past 24 hours
37. close the boxes

i love you all very much. 

party monster

hello! i am drunk! you know when you throw a party and things just click into place? it is the kindest best feeling. in my fashion class today, we were talking about the purposes of style and i realized mine is to make my body feel like a home. my room is so interchangable with my body to me and when both are decorated to feel extravagant and beautiful everything feels Right.

there's a lot of stuff in my not-here life that does not feel Right right now, so it is very very good to have this place be a constant. i'm trying to get better at talking about it, while at the same time trying to be less public online; a strange balance.

sidenote: if you don't fuck your friends i don't trust you. this is one of the things lesbians and trans people are best at.

when i was younger, i used to try to make parties that felt like the rookie mag shoots i loved. they were quaint and charming; we were sober the whole time. this fall, my best friend grace and i had a 21st birthday party themed after rookie. it was stylized and insane and wonderful.

i look back at that kid and i feel so much compassion for her; she just wanted things to HAPPEN already. that was never going to be possible in suburban washington, i've learned. every year, i grow further apart from the people i grew up with; every year i am more myself.

just as not all stylized parties are good, the best parties are un-stylized, like tonight. it is nice to be back in a place where the spur of the moment feels so full of possibilities.

unlike kaitlin, i made no promise to link these to the internet. still, i will.
here is a photo of all my friends in my room, but not their faces.

here is tavi's forever editor letter, a missive from another lifetime. 

here is this feeling in a song.

goodnight. kiss your friends heads and tell them about your old crushes on them.

insomniac in a cute room

i got back to college on Monday after 2 months away. the main change this term is i have my own room for the first time since i was 18 (i also had my school assigned roommate for 2.5 years, which might be a record?)
i definitely come into room design with something to prove, since so much of what i do here centers around having a cohesive visual look & designing spaces that are comfortable and stylized. a lot of people here play into the lace curtains/cottagecore/victorian haunted doll look, and i love it but i want my space to be something of a contrast to it. i'm not quite done with my room right now, but here are some *~first looks~* after 2 days of working on it whenever i'm not in class...

reading corner feat chair left by my dearly departed roommate

unfinished bed area and my friends who are short

another thing about being back is that i'm having terrible jetlag/insomnia. but my pain is your gain because here i am online at 1:45 am with room decorating images i've been thinking about for you. most of these are from flashbak.com which is generally pretty good but also there's something vaguely sinister about it? it's like. not quite old enough to be retro in terms of layout.

i'm really into the idea of a hammock just because i feel like it'd be nice for my back

i am absolutely in love with these graphics, which look like they'd be on the cover of a faded paperback in my mom's old boxes

my eternal dream is to live in a 1960s chidrens home decor album and i'd trade it all for that in a heartbeat

this is just here because it has gay vibes

obviously i am obsessed with the Madonna Inn and have been since i was 15. at the top of the stairs are tiny hidden loft beds that seem incredibly cozy. 

ok now i'm going to go smoke and try to sleep. goodnight internet i love you! 

vee day

happy valentines day! here is my favorite arthur russell love song that's not that's us/wild combination. one time i got home while coming down from acid and this song was playing on blonded radio. we listened to it while we ate dinosaur egg oatmeal, and it was excellent. 

today i am celebrating the fact that the guys from the how to make an alt-j song video have confirmed that it is, in fact, a gay video. love is real but only for those two. mostly i'm just glad we don't have to deal with those comic sans valentines day cards any more. when i was 15 my internet girlfriend sent me like 20 of them printed out, along with 24 jonas brothers valentines cards for kids that she'd written different names on. no one does love quite like long-distance lesbian teens. 

(the other day i sent a playlist she made me of historic lesbian love songs to my boss to play at an event. adulthood and being professionally gay are both very weird)

this is my second valentines day no longer engaged; a strange thing that i am probably too open about, but whatever. this time last year i was in the deep throes of it, and now it's something i only (?) think about for like 10 minutes a day. i still had a dream about it last night though. 

i just finished danny lavery's book, which had some great lines but didn't really gel together for me, probably because i have no great knowledge of medieval scholarship or the bible. still, he talks about how he always felt like his body was a family resource, rather than his. 
what a perfect description of growing up with parents who tell stories of you in the public eye.

it's interesting to be a child of a public figure writing about motherhood/marriage/parenting just a few years before all the kids of mommy bloggers etc. there's so much more discourse around it now in a way i never saw when i was first starting to think about it. 

i used to have this patricia lockwood quote up in my studio that really sums it all up. 

anyway, happy valentines day. i hope no one is writing about you. 

capital p posting

i've written so many blog introductions that it's maybe impossible at this point to write one that feels genuine? 

here is what i'm doing right now. i'm sitting in the back room of a prominent archive pretending to write an article about a 1950s lesbian.
really i'm listening to a new ezra furman album and texting with kaitlin (who inspired me to start this) about the weirdness of growing up online. 

i'm lou and i'm 21 and i started my first blog when i was 8. i don't have a gender but i've had lots of terrible sex. i like douglas sirk films and visual lushness and old interior decorating magazines. i'm gay for pay but in a very dull institutional way. i'm an archivist and curator in real life which means i have at least a hundred images on my desktop at all times. 

i grew up on tumblr and am still sort of on it, believe it or not, a lot of people think tumblr shut down after it banned porn but pretentious teens are still using it to get into fights. 
i'm bored of fighting and i miss spending all my time on weird websites that are just old men taking photos of 1950s hotel interiors.
this is a place for these images and to create a visual catalog somewhere between social media and diary. 



i've had an online persona for as long as i can remember so i guess this is a way to scale it back while still filling the impulse to Post. i was at a talk by tourmaline (who made this movie) last night and she told us to make things that aren't supposed to be seen, and this is my attempt to do that. 

that's all. here we all are together, me and you, alone on the internet for the first time in a while. 

⚮ (this is the official emoji for divorce according to unicode)