#lives.

honestly, yeah! Lots is relative. I’m not constantly thinking about the past, but stuff reminds me of them all the time. Sometimes the way my husband says something will bring up an inside joke I had with an ex, or something he does will actually trigger a trauma response and I’ll have to journal and work with my therapist to figure out why I reacted that way and it’s usually because of an ex. Sometimes they come up in casual conversation like (here’s a goofy example) the other day a neighbor and I were talking about literature and he asked if I’d read James Joyce and I had because my college ex wrote his thesis on him, and then we chatted about how my ex went to Dublin for a magic the gathering tournament and lost his first round intentionally so he could bop around Dublin for free. I dated him for 4 years so there’s lots of stuff from my life at that time where he is just always gunna be a main character and that’s ok!

I feel like this question is related to how often I talk about Taylor’s exes(?) which I think is a really different question. There’s different reasons I’m interested in those relationships. Taylor is a public figure and artist. I feel pretty strongly that her biographical information is relevant to conversations about her art (not always). I’ve talked about this before but, to me, one of the biggest reasons I talk about Taylor’s music (instead of just listening) is that I find a lot of value in the mirrorball. It’s like talking with your friends and comparing notes about how people treat you- you don’t know what’s normal or fucked up without some sort of external mirror to reflect on and see how it relates to your situation. So talking about Taylor’s exes in the context of the music, I think, is really valuable for me in giving me data points to reflect on my own relationships. There’s also the generic celebrity gossip interest angle to it, too, I can’t deny. But my main reasons are, in order: biographical context for art, window for self reflection, and gossip.

I also think part of it is that you spend a lot more time thinking about your exes when you’re in slumber party mode (and Taylor music famously evokes this). Like I don’t shit talk my exes on a random night, but if the girls are gossiping and we’re sharing stories of times men hurt us, yeah, my exes are gunna come up a lot more often. So I think it might seem like I spend a lot of time thinking about my exes if data was only being collected during girl talk. I don’t really think about Taylor’s exes much at all unless they come up in conversation on here in that slumber party mode, or for artistic context, or within the art as a window into my own experiences. That’s the beauty of Taylor’s music. And I think, crucially, for better or worse, Taylor’s biography is the first entry point to interpretation and relating to a song. That’s true for the public and it’s true for fans. It’s a whooole lot easier to casually chat about how the music relates to Taylor’s love life than it is to really sit with how the music brings up stuff from your own life that you might not want to face. The biggest example is WCS. It’s a loooot easier to drop into “omfg I hate John Mayer for doing this to a person I care about from afar!” than it is to drop into “Omfg I had XYZ traumatic experience and now I’m spiraling!!” And the beauty of that gift she gives us is that we can hear the music from this point of emotional safety and distance, then, we can go deeper- sooo many swifties have had multiple therapy sessions entirely based on how WCS relates to their life. But talking about John as a total stranger makes it a lot easier to wrap your head around what he represents in your own life.

why would someone send out a printed tweet?

it's either he himself or george

Ready for the BOYS ONLY gig tomorrow! And GIRLS ONLY the day after. Fun weekend.

Let’s have a great time. These are my favorite lives.