rachel's wrap up 2023. part iii: nostalgic and slutty edition

i'm almost onto 2024 i swear

if you missed part i and ii of this chaotic journey through time, catch up first.

and once you have, join me in

november

ups n downs of november

good things that happened recently:

1. the canucks are playing well

2. ?

3. ??

4. ???

5. see above.

life, and all its many facets, have been kicking my cute little derrière as of late. one of those “when it rains it pours” scenarios. i am from the pacific northwest, after all. 

re-introducing a past feature on my newsletter, the “did a boy make rachel sad this month” counter.

yes.

sometimes you just have to put on a push up bra and too much makeup and set womankind back about ten years and listen to shania twain sing about how men ain’t shit. 

it’s wild how much women musical artists loved to slutshame back in the early-to-mid-aughts. and sing about murdering men. carrie underwood really said…family values except murder is good <3

…

today i heard my cat vomit while i was procrastinating a self-tape. 

so now i’m procrastinating two things. this essay makes three.

…

november wrapped up my time subletting housesitting for six weeks. there’s a certain playing pretend aspect to housesitting. “make yourself at home” they say. but you don’t know where the lysol spray is and still forget which light switch is which and you don’t want to use their q-tips that you only even need because the lighting in the bathroom is insane and you put on waaaaaay too much eyeshadow because you couldn’t tell that you were doing so and now you have to walk to the shoppers down the street to buy some looking like this because there is no neighbourhood london drugs which is a massive strike against but you’re also lucky to have gotten this amazing deal in this amazing location but am i really that lucky or has the housing crisis in vancouver just gaslit us all into misplaced gratitude. 

anyway. 

while housesitting i did sort of get to play a character. a version of my college self who was young and carefree and didn’t have to worry about the last train home because she was a city girl. like carrie bradshaw. i may even have had sex in the city. but i’m not one to kiss and tell. (yes i am but these are stories not to be documented in my monthly essay, i do have a BIT of a filter…come see me do stand up)

for so long what i missed about college was the community. the campus. the close-knitness. knowing if i walked into a particular building at a particular time i would run into 15 of my friends. on a friday night i knew what the plans were and if i didn’t, i knew the group that i would have no plans with. who i’d split the bottle of cheap tequila with. who i’d cry to in the stairwell at the party when the boy i liked was flirting with the other girl i pretended he didn’t like but deep down knew he did. and if all else failed, who would all just chill in my dorm room while watching the kissing booth 3 all laying strewn across my floor while eating chips i’d hoarded from the dining hall and drinking tea brewed in my illegal kettle. 

i first pitter-pattered into the film community which i, uh, didn’t love. (if you’re a person i know through film u rock don’t ever change it’s not u it’s those other people). i’ve often felt in the film community people constantly trying to one-up each other. the capital-N networking of it all is alive and well. 

“what are you working on.” uh, myself? 

“do you have any projects screening here?” what’s a cooler answer than no? 

“what do you do in film” how can i make acting but i’ll do whatever you want me to not sound desperate? 

i always felt on the outskirts even when i made my own freaking movie. it feels like a microcosm for vancouver and the industry as a whole. you on your own have no value. what you bring to the table does. i bring lots, but i’m also just, like, fun to have around? isn’t that enough? like yes i’ll be your grip but like, as a personality hire <3 okay but actually hire me to be your script supervisor. i’m a walking contradiction.

and if i’m being really, really honest, which i do have a knack for being in these oversharing monthlyish essays: i love comedy more than film. i want to do both, but laughing will and always has been my favourite thing in the world. 

and thus, enter: comedy.

and now? i know where the gang will be on a friday night. and a thursday night. and a monday night probably. and it’s the same bar. where the bartender doesn’t know our name but definitely knows our faces and is baseline annoyed when he sees us walk in every few nights with a gaggle of misfit vancouver comedians coming to stay ‘til closing time and will yell at me to stop standing on the leather booths when my song comes on. cause after a few vodka sodas, they’re ALL my song. 

so when you get the community you missed in college back, what’s left? 

the classes. the coursework. the craft. 

and it turns out i miss that too. 

i was always one that loved school. loved to learn. i’m curious and i like finding answers. i was too good at math for my own good. 

and so all my jokes about grad school are starting to feel less like a quarter-life-crisis-induced joke, and more like an inevitability. 

but then the october wave of covid and calamity both world-wide and in my own little corner of it sidelined, delayed, halted, put a pin in, and every other empty way of saying: 

i didn’t apply to grad school. 

i even had an accountability partner to work on our applications for mfa programs. and i still didn’t.

whether this was self-sabotage or procrastination or me really running out of time, we’ll never know for sure. but i have come to know through taking other writing workshops and short classes that i really crave the discipline and more than anything, the time and space to write. 

being a freelance artist is hard.

and so next year, i swear i’ll do it. 

selections from seattle

november, famously my least favourite month, also saw the arrival of my favourite person: my college roommate katrina came to visit during american thanksgiving. i’ve told her this before, but i think katrina taught me what it means to really and truly be a friend. to work on a relationship. to work through the things you have out of common because you care about what you have in. part of that is we were on purpose friends. well sort of. up until 18 most of your friends are just the accidental people who grew up in your town, went to your elementary school, were in your english class, lived down the street, did theatre, irish dance, you name it. sure there’s a bit of a filter of the people you gravitate more towards, but everyone has the same baseline origin story as you, barring a divorce or a dead dad. soccer instead of baseball. ballet instead of jazz. and those things matter, they change who you are, they do. but katrina was different. 

i joke that i annoyed katrina into being my friend. she’s from southern california and when we were forced to live six feet away from each other, she intimidated me a little. her wall was full of cool art she had made that i didn’t understand and cool postcards from art museums i surely wouldn’t have appreciated, but at 17, katrina was already well-travelled, well-read, and well-cultured. my wall was covered in string lights and VSCO-edited photos of my friends at prom. 

so the story goes. 

katrina smoked cigarettes which both shocked me and seemed otherworldly cool. unfortunately sometimes poison does still have a sexy allure. 

i have one particular memory of our early days at NYU where i was going to the campus newspaper open house during welcome week. i imagine katrina too had expressed interest in campus journalism or writing of some sort, cause i mentioned it to her and she and another friend of hers tagged along. 

that wasn’t the moment our friendship was cemented. but it was one of the building blocks along the way. 

another time a friend of hers got too drunk and i went with katrina to pick her up from a dorm across campus. 

she was there the first time i hooked up with a boy in college. well not literally there. but i remember her texting me saying “you’ve been making out for a long ass time.” which even three weeks into our friendship story, i knew was katrina for “are you okay?”

the thing about college roommates, and really college as a whole, is it’s a hypercharged environment where two months in you can’t imagine your life before or without these people. people you probably won’t be friends with by graduation, let alone the end of freshman year, but like all young love, it feels so real and so important you just have to believe it’s true. and sometimes, it is. 

by second semester katrina and i would regularly do things together. we tried to become stoners but got a terrible deal and i was always too scared to smoke near campus, and so made us trek 100 blocks uptown on the train to a park where we probably almost got murdered, but i was too high to realize. we then went to shake shack to cure our case of the munchies where i then made the glaring error of ordering the portobello burger, thinking this meant mushrooms AND meat. it did not. it was their vegetarian option. and power to ‘em, but high 19-year-old rachel wanted 100% angus beef. 

we went to tom’s diner from seinfeld on valentine’s day in the -12 degree cold, which still-california-coded katrina was not yet acquainted with. i remember the first time she saw snow fall from the sky. 

once katrina had the flu and i flagged down a cab to take her to urgent care. i felt at once like a true new yorker and a true friend. when you’re 18 and there’s no mom to nurse you back to health, someone else has to rise to the occasion.

she was supposed to transfer at the end of freshman year but a series of factors halted that effort, so she stayed. selfishly i thank god for the bureaucracies of higher education that kept her in new york. kept her in my orbit. my life. my world. 

i think katrina met me where i was: a naive 18-year-old who believed in love and magic and good in the world. but she also saw my brain, my passion, my intelligence. people often pick one or the other. 

katrina, for her elusive exterior, also loves romcoms and pop culture and gossip. she is maybe the best friend i’ve ever had. 

and so her november visit in the midst of a personal spiral, was both terribly and perfectly timed.

for she is a person i can 100% be myself around. 

it’s fun, too, when long-distance friends finally get to meet the facetime characters, finally getting to sort the web of the life you’ve built without them. it’s also a heartbreaking reminder of the vulgarity and boorishness of adulthood. me and katrina will in all likelihood never live in the same city ever again, and our friendship was born of accidentally living in the same city for five years. 

but. part of katrina’s trip was spurred on by a desire to possibly relocate to the pacific northwest herself. seattle specifically. (and pacifically, heyoooo) and so we trucked down. and by trucked i mean ferried. 

katrina, too, is a good travel friend. and not all good friends are good travel friends and vice versa. neither katrina nor i are big planners. we are wanderers. into coffee shops and bookstores and souvenir shops and thrift stores and whatever else strikes our fancy. we have no itinerary. just curiosity and each other. we wandered seattle and found everything we needed. dive bars and hockey bars for when the canucks and kraken were playing and i got to be the menace at the bar when the canucks won. we found the local movie theatre where i fell asleep watching the holdovers. we rewatched old movies and shared in new ones. our favourite of course is when harry met sally, a movie that sums up the middle of the venn diagram of our friendship: witty repartee and good writing and a love letter to the city we found ourselves and each other in. a love letter and a time capsule to capital R-romance and comedy and billy crystal and meg ryan and the timelessness of that white fisherman’s sweater and carrie fisher, god rest her soul. we found the shoes i had been searching far and wide for for years at nordstrom on black friday. and i stand by the fact that i flirted the sales associate into giving me the sale price. we found the gum wall and the underground tour and new memories with old friends. we found the bookstore that sealed the deal on seattle for katrina. we found the metro station to take to the train station at 6 a.m. on our last day. we found the cafe car that had exactly one (1) thing my new celiac diet could consume. we found laughs and newness in a nearly 10-year friendship. 

i’ve heard it said it takes seven years for someone to be in your life forever. so as of 2022, katrina is stuck with me. 

for a week we got to be regular parts of each other’s lives again. she came to a number of comedy shows with me so by the week’s end she got to know who was who. i took her to my favourite places. i pointed out street corners and bars where i’d kissed boys. she ordered london fogs everywhere we went, a thing i did not know originated in vancouver, but something else from my hometown i will absolutely be bragging about. 

and then she left. and we returned to a life of monthly facetimes and periodic text check-ins. but we will always have 18-year-old katrina and rachel inside of us. two people who did not go together but who learned how to be adults together. who drank four loko together and nursed our floormate back to health during spring break when we were the only ones on our floor who stayed on campus. who had crushes on the boys next door, because when you’re in university in new york, you have to. who had no business becoming best friends, but did. 

i sometimes resent i never fell in love in college. not in a requited way, at least. but i got so much more. i got magic and sparkles and new york and theatre and many best friends, and one of them is katrina. and that is beautiful. 

december

get u a girl who can do it all

forgive this rupi kaur-ass interlude. 

…

17:

i think 

i’ve forgotten how to smile.

happy girls don’t know how to smile 

they know how to act.

good girls don’t know how to smile 

they know how to pretend.

…

i’ve fallen into a pattern recently 

of returning books before i’ve read them.

books i’ve waited for too. i put them on hold 

i chose them

and then i rejected them.

boy metaphor alert. 

life metaphor alert. 

…

i left a scrunchie at a boy’s apartment this fall.

i don’t think i’m ever getting it back. 

…

things i left at boys’ apartments this year: 

• phone charger

• earring

• dignity

• scrunchie

…

today i was once again reminded that my family are bad people. 

…

i went to another funeral. my childhood just keeps on ending. 

…

of all the boys who have seen my naked body 

i don’t think any have seen my naked heart 

and vice versa 

…

okay it’s insane once again to read this in future rachel time, because november/december rachel was so sad about a boy. a boy that probably didn’t give a shit about me. or gave just enough of a shit to kiss me enough times to make me think there was something there but not enough times to prove there was. the classic carrot dangle, as it were. there are of course always the ones we will have soft spots for. ones that, despite our best efforts, we are one grand romantic gesture away from falling for all over again. show up to my bedroom window with a boombox playing my favourite song, and yeah, i’ll be yours. but of course the ones i like never do. the ones i like are not 80s romcom-coded, they are 2024 fuckboy-coded.

i always fall for the flirty ones. because we all do. they’re the ones that make you feel like you matter. but then their charm is that they make everyone feel like they matter. so when you kiss in a dark room it feels special. but this is in their playbook. but at least i was worth drawing up the play on the whiteboard. yeah i was one of the many. but i was one of the many. 

it’s funny, too, because with boys who fall for me, i am the flirty one who makes them feel special, because i was already special to begin with. 

…

sometimes i get jealous of people who didn’t go to university because i feel like i wouldn’t be smart if i didn’t go. like i needed a ride on that conventional cookie cutter conveyor belt to feel worthy and still, i am out here working three jobs plus random odd jobs here and there to have a whopping $0 in my savings. i know people who never went to post-grad who have savings and disposable income and are smart and funny and capable and i’m like well what the fuck did i waste that four years on?? but then i think i needed those training wheel years of glorified theatre camp. i needed time and space to blossom and grow and evolve, to become the best version of myself, to sound like a knock-off judy blume book. and that’s ok. sometimes cliches are cliche for a reason. and i have long been a walking cliche. i like that part of myself.

december also saw my open mic come to an end. for eight months i ran a stand up open mic that became a little bit beloved. but like all great love affairs — because i turn everything into a metaphor about love — it burned hot and bright and was never meant to last. but it will live in infamy. 

ultimately i’m proud of what i built. so many people said i was their first mic or first time trying stand up and that i made them feel welcome and safe and that all matters. that i could be the friendly face to people who just wanted to come try and make other people laugh, which is all i’ve ever wanted to do. i also got extremely drunk at the last one but that’s neither here nor there. a little vomit then is a good story now. 

i also produced a film in 2023. proving that within all the angst and burnout and existential anxiety, i can get shit done. i’m a great connector of people. maybe i can do this thing. drop the maybe. i can.

my mom has this annual christmas party called soup night where she makes giant pots of soup, the main star being maritime lobster chowder. 70+ family and friends (and let’s be honest mostly friends because we are chosen family girlies) gather to imbibe in merriment and soup and togetherness. i always invite a small contingent of friends and this year was a particular hodgepodge of childhood friends, comedy friends, acting friends, and university friends. okay natalie was the university friend, but that still counts. everyone ate soup and got to know each other and played silly games of charades and taboo and it reminded that through all the chaos that 2023 brought,

i have beautiful friends and a beautiful life. 

2023 as a whole

as i reflect on the year that has come to pass, i, a person afflicted by stage four nostalgia on the best of days, find myself particularly nostalgic at the year’s end, because of course, every media outlet is giving us 2023 best of this and that and the other thing. what’s in for 2024 and what’s out forever. new year's resolutions. horoscopes about live-laugh-loving our way into a better life. vision boarding away the pain. manifesting away the heartbreak. intentioning away the celiac disease. sorry that one might be mostly just me. 

nostalgia is definitely the sluttiest emotion.

and i’m not gonna lie,

i had sort of a slutty year.

but there’s a reason the thing we’re nostalgic for ended. 

that doesn’t make it less heartbreaking.

that’s the thing about endings and beginnings, is they can’t help but make you feel nostalgic by design and make you long for the life and love and laughter of the past year and years and for those yet to come. what has been and what could be all wrapped up in one glib little bow.

the thing is though, as my collection of ascots would suggest,

i do love a good bow.

i’m a frivolous person. i don’t think i’ve ever let on otherwise.

catch u soon,

xoxo,

rach