The coolest club I've never been to

I don't own Tabis but I'm still just like other girls

Weird Zoloft dreams: I started taking 50mg of sertraline, the generic for Zoloft, in August. It has been my first time taking an SSRI and it has quite literally saved my life. I had quite a lot of side effects for the first month or so, but they’ve all since abated apart from bizarrely vivid dreams almost nightly. Last night I dreamt that a guy I went on exactly one (1) date with invited me to a club in the Lower East Side. It was shaped like a giant locker room, with hundreds of different rooms inside that each had a completely different “vibe,” played different music, etc. One room was filled with “brat” Bushwick gays and another was filled with finance bros. There was also a Momofuku and Chick-Fil-A. I spent a long time looking for this aforementioned somewhat random man in this enormous club and by the time I found him we both wanted to leave, which we did. It was the coolest club I’ve ever been to, or rather never been to. It’s hard to wake up from my Zoloft dreams and not feel as if it actually happened, in some other distant reality.

Why don’t we have house parties anymore? I have always been a big advocate for house parties because 1- I spent most of my formative years in London and they are more popular there for whatever reason and 2- I don’t like shouting at bars or clubs AND not having any control over the quality of music being played. Most people hate New Year’s but I actually like it because it seems like one of the only times of the year that I can rely on there being a good house party for me to go to. This New Year’s I went to a great house party and it was the perfect mix of people I knew very well, people I knew somewhat well, and people I’d never met. I wasn’t happy with what I was wearing but it didn’t matter that much because I was around people who knew and loved me, and I’d rather that feeling than being crammed into a bar or club with a bunch of strangers. Anyway, let’s have more house parties. I’m actually a little reticent to write this for fear that everyone is going to house parties all the time and I am actually just not invited to any of them (“is everyone hanging out without me” etc) but I’m going to be brave and press the return key now.

aforementioned New Year’s party with my two childhood best friends

Food in Queens: On Saturday I saw Babygirl (again…) with Inès and then we drove to Queens to EAT. This is one of my favorite things to do; the drive is long enough to listen to some good music but not so long that I feel like I am driving to my mom’s house in Connecticut. There is also a suburban teenager in me who loves to drive around chatting and getting stoned, only I don’t get stoned anymore. In 2025, I would like to attend more house parties and I would also like to get driven around the five boroughs in search of good food. Without sounding like a “I took the 7 train to get this birria taco you have to try”-type food influencer, some of my favorite places in Queens are Angel, Taste Good, and Homemade Taqueria.

Can anyone help me track down these books? I’m looking for Sex Objects by Eric Kroll (readily available but stupidly expensive), the Zizek Abercrombie catalog (linked as a PDF but I’m after the print version), and Did She or Didn’t She by Mart Martin. If you know me in person then you are probably thinking that those are pretty on the nose, which brings me to my next point.

I’m not special: I am working on a longer essay about this but I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that the “not like other girls” are actually “just like other girls.” New York is full of girls who developed an individuality complex for being seen as “the edgy one” in high school, only to later move to a city that is populated exclusively by girls who also were “the edgy one” in high school. I have never felt much pressure to fit in — rather, I always wanted to stand out, and as I get older I can’t decide whether I feel bothered by the fact that I no longer feel like I do. Once a boy I was dating sent me a meme about girls who wear Tabis, to which I responded, “I don’t own Tabis” (I don’t!). We stopped talking soon thereafter and on the next date I went on, the boy made a joke about how I was “probably the kind of girl who has multiple pairs of Tabis” (I DON’T). Hearing the same comment twice in one week was harrowing and I don’t know how to feel about being placed into such a neat box, a box which I don’t even think is the correct box for me, but maybe my self-perception is completely off and it is? Anyway, I’m starting to feel like the edgiest thing one can do is to shop at Macy’s or something.

me and a new bag I bought because I didn’t like how recognizable my Balenciaga City bag had become

Fantasy vs. reality and getting older: There are three layers of fantasy; 1- a somnolent dream state, 2- “awake” fantasy e.g. daydreaming, 3- actual, stone cold reality. I have spent a lot of my life living in 2 and my main goal for the past year or so has been to live mostly in 3, but as a writer I by nature have to shift into 2 to do my job, and my Zoloft dreams put me back into 1 almost nightly. As I get older the 3 feels easier to inhabit but sometimes I miss the comfort and teenage feeling of 2. This is a half-baked thought but I wanted to get it out!

Love,
Vera x