I don’t eat anymore, I practice #foodcore. I don’t take showers, it’s #waterfallacademia. When I go to the bathroom, it’s the less euphemistic #toiletcore. Brushing my teeth? Obvious, #toothcore. Yesterday, my cat practiced #vomitcore on my floor.

I’m kidding, of course.

I started college in the mid-1990s in a small midwestern town twenty minutes from another small college town. If you isolate young people from cool, they will invent their own cool, and that means subculture.

There was a lot of cross-pollination between these towns, and subcultures were everywhere. Hippy, grunge, and goth were big, but there were a many others that I couldn’t name then and definitely can’t name now. Unfortunately, I was a spod.

By the mid-20-teens, it seemed to me that the homogenizing effects of the internet had forever destroyed richly practiced aesthetic trends, but I really should’ve known better. Instead, they’ve exploded.

They also take themselves far less seriously, which is really for the best.

Yesterday, my husband and I decided that my new aesthetic would be ocean academia. We’re a step closer to moving to Los Angeles, so it makes sense. I’ll have access to a lot of seashells and other sea-related paraphernalia.

The beach where we go in Japan has dark grey sand with gold sparkles, which is really pretty, so I thought about bringing a jar of sand and sea back with me to support my new aesthetic, but I won’t because that’s insane.

Maybe it’s obvious, but I’m taking a more light-hearted approach to this week’s newsletter. This is something I need to do for my own mental health.

I’m only three months along in this journey, and I’m still figuring things out. I want to both respect your inboxes and give you my best work, so I can’t publish The Intentional Hulk weekly, anymore. The good news is that the quality of each issue should go up because I’m going to take more time with each post.

However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out my archives because I worked really, really hard on every piece.

Moreover, while I like to pretend I’m a serious writer, I’m actually most entertained by the minutia of daily life. It’s Seinfeldian in a way, except not funny because I’m not a comedian (although, my husband insists that I’m very funny). Maybe I should’ve been a poet (Seinfeld describes a poet as an “unfunny comedian”).

The point is, I’ve started another newsletter for people who don’t mind a little disrespect in their inboxes. It’ll be sporadic, random, and probably uncomfortably personal, but I hope it’ll be a place where everyone feels welcome. So, if that interests you, go there and subscribe.

This week, I mostly got into social commentary videos. There are too many good ones to link them all, so I chose two about Bridgerton because that TV show’s messaging perplexed me in about a hundred different ways. The plot did, too, but that was just bad writing.

The Liberal Escapism of Bridgerton by Broey Deschanel and Race-baiting, queer-baiting, colorism, featurism, and performative diversity by Khadija Mbowe. They’re both equally brilliant, but in different ways.