notes from december: jumping up and down because I'm happy

December is gone so quickly. I’m fine with December, wish I remembered it more. I had Christmas. I turned a year older. I sat on a couch in a way I thought was liberating and deserved but kinda realized I’ve done that in an unliberating and undeserved way for the majority of 2024.

All I’ll say for now is that I’m not excited for the stupid stretch of winter. A part of me feels like Christmas should be in March, the long stretch of January, February, and March is so unrewarding.

Here are my notes from December:

• Skipped out on a party where I could’ve had the opportunity to meet Sophia Coppola because I felt like I needed to lock myself inside, draw the curtains, and be an iPad kid to reset to prevent any further damage I could bring upon myself. A part of me wishes I went out more, but a bigger smarter part of me knows that I’m sensitive and would wither if I exposed myself to the egos of other New Yorkers more often. Going to the Lower East side feels like walking through a high school cafeteria, being in Soho feels like I’ve been transported to an outdoor mall in Florida, and Bushwick is an ‘Everyone I’ve Literally Ever Met in My Life’ convention. I think it’s good to know when to draw back, I’m no stranger to a public freakout, I actually love doing it, just, not in front of people who love to tweet.

• Friends who come into my life during these months are always so shocked when I become a beautiful, fashionable woman come Spring. I don’t really know how to dress for the winter, and I’m a horrible accessorizer. I only owned one belt I got from the boy’s section at Target until recently (x). I got into the season thinking this year is going to set a precedent, but I always end up looking shapeless, lumpy, and weird until April.

• My top two songs of the year were both from Camila Cabello’s album CXOXO- B.O.A.T (x) and June Gloom (x). Again, the genius of this album has gone greatly unappreciated. Camila led me to places I’d never thought I’d be this year, like crying on the subway platform to a Pitbull sample while waiting for the M.

  

• I appreciate the sentiment but I don’t really love when people greet me by kissing me on the cheek, only because the moment before a cheek kiss there is always a deeply awkward hundredth of a second where I think I’m about to get kissed on the mouth.

• What the inside of my sweatpants looks like is my business—it’s private, like a fingerprint or a PIN. I’d rather give someone my social security and the login to my TurboTax account than offer a quick peek inside a pair of the Hanes sweatpants I got from Amazon in 2021 (x). 

• Absolutely despise fancy toilets with the separate unattached mechanism for flushing led by those two flat round unlabeled buttons that slightly suggest they could flush the toilet. I don’t care how fancy that bathroom is I just think it’s really rude to Naked & Afraid someone without a warning. Toilets are mythical as is and dragging two weird space-age buttons into the situation makes the ritual into alchemy, and that just seems a little unfair to me. Though, I do think the bigger button is probably for poop- these are the same bathrooms that have the decency to tape laminated posters to the wall about flushing tampons, I think it’s worth going to Kinko’s once more and adding another sign. Just a suggestion.

  

• I’ve realized I took the sleep I got as a child for granted. Some nights I’d be so deeply asleep that I’d wake up in the morning on the floor without remembering when or how I got there— these days I wake up knowing exactly why or how I hurt my body in the middle of the night.

• Ignorance is bliss and I wish I could be even stupider.

• My friend Lily was visiting from Paris and introduced me to the saying “as warm as a prison door” which I’m sure sounds better in French.

• My boyfriend and I bought a Christmas tree, something we’ve been discussing since the summer. I’ve never had a real Christmas tree before, and he’s Jewish so we wanted to start small. Immediately after purchasing it an older woman stopped us on the street and asked how much we paid for it, laughing before implying that we had been ripped off. I don’t care if the tree smaller than my head was 50 dollars it was the perfect size for this Christmas.

  

• I’ve been working on being kinder to myself. It’s hard to have a gentle hand when you’ve lived your whole life thinking the easiest route is to suffer, it’s really tricky unlearning that.

• I took less than 100 photos of myself this year.

• Working my way through a 4-hour video about South Park lore, that I was really enjoying until I did some research and apparently there is a lot of controversy in the greater South Park YouTube community around the video creator possibly plagiarizing. I’m a little bothered by the plagiarism claim, but not surprised, the video is 4-hours long and the target audience is asleep people, I’m more disturbed by my own need to consume this shit as a way to pass the time.

• Been practicing my internal monologue. For the longest time, I didn’t think I had one, but if I really try I can do it, it’s just not natural for me. It feels weird thinking so loud, but if this is what normal people do and I want to be normal, it’s worth a shot.

• Laminated my eyebrows because I was influenced by photos of Gracie Abram’s I saw on the internet. My eyebrows look amazing, but every morning I wake up with a thick layer of frost-like dry skin over my eyebrows that is so impossibly ugly that nobody on Facetime or in real life is able to admit it looks crazy.

• Thought God was trying to extend a hello to me through water droplets found on my table during my meal at the Ichirin in Bushwick.

• I can tell I’ve matured this year. I like salt and vinegar chips now.

• I'd like to make an early addition to the 2025 lexicon. A few days ago, my roommate Blizzy and I played Roblox, sitting just a few feet apart from each other in the living room. This setup made it easy for commentary to flow effortlessly between us. During our games, whenever our avatars got close enough to each other, I’d hit the space bar a few times to make my character jump, then announce to the room, “I’m jumping up and down because I’m happy.” After letting this sit for a few days, I texted Blizzy and we both agree that “jumping up and down because I’m happy” could have legs. It can be used as an adjective, a verb, or an abstract emotion for celebrations big and small.

• My favorite Christmas song is Magic Moments by Perry Como (x).

• Sat in complete darkness with my friend Ian for most of the day, before I came over he warned me and said over the phone “Mackenzie, you won’t even see my face”. I asked him what that meant and he told me that his apartment would be so dark that I wouldn’t even be completely sure I was speaking to him. We ordered Postmates, I got sushi and he got a Mormon soda (x) from Sonic (Pepsi and coconut coffee creamer) which I tried and wasn’t completely crazy about because I was brainwashed by my mother to dislike ‘dark-colored’ sodas. We watched an amazing documentary that was reuploaded to YouTube about a church-funded Christian haunted house.

• There is an epidemic spreading among actresses— a lot of them are afraid of looking ugly. I saw a movie at the beginning of this month, and I was completely distracted by how much one of the actresses in it seemed to be more committed to slaying every single frame instead of slaying the truth of her work. I understand that the world we live in is beyond superficial, but come on, where is the love of the game gone? I’m beginning to see it everywhere, even recognizing it in new media from the last few years. I need the girls to be unafraid to get ugly again, nobodies gonna tell on you if you do your job correctly. Do you want to slay for a Tiktok fan edit or do you want to carry an Oscar?

• Saw the Rockettes. I need to become friends with a Rockette immediately.

• I celebrated my birthday on the 21st, which means I’m 26 years old now. My boyfriend and I Ubered to one of my favorite spots in my home state, King Spa in New Jersey (x). It was a low-key day and exactly what I needed to finish off my year of recovering from exhaustion. We ate good food, and I tried the hottest sauna, which I had been fearing since I peaked inside of it once when I was 19. 

• I can never tell if sending a ‘react’ to a text message is weird. Sometimes I feel that it makes me come off as out of touch when I’m texting my friends. I can never tell what the general consensus is.

• Christmas was restful. My friend Marissa came over and we talked till nighttime. I gifted my boyfriend some Nerf guns.

• Saw Nosferatu, but was distracted by two things: Count Orlok’s mustache and an ad for a mobile game called Dice Dreams that played before the film that featured Samuel L. Jackson.

• Spent the first half of New Year’s Eve looking for my favorite black Los Angeles Apparel skort (x) in my room, a skirt that fits me so perfectly I’m able to overlook that sometimes it digs into my vagina in a way that makes me think God didn’t make me in his image. Spent the other half at my friend Sophia’s beautifully-lit house with Ian until he lured me back to his apartment to watch YouTube videos until 4 am. Beautiful.

Happy New Year <3

-Mackenzie <3 <3