Don't kiss your phone!

I've been listening to "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" at least once per hour, and I've also been watching the music video. Don't kiss your phone, it's dirty! The boy in that video who is not Soulja Boy has a notched eyebrow, which I think all boys should be trying in quarantine.

Relatedly, the tall boy I have been dating for three weeks needs a haircut, and it's going to fall to me to give it to him. Can you believe that? That's too Instagram poem even for me. That's literally a Regina Spektor song.

Saturday night we were sitting in my room reading a Vice article about the best way to respond to nudes, because neither of us had ever received one (or we were lying) and neither of us had ever sent one (or we were lying). The advice was hysterically bad. It was like, "Don't say you look heavy," and Don't use the tongue emoji. "Boys, send a photo back but not of your dick"—I'm paraphrasing—"Try one of your hip bone or your fingers." It was cracking me up. No one has any idea what they're doing! The tall boy took a photo of his fingers while we were sitting there and showed it to me. I laughed some more and said "hot." Boys were also supposed to text "FUCK," and that was the only approved verbal response.

The next night, I was supposed to be working on my book but instead I (obviously) drank three glasses of wine and phoned a friend for some advice on taking my first-ever iPhone camera roll photobook of nudes. She told me to grow up, basically, which is fair. I was nervous about the fact that I don't really aspire to be sexy in general, and I only have Savage X Fenty lingerie which is pretty glaringly cheap-looking even to the untrained eye, and I don't know my angles, and my phone is from 2016. As the process went on, I grew increasingly worried about the fact that I'd had to place a mirror on my bare mattress and that the resulting photos were total compositional chaos. There were some bad moments. But I thought I would get further if I imagined the audience as my Tumblr followers in 2012 rather than the tall boy I met earlier this month and now have to basically live with until a plague is over, which turned out to be correct. My friend cropped the photo of my butt I sent her and returned it to me and told me to pass it on, which I did after another glass of wine. And the tall boy did exactly what I wanted him to do: he said "FUCK" and then he sent me the photo of his hand he'd taken in my room the night before. He said "the Live Photo makes it" and I realized it was a Live Photo. Oh my god. Then we talked about something else until I fell asleep.

I kind of already forgot that I did that, even though it felt like a very big deal while it was happening.

Here's my tiny new knife:

I'm not supposed to be spending money on myself during social distancing, but last night I had three glasses of wine again and spent $50 buying a long-sleeve t-shirt from a girl I follow on Tumblr who goes by yardsale666. The shirt is really two shirts cut in half and sewn together so that the face on the front is one-half Justin Bieber circa "Sorry" and one-half a demon. I had to have it, and I'll tell you why! That morning, I'd watched the "Where Are Ü Now" video twice, in absolute shock that it had been more than five years since it came out. That song feels like taking shots with simple syrup as a chaser. A feeling we will never have again? I wilted. Later that day, at lunchtime, I'd FaceTimed with James and he'd said mournfully, unprompted, "I think the peak of American life was that run of perfect Bieber singles leading up to Purpose in 2015. After that it's been downhill." I bought the shirt. Did Justin Bieber sell his soul for those three singles? No, he loves God. I don't know for sure that I will ever get to wear it out of the house, but as I said, it has half a demon face on it, so. James is escaping to Boston, where his girlfriend lives, and on the phone I said "that makes sense," but privately I thought "why would you even tell me? I could have just gone on thinking you were in Greenpoint." For once it could have been useful that he still refuses to location share.

One amazing thing: Ashley walked from Ditmas Park right up to the gate of my courtyard today, and I talked to her through the fence, six feet away. FUCK. I had written her a letter about the Justin Bieber-demon shirt and handed it to her carefully. What did we talk about? Boys. Haha! And whether we've already had coronavirus, who knows. Summer. The calories in wine. It was weird because I miss her every single day, yet it didn't really make sense to stand there like that for longer than half an hour.

I have been talking about my friends and family constantly. I want my sisters and I want to touch Ashley's puffy coat. Last night I told the tall boy the story of Tamar's career—a young star! He knows that Lizzie put Minion stickers all over her stomach at Loren's birthday party in 2016. I also told him that my sister wrote me a letter about how Niall Horan was going live on Instagram last week, talking to fans, and she'd wanted him to pick her so she could tell him I'm writing a book about One Direction, "but instead he picked a girl from either Uruguay or Paraguay who showed him how she organizes her shoes. No lie." If you think it sounds like I'm boring him you're probably right but uh, name one thrilling thing he could do right now instead?

Anyway, as I was writing this he texted me that he might leave the city.