I know some people find aestheticising in the midst of pandemic crass, anti-material, oblivious to the needs of dying bodies. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'll regret leaning into the roses of 'bread and roses'. Right now though, I am coping with the fact that the coffeeshop is usually the calm workspace with background hum in my life, and like many of you, I am now deprived of it. A lucky deprivation and small, in a world of gross and horrific deprivations, but still.
I have previously resisted the Kawaii, the self-consciously over cute, but now I have a bullet journal and a hand-stitched mask that I embroidered with the Latin word for hope. I don't quite know how this happened. Perhaps my response to fear is to revert to an aesthetic of softness. Is this a cop out, a dodge? Maybe, probably. But that's what coping is, right? I'm not nostalgic for the prior world, because that wasn't this cutely or gently inscribed either.
Now, I'm sucking you all into my softness cult, my complete aestheticisation of the private cosseted world of my imaginary. I'm giving you my animated coffeeshop gifs on infinite loop. I hope they feel like a cashmere sweater, like anything but the well-trod spaces of your apartment, like low-fi tracks in visual stereo, like hygge, only less sinister somehow for their actual non-existence in a physical or political sphere. The "look" is from mostly spare, pastel-ish, 90's animes digested into clips by teenage Tumblr users since about 2011.
