Dear Cosmos Community,
Over the weekend my partner and I embarked on my least favorite apartment activity : spring cleaning. In my mind the apartment is “tidy,” but hauling all the junk I’ve buried in my closet is a, sigh, necessary reality check. I accumulate things. I treasure material objects. I am messy, and no matter how much I clean, the mess will return (my kitchen sink has been merciless in teaching me this).
Throwing things away is an emotional experience. I would like to experience the joy promised in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but instead I cycle through doubt, anxiety, and inclinations to rescue my stuff from the building trash can.
So in honor of my hard work and emotional tribulations, I present to you the five things that I have no reason to keep but do so anyway:
Plastic Zip-loc bags that come with Amazon packages. This is the trash that could be a utility treasure. I might need to store something in this flimsy bag, like, other plastic zip-loc bags from other Amazon packages! My partner’s reaction: “Why do we have these?” Good question!
Receipts (the kind that chugs out of the point of sale system). They are long and if you have been to CVS lately you know what I mean. Some are so old the print has faded off the receipt! My parents used to check their credit card statements against every receipt. Scratch that, they still do that, and I never will. One day I will finally admit this to myself.
Furniture packaging. Every appliance or furniture you buy comes with extra parts that you do not know what to do with. Here’s an extra screw to confuse you. Here’s the warranty statement in three different languages. Here’s a rectangular square encouraging you to sign up for your warranty. Various pieces of furniture and appliances I own have broken, and I have never fixed them with these extra parts! P.S. You do not need another IKEA Allen wrench.
Gift bags. Okay, so some of these are nice. I have a slick red one from Chop Suey Club, a thick white one from the Whitney Museum…I imagine myself repurposing them, but in reality, I just have a Target aisle stack of gift bags, and no gifts. Nothing could be more depressing. I couldn’t look when my partner threw them all away, but okay, I stole a few back. So if you get a gift in a Chop Suey bag from me, well, now you know its story!
Wires. They reproduce on their own, I’m sure of it!! One wire turns into twenty and I don’t know what any of them are for! Wires are ugly. They take up space and they do not have any use, until I need a wire, and of course, it’s missing. Fuck wires.
Happy Spring Cleaning! :)
What Paying Subscribers got last week!
5 for Friday — a weekly recommendation of music, films, shows, and artsy things related to identity and belonging! Last week, things for staying ~soft~, cuz reality is wEiRd.
Every paid subscription funds The Cosmos Care Fund, a creative aid fund that distributes micro-grants to Asian women storytelling projects. Applications for our next round of funding open April 1!
Our Community Reading Series for Asian Women Writers in partnership with Yu and Me Books is back with a powerhouse line-up!!! We had a full house last month, and tickets go *very fast* so RSVP now!
Community Reading Series for Asian Women Writers
March 30 | 630 PM | Yu and Me Books, New York City
RSVP is by donation ($5 or $10), and all proceeds go to The Cosmos Care Fund, a creative aid fund that distributes micro-funds to support Asian women in telling their stories. If you're interested in reading at our April or May events, please sign up here!
Meet the Readers
Irene Villaseñor’s writing appears in Queer Nature: An Ecoqueer Poetry Anthology, My Phone Lies to Me: Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and elsewhere. She’s also co-curator for Bespoke Next Gen, an all queer, all genre reading series based at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division bookstore in the NYC LGBT+ Center (and via Zoom and Youtube during the COVID-19 era).
Julie Moon is a Korean writer and translator who earned her MFA from Columbia University. The winner of The Missouri Review's Audio Prize in Poetry, she has published in Public Books, Arkansas International, Catapult, and more, and she is currently seeking representation.
Yuxi Lin is a Chinese American poet and former AAWW Margins Fellow. Her published writing can be found on yuxi-lin.com.
Aishvarya Arora is a poet from Queens, where she lives with a parrot named Scallion. She's currently a Poetry Coalition Fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop.
Nicole Zhu is a Chinese American writer based in Brooklyn. Her stories and essays have appeared in Catapult, Eater, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.
This week I’ll be making my way through Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s films (I reviewed Drive My Car for paying subscribers), binging Bridgerton, and forcing my frugal ass self to sign up for Apple TV so I can watch Pachinko. See you next Monday!