The recovery takes time and it takes space
The more I do this, the more newsletters just feel like the new blogs
I went on TikTok yesterday and I found myself on ThinEyebrowsTok. Gen Z kids — who have never known anything other than full, bushy eyebrow trends — are discovering thin brows and I couldn’t be happier. I knew it was just a matter of time before the overplucked brows of Generation X would be vaguely acceptable again.
The lingering
Getting over covid is weird. I described having covid as being like a cold in slow-motion. Recovery is different from that though.
Physically I feel ok, no respiratory symptoms anymore, other than a vaguely runny nose that is more like hay fever than anything else. If I go for a walk (or do anything physical), that’s fine while I’m doing it but afterwards I feel mentally drained.
It’s a weird feeling that’s kind of hard to describe because I’ve never experienced anything like this before.
There’s also a curious thing I’m seeing on social media. No one wants to directly say they have covid. There’s talk of the “spicy cough”, which tbh doesn’t work for me because I didn’t have much of a cough and it was pretty low-key, nothing to warrant spicy. But maybe that works for others.
Load up your suitcase and think of home
Behold! When quarantine-free travel and scores of New Zealanders flooded back into the country, Auckland Airport handed out goodie bags full of Kiwi treats, snack food and a bottle of hand wash.
I have friends who live overseas and they regularly ship over care packages of their favourite foods. But it’s all the treats of their childhood — Burger Rings, Peanut Slabs, L&P, not the mostly new products of the goodie bag.
If you’ve been living overseas for 15 years, you’re not going to have a nostalgic hankering for Feijoa Lumps because they’ve literally only been around for one month.
The commercialisation of the feijoa flavour is also a new thing. Feijoas used to be the fruit that your neighbour would always be trying to give you by the bucketful. Now it’s a flavour of commercially made foods, with the feijoa flavour available in wine, sorbet, cider, jelly, smoothies, yoghurt, cheese paste, and a plethora of fizzy drinks.
But maybe all the homesick expats will fill up on feijoa lumps and take a suitcase full back home with them, forever associating the sweetie with taste of New Zealand (even though no one really eats them here).
Spending the nostalgia coin
I don’t exactly know how I stumbled across it, but this is “Bring Back the Time”, a new song from New Kids On The Block, featuring Salt-N-Pepa, Rick Astley and En Vogue.
The lyrics are nostalgic and reference 1989, but musically it’s more like something from the mid ‘80s. And while all those four artists were top pop acts of their era, back in the ‘80s they all existed in their own bubbles. But maybe, as the ones who have survived all these decades, they get to form their own club of ‘80s pop cool kids.
If I’m going to get nostalgic for a pop hit of 1989, it’s going to be Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance”. It’s recently been covered by fellow Swede Robyn, who distills the song into its essential parts, with a tense, minimalist arrangement. So there are two sides of the nostalgia coin — one side is NKOTB, the other side is Robyn.