I love my weird brain?

My friend Candice started a Substack called Best Thing, Worst Thing and it rules. It's still slightly surreal to refer to her as my friend because our friendship is something of a modern fairytale: My parasocial friend Candice (co-host of Slate's ICYMI podcast until Oct., 2025) loses her job the exact same day that I lose mine. I post my job loss and resume update on LinkedIn a few weeks later and thee Candice Lim is one of the handful of people to like it (like, woah). I message her out of the blue to suggest a coffee meet up, we make it happen, we sit at Alcove in Los Feliz for a solid three hours on a brisk December morning, gossiping about our former employers and digging deep into the cultural ephemera that fascinates us both. We keep at it until that brisk morning becomes yet another unseasonably warm December afternoon. And just like that, my parasocial friend Candice is my IRL friend Candice(!). Should I lightly fictionalize this story into a novella that I can submit for MFA programs or otherwise hyper-competitive writing courses?

I bring all of this up because I love how gleefully and unabashedly Candice recounts her cultural consumption. This is how I was as a kid, until I began picking up on not so subtle context clues from my peers that (to cite just one example) it was weird to have big thoughts and feelings about what Jonathan Pryce and Antonio Banderas were doing on a performance level in the 1996 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. It was actually very weird for a 12 year old living in Jonesboro, Georgia in 1996 to have any thoughts or feelings whatsoever about renowned British character actor Sir Jonathan Pryce. It was also very weird for a 12 year old living in suburban Georgia to see the 1996 adaptation of Evita, the much hyped and roundly lambasted star vehicle for Madonna, upwards of four times in the theater and to then perform along to the film OST alone in her room after school everyday for months on end — after she was done watching that afternoon's installment of The Rosie O'Donnell Show, of course. But I digress. I learned a few tricks and techniques for masking before this, but I'm pretty sure this is where it kicked into high gear. Even when I moved to LA a couple of years later and mostly hung around with child actors, I still kept it in check. I knew the handful of people I could go full sub-pop culture geek with, but I otherwise stuck to my trained nonchalance.

Riffing on the question that was the standard for Candice's former podcast: "What's your first internet memory?" I have a relatively cliche first one about visiting a family friend who had AOL in their home years before I ever did, but my core internet memories are as follows:

1.) Discovering that IMDB existed and using it to look up character actors almost every day as a 15 year old.

2.) An extremely dumb (and hella sexist??) early flash game where you would play as "Felicity," the titular character from the WB series Felicity, and the game would randomly assign you to chase after either Ben or Noel.

The Felicity game would begin once you heard the prompt: "I want Ben!" OR "I want Noel!" Then you'd run through a maze trying to catch your guy with a little voice running the entire time and repeating either "BenBenBenBenBen, BenBenBenBenBen" or "NoelNoelNoelNoelNoel, NoelNoelNoelNoelNoel." Your object of affection could switch mid-game and if you bumped into the wrong boy, you died. It was basically Pac-Man, but for making fun of a boy-crazy college freshman. This is a real thing that existed, so very very real. GREAT JOB INTERNET!

I'm beginning to think that part of the appeal of my early 2000s adoption of an indie rock nerd persona and my later, much deeper dive into the subculture of twee/indiepop was that these things offered cheat codes to obsess about culture in an easily identifiable way. Being a music nerd almost inherently meant being the right kind of nerd and with only a moderate amount of homework, you could definitely find a guy (almost always a guy) that would let you talk his ear off about some obscure band you'd just discovered and very much vice versa.

I don't regret much about how I've lived my life, the people that I've known, the records we've geeked out about together, etc. But if I could return to the early aughts and select an alternate course, I'd put my head down at SMC, fight my way through the math requirements, transfer to CSUN for an English or Journalism major, and apply for every single Entertainment Weekly internship available to me until I finally landed one. It's not that the fellow music nerds I've befriended along the way aren't my people, I just sincerely wonder who I could have been if I leaned all the way into my general TV + film fascinations from the jump? It would have been especially useful to realize that I never actually wanted to be in front of the camera, what I really wanted was to spend my life speaking and writing thoughtfully about the people who were. I'd almost certainly still be freshly laid off from a media job today, but I could have bounced through so many different media orgs by now instead of just the one. Heavy sigh.

Beyond my tentatively unfiltered, "I just know all the minutia that I know and that's ok" recent conversations with Candice, there have been other opportunities over the past few years. I introduced a screening of The Faculty for an intimate backyard movie club that I belong to and made a point of shouting out Shawn Hatosy as the ultimate "that guy" of '90s teen movies. When he showed up in the first frame of the film, another attendee pointed at the screen and dramatically exclaimed: "That guy?" "That guy!" I answered with a sense of excited contentment that I'd never felt before and haven't felt sense. And mind you, this was October of 2024, Dr. Jack Abbott was still but a shadowy figure locked up in an edit bay somewhere. Also, Shawn Hatosy did a brief guest arc in one of the later seasons of Felicity. Whew, it is such a relief to admit that these are the facts and figures that ambiently float through my head all day, everyday.

When I texted Candice yesterday to let her know that I'd be using her Substack as a jumping off point for today's dispatch — thinking at the time that my inspiration would be more inclined towards using the "Best Thing I Watched" prompt to talk about my affinity for the smooth-brain coziness of shows like Elsbeth and Paradise (both of which returned this week) — she said that she was honored. She also hit me back with "I love that you love Paradise." Honestly? Same.