Peaches🍑: The Lady Edition

G-Morning 🍑

Aight folks, so Maggie (aka 👸 Peaches) is back and per usual it's a barn burner! Equal opportunity, unequal outcomes. Break a leg, Maggie:

1. 👛 Polly Pocket healthcare. In case you hadn’t caught the Covid-era trailer, the healthcare industry has a new spin-off: home testing kits. Marketed as a prudent pitstop before reckoning with the Goliath of American industry, these “wellness tests'' tantalize consumers with a sketch of their various maladies—but they won’t actually tell you anything. Exhibit A: food “sensitivities.” Neither an intolerance nor an allergy, one prick of the thumb and you’re mailed a dossier of soft evidence re: the various qualms your immune system may have about admitting certain foods into its midst. Health kit CEOs will be the first to tell you that these tests are not diagnostic. They’re cosmetic at best, reifying our evermore complex snowflake structures. When I was a kid, my Dad had a rule: don’t go to the school nurse unless you’re bleeding and it won’t stop, throwing up and it won’t stop, or unconscious (a good joke). I found out about my fatal scallop allergy the old-fashioned way: breaking out in hives and hurling into the restaurant bathroom sink. And goddamnit if it didn’t build character.

2. 📍 The rub. If you’re reading this, I know what your butt looks like. That’s right. You, darling, have zits on your butt. How do I know this? Because the AA readership wants to look hot naked, and people who want to look hot naked work out, and people who work out tend to a) sweat and b) wear clothes that choke out your skin. Lucky for you, I know that what you actually have is folliculitis: chaffing of the hair follicles that can result in ornery, inflamed bumps resembling zits. On your tuchus. And because my mother is a dermatologist, and I have 3 pro bono tips for how to deal.. #1: Exercise in loose-fitting, always clean clothes. Ladies, that means swapping your Lululemons for hammer pants. #2: Exfoliate regularly to pare down the dead skin cells that mottle your hair follicles. Chemicals like SA > abrasives. #3: Treat with a retinoid (yes, on your butt) to dispel active inflammation. And there you have it. Softer than a baby’s behind.

3. 🧀 The hard stuff. Peep these tweets. Are your eyebrows aloft? They shouldn’t be. I for one am inspired by Mayor “I’m into the hard stuff” Adams’ poetic license. I doubt anyone’s ever been knifed for hiding the gruyére from a known cheese fiend, but food binges absolutely trigger neural activity akin to a drug binge. During an “episode,” food addicts enter a fugue state: their prefrontal cortex flickers; the anticipation of reward (the chow) ignites; and the actual pleasure gained from the reward (the eating) always falls short. Truthfully, the entire discourse around addiction tends to read like alphabet soup to me—overdressed word salad. But I don’t think it’s injurious to compare apples and oranges, especially when we barely have a half-baked consensus on which fruits belong in the same bowl.

4. 🤳 Phantom phantom limb. My Instagram was hacked last week. It pains me to admit the stultifying violation, bereavement, anguish, disorientation that accompanied the coup—roundly unflattering. But it got me thinking. Much ado has been made about the “consumptive” addiction to tech—but what about productive tech dependencies? My fix never came from doom-scrolling; it came from being too post-happy. Without IG, what am I supposed to do with the pic of “STDGRL” license plate I just saw? Soldier on? Text it to a friend? Uh, no. We already know the advent of writing completely reupholstered the human mind, like, a gazillion years ago. Shitposting has technically been around since the brothel bathroom stalls of Pompeii. In a sense, our skeletal makeovers are just the latest riff in a time-long song. What exactly about all this is new? I can’t put my orphaned little finger on it. But what I wouldn’t give to hear the rustle of a fresh DM in my inbox. You don’t know what you don’t have 'til it’s gone.

How do you like them Peaches? Any feedback for our resident Peach? If you ever need anything, hit reply.

Your friends,

Maggie🍑 & Andrew🍎

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