birthday girl fascism

mrs dalloway has a vague dresscode and an instagram meltdown

It is two days after my twenty-fourth birthday. Last night, I dreamt of my doorbell ringing at 3 am, and when the door opened, a stream of human-looking but alien-identifying mutants flooded into my home. They immediately set up various conferences in various rooms, and represented factions of the global intelligentsia (if you can call it that): policy heads; artists; trashy celebrities; and business people. My friends were in imaginary convenings in my head, networking and mingling prolifically, and making the most of the last night of life before the aliens killed us, as they promised they would. Meanwhile, a frightening, silver-rimmed woman, possibly in her 60s, took me into my bathroom. Her skin looked saggy, not so much from age, but more from carelessness — a refusal to apply retinols. Her extra-terrestrial detail was her fingers, which were shortened and webbed. She traced their semi-translucent, reptilian ends over my face and breast. She wanted me to relax! The world as I knew it was ending tomorrow, so I shouldn’t worry about hanging out with my friends or making sparkling conversation. I remember gulping with tension and loving my own long, slim, French manicured fingers, wishing she would free me to be with normie-core cliques instead of her weird isolation. She began speaking of literary greatness and ageing and femininity just as I woke up to an Instagram notification.

Lately, I’ve been getting off not being seen (online). I have lost weeks of my life to Instagram. Not through sloppy reels, but obsessive counting, checking, verifying of who likes me and who does not, how social capital can be measured, what photos and words I want to represent me, and when I would like to be seen. I am going to graduate school to investigate this neurosis with the scaffolding of political theory. But for my birthday, I threw a sundowner soirée, and I wanted the humid glare of visibility.

The event was originally conceived as an unabashedly nothing-party; I wanted polite conversation with society, followed by well-timed goodbyes. But then my mother bought me a set of champagne flutes and a pearl-embroidered dress. My boyfriend suggested having a projector playing a film in the background. My brother offered to set up some mini-golf. The list of invitees grew. Cocktail menus were prepared by friends wittier than I, and cheese boards adorned by mango-jalapeño roses and edamame leavened the wood. I began imposing myself on other people’s time. I thought about nothing except a beautiful set of blue hand-painted tissues and whether my party would be fun. All conversations became speculative fiction, determining where the hordes would move, would they dance, would they need shot glasses, and would they want to stay for midnight pizza. I turned into a worldly woman, concerned not by lofty ideals of creation and utopia, but instead, enforcing fascist prohibitions against jeans and weed before nightfall. I annoyed even myself.

Today, I sit scattered in golden balloons and lit buntings. I think of my house full, crowded in corners with unexpected pairings of party-goers who entered saying they were anxious about my vague dress code (“soirée chic”) but ultimately enjoyed getting ready to be here. I think of long and loud conversations that I saw without needing to add to as some sort of negotiating hostess. My overworked bartender called me at the end of the night and proudly counted the many empty alcohol bottles he had worked his way through (we ran out of everything twice). I was high on thoughtless chatter and saying, you-look-so-chic-very-on-theme.

The morning after, I debriefed with different sets of people for hours. The family members discussed the finished food, surprise bills, and not getting a slice of the floral cake. The new people from my life discussed the old people from my life and vice versa, and we wrote air diaries of what time does to knowing. The socialites asked for pictures to put in internet collages. The cultural critics theorised collegiate banter versus adult engagement, bringing house parties back, and the human craving for an occasion to perform.

Before preparations for this gathering took flight, I had made it halfway through Mrs Dalloway, where a London lady recounts in self-indulgent, detailed social psychology the agonising events of a day preceding a party she is hosting. In on-the-nose irony, I was too absorbed in myself and guest lists and playlists for the past two weeks to read Virginia Woolf. I turn back to a highlighted-but-forgotten passage: “She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination.”

My Jungian dream claims a consciousness in disarray. But I liked my aliens and their intrusions and the buoyancy of celebration — in dream and in home. I liked the grounded glitter of this real world, with its social proofs and domestic blisses. Just for now. Just until the open unemployed summer undulates, and then I want to be nothing but strange words and disturbing ideas, on a private plane unfettered by Plans and Places.