Photo by Hc Digital on Unsplash
I work to live (rather than live to work), so as I reflect on 2025, it seems fitting to acknowledge a few of my favorite purchases provided by said (patriarchally perpetuated) time-money exchange.
Can you feel my discomfort as I recognize the ways I partake and benefit from the systems I hate? HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! Cheers to upholding everyone’s anti-consumerism and anti-capitalist cores!
Criss Angel MINDFREAK
Photo by Smol Fortune – I know this photo is terrible, but I maintain it represents the chaotic pixelated vibes of MINDFREAK, not my poor photography skills
Price: $104.80 per ticket
As soon as I purchased tickets to Criss Angel MINDFREAK, Ticketmaster repeatedly emailed me asking, “Have Criss Angel MINDFREAK Tickets You Need To Sell? You’ve Got Options.” It seemed the company was well aware I paid entry to a garbage heap so must try its best to remove itself from any complicity. Expectations were low, and appropriately so, but my curiosity remained because magic is fun. How could a show possibly diminish the innate wonder and fascination of seemingly inexplicable tricks?
The key is to inflict the audience with emotional instability.
MINDFREAK was an edgelord magician’s portrayal of the episode of Friends in which cookbook pages get stuck together and Rachel accidentally bakes a sweet meat dessert – part trifle and part shepherd’s pie. The Vegas performance was a multi-layered mound of incompatible ingredients that were impossible to digest when sandwiched between each other.
Beginning with a montage of every piece of media that had ever uttered the words “Criss Angel,” the show blasted viewers with a big-screen endoscopy, uncomfortable crowd work, ill-timed confetti, tangents about parents, faith, childhood cancer, and MMA, masked human marionettes jerkily scuttling across the stage, and sometimes, illusions. None of it was helped by Angel’s continuously emphatic claim that “this is the best the show has ever been.”
The entire thing was fascinating and constantly replays in my head to spark intrigue, fear, and confusion. Though MINDFREAK is something I would never pay to see again, I am elated to have shared the one-time experience, nay excursion, with friends.
Uunisaari sauna
Photo by Smol Fortune
Price: 23€ (about $27) per 2 hour session
Call me Meredith Marks (of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City) because this broad is a bath aficionado. I also live for all extensions of baths: hot springs, saunas, really any spa-like body marination experience. It is one of the main reasons I visited Finland (a sauna superpower), and specifically Helsinki’s Uunisaari sauna. Located on an island just off of the city center, it provided me a two hour rotation of three different saunas and the ability to jump into the freezing sea surrounding them whenever I pleased.
As someone who finds a chill as enjoyable as pulling teeth, I doubted I would be plunging into ice cold water, but once invited to do so by a fellow sauna-going Finnish family, all hesitation went out the window. Assured by them that this was the perfect first time to “go swimming” because I would not be alone, I, along with the mother, father, son, and his girlfriend, plopped into the frigid tub of nature and followed the mother’s guidance to breathe.
The older I get, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am simply not meant for this world or the speed at which it moves. Like Sister Mary Robert says in Sister Act, it feels as though “everybody seems to be doing or catching on to things a second faster better than me.” Too much is happening all of the time, there’s never enough time to process it, and by the time I do, even more has happened and is in need of processing again. It is a never-ending, over-stimulating cycle whose repetition brings me closer and closer to shrinking inside of my own body and slowly transforming into a version of the Arquillian disguise in Men In Black – a miniature creature existing in a human vessel and pulling levers to make it move. I dissociate a lot.
For the ten seconds I floated in the Helsinki sea water, however, I felt present.
As the wet cold trickled through my every cell, I became a hatch-and-grow dinosaur. I expanded into the entirety of my body and was no longer the tiny operator sitting within my brain. It was refreshing, exhilarating, and a precious moment encompassing the kindness of strangers and why I love to travel.
2 cats
Photo by Smol Fortune – Bash on the bottom left, Toast on the top right; the two cutest boys in the world
Price: $155.85 for adoption fees
(total fees were $311.70 but these were split 50/50 with my roommate)
Lord Baby Bashington (aka Bash) and Toastmaster General (aka Toast) are the sweetest cats on the planet. I recognize that I’m biased, but even if presented before an objective jury, I maintain they would be deemed as such.
While their various health issues have, at their height, caused me to ping-pong between soul-crushing sadness and circulation-stopping stress, these boys’ well-being and mere existence bring me immense joy and love. I grew up with pets, so adopting Bash and Toast connected me with a piece of my childhood self and made me even more grateful for my co-cat parent/roommate/friend/life partner as these two fur-babies have further cemented the seal of our forever bond.
If you are in the Southern California area and looking to adopt a ball of purrfection you can check out Here Have A Kitten and Del Gato Rescue.
