Resurrecting rom-com rituals

A toxic/theurapeutic reflection on revenge diets, dead end jobs, and Chinese takeaway.

Cyber Diary is a collection of digital diary entries.

✰

Rom-coms are for me what Instagram is for normal people. 

Portal, gateway, enchanted doorway. Deceptive dream-inducer that I cannot let go of. I walk away from rom-coms thinking strange thoughts. “I liked how she thought about him and he manifested in the very next scene. So telepathic.” Or “I want a wall to wall bookshelf like that one day.” Or “How does she own that brownstone as an independent bookshop owner in NYC? Inheritance?” I’m using “rom-com” interchangeably with “chick flick” here. I don’t know which is the better phrase for the credibility of all this. I’m thinking about that collection of films that are upbeat and active and containing a heartbeat, bursting with a sanguine joie de vivre even when the lead is at rock bottom, treading dirty water in the gutter, and every plot is slanted on a love-angle (Love is the hero of the day! Love has wings, but is playing it cool, walking around the corner towards you just now…! Love is Hugh Grant, Chad Michael Murray, Morris Chestnut! Love wears a chunky cable knit, is clean shaven, is handsome even balding!).

And the big-time jewels like Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan are always cast as the girl-next-door who is magnetic, playful, and showy even while being difficult, contentious, hard-to know. Rom-coms are never trying to contend for top cinematography either, and yet they are eternally overflowing with sensorily delicious moments ripe for Pinterest screenshot-ing. Pretty Woman in a bubble bath, delectable in that aquatic whipped cream. I wonder what is sleeping in her bathroom vanity? Cucumber eye masks. Blue Moon Body Polish. Chinese Glaze Emerald Bae, if they had it in the 90s. Maybe OPI’s Black Cherry Chutney. Elizabeth Arden’s green tea honey drops body cream, Pleasures eau de parfum by Estee Lauder. Cool, crisp, lightly floral. The rom-com girls always have a packed shelf in my imagination. They live how I would live if I felt that life was still liveable, which I do, except on the day I am writing this, because the boutique I work at is closing for the winter and how am I going to afford my life, my simple life? 

A real woman’s go-to October shade.

Jennifer Garner as Jenna Rink, 13 Going on 30

Vibe-y, evocative, exquisite. A pictorial paradise. Conveyor belts of visual perfection. The window-shopping strip of films. Rom-coms make me feel things, they stoke my cerebral fire, they give me ideas. Not ideas central to their actual cinematic function (inspiring romance, rejuvenation, play, a desire for a serendipitous meet-cute, a Renewed Lust for Life) but ideas about the environments of their narratives. I am obsessed and drawn towards the innocuous background details, the threading of that silvery, plush cocoon that makes the rom-com woman possible: Her apartment (owned),