thank you notes 5/24

i'm thankful that keeping up with the kardashians, which i would say began as a second wave show (though its unique obsession with the most banal aspects of the quotidian has always marked it as unique and category-breaking imo), seems to have shifted into a different gear lately. 

i'm thankful that unlike second wave shows, which are almost exclusively concerned with the project of attaining fame (or, if you were famous at one point and then lost it, about reclaiming it or solidifying it or pivoting it into another realm), kuwtk is now about the post-apocalypse of stardom, about how you live with the fame you've gained and what it does to you and to your relationships with people and how you find ways to cope in this new world, a world that the show itself helped to create. i'm thankful it also has a lot to say, on a more meta level, about the competition between old mediums (the hour long cable television show, the tabloid pap shot, the photo spread in the high class glossy mag) being usurped by new ones (personalized apps, games, snapchat, instagram) in terms of how they capture (and, by capturing, shape) reality. 

i'm thankful that rather than take sides or simplistically moralize in a binary take on the modern world (i'm thankful that kuwtk has (almost?) completely abandoned the use of talking head interviews, which provides a much more subtle and naturalistic mise en scene), the show illustrates both the lows and the highs that our devices and accounts can create in our lives. i'm thankful for the three central plot threads of this week's episode, which demonstrate these things vividly: 1) the ongoing tension between the kardashian children and their mother/manager kris, 2) the bumpy road of rob's reentry into the outside world from his self-imposed six year exile, and 3) kendall's feelings of loneliness and isolation from her family. 

i'm thankful for this week's instance of a frequent motif in recent seasons of the show, which is kris trying to have a serious conversation in person with her daughters while they, to avoid the difficulty of discussing the issue, look at their phones and talk to each other and don't listen and aggressively pretend that she's not even in the room. i'm thankful, connected to this moment, for kris's franzenesque expressions elsewhere in the episode of a longing for solitude, for the dreamy way she says "i love being alone" and fantasizes about eating a meal by herself in a quiet house (which she says she hasn't been able to do in three years) and lying in bed all sunday with a pile of books and magazines and her laptop, consuming media downstream the old fashioned way.

i'm thankful for how genuinely hurt kris seemed in this week's episode that, on their first night in the house she furnished for them, rob and blac chyna posted instagram videos making fun of the healthy food she'd left in their pantry. i'm thankful that at the episode-closing kitchen sitdown scene, rob eventually kind of apologized, thought he mostly characterized the tension as a generational issue related to the perception of technology: for he and chyna, instagramming the first night in their new house (and the food that was in it) was not about insulting kris, but was instead a way to celebrate their happiness and gratitude, to capture this special moment in their lives and share it with others. i'm thankful that this explanation (even though i think he should have legit apologized) felt as valid as kris's hurt feeling, and that it made her feel better.

i'm thankful, as someone who went through self-imposed depressive exiles of my own when i was younger (i'm thankful that they were so frequent in my late adolescence that my college friends and i came up with a name for them, which was "the void"), that rob is feeling like a person who wants to live in the world again (and his reemergence on the internet is just as important or maybe more important than his reemergence into the physical world), even if his readjustment isn't as easy as it first seemed it might be (i'm thankful for the slightly tense snap from blac chyna last night, in which, as they drove down the freeway, she talked about he doesn't like to be on camera and then kept sneaking the camera over to capture him). 

i'm thankful for the scene in this week's episode in which kim (i think) is offended by another "joking" instagram post rob made and complains that he's "too busy to respond to me, but not too busy to post a meme." i'm thankful that this comment and conflict rhyme with a recent popular twitter moment from the writer ashley ford about not judging people who are depressed or anxious for posting to social media while ignoring texts/dms/emails, since "you're actually just pushing that person further into their hole, and taking away a space that was most likely allowing them to cope." 

i'm thankful that i would have agreed heartily with this in the past when i frequently ghosted on people, but that now i don't know if i agree so much, which i think might just be a result of my much-improved mental health and social functioning letting me forget how difficult interacting with other people can feel when you're in a dark place rather than any change in what i think or believe is the "right" way to behave. i'm thankful for how my youthful social anxiety and difficulty in interacting with people, in addition to a dose of garden variety voyeurism (i'm thankful for the moment of kim going through kendall's cabinets and talking about how she loves going through people's cabinets), was what drove me to love reality tv in the first place: it provided a space for me to observe human behavior and interaction and to feel connections with other people (rather than fictional characters) without the perceived fear and pain and danger of "real life" interaction.

i'm thankful, to continue to explore this theme of isolation and how that can be both exacerbated and ameliorated by social media, for perhaps the most moving thread in the episode, which was focused on kendall's increasing sense of isolation from her family members as she travels around the world working as a model. i'm thankful for the way that kendall's face, which is so blank and expressionless in comparison to kylie or kourtney or khloe (i'm thankful that this must be what makes her a good model), in this episode seemed to crack slightly in response to the pain of loneliness, thankful even though it's sad because it made me empathize with her. i'm thankful to have empathized with her frustration when early in the episode she makes plans to have lunch with kourtney, really making an effort, and kourtney sleepwalks through their conversation while texting and not making eye contact with her.

i'm thankful for the way that as it goes on, the episode shows that kendall's isolation is caused by social media on both ends: kendall feels left out because she sees her sisters having fun together on instagram or snapchat and she's not included, while on the other hand, her sisters see her images from modeling jobs around the world and assume that she can't talk because she's out "having the time of her life" rather than sitting alone in a hotel room at night after a long day of posing looking at pictures of their happiness. i'm thankful for kim's empathy about the situation, how she talks about getting FOMO when she's "super pregnant." i'm thankful that the sisters, in a gesture of love, come together to make a care package of kendall's favorite foods and then surprise her with a girls' night in. i'm thankful for how clearly happy this makes kendall and makes them too. i'm thankful that this isn't the binary solution of "unplugging" (they're still on their phones together and, of course on a tv show), but still functions as an acknowledgement that the exchange of mediated messages and images on corporate platforms cannot be the totality of our existence and our relationships, that it's important to make time to be together irl.

i'm thankful that, like most people, they unite as a family irl by breaking bread (or, rather, eating big salads), thankful that so many of the most important scenes in the show take place in the kitchen and arise from banal conversations about food (i'm thankful for the recent episodes' discussions of kumquats, organic bananas, gluten free pizza, sauerkraut, "flavors of deodorant," and new brands of chips). i'm thankful that food provides a perfect example of the situation i was just describing—i love looking at pictures of food and reading about descriptions of food and chatting online with people about food, and i'm glad to have all of those things in my life, but, at the same time, they can't possibly measure up to what it actually feels like to eat a piece of cake in the real world. i'm thankful for the scene in this week's episode where kris goes to lunch with kourtney and her daughter penelope at a natural foods restaurant. i'm thankful that there's a bowl of fruit on the table and penelope picks up an apple and kris, protectively warning her away, says "oh, that looks rotten" and then kourtney says, deadpan, "it's fake." i'm thankful they laugh and then go on with their meal together.