Being an adult is tough. There are taxes and oil changes, eventually, you’d do anything for a moment of peace and quiet. Even when I’m babysitting my niece, I end up just throwing on YouTube for her on my phone to close my eyes and relax for a bit. I didn’t know this, but apparently, that’s exactly how you end up with Belle & Sebastian album covers all over your Instagram page.
I have a very serious image to maintain and part of that means being extremely selective about what I post to social media. I didn’t get to 244 followers by winging it. I had to painstakingly curate every angle, every pixel to get to where I am. And now it’s all ruined because my niece decided to use the same filter Hollywood uses for films in Mexico.
I was too busy dissociating in the living room to notice her messing around with my phone and by the time I grabbed my phone, I was going viral. While I’ve always wanted to pop off on the ‘gram, I don’t want to be known as the poster boy of anxious adults who think they’re starring opposite Zooey Deschanel in a 2000s rom-com.
I love my niece, but she really fucked me over here. As if the posts themselves weren’t bad enough, she also deemed it necessary to caption each post with a charming but long-winded description of a very mundane experience about daily life. It’s kinda amazing, she’s only 7 and she has a high schooler’s grasp of English and a lonely and pathetic middle-aged man’s taste in music.
And if that’s not bad enough, now my DMs are rampant with these manic pixie dream girl types. They keep asking me if I want to go rent Penny-farthings and buy matching berets and eventually have a huge life-changing argument in a busy airport that ends in a loving embrace.
Goddamn it, I think my niece put all my TikToks in reverse too. Gotta delete those before people start thinking I like Coldplay.