I like structured fun. I was keen on hide and seek and other playground games long after they were popular. Quite honestly, if someone suggested hide and seek today I might still be down for it.
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The next phase of games in primary school was card games and werewolf. When interest in these tapered off I was pretty bummed. Several years later we got to drinking games and boy was I relieved.
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I don’t get bored of these games the way other people seem to. I’m sure part of it is coming to them later, and I feel like they’re different enough each time. I do know that I find it so much easier to socialise through games. So much of my anxiety in social situations is managed by having like… cards to play with. I used to be quite confused that other people got bored by these games and the fun wore off for them. Having reflected on how I’ve felt about games my whole life, and how I feel when someone suggests a game over just sitting around talking, I think it’s just part of the way I am and the way my brain works. It’s not exactly the only aspect of social interaction that’s taken me a while to wrap my head around throughout my life.
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I am a pretty extroverted person, so I will endure unstructured fun and I can definitely begin to enjoy it. But if you ever want to play board games with me, or cards, even jackbox or role playing games, don’t hesitate for a second to invite me along.
I was struggling with the theme of ‘icons’ a lot because I don’t have any specific icons of my own I look up to, and I couldn’t think of anything clever to say about computer icons. I googled icons and read the sentence ‘Pop icons of previous eras include Benjamin Franklin and Mozart’. This seemed kind of wild to me both because those two people are surely still iconic in some way today, and also because the term ‘pop icon’ just doesn’t seem a comfortable fit for them.
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I’ve realised I associate the phrase ‘iconic’ quite strongly with the queer community. Interestingly, there are many, many people with ‘queer icon’ status who aren’t queer. We end up in this weird position of wanting so desperately for both characters and actual real people to come out as queer because they fit this queer icon image. I hope in the near future there will just be more queer queer icons. They are definitely out there. I’m glad there are already some amazing queer icons to look up to, I’m just always starved for more.
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It really struck me at the Spice Girls how many of the attendees were visibly queer. I feel like the Spice Girls are such a weird image of 90s feminism and even though they were going full out with the inclusive messaging, I felt like I could see the split in the audience where there were super straight people and super gay people. Are the spice girls queer icons? Discuss.
Day 17 – Balloons
This is the first dear June I have failed to source my own picture for, but all I could think of for this prompt was the balloon photograph in the film Funny Face and I am far too sleepy today to think much beyond that.
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The part of the movie where they go out and take all the different photos was one of my absolute favourites, even though the song in that bit is one of the least fun (Give me Think Pink and Clap Yo’ Hands please). Someone please give me pretty dresses and a bunch of balloons and let me run around Paris.
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Also, take more candid photos of me you cowards.
Day 18 – Post-its
You’re really challenging my need to sound pretentious and poetic with this prompt. I don’t really use post-its myself, I like the idea of them but actually they are of very little use and they are never sticky enough.
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The only real uses I can think of for post-its are for sticking the phone number for IT services to your work desktop, and then I suppose I see lots of people put post-its on top of stacks of paper about a thing to remind them what to do with that particular stack of paper.
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I’m not sure that I have ever regularly used post-its, but nowadays they seem particularly outdated. Do you think post-its could become obsolete?
During June I took part in an Instagram challenge named #DearJune from superstar and friend Hannah Witton. I surprised myself by managing to write at least a little something every day and also by being brave enough to be so open and to share pieces of writing at all!
I’ve decided to put the pictures I shared and all the pieces of writing up here as well, largely because I’m about to get a bit pretentious about my Instagram ~aesthetic~ and archive some of the posts.
Don’t forget to follow my Instagram @alliegrce and I might share more writing there in the future!
