celebrate the normie days, too

Okay we know it has been Halloween for approx. 5,000 years but please just let this Slate piece on Japan’s “Mundane Halloween” party and the “glorious aesthetics of the everyday” be your final spooky szn-adjacent read. 

First, you’ll want to scroll through this Twitter thread first for context: Basically, there’s an event in Tokyo every year where everyone dresses up as a super ordinary but SUPER specific “characters” — like Guy Who Got Woken Up By An Amazon Delivery and Drugstore Employee Who Came To Work With A Hangover. 

The results are delightful, but the Slate piece gets all philosophical and digs into why it’s so charming to relate to and celebrate these normcore “costumes”: 

The mundane activities of life, philosophers of everyday aesthetics argue, have an aesthetic texture all their own. Domestic chores like hanging laundry or cooking provide all kinds of negative and positive sensory experiences. The fog on someone who’s drinking something hot’s glasses; the tray clutched in the lady who can’t find a place to sit at the food court’s hot hands; it’s all art.

Lovely, isn’t it? Now you go and have yourself a beautifully normie day, okay??

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