i accidentally paid for Crave twice, which is what I get for trying to consume media legally.

yeah, fuck. capitalism beat me twice and i let it. once through the website like a normal person, and then again directly on my TV like a millennial whose tech skills peaked with limewire. apparently those are two separate subscriptions and now i’m $40 poorer and pissed.

in true asian eldest daughter fashion to get my money’s worth, i started binge-watching whatever Crave threw at me. prestige television. i was ready to feel something.

and then i saw it: sex and the city.

growing up in the philippines, i thought sex and the city was about people having sex in traffic so it was basically porn-adjacent in my brain. i did not expect it to be just four women talking about men and designer clothes. which, okay, still kinda porn.

what i really didn’t expect was for this show to reach in, grab my internal organs, and rearrange my worldview. not because i agree with carrie’s takes on sex and relationships (most of them are actually insane), but because there was something deeply compelling about watching her make absolutely batshit choices while chain-smoking in $400 shoes and silk slips.

peak TV.

and just like that, i was out here losing to celebrity worship again, like evolution didn’t spend millions of years developing complex cognitive empathy only for me to hand it over to a fictional woman with several unpaid credit cards. thanks, gang.

but how could i not be obsessed with her? she was living the exact life i had already bookmarked for my future: a writer with a cute new york apartment. i wanted that. the character. the outfits. the friends who always got her back. the confidence to turn every minor inconvenience into an article. imagine stubbing your little pinky toe and monetizing it.

and mind you, i’ve never been to new york, but i love the idea of it.

people who’ve actually been say it smells like hot trash and capitalist despair, and maybe when i finally visit i’ll join the disillusionment. but until then, new york remains the city of my dreams. the delusion lives on.

naturally, i’ve taken all of this as a sign that i should become carrie bradshaw.

to me, she is a dream sequence, an archetype of femininity with just enough chaos to be charming. she’s fiction that feels aspirational without feeling completely out of reach. she’s beautiful but not in that genetically impossible way that makes you reconsider having a face. carrie just feels like someone you could actually become.

and for a while, that was enough. i wanted the job, the apartment, the terrible decisions supported by an unreasonable number of cocktails. but the longer i sat with it, the question started changing.

first: why do i want to be carrie?

and then, slightly more concerning: why do i want to be anyone else at all?

do i really want to be her, or do i just want the life she represents?

and that got me thinking: maybe i don’t actually want carrie’s life. maybe i just like having a version of the future i can point to and say, there. that’s where i’m going.

because pretending to chase a “dream life” gives me the illusion that i know what i want. suddenly, my life has direction. a destination. never mind that the destination is rat-infested new york where i am somehow a successful writer wearing louboutins.

anyway, i don’t know if pursuing this delusion will lead me back to myself or if this is just another one of those things where i watch a tv show and make it my whole personality again.

but for now, i owe it to Crave’s double charge and my asian heritage to try and be carrie bradshaw.