New year, new look, new Paige
Simple pleasures, free will, MANIfesting, books, ins & outs, and *not* predictions 🎉
If you’re new here, WELCOME!!!! I’m Nicole, writer & host of Nicstalgia. I explore how pop culture, media, and technology impact identity. This newsletter comes every Thursday morning (unless it comes on Thursday afternoon….)
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!! 🎉 🤩 🥳 ✨ Hope your 2025 is off to a great start. This time of year is fun – I loooooooove New Year’s rituals, Capricorn season, and Nic Q5!!!¹ This is the proper bye 2024/hi 2025 newsletter before we go back to our regularly scheduled programming.
So much rhetoric about New Year’s is around resolutions and advice for self-improvement. This is NOT that!!!! For me, it’s more about having fun on a day-to-day basis, enjoying simple pleasures, and living a life you’re excited about. All of the below is meant to encourage just that!
My simple pleasures of 2024:
• Wearing ear plugs when I’m next to the speaker in dance cardio class
• Using an alarm clock instead of my phone²
• Hanging my towels in the shower
• Using a dry brush to exfoliate (ironically, very Gwyneth Paltrow of me)
• Drinking bone broth (also very Gwyneth)
• Using heat protectant spray on my hair
• Having a signature perfume
• Having a real dresser for my clothes (I think for the first time in my adult life?!)
• Sleeping with an eye mask (I’ve been doing this but now I have one in every room)
This past year was really like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Jenga. I have failed and been rejected more than I ever thought was humanly possible, but have also never felt more happy, at peace, loved, loving, and more connected to the people in my life.
I see 2024 as the year of ‘When I Remember I Have Free Will’. Like yes, you really can buy a vintage handbag that’s also a gigantic functioning clock, get a job that requires you to make playlists and wear a little Britney Spears headset microphone, and order the same thing on the menu every time you go to your favorite restaurant. As Hannah Montana once proclaimed, “life’s what you make it”, and as The Artist’s Way said, “You’re either losing your mind – or gaining your soul.” Whoa.
Today’s agenda:
🎉 24 for 2024
💅🏼 MANIfesting: 2024 in Nails
📚 Your trash, my treasure: 2024 in Books
📊 Ins and Outs
🔮 *Not* Predictions
⭐️ 25 for 2025
NEW YEAR NEW YOU special runs through Saturday. Enjoy 24% off an annual Nicstalgia subscription! (Or you can still pay full price, I would never deny you that opportunity.) I wrote 52 newsletters in 2024, so enjoy the deal while it lasts.
Huge thank you to Nicstalgia supporters who I will love forever: Janine, Marie, Liv, Mitra, CY, Chet, and Jack! 💐💐💐
🎉 24 for 2024
My sister and I have been making Gretchen Rubin-inspired bucket lists for 8 years now. No item is too lofty, indulgent, or insignificant. Here’s (most of) what I did this year. Hope it inspires you to do something fun!
📚 Go on a NYC bookstore crawl
🎶 See S Club, Dorian Electra, Allie X, Missy Elliott, and Mariah Carey in concert
📺 Be in the audience at the Kelly Clarkson Show
🎤 Sing at karaoke
🪡 Complete DIY projects: 2000s skinny scarf, Britney Spears mood magnet, Necklace with Nonni’s beads, Digital camera candle holder, brat & Loewe tomato pumpkins
💃🏻 Go out dancing
🎭 See an experimental puppetry troupe performance
🎥 Breathe the same air as Celine Dion at her documentary screening
🍨 Make affogato and handmade pasta
🍓 Pick fresh strawberries on a farm
🏋🏻♀️ Teach dance & fitness classes
🛂 Renew passport
🧵 Take a rug tufting class and make a rug shaped like my EnV cell phone from 2007
✨ Buy an Oops!…I Did It Again-inspired beaded curtain for my closet
👃🏼 Find a signature perfume that smells exactly like Tropical Splash Barbie (1994)
🦉 Present at the Sixposium, the academic symposium dedicated to Drake studies
📖 Participate in the Matt Klein ZINE x McLuhan Institute media seminar
🎨 Go to local museums, galleries, and artist studios
💅🏼 Heal and grow my natural nails
👜 Buy a novelty handbag with a gigantic working clock and a kitschy vintage sweater from my favorite thrift stores
💅🏼 MANIfesting: 2024 in Nails
One of my 24 for 2024 was to heal and grow my natural nails, which I did for the first time in my entire life! You wouldn’t have caught me dead with bare nails until now. My nails always looked like trash when I was a teenager, and it was so embarrassing!!!! I’ve since gotten my act together aka. discovered nail hardener and stopped getting gels. Everyone was asking about my Chillhouse press-ons, so here’s your reminder to use NICOLE10 at checkout 😉 Without further ado, my 2024 in nails:
Passion Punch when enjoying iced coffee from my favorite coffee shop. (Places occasionally spelling my name Nichole keeps me humble…)
Sea Siren when opening the little love note inside my Baci Italian chocolate. “Per sempre è composto da tanti ora…” Forever is composed of Nows.
Blue holographic gels when I found my NICOLE keychain from the 2000s and added it to my car keys – Complete with my clear scrunchie elastic and A Shop of Things ILYSM flip phone compact mirror.
vitaminwater® With Lover when I wore my mood ring. Green means contentment!
Chill at the Disco as the finishing touch after I got an incredible haircut. These ones always make me feel like a superstar!
Acid Wash to match my gigantic iced New Orleans from Blue Bottle Coffee. These ones make me feel like Britney Spears at the 2001 American Music Awards.
Heading South to go to a dance class, impromptu sidewalk dinner, and spontaneous dancing in a basement club on 80s night with friends. Perfect NYC summer night.
Glass Castle to complement my new custom charm necklace before getting ready for a night out!
Emerald Tower as my official Christmas nails and showstopper to close out 2024!
📚 Your trash, my treasure: 2024 in Books
I’ve been tracking how many books I’ve read since 2019 and average about 25 per year. This year I read 30, mostly celebrity memoir audiobooks, because hearing a familiar voice is comforting and makes me have less road rage while I’m driving. Plus audiobooks typically have bonus content – sung songs, tone undulations, etc. – that you just don’t get in a physical book. Anyone who says audiobooks “don’t count” needs to GROW UP!!
Biggest lessons I learned from reading:
• If you don’t like a book, STOP READING IT immediately
• It’s literally fine if you read 3 books at once
• It’s not a big deal if you don’t finish it right away
• You don’t need to read the book club book, you can just bring/eat snacks
I never read what books are ‘popular’ or on bestseller lists, and that is what makes reading fun for me. I read the most fiction books this year (5) than I have in the last six years combined. Guess what? I still don’t really like fiction. But I tried!!!!!! I also never use Chat GPT to write this newsletter (as you can probably tell lol), but I asked it to summarize what I read. It’s cute and accurate!
🗞️ Tabloid Trash Chic: With Toxic, Paris, and Cue the Sun!, your reading list was basically the millennial TMZ archive in hardcover—100% camp, 0% regrets.
💅 Aesthetic Overdrive: Between Aesthetic Labour, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic, and Sleeveless, you dove deep into the ways we’re all sold a vibe—then asked, “But at what cost?”
🖤 Memoir Maven: From Love, Pamela to Cher to The House of Hidden Meanings to From Here to the Great Unknown, your favorite genre was “divas dishing.”
🎭 Nostalgia Royale: A year-long love letter to Y2K, with hits like Tacky, Over the Influence, and Walking Disaster. You didn’t just revisit the 2000s; you practically set up residence.
📱 Digital Age Visionary: From Millennial Makeover’s exploration of Facebook-era politics to Should Social Media Web Sites Be Banned?’s ethical debates on MySpace and The Ginny Suite’s surreal take on online identity, you dove deep into how the internet shapes society and the self.
💅 Your 2024 Energy: Equal parts pop culture anthropologist and nostalgic icon. You see the deeper meaning in everything—even Y2K gossip—and your bookshelf proves it. A high-low cultural connoisseur who can talk RuPaul and Debord, reminisce about MySpace and analyze neoliberal beauty standards, all while sipping a Y2K-themed cocktail.
My goal for 2025 isn’t to read a certain number of books, but rather to make a dent in my existing bookshelf before I go thrift more. I’d also like to make some kind of art (a drawing, painting, code, etc.) inspired by each book I read!⁴
📊 Ins and Outs
IN
• Shooting your shot
• Physical media & analog electronics
• Several income streams
• Long-term relationships
• Intentional consumption
• Thick skin
• Social dexterity
• Vehemently complimenting people
OUT
• Being lazáy⁵
• Creative blocks
• Hesitating
• Giving up
• Screenshot graveyards
• LinkedIn spirals
• Staying on bad dates too long
• Buying an $18 salad when you have lunch at home
🔮 *Not* Predictions
I have a degree and previous career in capital-F Fashion. The Diffusion of Innovations, evolutionary personal style, cyclical trends, and consumer behavior are my personal obsessions. Making predictions is so fun, but sometimes mine are way too early. (Aquarius Venus problems.) There are some amazing trend forecasters and fashion theorists out there, but the proliferation of nonsense is rampant. I’m not doing predictions for 2025 because many of them will be right, reinforcing my annoyance with the democratization of trend forecasting on social media. So let me say “I told you so” just this once for some stuff I called back in 2023 (and even 2022).
• Charms, namely charm bracelets (love) bag charms (hate).⁶ Lots of charm shops, charm bars, etc. popped up, and many have Ian Charms to thank.⁷
• Pandora jewelry. I thought there’d be a weird cultural conservatism where virginity promise rings would come back into style…but let me not hold my breath here…it is 2025
• David Yurman bracelets, or in this case, dupes of them.
• Arm parties, which
• Business casual revival, aka. Corporate Fetish, as coined by . Also see: Office Siren aesthetic.
• Boat shoes. I have my grievances about this, but I’m from New England, so these shoes unfortunately never leave the collective consciousness.
• Ballet flats. I love ballet, but in words misattributed to Victoria Beckham, “I can't concentrate in flats.” Also see: mesh flats.
• Colored tights
• Granny stuff
• Pickle-flavored everything
• Dairy, although I thought that products other than milk would start to take center stage (e.g. butter, sour cream, heavy whipping cream). Maybe this year.
⭐️ 25 for 2025
My intention for 2025 is to be braver than my imagination, pursue the extraordinary, and in the words of Gretchen Rubin, “Choose the bigger life.” The past few years have been about finding alignment and now I’m like…nah. I want to live OUT of alignment, completely obliterate my own status quo, and dream and act so BIG it’s definitively out-of-bounds as compared to my current reality.
I’m not gonna share the list with you (yet), but to start, I would like to cut & dye my own hair, learn to properly play the keyboard, and make something with my new digital drawing tablet. Everything else is too ambitious, unhinged, and perhaps surreptitious to some, but that’s exactly what I’m going for. Please tell me a star you’re shooting for this year!!!!! I’m rooting for you!! 🌠
🦋 Social butterfly
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¹ Nic Q5 is the period of time between the new calendar year and my birthday at the beginning of April. New Year’s is the most widely-recognized annual temporal landmark, aka. a standout moment in time that separates the past from the future. I channel the hope, ambition, and vigor that a new calendar year provides while looking to the end of the astrological year (the spring equinox) as my personal finish line.
² Actually, I think it’s already broken after a month. Unless I am going insane (which let’s not rule out completely), the time discrepancy between the time on my clock and the time on my phone keeps widening. Like now the alarm clock is 3.5 minutes faster than my phone. What in the TJ Maxx is happening here?
³ This probably sounds bizarre, but the hooks are far enough from the shower head to stay dry. I have a glass door, not a curtain, and this is my new favorite life hack.
⁴ Another idea: Remember “No TV Week” reading challenge and the Book It! x Pizza Hut collab from the 90s? I still have my pin. Would be fun to throw a reading milestone pizza party! (Please invite me if you do.)
⁵ Lazáy is what I call lazy, but with ~flair~ and ennui. This was very much my attitude during the pandi, which I used to temper anxiety about navigating the unknown. It’s a great way to practice self-care or mentally recover after a traumatic or highly stressful series of events. But it is also a great way to procrastinate, self-sabotage, and become apathetic about things out of your control instead of taking action to achieve a desired outcome. And for that reason, I’m out.
⁶ As a former handbag sales person, I personally cannot stand bag charms on authentic luxury bags OR dupes. The “Jane Birkin-ification” effect trend gives me the ick. It’s like people who only bring Gucci (or Fucci) luggage to the airport and are in boarding section E – get rich or die trying stop trying!!! Anyone who knows literally anything about Birkins knows that Jane Birkin, the actress for whom the bag was named, low-key hated hers. She threw it around and wore it to shit and repeatedly complained that it was TOO HEAVY. You know what adds weight to a bag? A bunch of shitty plastic keychains.
⁷ I made the most gorgeous little charm bracelets a year ago from one of my fav thrift stores in the East Village. Once they re-merchandised the pile of obsolete crap into a charm bar, it’s been mauled with customers and largely picked over. Good for business, bad for early adopters.
I'm always reading at least three books at once lol