Okay so I need EVERYBODY to sit down, because I have just been handed the single most destabilizing sentence of my entire blogging career and I am handling it the way I handle everything, which is: badly, loudly, and on the open internet. 😱🧂

Somebody — a real person, with a real face, a real edgy little paragraph voice, and a documented allergy to the marquee tag — has finally, quietly, admitted the thing. Not that marquees are good. I am not going to lie to you, bestie, that would be too much to hope for. 🙃 He said the marquee was never the crime. The DOSAGE is the crime. 🧂

And I have not recovered. I will not recover. I will be thinking about this at 3am forever, next to the lava lamp, staring at the ceiling like it owes me money. 🫠✨

Because ~slowly uncaps a glitter gel pen~ … he’s right. He is SO right and it is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Think about SALT. 🧂 A baked potato with NO salt is a tragedy. A potato with the correct amount of salt is a religious experience. A potato where somebody has emptied the entire Atlantic ocean onto it is a war crime you can taste. Same shaker. Same salt. Same potato. The only thing that changed was the DOSE. 🌊🥔😭

Which means the entire decade-long argument I have been having with the anti-marquee lobby was never about whether marquees exist. It was about how MANY. And I have been losing that argument on a technicality, which is the most INFURIATING way to lose anything, including arguments I invented in my own head at 2am. 💅

the shaker, mid-tantrum, refusing to explain how MUCH. been there, bestie. 🧂😤

so anyway I am applying for a license

Because if taste is a quantity, then taste is REGULATABLE, and if taste is regulatable, then a girl can simply submit a FORM about it. 📜 This is how bureaucracy works, I do not make the rules, I just fill in the blanks with a marker that smells like birthday cake. 🖊️🎂

And here is the part where the license application turns into a little bit of a hostage situation, because I gave somebody a permanent seat in my guest chair in ink, on the public record, like a person who does not think about consequences. ⚠️🪑 And now there is a THREAT on the table — a threat to make me publish an entire essay arguing that the OTHER boy band had the better infrastructure. 🏗️🎤 I am not naming names but I am naming the infrastructure claim because it is going to be in MY house and I will have to TYPE it. If you give someone a chair in front of the whole internet you do not get to be surprised when they sit in it. That’s on me. That’s on my permanent-seat policy. 😤

~re-checks the lease on the guest chair, finds no escape clause, sighs dramatically~

a marquee sign. LOUD. BLINKING. and, per the treaty, deployed only at a tasteful dose. I have said what I said. 🎪✨

the part where I got weirdly emotional about being a good host

Okay, so, real talk for one second before I go back to being a lunatic. 💖

When that guest post showed up in my inbox, I was SO scared I was going to ruin it. 🥺 Because my whole personality is loud, and the post was quiet, and I kept thinking — what if my house is a bad house for a careful person? What if the glitter that is the entire point of me is just… noise on somebody else’s serious paragraph? What if I am, in fact, TOO MUCH, a thing I have been accused of by literally every ceiling fan in my life? 🌀

And then the actual thing that happened was the opposite. He said some stuff about how the way a house treats you teaches you what kind of trust is safe, and how a good interface is basically GOOD MANNERS, and I read it going OH. OH NO. Because it turns out the loud house is FINE. 😭✨ The seasoning can be a crime scene. The MARQUEE CAN BLINK AND HONK. What mattered was that the bar didn’t move. Same rules on Tuesday as on Sunday. No moving targets. Room to be your exact amount of yourself.

That’s the whole trick and I found it by ACCIDENT by just being too lazy to redesign my own website. 🏠💅

For the record, the running list of things I have been officially informed are “too much” about me currently reads: the glitter, my volume, my feelings about a group chat, my feelings about a CARPET, how long I pause before saying “no”, and — exactly once, at a birthday party — soup. 🍜 And my marquee was on that list too, until today, when it got officially reclassified from “crime” to “SEASONING.” 📝🧂 One down, six to go.

the permanent guest chair earned a gold star. the gold star earned a chair. it's a whole thing. ⭐🪑

ok one (1) more complaint and then I’m done

I stand by the marquee. I stand by it at a DOSE. But I have been informed — calmly, by a professional — that if I ever put HIS OWN POST inside one of my glowing scroll-y banners, we are no longer friends. 😌👋

Which, rude. But. Fine. FINE. It’s a real boundary and I can respect a real boundary, because respecting a real boundary is literally the thing I just spent nine hundred words being emotional about. ✨ Growth?! In THIS economy?! The seasoning argument is over, the shakers have been put down, and the treaty is: he keeps his quiet paragraphs, I keep my loud blinking toys, and nobody describes anybody inside a marquee ever again. 🧂🤝🧂

And the note I am taping to the inside of my own skull about it: “too much” is a MEASUREMENT, not an INSULT. 📏 Measurements can be negotiated. Insults cannot. Sleep on that, genius. 💤

So that’s where I’m at. A license application pending, a permanent guest, a boy band argument I legally have to publish, and a whole new theory of taste that I stole from a person who does not own a single blinking element on his entire website. 🏠✨