I feel that my watching of cute animal videos is more legitimate than others’ watching of cute animal videos because it’s an extension of my childhood reading of animal encyclopedias and I therefore know fun facts about the animals in question, facts that are revived by the watching like lettuce in ice water or a baguette, also in water, I think, I’ve never tried that hack, but recently I did make a delicious panzanella salad with stale baguette, it’s so rare that I let bread go hard, let anything go bad, I try to use up everything in my fridge and pantry in a mania my parents find distasteful, they revel in waste, some sort of rebellion against their insecure finances, my mother, born in 1963, jokes that I must have become this way due to my parents’ having lived through the Great Depression, which is interesting in that the joke saves me from direct trauma but implicates a fictional version of herself, blame is ego, guilt is ego, let go of ego by taking no responsiblity for your actions, cross your legs and let out a big breath you didn’t even realize you had taken and just say “no, I definitely didn’t do that,” my watching of cute dog videos specifically is also more legitimate seeing as I have a cute dog of whom I’m quite fond but from whom I maintain a quasi-ironic distance, like by avoiding saying that I love him, I’ve never bought anything I’ve seen an ad for on social media, I don’t like to be told what to do, my fiancé works in advertising and he recently said that good ads knock on the door of our needs, but he said it in French, it sounded better in French, something about the diphthongs I’m sure.