Keeping Tabs On My 522 Browser Tabs

One is just a tweet that says, "Jenna Ortega taking backshots from mfin Bilbo Baggins in her new movie I’m crying bro."

Just a small selection of my 522 tabs

It all started with some skinny white woman’s ass.

The ads I receive on Instagram are generally pretty accurate, especially on the fashion front: minimalist (ish) aesthetic, ethical (enough), out of my budget (at the moment). And there’s this one brand called Oddobody that has been haunting my feed for months. Their mission: vaginal health, apparently. Their objective: Sell no-frills intimates that are 100 percent organic cotton to support optimal airflow “down there.”

I know the real reason why I keep getting served these Oddobody ads, and it’s not just because I’m going to check out anything that even remotely reminds me of American Apparel’s old branding (and Los Angeles Apparel’s current one). The reason is I’m always mezmorized by this one ad of theirs in which a faceless man is lounging on a couch while a slender, faceless woman is curled up next to him. Birds chirp in the background, and it’s all vaguely annoying and vaguely French, and every time I watch it I’m hit with such an embarrassing wave of yearning that I can’t look away. Instantly I’m reminded of Rob, and lazy days in our apartment, of me curling up next to him and resting my head in the indent of his funnel chest. I miss hearing his heart beat. I miss his smell. The models’ anonymity makes this self-insertion even easier, which—no Don Draper—I’m certain is the point: “You could fulfill at least part of this fantasy if you buy this 100 percent organic cotton thong.”

It’s all a bit rude, this hot, ugly, bubbling angst getting mistaken for Engagement™.

I took a break from working on this newsletter, checked Instagram, and guess what popped up yet again?

The first time I saw it, I vented about it in a weepy Instagram story, but not before doing exactly what Oddobody, Mark Zuckerberg, and the other Scrooge McDucks mining my data wanted me to do: I clicked on the damn underwear ad.

Now, I get ads from them all the time, each one featuring some white woman with a pert little butt and a flat belly (even though their actual website features more body and racial diversity). Last week was no exception: Oddobody popped up as I was scrolling Instagram, I clicked, I opened the page in a Safari browser¹, I looked at underwear I wasn’t going to buy², and then I noticed it.

I had 522 tabs open, and this stupid underwear ad was one of them.

For those who are absolute freaks like me and have hit the Safari tab limit before, you’ll know that the tabs are supposed to max out at 500. At that point, your phone will yell at you, insisting you must remove some existing tabs before creating new ones.

Somehow, I got around that.

I was a momentarily impressed, but I knew that it was time to purge.

I routinely hit the 500 tab limit. It’s a personality trait that left Rob gobsmacked. He always closed his tabs after use; not one tab ever lingered, which is frankly weirder to me than managing to have 500 tabs. I just don’t get rid of anything unless I have to. It’s not driven by a compulsion to hoard hoard hoard like the 400,000 photos/videos I have in my iCloud (I know, I know, I can’t talk about it, it’s mortifying, the ultimate “mento ilness luv x”), but I figure that if it’s not slowing down my device like having six Google Chrome tabs open on my laptop will, hey, play ball.

Still, 522 is pretty grim, even for me.

So I did what I always do when it’s time to do a big tab purge: I go through every single one of them, starting from the top/oldest tab. This usually ends up being a deep dive into whatever was important to me over the last few months. Sometimes, it’ll feel like the end of the era. For example, I’ll never finally deleting the tab for the cafeteria menu for Memorial Sloan Kettering, back when Rob practically lived at the hospital and my days and nights there revolved around keeping Rob company and forcing myself to eat. But usually my tabs aren’t bleak in a life-or-death way, but rather in a why-are-you-looking-up-the-wikipedia-page-for-a-deadly-plane-crash-from-2015 way: health questions half-answered in a Google snippet, fanfiction, questions about my cat that I already know the answer to, more fanfiction, clothes I can’t afford, and articles I often don’t get around to reading, but tell myself that I will, maybe, eventually.

Here’s an intimate look of some of the tabs I found, starting with the first few:

• Christopher Walken must have come up somewhere if I was looking up Natalie Wood

• Murder tab? I was watching Oxygen true crime bullshit

• I had a yeast infection

• For whatever reason I needed the quick and dirty biography of video vixen Karrine Steffan—AKA Superhead—immediately

• Braiding hair blending is an art

• Look at that beautiful Rains jacket I can’t afford

• Aforementioned plane crash

• I’m a KTN newbie

• The 503 area code represents northwest Oregon

• Gaza GoFundMe (they’re still accepting donations)

• My two-week obsession with The Holdovers

• A massage studio I went to in Bangkok

• Fanfic

• Trying to figure out how to light a candle for Rob at the cat shrine in Tokyo; I try to light a candle for him whenever I visit a new place because I miss traveling with him

• Maya Hawke but it says Kenneth the Page

• Looking up some bridge in Wyoming that my dad heard about

• Anyone else get a cough for a full week after flying?

• Testing Bad Brain’s layout before it launched

• Multiple tabs for Zone of Interest showtimes

• My favorite neighborhood restaurant, where I’m on a first name basis with the employees because my sad ass kept going there during my first year of widowdom and now I’m still sad and I can’t stop going

• More fanfic (I almost doxxed my ao3 account, thank God I caught myself in time)

• Depressing Lily Evans fanfic

• tennis date with my friend Naomi

• Shawn Hunter: fictional character

• “Jenna Ortega taking backshots from mfin Bilbo Baggins in her new movie I’m crying bro.”

• Evening-long obsession with left wing women who fought in the Spanich Civil War, specifically this photo by Gerda Taro.

• Had to do it to ‘em

• Kissing Jessica Stein

• Trying to get validation that my cat actually likes me

• Beautiful hats from Heirloom Hats that make me wish I had a smaller head.

• “Jewish American Princess for a Free Palestine”

• Amphetamines

• Olivia Benson’s alcoholic mom

• “Is it bad to eat while drunk?” Google search

• Santigold

• Sky High (I shipped Warren Peace with Danielle Panabaker’s character so bad)

And finally:

• Showing my exterminator my Vogue wedding photos

• Some music video I saw on MTV Classic

• “Smoke blunt, serve cunt”

• An invite to a cousin’s high school graduation party in New Jersey

• That fucking underwear.

It’s been nearly a week since I got rid of all of my tabs. I have 14 open at the moment. Give it time.

Please share what weird (or embarrassing) tab(s) you have open on your phone right now. This is not a judgement free zone, but I literally had over a dozen Harry Potter Marauders era fanfiction tabs open, so I don’t have room to talk.

1. My friend Ali made fun fo me for using Safari on my phone. Am I the only person who sees Google Chrome as a browser that is exclusively For The Computer?

2. The underwear is cute, and I need non-Parade underwear at some point