“I was supposed to be on a date tonight,” says @jezacat, who goes by jezabel, in the first seconds of a two and a half minute vlog titled “Saturday Night Vlog.” The video is tagged with dating, datingstorytime and datingapps, but the date itself takes only the first half minute. What follows is the evening she built instead.
She explains the setup. She says a man had asked her to go to a bar and she had not heard from him all day, so she texted him two hours before with an eyeball emoji. “And then he responded and said that money was a little tight to be going to the bar and would I instead like to get a tall can and go to the beach with him instead?” She tells the camera she said no, thank you. “So spend a Saturday night with me now. Cheers.”
She is already dressed for the night in a bright floral robe with green plaid trim and a stack of beaded bracelets. In the opening shots she stands in a kitchen pouring a pink drink over ice into a tall glass with a straw, and she raises it for the “Cheers.” The vlog then follows her through her apartment. “Life of the party,” she says, carrying a white mug past an orange shelf. A moment later she settles on a couch under an orange wall hanging, with a coffee table covered in what looks like her craft supplies and boxes, and white words flash on screen one at a time in the style of auto captions as she talks.
Next comes the home version of a date. She orders dinner, and while it is on the way she works on a Diamond Art kit. “I’m on my last section,” she says, and says she is going to refill her drink. While she waits for delivery, she puts eye patches on. She keeps them in the fridge “cause they just feel nicer when they’re cold,” and wears them when she wakes up and again at bedtime. She asks whether they do anything, answers “Hope they do cause I just bought a pack of them,” and calls herself “totally into the performative eye patch,” noting she never wears them outside the house.
Dinner is sushi, which she says earlier is about ten minutes away. When it arrives she unpacks two delivery bags on the kitchen counter and names what is inside: yellowtail, crispy rice and what she figures is the vegetable tempura. “Off we go,” she says, announcing that she is turning the lights off to watch American Horror Story. On the couch she does what she calls a little taste test before she “abandons” the camera, working through the yellowtail, the crispy rice and the tempura in turn, and notes that the restaurant did not give her lemon. When the show comes up on screen she shouts the name “Cordelia,” says she is actually panicking at the sight of Sarah Paulson and Jessica Lange, and by the end of the vlog she is wearing the pink eye patches, giving a thumbs up and telling the camera again and again that she has to go.
The pieces of her evening line up with ordinary mental health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency lists relaxing activities as one way to manage stress and names writing in a journal, spending time outdoors, and making time for hobbies or other activities you enjoy. It tells adults to aim for at least seven hours of sleep a night and to keep the same bedtime and wake time each day. It also suggests talking with people you trust about how you are feeling and taking breaks from news and social media.
Her version needed a few things the reader can copy: a project you are already midway through, like her Diamond Art, a dinner order placed early so you are not cooking, and something low effort to watch afterward.
She says no to the beach and moves on to her own plans within seconds. If a date suggests a cheaper plan you do not want, her approach is the practical part worth borrowing: decide quickly, tell the person no without a speech, and spend the evening on something you actually wanted.
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