February Favorites By Kiki Pape

1. Sabrina carpenter on the muppet show 

2. bedazzling everything in sight 

3. Lady gaga at the super bowl 

4. Elmo 

5. Copenhagen Fashion Week 

6. chloe kim listening to young thug before getting a medal 

7. JFK JR’s style 

8. Wuthering Heights 

February has been a slow month for me. Most of these days were spent writing, working, or figuring out how to write while I worked. This seasonal depression brought me to gravitate toward more media than usual — things that bring joy, rather than what the world has really seemed like recently: really dark, scary, and honestly just very mean.

This led me to find, at the beginning of the month, Sabrina Carpenter on The Muppet Show. The revamp was especially meaningful to me because Miss Piggy is my spirit animal. The nostalgia and the honest marketing behind it are amazing. Revamped by Seth Rogen, I found all of it — the humor and the press as well.

The Super Bowl rolled around, and I was especially excited for Bad Bunny, but the second Lady Gaga stepped out, I was simply speechless. A loud scream came from me in the living room in the Midwest. Obsessed.

Nothing has made me laugh more than Elmo. He is so f-ing funny. I love the way he gets into fights. This is my pledge to get Elmo into more of my media, please.

Copenhagen Fashion Week is something I embarrassingly discovered on TikTok, and I wish I could sound cooler and say I was always familiar with this style and this week of the year. But since I laid eyes on the street style and the pieces across the runway, I have been in constant awe. Coming from someone who loves discovering her sense of style and has never seen a certain type of fashion in one place that emulates me, it was a dream come true to see. I am quite an eccentric person, and it certainly comes out in my style. Copenhagen Fashion Week definitely shares the need to wear all the pieces and not be apologetic about it.

I have been snowboarding since elementary school, and I have always thought female snowboarders were the coolest people ever. I gave up skiing because I wanted to look cooler on the mountain, and also because my dad and brothers snowboarded. Chloe Kim once again wins a silver medal, emulating cool always — she even listens to Young Thug before she drops into the halfpipe. How cool is she? In another life, I would be Chloe Kim.

I don’t think I am the only one this month who is completely wishing that men like John F. Kennedy Jr. existed in this world. My discovery of the chic couple, Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr., was long before high school, and I realized that a passionate, good-looking couple doesn’t always mean it is perfect behind closed doors. But beyond the couple, the men’s style stood out to me even more than the women’s. I am not usually someone who focuses on men’s fashion, but what I found so interesting was that it was chic yet doable for all types of men. It makes me wonder: why aren’t all men trying to achieve this style? A simple suit with a baseball cap, or a pair of trousers and a turtleneck. I am constantly baffled every time I look at that man — I’m like, wow…

Finally, the month ended with a classic. Wuthering Heights has been a favorite story of mine for a while. I have always found every single character to be wildly complex, especially Isabella. I am a major contender for the book always being better than the movie, and that will forever be true. So when seeing Wuthering Heights, I already knew that if I started comparing the movie to the book, I would be significantly disappointed. Yet, viewing it as someone’s own version of the book made me look at literature in a different way. It makes me think: do we all view these classic stories differently?

Goodbye, February 2026. Thank you for a melancholy of days spent writing and watching TV.