Ryan Estrada

I scroll up, and they're all replying to a link to the dictionary.

I click it and I see immediately a photo of the exact outfit that I was wearing.

Next to a headline that says, Normcore, named runner up for word of the year by Oxford English Dictionary.

I'm like, what the hell is Normcore?

Luckily I'm in the dictionary.

So I scroll down, noun, a style in which you wear purposely unfashionable clothes to make a point.

A couple clicks later and I see, created by cartoonist Ryan Estrada.

I haven't left my house in a month.

How do these people know how I'm dressing?

It took some investigation work to figure out what was going on here.

Apparently, a couple years before that, I'd had this ridiculous deadline where I had to make 100 comics in a month.

I don't know if anyone here makes comics.

100 comics is a lot of comics to make in a month.

You go a little crazy, you don't sleep, and I was writing and illustrating comics that I had completely forgotten existed by the time I clicked send on the email.

One of them was apparently making fun of fashion trends, in which I made up a bunch of completely ridiculous trends, and the punchline, the last panel, was the stupidest fashion trend that my sleep-deprived brain could think of, normcore.

which I defined as wearing only completely ordinary clothes and only using slang after it had appeared in a sitcom.

Unbeknownst to me, a couple months after that, someone added my definition to Urban Dictionary.

Apparently there's a trend forecasting firm, and also apparently there's such a thing as a trend forecasting firm, that saw this on Urban Dictionary and wrote a piece about how normcore was the next big thing.

which led to every single trend-setting magazine, blog, newspaper, writing articles about how normcore was the stupidest thing in the world.

I do not read any trend-setting magazines because apparently I'm normcore.