LUCID DREAMING WITH
KIM CHI
&
ROB ANDERSON

The multifaceted media nerds share meditations from the cloud, touching on early influences, in-real-life experiences and how they connect with food, family and friends. CHI, the thriving makeup magnate, met ANDERSON, the cynical, hysterical, and psychedelic social media star, online of course. “You posted pictures of you playing board games,” Kim Chi recalls. “I was the fan,” Anderson asserts. “Now you’re the fan.”

KIM CHI: Well, Rob…

ROB ANDERSON: What's up, Kim?

KC: I feel like I haven't seen you in so long.

RA: It has been twenty-four hours and before that… twenty-four hours. I think we saw each other three days in a row. 

KC: Mm-hmm.

RA: Here we are talking about weed and creativity.

KC: The marijuana.

RA: Queerness.

KC: What inspires us. Being creative.

RA: When you're high, when you're stoned, are you more creative?

KC: I wouldn't necessarily say more creative, but when it comes to doing repetitive work – creating art or something – I can focus more easily. If I am painting something or sculpting something or brainstorming something and I'm high, I'm more likely to just do the repetitive work, over and over without thinking about it.

RA: Oh, that's interesting. So it keeps you very focused. When we're high, just around friends, and we come up with something really stupid, do you ever feel like those ideas are actually good ideas or do you just go, oh, I was just high. Or, the next morning you're like, oh, those are actually good ideas.

KC: A lot of good ideas do come. The problem is, I can't remember them half the time when I'm sober.

RA: Yeah, you gotta write 'em down.

KC: Even when I write 'em down, the next morning it'll say like “potato - wraps - flowers.” And I'm like, wait, what do these words mean?

RA: How did we meet, Kim? Remind me.

KC: We met on Instagram. I think I randomly came across your “Late Night Thoughts” that you used to post where you were laying in bed, talking about whatever it is that came into your mind. You had sound effects over each word. I don't know why, but the combination of you talking about these random things, plus the sound effect was like ASMR to me. 

RA: Wow, the sound effects. I was already a fan. I was following you for a few years before you discovered me. I was the fan and now you're the fan.

KC: Then in your Instagram story, you posted pictures of you playing board games. I love board games. You were like, “Oh, we should play sometime!”

RA: Yes. Then you came over and we played here at my apartment in Beverly Hills. It was just you and I. We played that dice building game with 125 unique dice…

KC: No, that was later in time. The first time I wanted to bring Trixie [Mattel] in case you were a psycho, ya know? When you're meeting someone for the first time, you don't know what they're gonna be like.

RA: Totally. That was smart of you. I should have brought someone with me in case both of you were psychos.

KC: Yeah. but you know, it's not every day that someone gets to play board games with Kim Chi and Trixie Mattel.

RA: That's true. I was living the dream. And then we got along. You’re one of my besties. We're both gay nerds. We make fun of ourselves all the time.

KC: And other people and pop culture and stupid things that people obsess over.

RA: We love the things that people hate. When someone hates something, we're like, oh, what do we love about that thing? One of our favorite things: the hate on Anne Hathaway. We do not understand it. It just doesn’t make sense why people hate Anne Hathaway.

KC: Anne Hathaway don’ nothing to nobody.

RA: She's a pure soul. She's just a theater girl doing her best.

KC: She's probably super friendly to the gays and all her stuff is probably all gay.

RA: We need more Anne Hathaways.

KC: You never hear stories about Anne Hathaway being a bitch on set, you know?

RA: Right. She gives cupcakes on the last day. She baked them herself.

KC: The time when Anne Hathaway wore that “fed up” shirt and we spent the entire day trying to figure out what that shirt was about.

RA: We were very high. Anne Hathaway wore a shirt that said “fed up” that looked like the FedEx logo. 

KC: But it wasn't funny enough to be like a haha shirt. I think the slogan was like, “Time for freedom.”

RA: And we couldn't figure out if it was a real organization or not because it wasn't funny. Is it an organization that feeds the children? Is it like a hunger thing? Is it an eating disorder organization? We couldn't figure it out, so we asked the internet.

KC: And the internet didn't really have a clear cut answer either. 

RA: They told us we were dumb for not getting the joke. We're like, what joke? 

KC: On the weird chance that Anne Hathaway reads this interview, please tell us, why did you wear that “fed up” shirt to the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards?

RA:  We don't want a boring answer like my stylist gave it to me. We wanna know why you chose it. 

KC: Of all things that you could have worn to the Kids' Choice Awards.

RA: Yeah. It's iconic though. It really is. What are some of the other things we've done while we've been stoned together?

KC: We play a lot of board games. We play a lot of video games.

RA: We've watched Illegally Blonde.

KC: Oh, my god. Yes.

RA: The most iconic, horrible… Well, some people call it horrible. We call it amazing.

KC: It's brilliant.

RA: 10-year-olds doing Legally Blonde.

KC: Except for the main character, who’s like 25, for no reason. So she's this giant woman with 10 year olds singing, terribly, around her.

RA: We were in tears over it. Okay, how does being gay affect your art, your creative mind?

KC: Mm. Gays, you know, I feel like we make the culture, we make pop culture. I feel like by being gay, I'm allowed to use femininity as a base for my art without feeling like I'm being judged by the society for it, you know?

RA: I hear you.

KC: If I were straight, you know, straight guy doing drag… he's a “cross-dresser.”

RA: Think about all the hate that Maddy Morphosis got for being a straight drag queen. You wouldn't wanna live in that world!

KC: Well, she's actually kinda brilliant in her own way.

RA: Totally. I appreciate Maddy. I don't know what a straight version of me would be like if I was gonna pursue what I'm doing now. If I was still a creative person, but I wasn't gay, I guess I'd be making all the same jokes that all these straight guys make.

KC: If you were straight, you'd be living in Chicago, you'd be going to a Cubs game every summer, and then you'd be hanging out in Wrigleyville. And you’d probably have a girlfriend, but not married.

RA: But would I be making content? I don't know. I can't even wrap my head around not being gay.

KC: I feel like you'd still be making content, but instead of like “Gay Science,” it’d be like, I dunno, probably about the latest movies or something.

RA: This is maybe a little sad, but I think that if I was straight, I would be more connected to my family. I feel like such a black sheep in my family as the only gay person. I just can't relate to them in a lot of ways. I think if I was straight, I would relate to them more. I would've stayed closer to New Jersey. I would still probably be in New Jersey and I would probably make content about my family. I think I'd be very close to my family. I love them and I talk to them a lot, but we're just so different because we just have different lives.

KC: That's true. Also your family's religious too, right?

RA: Yeah. Some more than others, but it's another thing that's just another barrier. Really can't get on the same page.

KC: My brother's super religious, but he wasn't that way. He recently became super religious and now he's all about god. My mom used to try to force me to go to church on Sundays, but now I think she’s got tired of going to church.

RA: Oh, yeah. There's nothing to do at church. It is the most boring time in the world. I had to go when I was a kid and god, I hated it. It smelled old. 

KC: For like an hour, you're listening to boring white people sing. And then this boring white guy talking in a monotone voice. The only reason why I went was it was the only day out of the week that we were allowed to eat out after. So if you go to church, you get to eat out.

RA: My mom was her worst version of mom when we were at church. She operates on different degrees. When we're just alone, the two of us, she's like the most real, which I appreciate. Then if we're around family, she puts on this facade a little. And then the church version of her was the worst. I'm like, oh god, I don't know if I can prepare for Church Pam. Anything I would do that wasn't perfect, she'd be like, “Don't do that!” She’d put on a little bit of a mid-Atlantic accent. I'm not kidding. She’d be like, “Robert…” and I'm like, why are you talking that way in front of the church? That's not who you are, Pam!

RA: What gives you inspiration for your art? 

KC: FAME AND FORTUNE.

RA: Money, attention… Do you get more inspiration online or do you get more in real life with real life experiences? When we were all locked down and the only thing we had was online, I think some people flourished during that time and others just really needed more IRL experiences. Do you gravitate toward one or the other for your inspiration?

KC: I think definitely in-real-life experiences. Online is great and there's so much content available online, but, you know, my last Halloween number was inspired by IRL events. The makeup palette that I found with Naomi [Smalls] was inspired by our trip to Joshua tree.

RA: I think that you can see a lot of opinions of things online and get a general grasp for how people feel about a thing. When I'm making something relatable or some situational comedy TikTok, I can see how people think about things online. I get a general sense of that. I can't really get that in person with a couple friends hanging out, but there is this moment online where it doesn't match reality. People talk about things in a certain way and have opinions in a certain way and dog pile on something and you feel like there's this consensus about something online. And then in real life, it doesn't match [that] reality. So, it's really easy to get caught up, if you're perpetually online, in this false sense of the way that things work. 

KC: I think it's important not to be swayed by the opinion of the internet and what everyone else is doing. Just see things for yourself, make opinions for yourself.

RA: Who was the first queer person or people to inspire you?

KC: This is going to be a very specific answer but Dame Edna in Ally McBeal. 

RA: I've actually never seen Ally McBeal. I know about it, but what about Dame Edna in the show?

KC: Ally McBeal was this problematic drama from the 90's/2000’s about lawyers working in Boston and then Ally McBeal trying to find a husband. Dame Edna was a crossdresser that worked in her office and she always wore a lavender wig and these ruffly outfit. I always thought she was fabulous. She's basically like Kim Chi if she was old.

RA: She really inspired Kim Chi!

KC: What about you?

RA: David Sedaris, I think, was the first. I found him so funny. I already loved Amy Sedaris and the whole Strangers with Candy crew. So I got into his books shortly after that because of how much I loved that show. I binged them all in like a year. I wanted to be David Sedaris. I thought it was so funny how he talked about his family. I related to this black sheep sort of vibe that he had. He was so brutally honest with the people in his life. Then it got very meta where he would later write about how the people in his life didn't like what he was writing about them but he was writing about that. I just thought he was so funny, so sardonic. I tried writing a blog that year. I was maybe 16 or 17. I went back and recently read some of the things that I wrote. I thought they were so funny at the time. I thought I was being so clever, but I was not. I was a 16 year old thinking he was David Sedaris, basically.

KC: I remember I archived my LiveJournal and went back and read it. I was crying from all the cringe. I was like, I can't believe my LiveJournal used to be a public thing and that anybody could read it. The things that I talked about when I was a 16 year old in high school…

RA: Can you recall any?

KC: I remember one of the posts was just a bunch of Hillary Duff lyrics, but posted unironically. It was my “mood” of the day. The line that I highlighted was “If the light is off, then it isn't on.”

RA: The most profound. We use that now as a joke, but that connected with you.

KC: Yeah. At the time.

RA: What does that even mean? That's how I think a lot of teenagers on TikTok will feel. I cringe for them with a lot of these videos, but they're certainly gonna look back and do a little archiving. They're gonna be talking about this in 10 years and go, oh, my god, can you believe we did that on TikTok?

KC: They're gonna get on Drag Race and wipe their social media.

RA: I wanna talk about food. We love food.

KC: We’ve never eaten together.

RA: We did in New York. We went to Bonnie's.

KC: We never ate together until like a year after we started being friends.

RA: Yeah. That's on me. As you know, I used to work for The Infatuation, the food review company. I worked for them for three years and I've always loved restaurants and food. It's why I started working with them. I think being in the business and eating out so much and getting that view of food, I just needed a break from restaurants after I left that job to do all this content creating full time. I had no interest in being out at a restaurant for quite a while. It took me about a year or two.

KC: I feel you because at my previous apartment where it was tiny there was no place to cook. Every meal, I would eat it out or order delivery, but then I moved into this new place where there's a big kitchen. I've basically been cooking every meal because I got so tired of eating delivery food.

RA: I'm actually thinking now about what it was about restaurants that made me wanna take a break. I think that I got fed up with the timing of it all. I like to eat in a certain time window. I don't think a meal should be more than an hour.

KC: I completely agree with you. I know that's very American of us and it's just a very American thing to say but sometimes I get exhausted by course dinners.

RA: The wait before you get the food. And then I eat it for like 10 minutes. I'm a fast eater. I sound like a terror. This is why I don't go on dates. As soon as I'm done eating, I wanna leave. I wanna pay and leave immediately. And going out to eat isn't about the timing that what you want. The timing is about what the restaurant does. 90 minutes is a lot. Two hours sometimes.

KC: That's why my favorite style of eating is family banquet style or small plates, where you just bring a little dish when it's ready. Then you just sample different things. My favorite way of eating. I like to sample different textures and different flavors. I don't just wanna eat one thing and wait for something else to arrive.

RA: Agreed. I like the shared plates. I like dim sum in New York. They are on it. They come by, they're quick. You get to try a bunch of things. It's very affordable. What about when you're high? What's your favorite stoned meal?

KC: There's nothing more satisfying when you're high than cereal. Whatever milk that you use keeps you hydrated, but then like, the crunchies… I like a cereal that has an element of savory like Cap’n Crunch. Once you get through the sweet coating, underneath is a corn that kind of has a savory aspect to it. Then, because it's a harder cereal, it stays crisp for longer in the milk. So Cap'n Crunch with oat milk or almond milk would be my go to.

RA: I've always wanted to get high and go to a cereal bar. They had a few in New York. 

KC: They have one in Chicago too.

RA: I'm sure they have one here in LA. Maybe we should do it. Maybe we should do it immediately. What are you doing in 30 minutes? I think that I just like sweet shit. I always want sweet shit when I'm high. I want ice cream. I want Haribo Twin Snakes. I love the sour and the sweet mix on that. I am bottomless so I can go forever. I think when we were in Joshua Tree last time and we were high, I ordered Instacart to get gummies and ice cream. As that arrived and we were eating it, I was already on my phone…

KC: Ordering more.

RA: Ordering more of the family size gummy worms. And then I crushed those too. Well, we all joined it.

KC: We did, we really crushed it. And all the potato chips and stuff were never eaten, but all those sweets went so fast.

RA: What about music? What's your favorite album to get stone to?

KC: So in college I went through a phase where I hung out with a ton of different stray stoners that were really into jam bands. So, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead… So, I'm very versed in that type of music too, but my favorite album to get stoned to is probably Of Montreal. Their album The Sunlandic Twins is my favorite getting-stoned album. Their music really excites me.

RA: I'll have to listen. I made a note. I should play it now. I'll wait. I'll play it after. I love Léon. I love Léon sober, but when I'm high, there's so much that's going on with her music. There's so many levels. The production is so good. It sounds like she's right in front of you. The way her music sounds. Love her. Lately Eurovision, actually…

KC: Slowmo (Spain)

RA: Then even the weird ones, the rock ones. It's just such a variety of music. Some are funny and campy. It's just a really fun journey. It's a fun, high journey.

KC: I love K-pop, but I don't love K-pop when I'm high.

RA: It's like too high energy?

KC: It's not that it's too high energy, but it's very simple and repetitive. I don't know. I love listening to K-pop when I'm sober, but something about when I'm high, it's not complex enough for me. Don't publish that, the K-pop fans will burn me.

RA: We love K-pop always, we would never not love K-pop. BTS army. You don't wanna get on the BTS army's bad side.

KC: They will destroy my entire life and my family.

RA: You're gonna join a religion, just like your brother, if the BTS army goes after you. You're gonna be going to church praying.

KC: Literally.

RA: They have “favorite past life” as a fun prompt for us. I was thinking about that. I don't know if I've ever had a past life. I can't recall one in my dreams or…

KC: What does that mean?

RA: I think it's where you have envisioned or lived a past life. You have a sense that you used to be in some other era. Some people have recurring dreams where they are tending to sheep or something over and over. And they're like, “In my past life, I was a sheep farmer in New Zealand – I know it.” Do you ever have anything like that?

KC: Not exactly that, but something still pisses me off to this day. It just happens a lot. I worked as a server at a fine dining restaurant for like nine years when I was an up and coming graphic designer and before I was a drag queen. I always dream that I'm back at that restaurant and I work a shift, just how I used to. Even last night I had a dream where I worked a full shift.

RA: Why do our brains do this?

KC: I don't know. I would approach the table, go through all the motions that I'm supposed to. I greet them, tell them what the specials are and the drink list, then take their drink order, put the drink order in, deliver the drinks, come back, make a recommendation and go through the motions. 

RA: Oh, my god, so mundane.

KC: I would wake up and be like, why did I just work another full shift as a server? This happens a lot.

RA: It's happened to me too with mundane shit. I think it happens to a lot of other people where I'll be studying for a test in high school my entire night. I'm stressed out about this test and I'm studying for it and I'm memorizing it. Then you wake up and you're like, why? I couldn't have been on a roller coaster? I could literally be reliving my first sexual experience.

KC: I could be flying through the sky. I could be anywhere, but, no, instead I'm just at this restaurant serving people.

RA: I used to be able to have lucid dreams. There was a period in my life where I was able to have them, maybe late teens. I remember feeling like I cracked the code. I broke it. In my dreams, I could know that I'm dreaming and then fly and do all these things. It didn't last very long. It lasted like a year or two, then I never got it back. I don't know whether it's the drugs or the stress. I don't know what it is, but I want 'em back. Lucid dreams are so fun.

KC: Maybe it's the drugs.

RA: Maybe it's the drugs. Can't give those up though.

KC: Joints or edibles?

RA: Uh, edibles.

KC: What cartoon duo best represents us?

RA: I would love to believe that we are Jane and Daria from Daria. I think that our essence are those two, even though our energy is a little bit higher than them. I think that our worldview is very Daria and Jane.

KC: Oh, my god. You hit the nail on the head. Yeah. Very that. Daria and Jane, but give ‘em a little sugar.

RA: Give ‘em a little sugar, give 'em a little glitter. Maybe a heel. I'd be wearing the heel though.

KC: Would you be Jane or Daria?

RA: I think that I'd be Daria. Who's drier?

KC: Daria.

RA: Then you'd be Daria. You're a little more dry than I am. 

KC: Yeah, you're right.

RA: And I'm jealous of that. I wish I was drier.