It’s bonkers to pay money to go to a Broadway show on opening night and sit in the front row and text. I get it. But if I have to go sit in the lobby or on the toilet, I would like to get a couple rounds of Words with Friends in. It’s only fair.
I deleted my Facebook account. I mean I really deleted it, “scorched-earth, can’t ever reactivate it, good-bye to all my 2012 photos” deleted it, “whoops, I forgot to get your phone number before I bailed and Facebook was the only connective tissue between us, guess I’m never going to talk to you again?” deleted it. Having intimate-seeming connections to people I don’t actually know was starting to weird me out. Sure, there’s value in community, but I was sick of seeing fake-news links and thinking, “Wait, how do I know this dingbat again?” But I kind of loved some of those dingbats! And I really loved being able to scroll through their lives and see everything they’ve been doing that they’re comfortable sharing with an audience of virtual strangers without having to, you know, ever talk to them! Do you ever think about how incredible it is that you can pop on your aunt Tracy’s page while in the waiting room at your doctor’s office like, “Great, her dog is still alive! Wow, she got a new car! That haircut is pretty cute…. Man, my cousins are a fucking mess. Damn, I see she’s still into conspiracy theories. Oh no, my strep test is positive?” That’s the magic of your pocket computer. You can find out everything you need to know without subjecting your full attention to your college crush’s bad jokes and awful personality. When is the last time an actual human interaction made you laugh more than a meme did?
Sometimes connecting with other people online sucks, like when some dummy you barely remember is assaulting you with posts about beauty products that you can purchase only if they sell them to you from out of a suitcase in your living room, or when people won’t stop trolling you with their truly terrible takes. This makes my case for cell phones > real human interaction even stronger, because you can just block people and pretend they died. You know, without going to jail for murdering them. One time, in an incredibly brave act of self-care, I blocked a dude because he posted the grossest-looking photo of food he was eating, two seconds after I had blocked another dude who was trying to sell me his mixtape in the year of our Lord 2018. Wow, sir, no fucking thank you! I could go on and on about a fifth-grade locker partner adding me to various LuLaRoe legging groups or spamming my Instagram with links for “Free iPhones!” but listen, you know who I’m talking about. And you shouldn’t feel bad for even a second for blocking that hoe and throwing her a funeral in your heart.
Every time someone’s Internet presence feels like a personal attack on my life, I first try to have compassionate thoughts like, “What if something terrible is happening in her world?” because there’s still a very slim chance that hell is real and I’d like to have a plausible defense of my actions on Earth should there be some sort of way to argue my way out of damnation. But then I think, “Well, if she was actually suffering, there’s no way she’d be spamming me links to all these pyramid schemes,” and my guilt evaporates just long enough for me to click that block button so I can move on with my day. I’m a patient person and hesitant to alienate anyone who might have fifteen dollars lying around to buy my books, but it dawned on me the other day that, for me, the Internet has to be a meticulously curated digital space in which your uncle’s vaguely racist tweets have no place.
I hate fighting. I’m sensitive and, frankly, not good at it. If the consequence of bickering online means I’ve got to spend the afternoon feeling bad because a kid I don’t remember from high school called me a “fat-ass Kelly Price” over a Reductress article, please murder me. And if my tweets get on your goddamn nerves: BLOCK ME FIRST. Kill me with your powerful brain! There are too many places in real life where blocking is not a viable option to tolerate someone ruining your secret lives online. You can’t block the coworker who won’t stop fucking talking while loitering nearby as you’re just trying to put half-and-half in your breakroom coffee, but you can block that friend of a friend who says shit like, “I’m not prejudiced, I don’t care if a person is purple or green or blue.” LMAO, blue people???? SHUT THE FUCK UP. You can’t delete the neighbor whose eyesore of a car is parked halfway across your driveway and whose cat keeps shitting on your deck, but you can delete your cousin who earnestly believes that rap music is reverse racism and vehemently comments as much on every Kendrick Lamar video you share. There’s no mute button for the woman at the grocery store who won’t stop asking you where the shampoo is, even though you’re pushing your own cart while wearing both sunglasses and a coat. But you know who you can mute? Everyone you hate on the Internet! Yes, everyone is annoying and also Extremely Online, the state of the public discourse is robust as ever, and the incredible thing about it is if you aren’t into it you can just log right off. Imagine if real life had an off switch!
Apple put this new Screen Time feature on the iPhone that’s supposed to, I don’t know, shame me into putting down the drug they won’t stop peddling to me. Every time I get that notice, I take it as a challenge to spend even more time messing around on my phone. Only one hour and thirty-seven minutes of Social Networking yesterday, you say? Let me put down this informative book I was reading and try to top that.
So here’s to love and loving your portable handheld telecommunication device. Stay inside where it’s temperature-controlled and there are no bugs and spend some time celebrating your beloved today. Make a delicious homemade casserole (look up the recipe on your phone), dip out to pick up a fancy bottle of wine (request a Lyft from your phone), sit next to a cozy fire (YouTube a fireplace video on your phone), sing along to your favorite jams (find it on Spotify on your phone), listen to your favorite book (open Audible on your phone), watch some cheesy movies (did you know you can get Netflix on your phone?!), send an update to the family members you haven’t seen in a while (use e-mail from your phone), order some Indian takeout (Grubhub dot com on your phone), text your homegirl some juicy gossip from your phone, and since you’re playing around on it anyway, why not do a little shopping on your phone? Is it holiday time? If so, maybe you could stop being a huge grinch for a change and just buy everyone in your circle the one thing we’ve been conditioned to constantly want: A NEW PHONE.
late-1900s time capsule
I keep every CD I’ve ever bought, since high school, in black Case Logic binders hidden in the closet in the sunroom of this house I didn’t grow up in and don’t have a real attachment to. Also in that same closet there’s the ever-growing, tangled wad of plastic bags intended for reuse that will most certainly outlive me, a couple cans of bug spray that are all clogged and nonfunctional, the seltzer cans I keep meaning to return for cash, a gooey tube of superglue, several non-matching batteries rolling around the bottom of a deteriorating plastic cup, backup gardening gloves—I mean, why do we even have these?—and an original and heavily scratched copy of Sneaker Pimps’ Becoming X purchased from a Blockbuster Music in downtown Evanston in 1996.
The closer I creep toward the precipice of forty, the more time I spend listening to the same songs I listened to in high school and combing through surprisingly vivid memories of my time there, which is wild, because I did not actually have a good time being young! Why can’t I bear to part with the copy of Sheryl Crow’s 1996 self-titled album Sheryl Crow that I last listened to in a battered Sony Discman I got as a hand-me-down from a friend? “Home” has lyrics I could neither understand nor relate to at the time of its release, because they’re about a grown-ass woman and her disappointing relationship with some useless bonehead she’s desperate to cheat on. But when I was sixteen, I used to put it on repeat as the melancholy soundtrack for my brooding walk to school.
Mixtapes were the love language of my youth. If you got one from me, that shit was as serious as a marriage proposal. Maybe because they were so time-consuming to make? I had a painstaking process I went through before I put a mix together. First of all, I would figure out what mood I was trying
to create: How cool did I want the recipient to think I was? Is this a person who would understand my deep and abiding love for They Might Be Giants? Would they see through my artificial cool and realize that 50 percent of the songs I’d chosen had come from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack?
The second thing to consider: What was the goal? What kind of overwhelming pressure was I placing on a meager 1.43 ounces of plastic film and magnetic tape? Was I trying to convince someone that I was worthy of their love and/or friendship? Or did I just want them to know that I, too, spent a lot of time hanging out at the indie record store after school digging through all the used CDs in the alternative section hoping to find something interesting that was also less than seven dollars? Or, failing those two, was I trying to make them jealous of my wide-ranging interests? (Why, yes, I do enjoy both Phish and Nina Simone!) And, most important, should I use a ninety-minute tape or a sixty-minute one? (Oh, I know, I know: GIRL, WHAT THE FUCK IS A TAPE?!)
Here is my ’90s mixtape for you. Please love me.
A SIDE
“World Falls,” Indigo Girls (live version)
What do you mean, you’re “surprised I ended up with a lady”?
“Black,” Pearl Jam
I first heard Pearl Jam in the seventh grade, when this kid I didn’t know very well was brandishing a copy of Ten on cassette in our language arts class. I asked to borrow it and took it home and held a tape recorder up to the speaker in our living room for an hour to record it. (This, sweet babies, is my version of “in my day, we used to have to walk up a hill to get to school with plastic bags for shoes!” Please kill me.) I then listened to that recording for months and months and months while brooding. Being very complicated and deep, I was enamored with this idea that love was difficult and stressful, and that torrid relationships fraught with passion and rage were exciting. This was, of course, before I knew how tiring life can be for an adult. Oh my goodness, “my bitter hands cradle broken glass / of what was everything”? Yes, please! “All the love gone bad turned my world to black”? Swoon city. Eddie was the perfect embodiment of Brokenhearted Sensitive Grunge Man; I lived for him then, and I still do. I would totally listen to him howl about his electric bill.
“Elsewhere,” Sarah McLachlan
Freshman year of high school, I failed gym class. Oh, I know. It’s easy to think you know why, and guess what, you’re right! I appear to be as athletic as a boiled chicken sandwich under a heat lamp in the cafeteria. That’s something I understood about myself, which is why I spent an entire semester sitting on the sidelines of every gym activity pretending to be suffering from debilitating menstrual cramps rather than pissing off my classmates while trying to play kickball. Listen, I don’t need to trip over my own feet trying to dive for a volleyball that’s inevitably going to bust me in the face, and you don’t need to waste all your budding testosterone yelling at me for making us lose; it’s a win for everyone to have me sit out! So I failed a semester due to lack of participation, which is perfectly reasonable. I also failed a semester of history that year, and math, which was less so. My mom was dying! But I also literally never did any work. In a fit of optimism, I signed up for summer school to try to make up some of the classes I’d failed, and the only available gym class was first thing in the morning. In the fucking summer. Unbeknownst to me, it was full of super seniors who should have graduated already but didn’t have all their credits completed, so I was out there trying to play catcher behind grown men with full beards swinging their bats harder than Barry fucking Bonds. These were gentlemen who smoked cigarettes in the outfield and ran full speed into you when you tried to tag them out, so after a week of crouching with my arms over my head while crying, I would get off the bus at school in my gym shorts and walk to the McDonald’s a few blocks away, grateful that it was still early enough in the day to get a one-dollar sausage biscuit, while listening to this incredibly soothing song. I failed gym again that summer. Senior year, I had to take two gym classes so they would let me graduate. I got very good at badminton.
“I Miss You,” Aaron Hall
“I’ll Do Anything/I’m Sorry,” Ginuwine
“Beauty,” Dru Hill
“Hey Now,” Carl Thomas
There is a specific breed of crying-ass, begging-ass, I’m-sorry-ass, you’re-so-beautiful-ass ’90s R&B songs that at first blush sound like they are intended for sensuous lovemaking, but if you actually stop and listen to the lyrics, it’s like, “Hold up, wait, you cheated on me with who?” Or it’s six real minutes of a dude in either a torn-off shirt or an oversize cashmere turtleneck (sorry, there’s no in between!) crooning super hard and laying it on real thick about how beautiful you are and that is 100 percent the type of R&B song that got me through my elderly teens.
“Softer, Softest,” Hole
I was obsessed with Hole mostly because I was obsessed with Sassy magazine, and Courtney Love was, like, queen of the alternative girls, and I very much wanted to be an alternative girl, down to the steel-toed Doc Martens I saved my babysitting money to buy and then wore every single day because I could not afford multiple pairs of shoes. Picture me, lumbering through the halls of my high school between classes trying not to be noticed, wearing your grandfather’s cardigan and shoes literally the size of cinder blocks, humming “your milk turns to cry” under my breath. There was a certain type of girl in the ’90s that I dreamed of channeling, chief among them Veronica Sawyer and Vickie Miner and Daria Morgendorffer. They all seemed like the kind of girls Hole made music for. So I listened to Hole a lot, even though 99 percent of the lyrics were confusing as fuck to me back then. Who am I kidding? They still are! I’m putting this track at the beginning of the mix, so you know that I’m sweet but also kind of scary, which I hear some people find sexy. (I am actually not the least bit scary, which is why I let Courtney Love scream on my behalf.)
“Mad Lucas,” The Breeders
I still fuck with the Breeders, heavy. Last Splash came out and one of my rich friends—you know, the kind whose parents could afford a dual-cassette-deck boombox—dubbed me a copy of it. I was like, “HOLY SHIT, WHAT THE FUCK AM I LISTENING TO?” I don’t know, I was kind of a square, so in hindsight I probably said, “This sounds neat!” But you get it. It’s a little surf rock, a tiny bit alt-country, sometimes straight-up grunge, and it was like magic to my ears. I know everyone loves “Cannonball,” and believe me, I do, too. But if I’m going to make you a tape, I’m going to make you a tape that has a truly bonkers surf-rock slow jam that you probably could bone to on it.
“I’ll Back You Up,” Dave Matthews Band
Once upon a time, I lived in a crack house. It wasn’t so much a crack house as it was a rooming house that a lot of people who enjoyed smoking crack cocaine lived in, but “crack house” rolls off the tongue better, so I’ll just call it that. It was a decent-looking house on a well-kept street in a nice part of town, and if you looked at it from the outside, you’d have no idea that behind those imitation wood blinds operated a literal den of iniquity, and you know what? It was fine! I had a bed and I could afford it! Which is honestly a low bar, but what do you really care when you’re twenty-two? One day, I came home to find that someone had broken the lock to my room, and, haha, joke’s on them, because unless you want a bunch of cried-on journals and a keytar, you’re going to be incredibly disappointed with my belongings. I pushed open the splintered door and found a crackhead in my room sitting on the floor, riffling through a bunch of grunge CDs. I don’t know what the appropriate response should have been (screaming, maybe? outrage?), but I just burst out laughing. A genuine, hearty, throat-opening laugh. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the rotten underwear and poorly rolled, half-smoked joints littering my floor, this young man was really going to take, what, a couple Ben Folds records? He jumped up as soon as he noticed me, clutching Under the Table and Dreaming, the Dave Matthews Band masterpiece. (YES, MASTERPIECE.) I put my hand out to take it back, humiliated for us both, and when he tried to scoot past me with t
he cracked jewel case tucked under his shirt, I grabbed at him, and we had an embarrassing tug of war, which of course I won. Come on, “Satellite” is a jam. Anyway, this song isn’t on that record, but it’s the best. Give me some whispery, warbling male vocals, some gorgeous falsetto, some plaintive guitar plinking and plucking. Honestly, what’s not to like? If you hate Dave Matthews, that shit is on you. *wink*
“Wake Up,” Alanis Morissette
There was an article going around in early 2019, written by a woman around my age about how she was listening to Jagged Little Pill, Alanis’s first album, which is fucking canon for angsty ’90s teens, and now that she’s an adult, her husband made her realize that the album sucks. First of all, why you would ask a man anything is beyond me. Also, accepting his assessment of an album meant for hyperemotional girls twenty years after it came out is bullshit. Why does he care? Was “Hand in My Pocket” even written for him?! I really love some emotional singing, and I also love copious amounts of rock harmonica, so basically this album is perfect.
“Tear in Your Hand,” Tori Amos
SPEAKING OF EMOTIONAL SINGING. Seriously, is there anyone better to dramatically weep to? I skipped school one day sophomore year to go to the new girl’s apartment—the most stressful day of my life, to be honest, because I thought you could get arrested for ditching, so every time a car door shut outside I braced myself for jackboots and a battering ram. Her dad was divorced and too permissive, so we spent the entire day listening to Little Earthquakes while she told me all her illicit sex stuff. I had only had one sex thing happen up to that point and it wasn’t even that exciting, so I just sat quietly with big, shocked eyes and tried to pretend that I knew what “blow job” meant. Tori’s music always made me nervous because I didn’t understand a lot of what she was talking about, but I knew it all sounded like it was about masturbating or fucking, and that was embarrassing. I wasn’t raised in a sex-positive way! I mean, my mom didn’t say “dirty pillows” or anything, but she wasn’t, like, teaching me about clitoral stimulation or whatever. All Tori’s songs are either about Jesus or getting banged, and I was so mortified every time I heard one, even if I couldn’t articulate exactly why. “Me and a Gun” is about her own experience being raped, right? And “Leather” is definitely about fucking. “Precious Things” is about making someone come! I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but I knew it had to do with private parts and that if I got caught singing that shit, I was going to be in trouble. Anyway, “Tear in Your Hand” is about a girl who gets broken up with (definitely can relate) and then spends an entire song telling the dude who left her that he made a huge mistake (DEFINITELY CAN RELATE). Me and the new girl ate so many bags of chips and sang our hearts out, truant officer (are those real) be damned! I got front row seats to see Tori a few years ago at the Chicago Theatre, and a sobbing woman broke my toe (she stomped on it while wearing what I can only assume was a chunky-soled Steve Madden clog) as she ran screaming for the stage when Tori sang this during the encore. I wasn’t even mad. I get it!!
Wow, No Thank You. Page 4