I want to be cringe.

I want normal everyday people to think I have too many hobbies. I don’t care if you think I’m pretentious. I want to have niche interests, because I think they are interesting. I don’t care if you think that I think that I’m better than you because I don’t like most modern pop music and box office films. I don’t think I’m better than you, but I won’t bother trying to convince you. I started collecting vinyl at eighteen. I first longed to shoot film as a teenager. I took only art and English electives in high school. I think food is art. Or can be, at least. I’ve always loved poetry, and escaping into words on a page. What’s so wrong with being a hipster? Okay, that word is antiquated now, but I was there. I embraced Indie Sleaze long before it was even called that. Long before it was trendy. Way back when hipsters hated being called “hipster” because being associated with anything was uncool. I didn’t care what I was associated with, so long as it wasn’t the popular jackasses at my high school who bullied me for trying to fit in. I decided I wasn’t ever going to fit in and I should just be myself because my peers would hate me either way. So I started dressing how I wanted and doing what I liked. The first new vinyl album I ever bought was In Rainbows. I like “Creep” as much as the next guy, but “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” is where it’s at. I don’t care if you think my personality is performative. You’re the one still posting curated Instagram carousels of the highlights of your life. I had Instagram long before it was monetized. Back when all we posted was cringe, overly-edited heavily filtered selfies and photos of food and random shit we were doing or seeing. Back before we started doing it for likes or money. Back when we thought these platforms were actually tools for connection. I had the same Instagram handle for the entire eleven years I was on the app. Which, yeah, I think is worth mentioning cause so many people want to change theirs all the time to, like, stay relevant or something. I don’t care if I’m relevant as long as I’m authentic. I want to mend my clothes and buy secondhand. I want to pay a tailor more than an item is worth to bring it back to life. Even though I’m broke. I want to drink twelve dollar cold-pressed-to-order green juices that my partner Kyle thinks are gross and overpriced because I think they are yummy and they make me feel alive and nourished. And yeah maybe I do think I’m better than these BookTokers who say there are too many words on the page and completely missed the point of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. So what? Bite me. I hate it here. Why do almost none of my peers read? Why is it nearly impossible to start a book club? Did you all used to read, but don’t anymore? Did you never like to read? Did your parents and teachers never instill within you a love for books? I don’t want InstaPoetry. I want Sappho and T.S. Eliot and Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg and twenty-first century poets who actually read and who write their poetry without taking into account whether it will fit neatly into an Instagram post or how an algorithm will react to it. Do it because you love the art, stop doing it for internet clout. I deleted social media because it was poisoning my psyche and wasting my time. Now I have all these thoughts I can’t ignore anymore so I’ll send them off into this void. I’ll never forget in tenth grade when Sam tried to tell me The Beatles are overrated. Why do so many people think that? Is it for the same reasons I don’t listen to Taylor Swift? I hated Facebook. I got banned from a Squishmallow group for telling everyone how unethical the corporation is. I wasted hours I’ll never get back being called a white savior and arguing with morons about whether or not plants have feelings. Ugh. Shut up. Does nobody have any sense of media literacy? Can you really not tell the difference between a reputable study and a blog post? How is it that I am so jaded and angry to the point that I have to avoid these apps completely because the rest of the people on them are so unbelievably apathetic it makes me want to vomit? Maybe vomit on them. When did it become uncool to give a shit? I like giving a shit. I like having my silly little principles and trivial hills I would die on. I want to care so much that it tortures me into having an original thought once in a goddamn while. When did we all start thinking and speaking in meme? The damage can’t be undone. The internet exists, and for better or worse, it is a part of me. My partner Lydia says I’m a meme lord. I am always coming up with meme ideas, but I don’t post them. I make them on some free meme generator or in the Procreate app and they rot in my camera roll. Why did Donna ask me what’s the point of a film camera? “Don’t you have an iPhone?” Man, I love you, but be serious. A photo taken on an iPhone looks nothing like a photo taken on a Lomourette. I don’t want to explain. Figure it out. I didn’t own a TV until I was thirty. I’ve always thought there were better things to do. People would question me about it and I’m like, “So? I have a record player.” When I sing “Flagpole Sitta” at karaoke it transports me back in time. The people listening to me sing it have no idea where or when I am. I can’t believe someone stole my iPod Nano at that party twelve years ago. I’ll never get over it. It took me countless hours to put all four-hundred plus of those Beatles songs on there and I bought so many songs on iTunes and now I don’t even have access to that account anymore. Ugh. The person who stole that iPod probably got rid of it and just uses Spotify now. I would’ve kept it. Fucking asshole. Spotify is cool and all, but nobody even knows how to curate a playlist anymore. What, you never made a mix CD? I remember being a youth and hating how adults treated me, treated us, scoffing “…kids these days…” and I’m that person now. I’m thirty-one and I feel so old. I hate the way social media is hurting everyone. I hate that kids don’t read books anymore, they just want to watch Skibidi Toilet and play Fortnite. Maybe that stuff’s not even cool anymore, I dunno. I’m irrelevant. Nobody even goes to the library anymore. Every time I go it’s so empty. All this online discourse about Third Places and none of y’all are even at the fucking library. I don’t see you at the bookstore either. You don’t even read. Yeah, whatever, sure, we need Third Places that aren’t just about books, but honestly. Sometimes it feels like everyone online is either anti-intellectual or pseudo-intellectual. Reading Colleen Hoover does not make you an intellectual. Change my mind. There I go, speaking meme again. People only want to read nowadays because it’s romanticized online. I guess that’s better than not reading at all, but I hate that we aren’t teaching kids the importance of literature anymore. High schoolers just read excerpts now, not even whole books. Kids don’t even know how to write in cursive. What do you mean they changed the ABC song?! Remember Schoolhouse Rock? Remember the ads for Hooked on Phonics? TV commercials suck now. The ads on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon were so cool back in the day. Bendaroos?! Floam?! Do you ever search for old 90’s TV ads on YouTube, just to feel something? I miss the Cartoon Network games on the old website. That Samurai Jack game was fire. Millennials are all so hopelessly nostalgic. Maybe our parents’ generations were too, but I think the nineties are more nostalgia-worthy than the sixties. Maybe that’s because I didn’t experience the latter. Maybe it’s because the nineties had the perfect balance of exciting new digital technology and old if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it analog basics, of ease and inconvenience, of progress and work left to do. I miss being a kid. And not just because I had less responsibilities. I miss the simplicity of the nineties and early 2000’s. I hate social media. I hate all of these apps begging for my attention. I hate the immediacy of everything. I hate that you can’t have anything without having an email address. Even my ninety-five year old grandma has email, not that she knows how to use it. I hate QR code menus and AI drive-thru speaker ordering. I hate how hard friendships are now. I hate how hard dating is. I hate that nobody knows how to communicate. I hate ghosting. I hate the government. I hate being so goddamned aware of how much I hate everything. I hate that people get upset if you don’t text them back right away. What about landlines? Remember in 1999 when your friend would call the house while you were at Blockbuster with your parents but you wouldn’t check the answering machine until after the movie and the Baby Bottle Pop and by then, according to your parents, it was too late to call back, so you’d call them the next day if you remembered, but that was a Saturday and they were at a soccer tournament or something so you’d leave a message and they would call you back after school on Monday and you’d answer and make plans for a sleepover on Friday, and throughout the week while you bathed in anticipation you’d listen to your Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears CDs, and you’d play Super Mario on your Gameboy, and you’d flip through Highlights magazine in the dentist office waiting room, and you’d go home and watch Mulan on VHS, and dance around the living room when “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” came on, and you’d do your multiplication tables after school and then play with the magnetic gyroscope toy you got at the science center gift shop, or maybe Legos or K’nex or a Rubik’s Cube, and you’d go on bike rides just for the sake of it and you’d see a turkey vulture flying and you’d ride towards it, convinced you could locate whatever carrion it was circling, but you’d never find it? Yeah, me too. I miss that. Cell phones were exciting at first, yeah. Smartphones too. But has their impact been a net positive? Maybe. All I know is there are a lot of days I’m exhausted by the thought of responding to a text message, or answering a phone call, or logging into a patient portal. Is all this “convenience” really convenient at all? For the love of my precious time, just let me check in when I get to the office. I don’t want to do it the day before, on a tiny screen. Hand me a clipboard and a pen. I was so impressed the other day when I was giving someone my number and he pulled a fountain pen out of his pocket. A fountain pen. How retro. Nobody carries pens anymore. I mean, I always have, but it seems like nobody else does. Why would you need a pen if you have a notes app on your phone? Anyway I thought it was super cool, so today me and Lydia bought fountain pens and they are so fun and aesthetic. I had some when I was a kid, but this one is better. It writes smoother. It doesn’t catch and tear the paper. I told Lydia I need to buy a bunch more, and extra ink cartridges. I need a fountain pen for every one of my vintage handbags. Obviously I know I’m not the only person who carries a pen. Lots of people do. They’re all over YouTube talking about their Commonplace books, but where can I find them in the wild? The coffee shop or the bookstore or the vintage boutique or the record store? Sometimes I’m at the record store and I want to tell someone I like their shirt or their shoes or the vinyl they’re looking at, but they’re wearing headphones. Why does everyone want to be unapproachable? How am I supposed to make friends? At the climbing gym it’s easy to make friends. People know it’s a social environment and we’re solving the same problems; there’s a common denominator, and that’s an ice breaker. I think it’s annoying when people wear headphones at the climbing gym. This is the closest thing we have besides libraries to a Third Place and you want to ignore everyone? There’s one guy who is always wearing AirPods at the climbing gym and he is super hot, and a strong climber, so, many months ago when I was still on Instagram I crept through the list of people who follow the climbing gym and clicked on every one that looked vaguely like him in the thumbnail or shared his first name and I found his account and I looked at a bunch of his posts and he was very obviously one of those guys who knows he’s hot and thinks that makes it okay to treat women he isn’t into like they’re not worthy of a crumb of his attention. Like platonic friendships aren’t worth a damn. And that’s how he acts at the gym too. Whatever, maybe he’s in a monogamous relationship and he feels some type of way about befriending women who aren’t his girlfriend (that’s unhealthy, but I digress), I just think it’s dumb to be unfriendly all the time. I have bad days like everyone else and I still manage to act like a human who lives in a fucking society. I want to seem friendly, even if I don’t feel friendly on that particular day. I want people to compliment me, and I want to compliment them. I want the barista to tell me they like my plushie or the hat I crocheted when I step up to the counter to order my matcha latte with oat milk. I want to carry a plushie and a film camera everywhere with me and I want people to ask me about them and I want people to want to talk to me because I’m weird, not in spite of it. I want to connect with people, in a real way, not this fleeting bullshit of viewing each other’s Instagram stories but never actually reaching out. I want to spend all my free time watching indie films and listening to vinyl and taking photos on film and reading books and making memories. Real memories. Ones where I’m really present, not just living them through a screen. I want to collect things that I like, even if Kyle thinks they’re a waste of money. I want more permanence. I want to own a book, or a record, or a movie. I don’t want to license them from Amazon or Spotify. I want an iPod, and I want all of the music on it to be from CDs I actually own, not “purchased” on iTunes. I want to buy clothes that I know will last, because they’ve already lasted forty years. I want to not be a part of the problem. I want to go out of my way to find firsthand items that are ethically produced, whose materials are ethically sourced, whose shipping is carbon offset. I want to spend way too much money on these items because they will last and I will care for them and be proud of them and of myself for being the kind of person who buys them. I want to shop at the zero waste store, with my own refillable containers. I want to drive all the way home and back when I get to the grocery store and realize I forgot my reusable tote bags. I want to go out of my way to go shopping at three different grocery stores and a farmer’s market because that’s how you find all the best things that aren’t packaged in plastic. I want to carry my own boba straw in my purse. I want to bring a reusable tumbler or bottle or cup, and my own Pyrex containers for leftovers to the café or restaurant even if the workers and other patrons give me dirty looks. I want to drive around thirsty as all hell because when I stopped at the gas station they didn’t have a single non-caffeinated beverage that wasn’t in a single-use plastic bottle and I refuse to buy drinks in plastic bottles. I want to pretend it’s the nineties and everyone must care about the environment because everyone in my household, my bubble, cares about the environment and so that must mean everyone does. I want to give a fuck. I want to enjoy little joys even if the news says we’re going broke because of avocado toast and lattes. I want to like the things I like, unashamedly, unapologetically. I want to do and like all of these things even if people think I am self-righteous. I want to do and like all of these things even if people think I am cringe. Let me be cringe. I want to be cringe.