because nobody ever grew up. I used to think “growing up” was that one moment when everyone looked around and suddenly realized they’d become Miranda from Sex and the City , but these days I was pretty sure it meant accepting that the concept of adulthood didn’t even really exist at all, and that everyone you’d looked up to as a child had just been elegantly faking it, like a toddler putting on their mom’s heels and jewelry and parading around the house with a candy cigarette in hand. Sure, our modes of dress-up changed as we progressed in age, and cheesy pearl necklaces stolen from our grandmothers’ dressers gave way to business suits and blowouts and battered old briefcases, but every time I saw my mom send my little brother off to bed and then take off her Adult Mask for the night, slump against the counter with a bottle of wine in our darkened kitchen, and quietly panic about the state of her life, my childhood faith in the authority of the world eroded just a little bit more.
Anyway, my boss’s name was Dakota J. Fanning, I am not kidding, and sometimes I suspected she had hired me solely to make me listen to her rant about her personal issues and be a shoulder for her to cry on whenever her love life went south, which was always. After she talked my ear off about her latest problems I went to my desk to work on some ads for a local author (God knows kids weren’t reading books, either) and put in my headphones to give myself some time to think about the Cooper situation. Two days had passed and still he dominated my every thought, and I knew that if I didn’t get a handle on this soon, I was going to go even crazier than I had that night of the fireworks.
While I thought, I listened to a TED Talk given by this singer called Saviour, creator of my favorite album, Pop Killer . Saviour was actually the stage name of an androgynous, auburn-haired seventeen-year-old from Tasmania or something, but age had nothing to do with talent sometimes – I knew that – and she was a lyrical genius nonetheless. She took the most haunting lyrics that simultaneously mocked the state of youth culture and confronted Big Life Questions, and then spit them over these massive, menacing hip-hop beats that rattled your eardrums and shook your bones. Her music was seriously soul-crushingly sad and was mostly about death and disillusionment and the fear of growing old and stuff, but that’s why I liked it. Actually, it was so good it made me look at the speakers when I heard it, made me crave some deeper connection to it than I was actually experiencing, like when you finish a good book and hug it to your chest to somehow soak the words into your soul through osmosis. Sometimes it was comforting to know another human was thinking the same messed-up thoughts as me – it made me feel less alone in my awful-ness. And I guess I liked when something made me feel deeply, while having no real-life consequences. I enjoyed reading words that attacked my soul and made me question everything I thought I knew about the world, and I liked that I could get my heart broken by Saviour’s music and then get up and walk to the sea and feel nothing at all. I found it healthy to seek temporary heartbreak in art, especially since real life gave you such a hell of a hangover. After all, wasn’t that what constituted humanity in the first place? Seeking out some pretty bullshit to insert the knife and remind us of why we’re different from the beasts?
I opened up Photoshop to start obsessing over Cooper doing my job. “This age has turned us into a billion little superstars,” Saviour began in her odd, high, crystalline voice. “If you eat it, post it. If you’re feeling it, rant about it. If you love it, shout it from the heavens. If you hate it about yourself, hide it with a filter and move on. The truth means nothing if the lie is pretty enough. We run to our glowing screens and throw our edited lives under the lights and bam – it’s
Anyway, my boss’s name was Dakota J. Fanning, I am not kidding, and sometimes I suspected she had hired me solely to make me listen to her rant about her personal issues and be a shoulder for her to cry on whenever her love life went south, which was always. After she talked my ear off about her latest problems I went to my desk to work on some ads for a local author (God knows kids weren’t reading books, either) and put in my headphones to give myself some time to think about the Cooper situation. Two days had passed and still he dominated my every thought, and I knew that if I didn’t get a handle on this soon, I was going to go even crazier than I had that night of the fireworks.
While I thought, I listened to a TED Talk given by this singer called Saviour, creator of my favorite album, Pop Killer . Saviour was actually the stage name of an androgynous, auburn-haired seventeen-year-old from Tasmania or something, but age had nothing to do with talent sometimes – I knew that – and she was a lyrical genius nonetheless. She took the most haunting lyrics that simultaneously mocked the state of youth culture and confronted Big Life Questions, and then spit them over these massive, menacing hip-hop beats that rattled your eardrums and shook your bones. Her music was seriously soul-crushingly sad and was mostly about death and disillusionment and the fear of growing old and stuff, but that’s why I liked it. Actually, it was so good it made me look at the speakers when I heard it, made me crave some deeper connection to it than I was actually experiencing, like when you finish a good book and hug it to your chest to somehow soak the words into your soul through osmosis. Sometimes it was comforting to know another human was thinking the same messed-up thoughts as me – it made me feel less alone in my awful-ness. And I guess I liked when something made me feel deeply, while having no real-life consequences. I enjoyed reading words that attacked my soul and made me question everything I thought I knew about the world, and I liked that I could get my heart broken by Saviour’s music and then get up and walk to the sea and feel nothing at all. I found it healthy to seek temporary heartbreak in art, especially since real life gave you such a hell of a hangover. After all, wasn’t that what constituted humanity in the first place? Seeking out some pretty bullshit to insert the knife and remind us of why we’re different from the beasts?
I opened up Photoshop to start obsessing over Cooper doing my job. “This age has turned us into a billion little superstars,” Saviour began in her odd, high, crystalline voice. “If you eat it, post it. If you’re feeling it, rant about it. If you love it, shout it from the heavens. If you hate it about yourself, hide it with a filter and move on. The truth means nothing if the lie is pretty enough. We run to our glowing screens and throw our edited lives under the lights and bam – it’s
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