back at it again at krispy kreme

apparently the gym scene was already too steamy for them

even if they step in and “save” (read: sell to the highest bidder) the app, everyone else who has the audacity to make something (video games, movies, tv, apps, etc) is going to live with the constant threat of banning and forced sale

they’ll come for chinese-owned video games and smutty romance novels and foreign documentary films and anything that threatens american billionaire interests

you can point and laugh at the dancing teenagers all you want, but nothing you enjoy is safe from government interference anymore, not even if you’re not american

i miss being a teenage girl. was it just because i was 16 without any worries except writing my next ap english essay and what i was doing for the weekend? or was the time period pre-2016/pre-2020/pre-college for me just full of more joy? did i somehow lose touch with letting myself feel happiness or are things really just worse now?

i’m thinking back to when I was saddest as a teenager and it corresponds to when i dug deepest into embracing the worst parts of myself. Sad, angry, bored, pretentious, snobbish, self-loathing and self-aggrandizing at the same time.

around the time i turned 16, i found myself embracing joy and whimsy and “cringe” and i genuinely felt better. i think i’ve somehow forgotten the teenage girl i used to be in the decade since i left high school.

during the pandemic i did a reread/re-watch of the twilight saga and i re-embraced my cringey 13 year old self who loved a sweeping romance series and made it her whole personality

and then last week i dug back into my one direction phase and re-listened to the albums that kept me sane for the back half of my high school years and i remembered how happy i was at that time, just enjoying something goofy and silly and sweet without having to defend it to anyone

i know some people that went to when we were young fest to see mcr and the other emo bands i used to love when i was 12/13/14 and i just felt a weird sense of sadness. i can't really go back to those days without remembering how sad i was and how i was coping by making myself sadder. (sidenote: it was cringe to like emo bands in middle school and i can't believe we're pretending it wasn't cringe and no one got bullied.)

i don't regret my early-teenage parasocial mcr tumblr blog because i did genuinely have fun, but i closed that chapter of my life a long time ago. i was unhealthily coping with feeling depressed and isolated and i actually really can’t stand any of their music anymore. i’ll be happy for y’all from a distance, i guess?

i did the whole indie hipster thing in high school and while it was cool to be into all the up and coming bands at the time, i think i was just desperate to be taken seriously. a lot of that music, despite having indie cred and accolades and whatnot actually sucks. it's boring and it says nothing and it's just noise. i listened to the new vampire weekend album and it's so dull. there's no passion or emotion or genuine feeling, just sad indie dudes smoking cigarettes and acting so much cooler than you. when i let myself have fun and enjoy pop music, i stopped caring about impressing some loser on reddit and instead did something totally for me for once.

the silly girly pop music and the melodramatic girly teenage vampire novels and the teenage girl i used to be is so much more fun to look back on than the pretentious sad girl i was desperate to be seen as. i wasted too much time of my adolescence convinced that i needed to be sad to be taken seriously.