Aloofness is out, having emotions is in.

Aloofness is out, and having emotions is in. If I had easy access to any roofs, I’d shout those words from atop them; instead, I’ll settle for writing this article with as much conviction as a tabloid gossip columnist. I may not be able to cite any hard data or experts in the field, but I’ve sure got a hunch that being cool and distant really lost its edge in a world where, for a while, that was the only option. It’s just so much hotter to be in touch with your feelings.I understand the appeal of behaving standoffishly, and the allure of standoffish people. It’s all about power or something, right? Withholding validation, doling it out as if there’s a limited supply, praying on our shared desire for things we don’t have. It probably began with some cookie-cutter childhood trauma, and now we unconsciously seek the child/absent parent dynamic between ourselves and our partners, or ourselves and our high school frenemy, and look towards an outside source to affirm our worth. Or maybe it goes back to something even more primal, like something about the leader of the pack having the authority to vote the weakest link off the island… or something.

Whatever the case, we somehow all got it in our heads that showing emotion is a sign of weakness, of naïveté, whereas being a rock of a human indicates strength, knowledge and power. I find it interesting how this preconception influences the social dynamics within any sort of institution populated by young people. Pre-middle school, it’s like our brains aren’t developed enough to make any complex judgements about other people. Conflict is cut-and-dry, and the mean things we say or do are usually rooted in ignorance, not malice. Then sixth grade rolls around, and the nastiness gets a bit more nuanced.

The first time I can remember being pinned as “annoying” was at age eleven. Before this, I’d been admonished a few times for spilling secrets or writing something rude about another kid on a bathroom stall door, but these situations had clear cause and effect. Then it’s like one day my long-time frenemy, Mimi Murray (whose name I still curse to this day), just decided that the essence of my character was inherently obnoxious. Worse yet, she publicly and falsely accused me of being a “stalker”—a word we loved to throw around back in 201o because it cut so much deeper than the word “clingy.”

I transferred to a suburban, Episcopalian K-12 the following year. No shocker, this turned out to be a big mistake, but I had merely been fleeing from Mimi and her posse after a year’s worth of hurtful comments, not to mention an incident in which the plastic intestines of an anatomy doll were hurled at me one day in science class, resulting in a nosebleed and a bruise.

The type of bullying at my new school was a little less school-yard, and involved more whispers and condescension—a sign that our methods of psychological torture were advancing. I remember sitting in Algebra one day at a table with three of the most popular girls in school, Maya, Emma and Olivia. They were goofing off, drawing a map of the classroom where they assigned a label to each table based on who sat there. I snuck a regrettable glance and saw that James and Sam were now “The Obnoxious Duo,” and Ian and Vanessa were “The Quiet Ones.” They had divided our shared table into two, split off a fourth of it just for me and labeled my desert island “Cutie Camel.” The three-fourths that they occupied was labeled “The Queen Bitches.” At age thirteen, I had zero desire to be referred to as neither a cutie nor a camel; what I longed for in that moment was to be considered a Queen Bitch.

As a matter of fact, I continue to hear the call of the Queen Bitches even to this day, although over the years it’s become more like the call of the ‘Supercilious Hot Indie Kids Who Juul in the Commons and Won’t Look Anybody Except Each Other in the Eyes’. If I just started to exclusively wear Carhartt and vintage Patagonia, started to act kind of mysterious and unfriendly and got addicted to nicotine, would they invite me to sit with them? Or maybe their characters are fundamentally cold, and by the grace of God they were united during Welcome Week, then quickly sealed themselves inside the ‘Tomb of the Cool Kids’. And the facade of said-tomb sure looks magnificent (it’s like, Baroque or something), but perhaps the inside is kind of cold, dark and damp, as I’ve heard tombs tend to be.

I know I run the risk of sounding really pro-quirky and pro-snowflake in my closing remarks. For now, I won’t disclose my stance on these particular matters, but I will say that I am indeed pro-emotions and anti-aloofness. I don’t want to keep idolizing people who make me feel sort of bad, and I don’t want to stifle all the joyful emotions I experience each day for the sake of appearing cool, like I know something you don’t, like I’m so troubled and artistically talented and you could never understand. I’m happiest when I wear my heart on my sleeve and when I’m around friends who do the same. Genuine intimacy is fucking cool, and perhaps even edgy in a world that’s constantly trying to scare the capacity to be vulnerable straight out of us.

Lost time, Lawrence time.

I’ve been irresponsible lately. All I want to do is hang out with my friends, all the time, and I don’t want to do my homework, or my regular work, and I don’t even want to participate in the cultural movement that is “Me Time”, because that tends to involve being alone, and I’m sick of being alone. 

At the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, I decided not to return to campus, fearing the particular type of depression that might arise from being constantly just six feet out of reach from all the people I love the most. I stand by this decision, but I see now that no matter the choices I could have made, the transition back into a world where I could touch my friends would have left me overwhelmed with the desire to make up for the time I feel we lost together.

This year, my college shenanigans are unfolding consecutively and at hyper-speed. We’ve all heard of “Lawrence Time”, the theory that time condenses on this campus, and then suddenly it’s ninth week, and you still haven’t bought your plane ticket home. (Maybe this is how all liberal arts students feel, and it’s just something about being in a small place with a fairly stagnant population,; or maybe there’s a space-time vortex in the bowels of The Con.) I’m certain that Lawrence Time is operating in overdrive right now, because we’ve been watching three to four movies a week, going to the VR every Wednesday night, baking an excessive amount of zucchini bread (because the SLUG Garden zucchinis are unusually massive this year), and lounging about the Commons from the beginning of brunch until the end of lunch on Saturday mornings. In the spaces between, I’m either barely sentient or asleep. 

Literally out of nowhere we’re coming up on Reading Period, the four blessed days each term when everything slows down, and I can already feel the impending self-reflection that I’m usually able to block out if I keep myself busy enough. I’m realizing, or I at least logically know, that as Ben Franklin once said, lost time can never be found again. And I know that I could not have chosen a more generic quote from a more generic historical white man, but I think it’s the most obvious of rules that we tend to forget about when we get wrapped up in the search for their loopholes. There’s no amount of zeal that I could bring to any amount of hours passed with friends that would make up for the year that was stolen from us all. 

As sick as I am of hearing about all the lessons we wouldn’t have learned had it not been for the pandemic, I can’t ignore its relevance to my argument. Yes, I’ve learned about the transience of everything and the fragility of human society, yada-yada-yada. The problem is that I must admit I would trade in these valuable lessons to eliminate the existence of the tragic fable from whence they came. What if the virus had come and gone from our periphery just as we anticipated in those early days of 2020? Call me bitter, overdramatic, etc., but my heart physically hurts when I think about that blissfully ignorant alternate universe. 

Granted, I speak as a college student who is basically complaining about not having had as many opportunities to party throughout her glory days. On the other hand, the value of human connection cannot be understated, and all I’m really trying to say is that I missed my friends so, so much; too much, even, because I’m holding on with a white-knuckle grip to every minute we spend together, neglecting the quieter activities I used to find time for, because I’m just so scared of it all getting taken away again. It turns out I am traumatized by the pandemic, just like they said we’d all be. 

I’m hoping that I’ll calm down a bit as the school year progresses, because with everything that’s happened, I’ve nearly forgotten that I’m simultaneously already and only five-and-a-half weeks into my last year of college. But I hesitate to think about “coming to terms” with all this lost time, at least at this point in my developmental stage. At best, I’ll write a pensive journal entry over Reading Period in which I’ll momentarily realize that this is merely another beautifully painful part of life, a mystery of the universe, and I’ll swear to relinquish control and change my ways… and by the time Monday, Oct. 25th rolls around, I’ll have forgotten all about my proclamations, and find another movie we simply must watch, another drink we’ve got to try, a fourth loaf of zucchini bread we have to bake.

“Euphoria” and teen cinema envy.

On Sunday night, I watched the final episode of the first season of the 2019 HBO teen drama, “Euphoria.” A tear rolled down my cheek during one of the three excruciatingly long montages that played almost one right after another, concluding the episode. More specifically, I choked up while watching a series of main character Rue’s (Zendaya) flashbacks — her, as a child, running into her dad’s arms; at 13 in the early days of her drug addiction, stealing her now cancer-ridden dad’s pain medication, then, after his death, Rue putting on the sweatshirt he wore in his final days; in a screaming-match with her mom over $40 Rue had stolen from her wallet to buy drugs; her little sister, Gia (Storm Reid), sobbing at the scene of Rue’s overdose. All this playing behind the heartbreaking and elegant “A Song For You,” sung by Donny Hathaway. And it is all so, so sad, and the entire show is so sad, and yet I still sort of, in theory, want my life to be exactly like “Euphoria.”

This is one of the problems with cinema in general, the dazzling nature of any well-shot, well-acted movie or TV series. For the purpose of keeping a narrow topic, I want to vent specifically about cinema in which teenagers are the primary focus and why, no matter how bad things get for the characters, I still wish my life looked even remotely like theirs. “Euphoria,” in particular, really hit me with a sense of wistful ennui because it has many moments of realism, even among the melodrama, that make me feel like these things are actually happening to someone, maybe almost play-by-play, so why did none of it happen to me?

It also helps that, no surprise, everybody in the show is insanely hot, and the “teenagers” are played by celebrities who are 21-plus — again, no surprise. This is something that has always driven me nuts about teens in movies — nobody looks like that when they are 17, not even the 17-year-old Instagram models who show up on your discovery page in a supposedly unedited photo. How can I look at somebody like Zendaya and not feel bad about myself? At the same time, if Rue looked like the next teen drug addict the casting crew had stumbled upon, how could I or the rest of the world be half as interested at the sight of the thumbnail?

I am far from the first to suggest that cinema becomes more interesting when sexy people are at the front and center of the screen, so I do not want to drive that home as my main point. More so, I am asking how we all might be able to enjoy teen dramas without feeling like we failed in our own youth — or, in the case of college dramas, feeling like I absolutely cannot graduate until I go to at least one wild toga party that features a live performance from Otis Day and the Knights. I think the answer is twofold, but still open-ended.

First, I, the slightly pretentious film studies major that I am, certainly try to morph my memories into the most cinematic pictures possible. After a while, I can trick myself into thinking that the lighting was as soft as in the late-night biking scenes in “Euphoria,” or that that one really catchy Blood Orange song played during one of my tender, romantic moments, like it did for Rue and her love interest.

Second, I can keep trying to convince my dangerously Hollywood movie-saturated self that life does not look so gorgeous for anybody. During every episode of “Euphoria,” I would turn to my best friend, who I was watching it with, and ask, “That doesn’t actually happen, right?” And during the more out-there scenes, I felt confident enough to throw my hands up at the TV and self-righteously shout, “This is so unrealistic!” It is the vocalization — and, I guess, the chronicling — that keeps me sane in the face of cinematic speciousness.