Chelsea Fagan

The thing to remember is that you are extremely interesting, and people need to see more of you–of all of us. We should be making more of an effort to document the moments where we’re bored in our rooms and experimenting with how pouty our lips can look on a webcam.

Not too long ago, I had to say it. I found myself in a situation in which the only mature, responsible, appropriate thing to do was to grit my teeth, swallow my pride, and let the tissue-thin words slip from between my lips: “I’m happy for you.”

LOL – Lol–the true Frankenstein baby of the internet. We created it, we rose it from the depths of internet inside joke obscurity into the universal proclamation of “I totally accept that you are trying to be funny, man” that it is today.

There is a persistent rumor in America that in going to Western Europe, we don’t need to learn the language of the country we’re visiting. And while it’s true that a tourist can get by for a week or so with a few key phrases from his book, there are many people (some I know personally) who see fit to go live in a country for months, even years at a time, without even attempting to learn the language.

The sun is so angry at me right now. Is it socially acceptable to wear two pairs of sunglasses stacked on top of each other? I want one of those crazy sunglasses old ladies get after cataract surgery. Or maybe a welding mask. Where do I get that?

Facecreeping. Creeping people’s Facebooks. We all do it, despite my spell check’s refusal to acknowledge its existence. We’ve all found ourselves, at some point or another, listlessly scrolling through someone’s photos as we foster some vague emotion. It’s 2011, come on, we’re all just looking at what everyone else is doing as it pops up on our news feeds…

You are the swell of my chest when, at all of eight years old, I look across the playground and see the best swing–the one I’m sure will send me over the bar and turn me inside-out forever–completely open. You are the pebbles scattering under my tennis shoes as I race past the monkey bars and under the slide…

Pop music is there to make us absent-mindedly nod our heads, we think, not speak to the part of us that we are afraid to look at in the mirror. But whether it is a particularly poignant line or an entire lyrical theme that gets us, when a manufactured pop song overcomes its sugary coating, it becomes the kind of song we listen to instead of just hearing.

Are you a 20-to-30-something white, creative male? Are you left perusing the glitter-and-Pocky sprinkled remains of your life? Was your last relationship with an ethereal, oddly attractive and charmingly unemployed girl wearing Victorian doll dresses—more succinctly, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

While I have plenty of friends now, I would love to add a shiny new face to the collection. I can promise you that friendship with me will enrich and give meaning to your life in ways you never considered possible, and I am a firm proponent of nights spent watching/making fun of Real Sex and Cathouse and eating Pringles. Get at me.

Apparently there’s this part of my brain, lodged uncomfortably somewhere between the temporal lobe and the cerebellum, that drives me against my will to start aimless conversations while drunk. No matter how unengaged the interlocutor, how uncomfortable the scenario, how forced the interaction–I’ll do it.

I wonder what they must be thinking; I marvel at how well each one of them carries himself, all appropriate masculinity and restrained self-importance. They each carry a look on their faces that says, in a subtle prep-school lilt, that they are businessmen.