#i have a BIG ASS CAMPUS and popular ish college

[justatallstick]

first day of college: AAAAAAAAAAAKFNFONFJFJEKFJFROFKNFDO

[quarter-lifecrisisblog-blog]

A brief introduction

The Wikipedia entry for “quarter-life crisis” references exactly four (4) songs that are written about the subject:

“20 Something” by SZA — one of my favorite songs off of the Best album of 2017

“Why Georgia” by John Mayer — an excellent album from a gifted guitarist [from a beautifully pure time before he told Playboy “my dick is sort of like a white supremacist” and got canceled]

“True Love (For Now)” by Spector — truly don’t know anything about this song or band; gonna give it a try

and of course, “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac — a classic and a banger and don’t even get me started on Stevie’s brilliance IT IS 2018 WHY DON’T WE HAVE A HALF-DECENT STEVIE NICKS BIOPIC

Hi, hey, hey there, hi, I'm Al, and YEAH, I've officially started my newsletter with a Wikipedia page reference! The corny-ass millennial equivalent of starting your best man's speech with, “Webster's Dictionary defines ‘love’ as ‘a score of zero’…”

But! I promise I know what I'm doing. (put that on my tombstone !!!)

Welcome to Quarter-Life Crisis. I’m a 26-year-old copywriter in the middle of a big ol’ full-blown existential crisis, and I’m going to try my best to write my way out of it.

For the past few years, I’ve been typing out boring marketing crap rather than writing the things I WANT AND NEED to write. Of course this has led to me becoming desperately unhappy at work, which is consequently bleeding insecurity into other aspects of my life, like maintaining my adult friendships, and uh, dating.

(i’m sure this is a big part of it, too, but i’m somehow simultaneously broke as hell? lol)

So now I’m writing about what I want to write about: Politics, culture, movies, relationships, being a bad feminist, not wanting to admit I haven’t actually read “Bad Feminist,” recommending books I have read and liked, screaming about the music I like *that week*, and working through my complicated feelings about being a rap fan/sports fan/lowkey astrology fan?/single woman/horny bitch/crude professional.

I want this to be a place where I can bitch, but also a place where y’all can bitch back; a weekly brain dump that will hopefully speak to some of the things you’re feeling, too, and a conversation where we can try to make sense of the fucking hell that is our late twenties—together~!

This week…

Ah yes; so I started this off with a Wikipedia pull on purpose. Because this week? I've been thinking a lot about definitions. This past week, something fucking terrible has been happening, and that terrible thing is the Br*tt K*vanaugh job interview/confirmation/swearing in/media circus.

A lot of the process has been frustrating. I’m so tired and I don’t want to make you relive it. But I do want to talk about one moment that stood out to me:

In what felt like the only good-ish moment of the hearing, Sheldon Whitehouse—junior senator from Rhode Island and bizarro Jeff Daniels—carried out his questioning with the kind of cutting quick-wittedness that I like to imagine would make Aaron Sorkin exasperatedly throw a stack of papers up into the air.

But aside from the sheer thrill of seeing Kavanaugh being grilled, why’d this moment get my attention? WELL, FOLKS, as someone who once held her college campus’s newspaper's job of coming up with the “Position of the Week” each Wednesday (yes, that means what you think it means; no, the job interview for that one is not as interesting than you’d think), I can tell you: that’s uhhh,

NOT NECESSARILY THE DEFINITION OF THE PHRASE.

Can we prove that Kavanaugh’s “definition” of Devil’s Triangle either was or wasn’t a lie? And more interestingly to me this week: Does it matter? In a time when the definition of a word can evolve and change with the introduction of a meme, or the edit of a page?

That same day, someone with a congressional IP address anonymously edited the disambiguation page for “Devil’s Triangle,” to include an entry for the “popular drinking game enjoyed by friends of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.” The edit was flagged and rescinded by Wiki mods, but it made enough of an impression that many Kavanaugh supporters felt vindicated in proclaiming that he had told the truth.

(By the way, whoever’s using that IP address has also edited the pages for the beloved Disney Channel film “Motocrossed,” beloved Charli XCX album “Pop 2,” and beloved Star Wars character Luke Skywalker. And it’s hard-hitting stuff, as you can see below. For the love of god, someone PLEASE get my girl Ashley Feinberg on the case.)

All of this brings us back to Stevie Nicks, thank god.

Some Wikipedia editor has decided that “Landslide” should be held up as one of the top four pivotal mid-life crisis songs, and that’s probably accurate. Stevie wrote it when she was 26 (hahahahaha fuck me !) and the lyrics seem to speak to every second of everything I’ve been feeling work-wise and relationship-wise lately.

But to others, it can be a song about something else. Before you hopped onto Genius (one of my favorite sites because of gems like these) and got pointed to direct quotes from four different interviews Stevie’s done on the song, you might’ve imagined it to be about someone contemplating infidelity, or a tumultuous father-daughter relationship. In looking up the lyrics, I saw someone say it exactly described their relationship with their faith.

So… do definitions matter? Maybe not. Maybe the meanings you assign to things are just as valuable as truth…certainly when it comes to something as subjective as music or art, at least. But when it comes to history, or language, or Supreme Court justices, or job interviews, shouldn’t there be one central source of truth? YEAH, probably.

PROBABLY—and look, I’m no Frasier Crane, but—I’m just wading into the idea of ever-evolving definitions trying to avoid putting weight on the lack of definition in my own life right now…

I recently started ~hanging out~ with someone. Everyone my age knows, “We’re hanging out,” said in a certain way with a specific tone can mean any range of things from “we’re occasionally fucking” to “we’re kind of maybe nearing something like dating?”

That ~hanging out~ phase is a beautiful bubble, but the second someone tries to really drill down on what the phrase means, it pops. I’m not going to comment on what side of that sliding scale I’m on with this one, but I do know that for now, floating around in this definition-less grey froth is much, much, much more lovely than my attempts to define—or, ew god sorry, describe—it.

But even in the grey areas, there’s always always always a gut feeling that refuses to go away, refuses to stop speaking your truth, even if it’s only whispering it just to you. So yeah, yes, I know what I want this definition to be; I know where I want us to go…I just don’t want to say it just quite yet.

OK LOOK, I’ve gone in circles, so maybe this meditation on definition has been as futile and pointless as a Jeff Flake gesture. But for the record, I AM gonna go ahead and keep defining Brett Kavanaugh as a pathetic entitled slimeball who lied through his tiny off-white teeth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Some definitions just feel better than others. Because I’ve never seen this area as particularly grey; the voice in the pit of my stomach is saying something I actually understand loud and clear: I believe Dr. Ford.

To all of the people who’ve been marching, rallying, tweeting, walking out, speaking out, calling CSPAN, writing their representatives, ANYTHING…this one’s for you.

—Your newest lady friend, Al

(psssst, if you want any of this in newsletter form, please, step right this way)