Girls and Sadness

I’m a happy, posi homie (like, par example, this week I ordered half-the-rice in a burrito and the receipt, I SWEAR TO CHRIST, said “LIL’ RICE” which made me 2004 out and office-scream “THAT’S MY RAP NAME! LIL’ RICE IS MY RAP NAME!”) but once in a while, like now, I get stoked on being sad. Sad, like, a gutting and unresolvable alienation that just needs to be had, not period-irritated or reflexive singer-songwriter diarrheics (no emo) or clinical depression (which is a level of hev that nobody gets off on).

Welcome to Bummer Town, population chicks. That was weak, I’m sorry. But here you are, with your toe tilting down into a sweatpantsy hidey-hole/vortex.

WINTER, ETC.
Is it seasonal? Sure. Joan Didion’s corpse (#notclearon) hoverboarding, inescapably, above us? Yesss. Is it that God is dead, that every machination and micro-movement toward being good is both futile and damning, that the betrayals and disappointments of people who love me have metastasized to the point where I just expect it, that I toked away my intelligence and grew up in a big house so all of the alienation I feel down to my hard white bones is nothing more than jerkpaste? Yesss, it’s all of that.

ACTING OUT
Sad-decisions will include sleeping with your roommate who is also sleeping with your other roommate, because why not degrade yourself as entirely as possible when you’re eating cookies for meals (not by accident, either); taking two milligrams of Lorazepam instead of one to fall asleep (by accident, I guess, but you could have looked at the label, right?); and existing in a biodome that harvests slurry-thinking, Cronenberg daymares about being murdered by your gold-studded jewelry (with concurrent horizontal stud-stabs to the forehead) and leaving your office Christmas party before it starts even though there are chicken fingers which are your favorite. Those are “for instances.” I don’t even have a roommate.

DRUGS
Question: Have you ever met a girl that you tried to date, but a year to make love she wanted you to wait? No, no, just kidding! Question: do guys do pills for sadness as much as girls? I guess so, but anti-anxieties and painkillers and SSRIs also feel deeply feminine. I know one guy who is a prodigious pill-taker but he is already fucking up my averages in terms of talking about feelings and huggles, so, hrm.

RAPE
[….]

SAD WHITE PEOPLE MUSIC
Really really really #notclearon the folky, hushed, vibrato indie-sad continuum and I’m REALLY REALLY REALLY #white. Addendum: #white is fucking retarded because what it MEANS is rich + white and while I suuuurpooose I am government-survey-style both of those things I remain #notclearon most tropes of white-girl sadness, like, mooning over guys who have wronged us (when I like a boy I do not Google him, and I do a disciplinary “NEIN!” corrective-thought if he wanders into my mind-grapes) or the more physically punishing of the self-sabotages like cutting and dating old guys with wrinkle-dinks.

1990s
Nostalgia for another era is the super-saddest true love story, especially when it just happened and we’ve collectively forgotten about the important things that sucked about it.

MOMS AND DADS
When a guy is really close to his mom or dad, everyone is all implicitly like “Yikes, get a job please, be a man, move away.” When a girl is really close to their mom or dad it’s all adorable and wholesomely reassuring and appropriate. What’s unfortunate is that one day the mom or dad will die and then the girl, who has never really had to feel adrift in the world, even during the extendamix of drop-out-of-high-school existential blankness, is truly alone.

BRITNEY
Britney Jean Spears from Kentwood, Louisiana is a single mom of two who loves her boyfriend and doesn’t have her hair sorted out. Like, WHAT? HOW?

THE WORST THING
Sometimes you get everything you ever wanted, and it’s so fucking horrible that you don’t want it anymore. My budski August Strindberg said it best: “What people call success is only preparation for the next failure.” Like whoa.

FORGETTING
You know that ep of Curb where Cheryl is uncharacteristically like “No! No!” when Larry tells her that he invited a registered sex offender for dinner, but when he showed up she was just tepid and didn’t tell him to leave? That is how all of us are about everything terrible. I mean, remember when Odd Future was like this scandal a couple months ago? When I was 12 I wore track pants that said “Don’t melt my ice caps” and sobbed to my mom about Nostradamus. This is especially prescient for girls, because your life is just easier the less you care, and you can’t unfind that out. Trag.

GLAMOUR
There is an undeniable hotness to being sad, when you manage it properly. See: Gwyneth Baby transcending how much she sucks by starring in that beagle Wes Anderson’s Playskool movie, where she has a disfiguring injury, the great fur, the eyeliner. Golden!

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway

Previously – What Girls Want