Girl News - Girls and the Future

The first line of this content unit is going to be “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” which is obviously the zeroes-and-ones-style code that will create, narrate, and regulate the future. So “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” means “This is the future.” For our dumb purposes, The Future will be 2012 and whatever lies beyond it!!! (!!! Is code for NOTHING.) Oh, and, there will be no jokes about the tantalisingly bad Miranda July film, please. (Oooooh it was so bad, you guys!) Obviously the near future will be a garbagey garbage garbage-land in fact, right now is already a garbagey garbage garbage-land, which I know for a fact because there is Facebook on airplanes.

Anywaysenfreude.

ACCEPTANCE

First, let’s be conscious of how incorrectly astray we have gone from existentialism as a dominating youth philosophy, which is also eeeeasily the sexiest doctrine available. Like, they might have had (be having? I don’t read the news) a lot of sex at grossie, pot-smoky Occupy Wall Street but what do you think that sex is like? Let’s forgo the abstract, numbed-out nail-biting on what awaits us when the government’s money runs out and everyone is too boring to look in the eyes, and create a real, useful working draft of The Future as it should be, which is short, and different than the gigantic aspirationalism and concurrent MAD FUCKING STUPIDITY, YOU GUYS, LOOK AT ME I’M DOING IT NOW AND YOU WANT/ NEED/ TAKE IT which defines the post-modern, entrepreneurial mindset that got halfway out the door and decided rebellion was too much work and has just skulked around ever since in a t-shirt. That’s what we’re dealing with. It won’t sustain us, but here we are.

NO HISTORY

Forget No Future, nerds… With Gmail’s capacity for history (the chats, I mean, come on!) there is actually no remaining need to remember anything at all ever again forever amen. It helps that our pasts are uniformly uncute, so who cares. Do you know how obsessed with the Adolescents I used to be? Obsessed. It was weird.

THE APOCALYPSE

Related: This is the year we’re supposed to become extinct. Look, I’m not even a cynical kind of pup. It’s just true. And it’s complicated by the fact that our shared culture - the most privileged era and cohort in human existence minus the Clinton I years - is almost entirely and equally oriented toward self-improvement and self-denial and self-regard, which means that we are always trying to fake-beatifically refine and restore our wilting husks, while shittily telling everyone we encounter what we’re going to do. (Fun, impossible thing: try not saying or typing “I” for a day. It’s hard!) Do you see how all of this is fundamentally inoperative? Like, non-cynically, is there even a point? Liiiike when we consider the apocalypse, do we care? We definitely don’t care about any of the things contributing to or hastening the various suggested apocalypses, so logically, non, we do not. Like the French, we do not. Oh and also I didn’t see Melancholia yet, is it good? Are her teeth in it? You know those teeth.

NOT COVERED

Déjà vu. Have nothing to say about it, don’t understand it, but it’s weird, right? Does it mean anything? Instructive? Email me.

FUTURE KATE

It would be super-good if Current Kate knew anything at all about Future Kate, which really means “remembered anything at all.” Like, Current Kate resents Saturday-night obligations almost all of the time but continues to make them for Future Kate, who will surely be energised for and happy about an across-town party for which a bottle of something and certain shoes are required. Current Kate isn’t even that much of a dick, just, stupid, and I guess marginally hostile, sure.

I think it’s just that Future Kate doesn’t even really exist. To wit, this scene (INTERIOR, A SUBURBUN UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS DINING ROOM, THE CARNAGE OF CHRISTMAS DINNER STILL ON THE TABLE):

“How far ahead are you looking?” my brother asked me, about my life generally, both of us wearing paper crowns, his orange and mine yellow. “Like three months?”

“Yeah, three months. Sometimes six. No, like three months.”

CLEANSING

The first thing you’re going to want to do after New Year’s Day is get on a really serious cleanse or detox program to make you pure and good and clean and healthy and empty and useless and also a virgin ($). Or, get on a plane and leave behind your stuff, your whole family, all obligations, and most of your friends and move to Los Angeles for the winter, that works too ($$$$).

PREDICTIONS

The perfect Azealea Banks/ Kreayshawn feud will usher in the sorely needed new paradigm of girls and women and rap and music. This is our only hope. BEST BEEF! MAKE IT HAPPEN, AB!

YOUR MOM

Things to find out about your future by looking at your mom: See if she has “elevens,” which is the Botox community’s name for the two vertical wrinkles between your eyebrows (also, there is a “one” little wrinkle-line or a “one plus elevens” triple-play if you’re a real frowny piece-of-shit). See what her hair is up to in that bottom, back quadrant where it gets real. Check her ankles, too. Also be nicer to her probably. I’m so obsessed with moms, you guys.

POLITICS

Since your next president thinks that your birth control pills are millimeter-long white baby-bots just waiting to be snuggle-bugged into a nation looking to replace its salty Christian values with double reverse-Islamofascism, you’d best get to work on turning that burned-out Jeep in your weird friend’s backyard into a life-vessel for the underground Gonzo-village, which will in turn be destroyed by its own anomies, because you’ll be living in it by this time next year.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

Instead, go “Today I will have a dark hot chocolate with the small marshmallows and will drink it and rest my scroll-thumb for just a second.” I think they’re calling it The Joy of Silence or similar. I’m too far gone, you try it.

THINGS THAT ARE HAPPENING

Sweet Valley High movie! Maybe it’s not coming out already, but it’s definitely being made somewhere. And that Hunger Games one.

OUTFITS

High-low needs to be immediately replaced with good-bad. (I feel like I got a press release the other day for David Beckham x H&M underpants? Could that have been real?) I have no quippy thing to say here about how over it I am with the Chanel purses and jean rips or what have you because I think exponentially and geometrically (#oopshumblebrag?), but anyway, the future is going to have to be about unironic personal badness that makes literal our individual yearnings (ex: the clean, ultra-innocent North Face hoodie I am wearing to type in) plus something nice-on-purpose. OK? Also, let’s hold hands more and make it not gay or sexy.

In every entertainment-based representation of girls in the future, clothes are both body-con and masculine, which means that in that future, surely real, fashion’s ideas about how women should look like horse-legged guys has been fully embraced. However, it turns out that all women are also sweet-in-the-face and really into science and math and don’t talk about their feelings anymore, so, let’s call it a draw. WHOAH, are there periods?

GIRL CULTURE

Girl culture needs to get split like a twig’s hymen into the smallest fractions of experience. My internet be-fry @jawnita, who I don’t know at all in real life, tweeted “UGH now that we fortunately have more than 1 prominent female rapper in media can we please REFRAIN FROM PITTING THEM AGAINST EACH OTHER?!” to which I thought “Who is the other one???” and then she goes, she goes, she goes, “SHIT IS SEXIST AND WE ARE FIGHTING FOR THE SAME MULTIPLICITIES THE BOYS ARE ALLOWED” and that’s the actual Tree of Life, past present and future, goodbye!

Previously - Girls and Christmas

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway