Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,19
I know “Soma” is a weird choice, but what can I say? I like sad and soothing shit. I come for the angst, but I stay for the drear. I got Siamese Dream at a record store called Second Hand Tunes where you could get used tapes for three bucks. I picked up the Juliana Hatfield Three’s Become What You Are the same day, mostly because I was obsessed with Reality Bites (and with the idea that my very own brooding, misanthropic urban cowboy was out there with some obscure novel jammed into his jeans pocket, just waiting for me to save him), but they didn’t have a copy of the soundtrack, so getting her record was the next best thing. Yes, asshole, I mostly wanted that soundtrack for Lisa Loeb’s song “Stay (I Missed You),” but it doesn’t take away from how good “Spin the Bottle” is, and honestly, it doesn’t even matter, because I could listen to either over and over in the hope that I would go to sleep one night and magically wake up in a complicated situationship with Troy Dyer.
“Waltzing Back,” The Cranberries
Sometimes I get super tender when I think about how dumb and naive my child self was, and I wish I could go back and hug her while also reminding her to tuck in her shirt. I often think about how I was really into grunge especially because it seemed accessible to me, a person on welfare, because the whole premise was that you could dress like a grandpa who looks like shit and everyone would think you were cool and “alternative” instead of just dirty. I saved up a bunch of odds-and-ends money until I had enough to get a few things from the Salvation Army, because while I was fully grunge in my heart, on the outside I was dressed like a woman setting up for a church luncheon, as most of the available offerings for fat women at clothing stores were of the choir-rehearsal-on-Wednesday-night variety. I studied my copies of Sassy and decided that I needed some threadbare cardigans and at least one buffalo-plaid flannel shirt. I walked to the Salvation Army one day after school with the Cranberries blasting through the foamy headphones of my Walkman. I discovered there that even if you thumb through every rack of clothing until your eyes water and your throat closes from the dust, and the lady at the register jokingly threatens to physically remove you from the premises because it’s time for her to go home and start dinner, unless you are looking for a shapeless sack to attend a christening in, there will be no suitable cool clothes that fit you.
“Breakdown,” Mariah Carey ft. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony
Easily in the top five Best Breakup Songs of All Time.
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There was this Chicagoland chain in the late ’90s called Dr. Wax that had three locations, one of which was smack in the middle of downtown Evanston, within spitting distance of both a two-story Barnes & Noble (remember when they were also trying to be a record store?) and a Borders (pour out some of your overpriced coffee from the ~café~ in honor of that revolutionary scan-the-barcode-on-a-CD-and-listen-to-thirty-seconds-of-each-song feature). Dr. Wax was this indie record store that was dusty, covered in posters, crammed with crates full of vinyl and a diverse offering of new and used CDs, and manned by semi-hostile music nerds who scoffed openly at your bad taste when you approached the counter with your tacky Top 40 albums. It was as if your friend’s parents had let them open a very specific record store in their cluttered basement. I remember when High Fidelity first came out and I saw it in the theater. I was like, HOLY SHIT, I KNOW THESE FUCKING GUYS.
I used to hang out at the Dr. Wax on Berwyn, under the train, and just listen to the dudes behind the counter arguing with each other about groups I’d never heard of, then parroting their opinions and presenting them as my own to my dumb-ass friends who definitely didn’t care. I hung out there often enough that they started recommending new things for me to listen to (Massive Attack, Stereolab, OutKast) to expand my limited horizons, and I got comfortable enough to share my embarrassing requests with them (“Could you guys order the new