But sometimes I wonder why she likes Community. The show panders to a Millennial’s sense of nostalgia with frequent references to ‘90s pop culture; and yet the show still resonates strongly with my sister and her friends, who are too young to get many of references. One episode is about Pulp Fiction (she’s never seen it); another about Dungeons and Dragons (she’s never played it); and my sister’s favorite episode is about drinking (we’re close enough for me to know that she’s never done it). And yet, she says it’s the only show that she and her friends keep up with. (I realize that using my sister and her friends is a small sample size to gauge the show’s popularity among teenagers, but a cursory glance at the “community” tag on Tumblr reveals a multitude of GIFs being reblogged by high schoolers everywhere.)

Max Read at Gawker recently wrote a piece that argues that the show’s constant self-awareness and pop-culture references make it the sitcom that is most attuned to nerd culture on the web. But while this certainly speaks to why I, a twentysomething who lives on the internet, like Community, it doesn’t quite explain why teenagers like a show about seven people who attend community college.

Read concludes that the show teaches socially inept people (aka people on the the internet) “how to make friends.” Community is, for all its somewhat smug self-winking, shockingly earnest. But it’s far from the only show about disparate personalities who care about each other. TV’s most popular shows, Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother, and The Big Bang Theory, are all about friendship. Parks & Recreation has a similar format to The Office, except instead it features characters who are people you would want to work with. And have we forgotten that the biggest sitcom of the ’90s was called Friends?

What separates Community from its contemporaries is how traditional and untraditional it is as a sitcom. The characters have been established as broad archetypes; where Sex and the City‘s four characters have become cultural archetypes of the female psyche (and varying degrees of promiscuity), Community‘s seven characters cover the nerd spectrum. (My sister says she relates closest to Troy, but I think she’s more of an Annie.) And after the first season, those characters have been more or less set in stone. They’re familiar, like hanging out with old friends every Thursday at whatever-time-NBC-has-moved-it-to-now.

Even though Community hangs out among the comedies on NBC’s Thursday schedule, it actually has a lot in common with CBS’s decidedly less-hip lineup because it adheres to a pretty standard sitcom rule: show people something familiar, week after week.

But Community finds inventive ways to retell the same friendship-is-important moral by changing format from episode to episode. This is easily the show’s best quality. After the first season, there aren’t really any ”normal” episodes, and each successive one has a new twist, whether it’s parodying documentaries or gangster movies or Glee. It’s a lot like the musical episode of Buffy or Daria — seeing familiar characters in an entirely different context. Except Community does this every week.

And perhaps this is why teenagers love Community: they’re at a point in their lives when they are discovering who they are, establishing their own identities. Community takes familiar archetypes and subjects them to dozens of different scenarios; it tests the limits of its characters’ friendships, and each episode generally ends with Joel McHale delivering a monologue on the importance of caring about other people (some of these are better written than others).

It’s hard not to see the teenage experience embodied in many of the characters. Community‘s cast is constantly trying to balance their own needs with the needs of the study group: Abed, who relates to pop culture better than he does other people, is reminiscent of any high schooler who believed an author or musician understood them better than their friends; Annie’s academic over-achieving prevents her from pursuing the things she wants; Troy’s nerdy fascinations threatens his masculinity; and of course there’s Jeff (McHale), who just wants to look cool and be liked. In fact, these central conflicts are best emphasized in the episode about drinking, which I mentioned earlier was my sister’s favorite, and I’m realizing is mine as well. In it, Troy is excited to have his first legal drink because it’s his first step toward adulthood. But he comes to understand that doing supposedly grown-up things isn’t necessarily the key to growing up.

Maybe it’s not so surprising that teenagers like Community. Despite its college setting, Community reflects the high school experience better than any other show. Adolescence is, after all, a struggle to find both acceptance and individuality, even when those things are at odds.

The truth is that I’m too old to really understand my sister. I’ll ask her how school is and she’ll say it’s good; she’ll ask me about work, and I’ll say it’s fine. Community is the way my sister and I relate to each other best, which makes me sad that it likely won’t last past its recently announced shortened fourth season. The problem with Community is that it’s tough understanding the show from the outside looking in. Its self-referencing is so pervasive it reaches near-Arrested Development heights, and catching an episode of Community partway through season three must be like being a stranger at a party where everyone else already knows each other.

But perhaps Community‘s exclusivity is part of its appeal. I visited my sister last weekend, and at the dinner table, we constantly joked in Community references. Our parents stared at us, sort of bewildered and largely annoyed. But that’s the strength of an inside joke: it’s like a code or secret language, one of the last few things that my sister and I share.

Images courtesy of Community GIFs and teenagers everywhere

Like marijuana and marching band, I decide to try online dating after my older brother does it. It’s my senior year of college and I’ve barely dated at all. Disenchanted with the male population at my school, I thought some extracurricular dating in the surrounding city might be a good way to gain experience. Like an unpaid internship.

“It’s pretty awful,” my brother Ben tells me. “You basically meet up with a stranger just to make sure you’re both terrible human beings. And then you go home.”

With this in mind, I start a profile, post a couple pictures, and answer a few questions. It’s refreshingly simple: here’s what I look like, here’s some stuff I like, here’s my geographical location. I especially love how I am “putting myself out there” without having to actually go out there. No nuanced eye contact, no serendipity, no having to brush your hair. On OkCupid, you just have to enter some data and you’re dating.

I receive a lot of messages in the first couple days. I reply to a few with dismissive, sarcastic — and in my own opinion, hilarious — remarks. I am secretly, cartoonishly enjoying being in the position to reject someone.

Almost as a rule, 95% of messages are dismissed as boring. Introductions like “hi, my name is Chad.” or usernames like “fit_dude” are red flags (in adherence with my strict No Bro Policy, est. 2008). Messages that read like job applications or internal monologues are mocked and then disqualified. Profile pictures featuring abs or camo, also automatic nos. (I’ve never had abs and therefore can’t imagine dating someone who does. It would be like dating someone with a tail.)

A few weeks go by and my cruel and rigorous selection process maintains a 0% acceptance rate. I’ve done nothing but mess around on the internet and I still haven’t met any cute boys. In other words: my online dating life is identical to my real dating life.

I can’t blame OkCupid because I’m not actually using the website correctly. It’s like if I joined twitter and begrudgingly tweeted things like “twitter is so stupid” and “@twitter I don’t get it.” So I swallow my pride and resolve to set out to do what I came to do: date.

I begin by searching for someone in my area who doesn’t immediately seem awful. After a week or so of browsing, one profile keeps drawing me back. I can’t immediately reject him because I can’t tell much about him. We’re a 92% match. He seems cute, tall, and innocuous. His profile categories all have one or two-sentence answers. In fact, it’s his vagueness that fascinates me. With so much blank space, I start to create all the interesting details myself. His stories, his laugh, his voice start to take shape in my mind. I write him a message, and we agree to meet for coffee a few days later.

When the day comes, I’m nervous. I call Ben and say neurotic things in quick, annoying succession. How am I supposed to recognize him? What if he looks nothing like his profile picture? What if he’s completely insufferable? Worse yet, what if he isn’t? 


“Just go,” he says. “You can leave after fifteen minutes if it’s bad.”

I arrive at the café and quickly observe that this is a terrible place to meet for a blind date. It is extremely small and any awkwardness is guaranteed to be performed just a few feet in front of a barista who will laugh and tell everyone about it later. I get my coffee, sit down, and try to seem all casual, like, “I’m just sitting here, not waiting for anyone, just keeping an eye on the door in case it tries anything funny.”

But when he walks through the door and we take our places in front of the barista, I am too confused to feel awkward. This guy is clearly an impostor. First of all, he is 3-dimensional. The guy I saw online was definitely 2-dimensional. Besides that, he’s very clean-cut, soft-spoken, and polite. He’s tallish, but definitely not the 6’2’’ advertised. I consider ripping off his mask or elbowing him in the gut and running away (the barista would love that), but out of ladylike good manners I allow the now-ridiculous premise of our date to continue uninterrupted.

We agree to drive to a nearby park for a short hike. As we chat, I force myself to abandon my expectations and try to get to know this person. I ask him questions and joke around. It’s friendly and amiable, but still, he is so shy that I find myself guiding our conversations. Somehow he is exactly as limited as his stark OkCupid profile. But far less intriguing.

Although normally I might hesitate to enter a dark forest with a complete stranger, this guy is too timid to frighten me. In fact, if this date was a bad 1980s horror flick, I’d probably cast myself as the psychotic killer and/or sasquatch monster, and him as the unsuspecting victim. We hike around for a while and eventually reach a mossy slope overlooking a dense, gray Washington beach. Below, a geology class from the local community college is on a field trip. 20 or 30 students wander quietly around the beach as their professor intermittently yells facts about the Earth through a megaphone.

Things get quiet. “Do you like to draw?” I ask, remembering that my sketchbook is in my bag. Maybe an activity will help loosen him up.

“Not really,” he says.

He doesn’t elaborate or suggest another idea. He’s just quiet. And I’m suddenly very afraid: I don’t know this person at all, and he doesn’t know me. If a huge branch fell on my head and I was all bleeding and unconscious, he would have no idea who to call. Maybe he’d take me to the hospital. Or maybe he’d leave me in the woods to die.

“We should go,” I say.

It starts to rain as we reach the parking lot. We don’t talk much on the drive back — a Devendra Banhart song just meowls as my windshield wipers drag excruciatingly along the glass. We are two complete strangers in a wheely box filled with squeaking sounds.

I don’t turn down the music or try to make it more pleasant. I just want to return him to the netherworld of OkCupid whence he came. I want him to turn back into the chalk outline of his profile. I want to click out of the OkCupid window and return to my desktop. I want to go home and be myself again. When we get to his house, he asks for my number. I give it to him and drive away, and when he texts, I don’t text back.

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

Thanks to new information acquired when my tinfoil hat slipped off for a minute, I can tell you the reasons behind many otherwise perplexing or vexing events. If you think you’re living in a random, meaningless universe, prepare to be comforted and enlightened.

Thing: You lost your job.

Suspected reasons: Poor economy. Your boss is a tool. You’re terrible at your job.

Actual reason: Odin lost your job to Xenu at poker.

Thing: Wealthy people control everything.

Suspected reasons: Greed. Conspiracy. Corruption.

Actual reason: The secret lizard people who control everything are terrible with money, so they give power to the wealthy in exchange for a healthy allowance.

Thing: A dude at the coffee shop keeps yelling into his phone about his dog’s diarrhea.

Suspected reason: He’s a jackass.

Actual reason: God is a dog, and He was concerned about His own digestive health but also hard of hearing. Therefore, making that guy yell was His best option.

Thing: Many people believe the Rapture is coming.

Suspected reasons: People are crazy and gullible. The Rapture is coming.

Actual reason: Thor tried to assemble some shelves from IKEA with his hammer and hit his thumb really hard. This always results in Rapture-mania, which should go down with the swelling of Thor’s thumb.

Thing: Earthquakes.

Suspected reason: Shifting tectonic plates.

Actual reason: Ghosts. You see, ghosts cause natural disasters when they’re bored.

Thing: Leggings commonly worn as pants.

Suspected reasons: Women are crazy. The fashion world is desperate.

Actual reason: Athena has been wearing leggings since time immemorial, and she demands company.

Thing: A bird pooped on your head.

Suspected reasons: Bad luck. Good luck. Birds are evil.

Actual reason: That was no bird. It was an angel. Angels are the Jerky Boys of the cosmos.

Thing: You fell in love.

Suspected reasons: True love. Destiny. Hormones. Soulmates.

Actual reason: Cupid got wasted and drunk-arrowed you.

Thing: Overprescription of drugs to children and adults.

Suspected reason: The pharmaceutical business is in cahoots with doctors.

Actual reason: The pharmaceutical business is in cahoots with the Virgin Mary. Long story.

Thing: The McRib will not stay away, nor will it disappear forever.

Suspected reason: McDonald’s is a tease.

Actual reason: Like werewolves, McRib outbreaks are caused by the moon.

Thing: Your teenage daughter is pregnant.

Suspected reasons: You failed as a parent. She’s naturally expressing her sexuality. Abstinence education. Teenage boys are slimeballs.

Actual reason: Zeus, in the form of a horse, made love to your daughter. What a blessing!

Thing: House destroyed in fire.

Suspected reason: Fire.

Actual reason: Liberals.

Thing: Your dog rolled in a giant pile of poo at the park.

Suspected reasons: You dog is gross. Instinct.

Actual reason: Nostradamus foretold this one all the way.

Things: Starvation, disease, war, terrorism, genocide.

Suspected reasons: Global inequity. God doesn’t exist. Everyone is the worst.

Actual reason: Everyone is the worst.

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

I love to hear my dad talk about what he did after graduating from Stanford in 1969. This might sound like the introduction to a nauseating list of accomplishments, but for my father it’s quite the opposite.

After being kicked out of the Peace Corps for possessing hash brownies, he worked at a plastic bag factory feeding defective bags into an enormous machine which melted them down “for a second try.” He was fired in less than a month for failing to show up on Mondays and Fridays. He claims the long weekends were necessary to maintain his sanity.

Although he didn’t know how to drive a bus, he was a school bus driver for a brief period. He recalls quitting after one stormy night when, delivering a grade-school basketball team to their game, he nearly drove the bus into a canyon. “When we finally reached the school alive, I was so nervous I just stood outside the whole time, pacing and chain smoking.”

He worked as a door-to-door Pony Picture Salesman. Two little old ladies would go around neighborhoods with a pony, causing children to flock into the street. The ladies would take pictures of them with the pony, and weeks later my dad would show up to get the kids’ parents to shell out some cash for the evidence.

This is just a small selection from his humiliating resume. It seems there is nothing too degrading for him to fail at, no job too disgraceful for him to disgrace further. And he loves to talk about it. After all, he’s a writer. He’s just happy to have what really matters to him: great stories. — Art Director Hallie Bateman

Where do you put your disappointments? My mother tells me to put them in my bag of experience. From debt to divorce to death: “Well, put that in your bag of experience.” How do they all fit in there?

She never gave me the properties of the bag. Perhaps that is up to the holder. My bag of experience is a deep black color. You might mistake it for a shadow. Some days it grows heavy and I slouch with the weight of it as I drag it behind me. Other days the bag feels like a fantasy game “bag of holding” — a convenient, small sack with a pocket universe that holds entire years of tragedies, attics-full of mistakes, all the dead friends whose lives seemed to be bought cheaply by cancer or accident. And yet the bag remains magically light.

My daughter is just a kid with a Hello Kitty backpack of experience. But she has started packing it up with petty disturbances that seem large to her and a few Big Deals that we both lived through fine. The bag chaffs her shoulders and makes her cranky. I am confident that she will find a way to carry it comfortably. Most of us do. — Writer Jonathan Gourlay

When I was first getting interested in comedy “seriously” (as seriously as you can be at 13?), my dad bought me a George Carlin book. I said it was cool — only cooler if it were signed. A few days later, he presented me with a Jerry Seinfeld book. “It’s signed,” he said, and I flipped to the front eagerly! Not only was this book signed, Jerry knew about my theatrical aspirations because he had written “Keep up the good work, Alice.” I loved this book, and I brought it to summer camp with me. I was reading a passage aloud, and I shared the inscription with a friend. “Huh,” she said. “It’s weird that Seinfeld signed in pencil though.” That was weird. Almost as weird as how the S in Seinfeld looked exactly like the S in my dad’s signature. — Writer Alice Stanley

My dad is a finance guy and, like most finance guys, has been since he graduated from college. His stories have always reinforced a lot of stereotypes I’ve had that finance is a sort of boys’ club where the common denominators are greed and excess. But it does make for great storytelling. The best anecdote he tells takes place in the ’80s, when his broker took him and a couple coworkers out to lunch at the Bostonian Hotel, a ritzy place near Fanueil Hall where they convinced the broker to purchase an extremely expensive bottle of port.

The first time I heard my dad tell this story, years ago, the cost of the bottle was $5,000. The next time, it was $4,000. When I called him last weekend, the price had plummeted to a measily grand.

“I don’t want to exaggerate,” he says, now, suggesting that I try googling the cost of an 18th-century bottle of port. “But I remember it was the most expensive bottle on the menu.”

Originally, my dad said he had pressured the broker into getting the wine. Today, he says the broker had just gotten carried away after my father pointed to a bottle on the menu, noting that it was around during the American Revolution.

“I think he got fired shortly afterward.”

My dad explained that it was the ’80s — an era of excess, one I might not relate to in our current world, grounded in pragmatism. But I felt like his stories also used to be full of excess, in that they were bloated and exaggerated for effect. Those tales might’ve been taller, but they were funnier too.

Still, the punch line is the same:

“When we opened the bottle, I swear ghosts came out. It was like drinking history. But I couldn’t taste any difference. That bottle tasted like any other wine I’d ever had.” — Editor Kevin Nguyen

I was 15 years old and my mom was driving me home from school. Though ordinarily I wouldn’t have cared about cars one way or another, I’d gone to a car show the previous weekend with my father. So I stepped out of character and told my mom that someday I wanted to get a Nissan Z.

“You can’t get a Z,” my mom replied.

“Why?” I wondered, genuinely confused.

“When I was 18 and working as a cashier at JCPenny, a man came up to the counter and asked me if I wanted to travel across the country with him. I left right then and we drove across the country in his Nissan Z, having sex the whole way.”

I didn’t say a word for the rest of the drive. I do not own a Nissan Z. — Contributing Writer Ben Bateman

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

When most solutions and explanations are just a Google or Wiki away, how are we to come to grips with the unknowable, the unsolvable, the unsearchable? Like everything else you could ever want, the answer lies in BitTorrent.

The Uncertainty of Solitude

0 seeds, 0 peers. Are you to keep your client running, ports open for incoming connections? Or are you truly alone, nobody sharing with you the Full Series Run of Clarissa Explains It All (XViD) (Ht3) that you seek?

Recognize that you can’t change anything — not the past, not the future, and definitely not the number of Nickelodeon fans who do the right thing and upload at least as much as they download.

You may be forever alone, searching for those VHS rips of Melissa Joan Hart, but in that loneliness is comfort — for if you are the only one connecting to the tracker via this particular torrent, then you are master of your domain. Or, at the very least, master of your IP address.

The Uncertainty of Inertia

2.3 KB/s. 5.6 KB/s. 2.1 KB/s. The latest episode of HBO’s Girls is out there, and people are sharing, but your internet connection won’t budge. Will the .mkv file ever arrive?

Remember, an ocean that increases by just one drop still increases. With every second, you have more of Lena Dunham’s show than you had before. Perhaps you do not need completeness, perhaps you only need progress.

That said, you really have to see this week’s episode. Maybe stream it?

The Uncertainty of Self

$675,000 Fine in RIAA File-Sharing Case. With each attempt to grab Blink-182’s entire discography from Demonoid, you open yourself up to assault from the legal system. Will it be you next? Will you have to empty your pockets? Will your uncle Jeff represent you in court, even though his specialty is more contracts and corporate mergers?

It is true that your next download could provoke a cease and desist from Johnny Law. And yet, that will not stop you. Since worrying will not help, choose to forgo concern. Let go. Consider the danger of peer-to-peer sharing just another one of “All the Small Things.”

The Uncertainty of the Tangible

267 GB used. 134 GB available. Your hard drive is full of so many TV shows, so many movies, so much music. And yet, to the human eye, nothing in your hardware has changed. Are you gaining anything at all? Does something exist if it cannot be touched? Wait, is Adventure Time really taking up ten gigabytes?

We are surrounded by the invisible-yet-authentic. Air, heat, electricity. Oh, actually, you can see electricity… and heat makes those wobbly lines in the air on hot days… I suppose those examples don’t count.

Look, just because you can’t hold a jpeg in the palm of your hand, that doesn’t mean you can’t observe its beauty. It is, like your downloads, both real and unreal. And when you watch — or listen to — a piece of media, it becomes tangible in your mind. Although… have you ever seen your mind? How do you know that it exists?

Yeah. Totally trippy, right?

The Uncertainty of Time

154 episodes x 50 minutes = 5 days, 8 hours, 20 minutes. Wow. Are you ever going to be able to find time to watch all of The West Wing? Who knew the damn thing was so long? I mean, I know the download was huge, but jeez…

Like bytes through the router, these are the days of our lives. There will never be enough time to consume all the entertainment on offer, to experience everything that you could possibly download.

To come to grips with this essential truth is to face your own mortality. I cannot walk you through this step; there is no Dealing with Death for Dummies.

Oh wait, yes there is. The eBook is on the Pirate Bay.

The Ticketing Agent

It was love at first sight.

The moment Yossarian saw the ticketing agent, he fell madly in love with him. Ever since General Regional Manager had raised the number of yearly mandatory meetings again, Yossarian had been trying to get out of flying. He hated flying — he knew that it would one day be the death of him — but his job depended on flying, and his livelihood depended on his job, so Yossarian had learned to live with the fact that this livelihood of his would one day leave him dead.

“I need you to go in your system and give me the deal I saw advertised on your website: 600 flyer miles roundtrip, New York to Chicago. It cost me the full 1,200. You owe me a rebate. I’m Elite Member status.”

“I know the deal, but it was only valid for web bookings.”

“I tried to book online, but the booking option wasn’t available on the site.”

“If it wasn’t available on the site, then you would have had to call or come in to book the flight no more than 48 hours beforehand to get the deal.”

“If I came in or called 48 hours before the flight then the seat wouldn’t be there.”

“Which is exactly why we have online booking. The only way I could possibly give you the rebate would be to downgrade you from first class to economy class, but you’d have to be crazy to fly economy. I could also give the deal to family members, but we’re not family. Unless we get married, of course.”

“I can’t get married. You have to be crazy to get married.”

Yossarian was in a bind. Life was precious; he wanted to live forever, or die flying cheaply. Over the year he had paid good money to earn the flyer miles that would give him the elite privilege of dying a cheap death. He wanted to die cheaply, and he wanted to avoid economy, but most of all, he was in love with the ticket agent.

“Marry me,” Yossarian groveled.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re an Elite Member. You would think that I owed you something forever if I married you.”

“Then downgrade me to economy.”

“Why?” the ticketing agent’s eyes flashed murderously, “because you believe that only an economy flyer could marry a guy like me?”

“No. Because I’m crazy.”

Major Major Major Security Pain

“I’d like to opt out of your enhanced screening,” Yossarian told the Transportation Security Administration officer. He’d read about the full-body scanners, and he wasn’t at all certain that it wouldn’t one day turn out that the radiation had killed him.

“Sure. Just step right over here for our enhanced screening, sir.”

“I don’t think you understand: I opted out of your enhanced screening. That group of people over there didn’t have to go through any enhanced screening at all.”

“Anyone who doesn’t mind going through the full body scanner or a full body pat down doesn’t have to go through either one of them. People who do mind going through the full body scanner always have a right to opt out of it, but by opting out of the full body scanner they opt into the full body pat down. It’s been like this ever since Milo Minderbinder was smart enough to try to bomb his own plane after forming the M&M Full Body Scanner Syndicate. At any rate, it really doesn’t matter, because the reason these things work so well for us,” he kicked the scanner twice, “is that they don’t work at all.”

Yossarian had heard there were terrorists everywhere trying to kill him, and the idea of these machines that could very possibly kill him not working instilled within him the fear of death.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry, though. Any smart terrorist like Milo Minderbinder who doesn’t want to pass through the scanner is absolutely required to pass through the scanner and is not at the airport, and any smart terrorist whoisat the airport and doesn’t mind going through the scanner does not have to go through. So no terrorist that you have to worry about will ever manage to pass through one of these things.”

Captain Snowed In

“I need to speak to the captain about grounding the plane. It’s a matter of life and death. There’s a blizzard coming in; we’ll die trying to take off.”

“The captain is in, and you’re free to see him any time, but you have to get through the double-reinforced cockpit door first, which will not be possible.”

“The double-reinforced cockpit door?”

“Along with the drop-down steel bars, which you’ll find ideal for not getting anywhere near the captain who is in there waiting to shoot you when you do get through the impregnable doors. It’s been like this ever since Milo Minderbinder—”

“Enough about Milo Minderbinder!”

Yossarian eventually managed to get the captain on his cellphone in order to sound the alarm about the approaching deadly blizzard he knew the captain would want to hear.

“Stop sounding the alarm about this approaching deadly blizzard. I don’t want to hear it,” the captain informed him, “because I can’t ground the plane. In order to safeguard passengers’ rights and well-being, the Three-Hour Tarmac rule forbids us from keeping passengers on the tarmac any more than three hours. The FAA would fine us if we did, $27,500 per passenger. So we either cancel their flights when we can afford it — and the airlines can never afford it — or we take them up in the deadly weather when we can’t.”

“You fly in deadly weather?” Yossarian’s head was spinning.

“Oh God yes, the worst kind of weather imaginable, luckily for everyone — the fine would only be passed onto the price of the tickets.You’d be surprised at all the deadly weather they say is statistically safer to ascend and descend through when compared to carefully driving your car around the block on any given sunny day.”

“Where are the snow-ins of yesteryear?” Yossarian lamented.

“I can only answer that question if you call me back, after all cellphones and electronic devices are turned off. It’s all part of the regulation.”

“The regulation?”

“FAA Regulation 22.”

Illustration by Yael Levy

In the last century, my father used a 1954 IBM Model B Executive typewriter that smelled of metal and ink and looked like the insectoid spawn of a Buick and a scarab beetle. Its dark green surface was rough and unfinished, as if it had escaped from the factory before it was fully formed. When I clicked it on, it babbled and buzzed and shook. The green beast waited impatiently to release the pent-up thwack of a letter onto a page helplessly pinned to the platen by a metal arm.

In my memory, the typewriter is enormous because I am tiny. It rattles and ticks atop an old sewing table as I crawl onto a black vinyl swivel chair and sit and stare down the serious silver letters IBM. Hitting the space bar is as pleasing as firing a gun. At first, I just randomly punch keys to see what happens. Now I’m hooked on the thing. I love the noise of the shifting letter racks when I hit Caps Lock. I punch three keys at once to try and trip it up.

Who’s in charge now?

The type bars tangle halfway between the key-lever and the page, unable to reach their destination until I untie them. If I want words I can’t just go monkey on the thing. I must tame the beast to sentences — a difficult task for a ten year old that includes overuse of white corrective tape and fingertips blackened from wayward letters. I finally get it to say what I want:

Dear Liechtenstein:

I am doing a 5th grade country report please send me information on your country thank. you.

Liechtenstein is, in my mind, a magical made-up place like Narnia. So it was surprising, three-weeks later, to receive a package of books from such a distant place. A thick, picture-less economic report counted every sheep and coin in the Principality. The book devoted pages to one of the main sources of income for the country: selling plates of stamps to collectors. Other books contained information, historical, geographical, and economical, on every inch of Liechtenstein, from Bangshof to Balzers. A Liechtensteiner clerk wished me well on my report.

Although I wouldn’t have called them such, the empty pages that I rolled onto the beast were search windows into the obscure world beyond the suburbs. A query. Three weeks later, a ping. Today the sheep of Liechtenstein appear on my screen almost as soon as I have thought of them.

It’s easy to romanticize typewriters because they are obsolete. Dead technology is melancholy; we see our own future in its rusting carcass. Yesterday’s ubiquitous machines are tomorrow’s specialist fetishes. I don’t know if writing has become better or worse since the death of the typewriter or if our lives were simpler and more fulfilling before we lived under the unblinking eye of an infinite search bar. Was it somehow more authentic, better, more “real” to wait for three weeks to discover the number of sheep in Liechtenstein? Was the information itself more precious? Perhaps a typewriter, because it contained no information but what the user could supply, reflected the writer’s essence more clearly.

A typewriter wasn’t connected to anything but your own mind and, if electric, the wall socket. It is no wonder that writers became attached to them as they would a lover or a limb. It’s no wonder a blank page could drive them mad. For a brief period in the 20th century, writers had to face a metallic mind-mirror that mocked and cajoled them while it waited for their fingers to bring it to life. Yes, you would need to drink something strong just to approach the thing.

In graduate school the poet Donald Revell instructed us to sit down to write and “type until your fingers bleed.”

This advice was impossible to implement on my Macintosh. The Macintosh was not adversarial like a typewriter. The Macintosh said, “Ting! Happy Face!” It had the goony grin and sweet nature of the lobotomized. And it was wimpy, too. One careless spill of fruit punch and your precious device was fried.

I don’t know if the typewriter made him a drunk, but the two items Pete required to be a successful college professor were a mini-fridge of cheap beer and an Olympia SM9 Manual Portable Typewriter. (Three items if we throw the general category of “tits” into the mix.) I spent eight years with my back to Pete in various faculty offices on a small island in Micronesia. When Pete and I moved offices, we always chose the same set-up with our backs to each other. Our office was as comfortable as a marriage bed, though to say as much would excite Pete’s comically overstated homophobia (which was oddly fixated on Johnny Mathis).

Pete was a Korean War veteran with an ex-smoker’s cough and his own name spelled incorrectly in tattoo just above his crotch, a souvenir of shore-leave in San Diego and a boozy trip to Painless Nell’s. Pete was as attached to his Olympia as he was to his tattoo. He never used a computer — something he was quite proud of. Each time we upgraded our technology, he would watch me unbox the latest CPU and say, “Is that thing going to make you a better teacher?” When the power went out, which was often, he liked to pound on the Olympia just to make a point. He was working while the rest of us pouted in the lounge, waiting for our machines to come back on. Pete wrote several books about the island using the Olympia, though in his later years he had a secretary type them into Word while invariably saying that her muumuu made her look like a candy cane, good enough to eat.

Eight years. Eight years and then he died and I can still hear the smack of Pete’s Olympia behind me. The click-whirr of the carriage return. The coughing jags followed by the gassy shoooooof of his inhaler. The tap-tap-bang of the Olympia. His sneeze that sounded like he was yelling “horseshit!” which I suppose he was.

At Pete’s memorial we placed the Olympia front and center. Then we displayed it in a glass case in the library. It is still there next to another bit of obsolete tech: his card catalog filing system arranged in Dewey decimal and stained with years of Australian beer. Some objects reflect the minds that used them and so become totems of that mind. In my more romantic moods, I think that the typewriter reflects the soul of the writer. Why else would tourists want to see Hemingway’s Royal Quiet DeLuxe and not just any old Royal Quiet DeLuxe? Why bother to revere a typewriter at all unless the user’s life is somehow caught up in the keys?

My laptop reflects nothing but rather radiates information. The sheep of Liechtenstein graze upon the 35% of Liechtenstein that is alpine pasture. The original UN charter was typed on an IBM. Olympias were made in West Germany. A photo of Pete’s Olympia, forever mute in a glass case in Micronesia, appears in my email. An archeological relic of the last century, stubbornly holding on to its ghost.

Photo by Dana Lee Ling

The summer after I graduated college, I suffered from a serious nervous breakdown brought on by health problems, a prolonged break-up with my girlfriend, and a post-graduation existential crisis. I was despondent, constantly on the brink of panic, medicating myself with sleeping pills, anti-depressants, and tranquilizers. I was living inside of myself and my memories. Thinking about the future only provoked more despair. In the throws of this severe depression, I reached a mental state where, unlike ever before, I was able to write openly and honestly for an anonymous public. In the face of what I saw as the complete pointlessness of my life (and it seemed like I had little life to speak of), why should I feel self-conscious about my writing? So I wrote, unaffected by concerns about how I sounded, and a voice that was distinctly mine emerged. It was this frame of mind that allowed me to write “Dan Hoffman, College Graduate,” a piece about post-collegiate depression and heartbreak that was published on Thought Catalog.

It was more honest than anything I had written before. It mattered little if I appeared pathetic, dangerously self-centered, heartbroken, and completely disgusted and unappreciative of my situation. And it was a situation that, if I had been able to keep things in perspective, was not as bad as I thought. But depression is, after all, a distorted perspective. This was how I felt, so that is what I wrote about. I maintained a sense of humor, because one has to in those times, but the overall tone was one of despair.

This small piece was crucial in my development as a writer and, more than that, as a person. I heard from my editor that the piece received a few thousand hits and that people he knew in New York were talking about it; people from around the country and even abroad were tweeting about it, too.

On Thought Catalog itself, most of the comments were affirming; readers empathized with my sentiments and found that I had adeptly articulated a common state of mind for recent college graduates and, in a more general sense, described what severe depression feels like. A few comments were snarky or admonishing, but I wasn’t bothered by them. I felt a sense of conviction about what I’d said, and the criticism didn’t cause me any pain or self-doubt. Beyond these anonymous comments on the website, I also received emails and Facebook messages from people I had known in college who had stumbled upon the article. In some cases I was little more than acquaintances with the people who felt moved to write me. It was as if they all saw a little bit of their experience in mine.

“Dan Hoffman, College Graduate” began the creation of a persona, cultivated by sharing carefully selected aspects of my life for thousands of anonymous readers on the internet. I was encouraged to continue writing by comments from readers, many of whom continued to keep track of my writing after the first piece. In a period when very little comforted me, my moderate success on Thought Catalog was something that gave me a small satisfaction.

Eventually, I came out of the depression, and my recovery was due in part to the writing. I found something I actually liked doing, something that validated me, and what made it more exciting was that it was a form of writing I had never attempted before. It was unexpected and new. I found the answer to the question that never really goes away and, at my age, seems to pose itself in its rawest form: what does one do?

I had entered a new phase in my life, and naturally, my writing followed suit. Where despair allowed me to write unhindered by self-doubt, now it was mania — a mania brought on by the realization that finally I could stop thinking about everything I had been thinking about for the past six months and just live. My life became erratic. I had limitless energy and supreme confidence that anything I wrote, or did for that matter, was good. I would share anything; it didn’t matter at all how I came across, and my detractors on Thought Catalog bolstered my ego more than anything else. I developed a pill habit, drank daily, regularly had sex with a rotation of women, and stayed up until dawn. I became a rabid hedonist, and my life felt like one long party. I had been inert so long, and so I had to live again. And I had to live hard. A side of myself emerged that I had never seen before, a side that had completely let go of the burden of excessive thought. All of this came across in my writing.

Because I was so liberated from my former self, I felt entirely comfortable with sharing the most intimate details of my life, as long as they made for an entertaining story. It’s a natural tendency, I think, to keep our despair and our mistakes to ourselves — revealed perhaps to those we know, but always hidden from the public. Even internally, they are kept separate from the rest. For me these distinctions were blurred. I had no private life, properly speaking; even if I didn’t share it all, I might as well have.

The first story that really reflected this new phase of my life was “Oops, I Totaled My Sister’s Car!” Many of its features quickly became some of my trademarks: drinking, sleeping with women, an awkward situation, a mistake, a bit of self-deprecation mixed with brash confidence, and in the end the ability to come out of it with a sense of humor. The real story was actually worse, because I hadn’t only been drinking — I was liberally indulging in speed, Xanax, and pain killers as well — but out of fear that someone from my family would read the story, I left those details out.

I raised the stakes after that and wrote about an embarrassing health problem, the very health problem, in fact, that had in large part led to my nervous breakdown. I began to realize that if I wanted to keep writing so openly and not worry about repercussions, I would have to create a pen name. I didn’t care what people thought about me, but I didn’t want to get in trouble with a future employer or a family member. So to write with impunity I created “Neal Mackey,” and the first story detailed a day-long drug bender. Under that same name I wrote a succession of stories, which in particular highlighted my more erratic side, prone to drugs, booze, and women.

And all the while, I was having so much fun, and my Neal Mackey persona seemed to have the dual effect of not only raising the stakes of what I would write about, but also what I would do. These Mackey stories in particular generated a lot of hateful comments, and I loved it. I was arousing passion, after all. With each story I waited eagerly for the comments to come, and each time it seemed I had infuriated some commenter more than the last time. Under my own name I even wrote a piece about how I liked “trolls,” which predictably attracted more trolls.

Something strange was going on. To an extent I was reporting on what was happening in my life, but it was more complicated than that. I was becoming more than just myself; I was becoming a character in a story I was continually writing more so than the actual person who inspired a character. Even events that didn’t make it into stories were part of a larger, overall narrative. It was as Philip Roth says in The Anatomy Lesson: “The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book.”

I did not write so openly and freely without it eventually coming back to haunt me. Any number of my stories were offensive on different levels; the number of anonymous yet deeply personal comments left by people suggest that I alienated a lot of readers — readers who may have even known me in person. But the truth is none of that mattered to me, except in one instance. Shortly after I wrote “Oh Shit, I’m 22 and I Got Circumcised,” I heard from my ex-girlfriend — the same one mentioned in the story. She was embarrassed, and she told me never to write about her again. She has not communicated with me since, and I’m given to believe that her hatred for me is profound.

After a while of acting out these stories and then writing them up, I ran out of steam. Whatever mania had been propelling me to write consistently and live erratically gradually dispelled. I wasn’t the same character any longer; it simply wasn’t something I could sustain. It also didn’t help that the more and more I was obliged to write and edit, as it eventually became my full-time job at Thought Catalog, the less time I had to live erratically. Right around this time, I had one last drunken romp where I alienated the girl I was currently sleeping with, a girl who I actually cared about. It would’ve been another entry in a series of similar pieces, but this time I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just laugh it off.

The shock of that event radically restored me to my former self. I realized I wasn’t the person that I’d been writing about all along, nor did I necessarily want to be. Writing became more and more difficult. In a sort of symbolic gesture, the last story about me I wrote for Thought Catalog in that period was humorless and sincere, simply detailing my struggle with severe clinical depression.

It is with a mixture of regret and pride that I look back on that period. I lived violently and my life became a story that I reported on as it unfolded. It is true that on occasion I do something debauched, debase or embarrass myself in some way, or live dangerously, but I have a lot more trouble writing these stories, because now they belong to my life, not to a character’s. I couldn’t keep up being that character, even if I wanted to. It was probably for the best. During this erratic period I made a distinct impression on both an anonymous readership and the people I knew. What worries me now is not so much what people thought of me then (though I have a few regrets), but what new people I meet will think, when and if they ever google my name.

When I make new friends, at a certain point I feel obliged to mention that time of my life, even if only in a perfunctory way. Having so carefully told those stories already to so many people, it doesn’t feel right to tell them again. I wouldn’t be doing them the justice I did them the first time around. For a while I used to mention my Thought Catalog pieces, hoping they’d later be read. Now I don’t say anything, other than perhaps, “I used to blog professionally.” There’s too much explaining to do; and besides, these stories don’t even belong to me anymore. They belong to someone else or something else — the internet perhaps, or the commenters, or a once-real world that now seems more like fiction.

Illustration by Justin Rands

Welcome to the medical office of someone who at least one licensing agency allows us to call a doctor. In order to reduce confusion, misunderstanding, and positive feelings about your health care experience, we have adopted the following policies:

Waiting Room: Check in with the receptionist when you arrive. She will be in the middle of a personal phone call. Please wait for her to finish. We have provided informative reading material for your convenience, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 1943 Edition, Volume G-Gu. We request that you supervise young children. Those children will be provided to you by the receptionist. Please do not bring food into the waiting room unless you have enough to share with the entire staff. Two of our nurses require a gluten-free diet and one is allergic to salt. Please note that the chairs in the waiting room will not support the weight of an average human being.

Documentation: We require you to bring your insurance card to every appointment, along with your library card, gun license, and at least fourteen forms of government-issued photo identification from at least three different governments. If you have any past lab results or x-ray reports, please swallow them at least twenty-four hours before your appointment so that they will be in your system when you arrive.

Appointment Reminders: As a courtesy to our patients, we utilize an automatic calling system that will call you every hour, on the hour, for 72 hours prior to your appointment. If you miss any of these calls, your appointment will be canceled. We ask that you extend us the courtesy of at least four months notice if you need to cancel an upcoming appointment. If you fail to notify us before the four-month window, we will charge your account an administrative fee of $6,300. For appointments related to illness, wellness, physicals, or procedures, this fee will be doubled.

Phone Calls: The doctor gladly returns all phone calls. The staff, however, physically keeps him from doing so using wrist restraints and surgical tape. Our system is not designed to receive incoming calls, or take messages. If you accidentally get through to our office, rest assured this mistake will quickly be rectified. Do not call back.

Suspicious Skin Lesions: Please keep them covered to avoid frightening other patients. Additionally, if you are bleeding, dripping, or oozing from any part of your body, we ask that you reschedule your appointment for a time when you will no longer risk damaging our carpeting or furniture. If you are unsightly, either due to illness or your normal state of being, we may move you to a private waiting area in the office of another physician.

Please initial this form next to all appearances of the letter S, using your initials and the initials of the person to your left. If you are waiting for test results, we will announce them publicly. We apologize if fellow patients leave urine samples on your person or personal belongings. We are not responsible for injuries resulting from stolen medical equipment. Do not drink from the water cooler. The water is only for show.

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

We live in Montpellier, the largest city in France’s poorest region, the Languedoc-Roussillon, which has the highest jobless rate in a country that just hit a twelve-year high for unemployment.

In other words, we live in the Rust Belt of France.

Before we moved here we had, like most Americans, imagined France to be a place of bustling outdoor cafés, sprawling esplanades, grands chateaux, fois gras, and day-drinking. And we’ve found this to be partly true. We live in the heart of Montpellier’s well-kept medieval centre ville, in the fifth-floor apartment of an 18th-century building with stone floors and a spiral staircase. The streets outside are narrow and winding, wide enough for small French cars but narrow enough to leap from rooftop to rooftop, like Jason Bourne. We buy fresh-baked baguettes from the boulangerie every morning. We drink cafés out of tiny cups. Sometimes we have wine with lunch. In a lot ways we live in the idyllic France we’d always imagined, and it’s great.

But there’s another France down here in the Languedoc-Roussillon that permeates our idyllic France. It’s the France of nomadic crustpunks and jobless graduates and teenage beggars who pretend to be handicapped. It’s the France of disproportionately large numbers of crazy, homeless drunks and their scraggly dogs. It’s a place where entire neighborhoods and cities of unassimilated North African immigrants live in ghettos outside the prosperous urban centers, ignored and forgotten by mainstream French society.

If you’re able to look past all its problems, though, Montpellier itself is a lovely city — one of the best in the south of France. We feel safe and welcome (something we can’t say about other places in the Languedoc-Roussillon, or Marseilles), and despite everything Montpellier is a place we really enjoy most of the time, which is a good thing because in the end there’s no way to ignore its troubles; you have to learn to live with them, no matter how much reality clashes with your expectations.

We moved here because the university my wife attends offered her the opportunity to teach for a year at the University of Montpellier, situated less than an hour’s drive from the Mediterranean coast. We knew nothing about Montpellier and I spoke very little French, but the idea of spending a year in the south of France was compelling. She would take a break from her graduate studies to teach, I would spend time writing, teaching English, and learning French. We would stroll through les places by day and drink wine on terraces by night. Our year in France was going to be perfect.

And then we got here. We didn’t know much about the city’s neighborhoods, and during our first week we rented a room in the Figuerolles-Gambetta section, only a few blocks from centre ville. Our dilapidated two-story house sat on a corner and faced an abandoned, graffiti-lined lot on one side and a row of fish mongers and kebab shops on the other. The store signs were all in Arabic, and after sundown there were no women or children on the streets and the men sat outside drinking tea and talking. This wasn’t the France we’d been expecting; it felt like we’d gotten on a train in Paris and stepped off somewhere in Algeria or Tunisia.

The trouble with Figuerolles-Gambetta is not that it’s an immigrant neighborhood, but that immigrants here are not really integrated into French society and most of them live in isolated, economically-depressed enclaves, like the infamous suburban housing projects that ring Paris, les banlieues, which erupted in riots in 2005.

Montpellier, like most other French cities, has its own petite banileue at the end of the tramline, in Mosson, where in the 1960s the city built a series of public housing projects on what was fallow scrubland, far removed from the city center. The idea was to repatriate and integrate Pieds-Noirs, French nationals who fled Algeria after the war, and accommodate a huge number of Muslim refugees and immigrants from the Maghreb.

It didn’t work. The city’s population almost doubled between 1960 and 1970, and Mosson quickly turned into an over-crowded ghetto. Today, the entire neighborhood looks like a developing country: a cluster of decrepit apartment towers overlook graffitied housing complexes with small balconies draped in drying laundry and satellite dishes bolted to crumbling concrete façades.

Every Sunday in Mosson there’s a sprawling flea market. Vendors spread out their wares on tarps — everything from piles of used clothes to stolen car-door mirrors and headlights — and haggle over prices. Most of it is just normal stuff people need to survive: clothes, tools, random household items. But there’s also little oddities, like a WWI French propaganda magazine I bought for just one euro, which seemed really cheap until I realized that there weren’t a lot of other people there interested in official French government propaganda.

Mosson, like all of France’s banlieues, is the unhappy result of the country’s strict universalist model for assimilating foreigners, in which citizenship is supposed to trump ethnic, racial, and religious identity. That looks good on paper, but in France integration has always been a fiction if you’re non-white or Muslim. A French Algerian friend of mine told me that it’s common for North African immigrants to change their names if they become doctors or a lawyers because most French people will not go to someone with a foreign name on their office door.

This same friend — whose French-born father-in-law doesn’t consider her truly French because her parents emigrated from Algeria in the ’70s — said she was shocked to hear immigrants in New York talk about how they were proud to be Americans and how they loved the United States. No French immigrant would ever say such a thing, she told me, because France does not love them, and so they do not love France.

Montpellier’s problems, of course, aren’t confined to Mosson but extend into the heart of centre ville. One of the main commercial arteries is Rue de la Loge, a wide street lined with ornate 19th-century buildings that runs from the Préfecture, the seat of government for the Languedoc-Roussillon, to the Place de la Comédie, an enormous public square and the focal point of the city, anchored by a large, beautiful 18th-century fountain called The Three Graces.

The Comédie and Rue de la Loge are elegant and charming and represent the best of Montpellier. They are also, unfortunately, frequented by gangs of drunk crustpunks and their dogs, and quasi-homeless guys playing old-timey blues songs on ukuleles. (The ukulele players are actually pretty good guys, for the most part.)

And although we have homeless people and crustpunks in the United States, it’s nothing like in Montpellier, where there are far more of what the French call SDF (sans domicile fixe, or homeless) than there should be for a city with a population of less than 300,000. Walking down Rue de la Loge or through the Comédie on any given day you can see more than one small encampment of able-bodied, dreadlocked guys and girls sitting on dirty backpacks drinking malt liquor tallboys. Sometimes on the weekend they’ll spread all their stuff out in the entryway of a closed storefront or in front of The Three Graces fountain and camp out all day, pissing in the street and raising hell.

A certain group of crustpunks hang out and drink in front of a grocery store on the Comédie with their dogs. Most of the time they’re aggressively, drunkenly arguing with each other or beating the dogs, making the grocery store a place to dread (but we still have to go there because it’s the only one in centre ville). The reason they all keep dogs is because the police are required to place dogs in protective care if they arrest the owners, which I guess is a bureaucratic headache, so instead the cops just turn a blind eye.

I should point out that not all homeless people here are rabble-rousing crustpunks; some of them suffer from serious mental illness and are in dire need of help. About month ago a homeless guy grabbed a knife from a café table in the Comédie and stabbed himself three times in the heart. He died a few minutes later in the nearby esplanade, the knife still stuck in his chest.

Like much of France’s Rust Belt, Montpellier is also home to a large number of Roma, also known in France as gens du voyage (travelers) or gypsies — a term that’s not considered an offensive ethnic slur in France the way it sometimes is in the U.S., but which, given everything else I’ve learned about French society, isn’t really saying that much.

In Montpellier, Roma have various methods of begging and busking that involve children and teenagers. Sitting at a café on the Comédie, it’s common for Roma girls no older than four or five to come around with a plastic cup or an open hand and ask for change while their parents play music in the square, and we usually give them something.

The scheme of Roma teenagers, however, is a bit more cynical. They solicit donations for a bogus charity for people with hearing and speech disabilities, which they do by pretending to be deaf or mute. They approach carrying a clipboard with a photocopied form on it and begin making sounds meant to imitate someone with a hearing disability, signaling to give them cash or write down your credit card information.

During one of our first weeks here we saw one Roma teenager try this on a person who was actually disabled and who became very angry and started berating the kid, who just ran away. But usually they’re pretty forceful and have no qualms about getting right in your face with the clipboard. This has happened to me five or six times, and at first I tried saying in French that I didn’t speak French, but they would just say, “English? German?” So now I just shake my head and pretend I’m deaf.

And that’s kind of what the French do; they play deaf and blind to the glaring social problems around them, preferring instead to think of their country in the same idealized terms my wife and I once thought of it. It’s almost possible to do this in Montpellier if you never go to Mosson or Figuerolles-Gambetta, or if you steer clear of the crustpunks and shoo away the Roma kids—almost possible, but not quite. The stark reality of France is, ultimately, all around you, sleeping and dying in the streets, begging for money, looming in the distance at the end of the tramline, out in the crumbling banlieues.