Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

"They call it youthful idealism / And even I would have to agree with them / Some of us grow up, and it's still there"-Operation Ivy, "Junkie's Running Dry." When I think of coming of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I often find myself attempting to recapture those moments of silence or solitude that still existed in an era before social media and 24 hour news cycles took over. While we had cellphones, they were not the pocket computers of today, social media did not exist as it does now, and people could still use the excuse that they were not at home to answer the phone. No one expected us to be on call at all hours of the day, nor did they battle over political talking points in the stratified way they do now. Instead, we could "turn on, tune in, and drop out" like the previous generation, albeit with different drugs and drama, in ways that are often not available to younger generations. I was a master at "dropping out" in those...

I moved in that summer, not prepared for a hot, festering several months in a strange, small house that had seen its share of drunken, college parties. I moved in with three other guys who I had known awhile: Dave, Joe, and Jeremiah. We were a motley crew: a punk rock English major, a brusque music major, a science major, and an opinionated psychology major. I was the progressive English major that flirted with anarchism, like a less obnoxious version of Rik from The Young Ones . In some ways, we resembled that troupe, except with far less humor.   Joe was a more conservative psychology major who liked to argue. We were both from the same hometown and had honed our friendship as outsiders. Dave majored in teaching music; he was the authoritarian taskmaster that wanted to keep us in line. Jeremiah, the science major, added a new flavor to our little group of outsiders. We met Jeremiah when he took a room in the house the previous January. He and I would move into another house, T...