Snowed Under

• DOWNLOAD | KEANE “Snowed Under” Hopes and Fears (Japanese Edition), 2004

I don’t really like to talk about school so much, but I’m only in the second week of a new semester and, obviously, I haven’t yet figured out how to write on the internet and read 300 pages a week with this schedule. I should, in fact, be reading the rest of Winesburg, Ohio right now, but whatever.

There is supposed to be a Snowpocalypse here in New York tomorrow — so scary that New York City’s public schools have already announced a snow day for students. I guess when you’re only five feet tall, six to ten inches of snow is kind of a big deal. (I also realize that when I say the words “six to ten inches of snow” combined with the words “kind of a big deal,” I am somehow invoking the Clipse, who have absolutely nothing to do with this.) At any rate, I think snow is romantic and if Drew Barrymore ever starred in a rom-com about two unlikely lovers trapped in a blizzard in Brooklyn, I would pay good money to see it.

So yeah. As long as I’m freestyling, can we talk about a young adult novel called The Perks of Being a Wallflower? I had to read it for a class over the weekend, and I still can’t shake the bad taste from my mouth. Apparently, we’re dying to find a “new” Catcher in the Rye so badly that we would anoint praise on a book that depends more on establishing the presence of lazy teen tropes than actual story development; the issues raised by its author are, for the most part, only important to the narrative in that they lend the sense of significance or gravity without actually functioning as significant or grave. It’s like trying to argue that the lyrics for “We Are The World” are somehow deep because the proceeds of its sale are going to a good cause.

Or maybe I’m just sensitive because I remember being an awkward fifteen-year-old and actually contemplating the world I was in to the point where a book like this might have felt patronizing. When one of my classmates countered this argument by asking, “Did you actually think deeply about all of these issues when you were an adolescent?” I had no choice but to tell her my truth: I basically renounced my teenage life and became a monk shortly before my seventeenth birthday. “So yes, to answer your question,” I said.

Elliott Smith once sang, “I can deal with some psychic pain, if it will slow down my higher brain.” I’ve always felt like that, for as long as I can remember, and for a long time I thought I was the only one. But the longer I work with teenagers, the more I realize that these kids are really thinking. Perhaps it’s the adults who need to convince ourselves that the adolescent world begins and ends with Twilight and Gossip Girl, or that a high school-aged reader is not sophisticated enough to contemplate the issues that make his parents socially uncomfortable. If so, books like Wallflower are more for us than they are for them. But that’s not the outlook I choose to subscribe to. While I’m positive that many New York teenagers will spend tomorrow’s snow day at home playing video games, I’m equally as positive that someone will be reading Howard Zinn or listening to Dead Prez or googling feminism. The old guard would rather you not know this, but it’s true.

Photo: Guy Schmidt