Why Fashion

Ingredients:

 - The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

- "Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth

I love being a teenager.

We exaggerate, get annoyed by everyone, love and hate the same thing in equal measure, have the freedom of adults and the consequences of children, and enjoy playing tricks on unsuspecting victims.
The littlest things can make you incredibly happy, and the littlest things can make you unbearably sad.


To us, everything is real and raw. One song, one drive, one shirt can make our mood.
The quote that accurately sums up adolescence is in Perks, 

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."

Those moments when you are so happy you feel like the world will stop and everything will be okay and you don't worry about the future. Sometimes it turns into a feeling so deep I can't put to words, which really bothers me because I prefer putting things to words. One of those feelings is what caused me to sit on my roof at two o'clock in the morning the other night because I couldn't fall asleep.

William Wordsworth, 

"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

It's full of contradictions. Hate and love, resent and fondness, child and adult, happy and sad, big deal and brush off.

One can feel all of these at once, and it doesn't matter that you can't exactly place what you are feeling because just being is fine with you. 

Again, Perks,

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be." 

I feel that throughout the rest of our lives we see the world through the glasses of our past.
 

"But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." -Wordsworth I mention The Catcher in the Rye, because Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, is "the teenager" in one character. Embellishing, feeling, bothered, loving, happy, tormented, he is that character I feel was made just for me. The one with my thoughts and attitudes. The one who says "I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway," who feels different after he hears his parents fighting, who hates phonies and at moments hates people in general. He says "People never think anything is anything really." But teenagers do. They don't have to label their feelings, don't need a reason for doing spontaneous goofy acts. People seem to think that adolescence isn't "legit." You're just a kid, you aren't a real person yet, your brain is messed up. But being a teenager is the most real experience you can find. One of my infinite drives with the perfect song.