The O.C. All Night

I’m completely destroyed. Haven’t slept since yesterday afternoon. We’ve been watching The O.C. since four o’clock—André, Lisa, and me—just chaining episodes together, drinking, eating, existing in Newport Beach for fifteen hours straight. The weather outside is actually decent, which makes it worse somehow. We could be outside doing something. Instead we’re inside watching a show about rich teenagers ruining their lives.

I dragged André into this. He showed up skeptical, thought it was just empty melodrama. That’s always how it starts—someone convinced they’re above it until the show actually hooks them. By episode seven or eight he stopped making jokes about scripts and acting. Once Marissa’s death trip to Tecumana happened, once Oliver turned out to be a complete asshole, once Seth’s situation with Summer became genuinely pathetic, André just gave up fighting. The show does something to you. It has this intrigue, this ache of wanting things you can’t have, this way of making you believe that a seventeen-year-old’s problems are genuinely devastating. The O.C. becomes real. It lives in your chest now.

I’m wrecked. Sixteen hours with no sleep. Everything looks too vivid and strange. My spelling’s still perfect though, which is sort of hilarious because I can barely focus.