What Was Cool

Fresh orange juice was in. That was the kind of thing you had to know. Laura Jansen’s cover of Use Somebody was playing everywhere. The new iPhone if you could actually get one—the waiting was the real experience, not the having. Someone published a list, officially, of what was in and what was out. I read it. Everyone read it. You weren’t supposed to care but you did.

The details were very specific. Monster Hunter III if you gamed. Uffie. Cheap sangria in plastic bottles. Chicken feet at parties. Not knowing Julia Hafström was cool—not knowing random pretty women mattered. Not having seen Twilight. Monetizing every thought you had. Karaoke at Mauerpark. Wearing something dead on your head as a joke. Lying next to someone out of your league and calling it conversation. Saving photos of old friends in your wallet. Being broke but moving to Berlin anyway because something was happening there.

What was out cut deeper. Small talk, which you did constantly while hating yourself for it. Til Schweiger. Heidi Klum. Actually getting sick from partying, not just hungover. The outer boroughs, the suburbs. Avril Lavigne. Trolls. Your ex. Running out of weed and acting like it mattered. That earthquake year—Eyjafjallajökull—grounded the planes and that was unforgivably out. MGMT, because once they got big they became unwearable. Death, which was always out.

The moment closed. The list got replaced or disappeared. People moved or just got older. You can’t sustain that kind of cultural vigilance—maybe you don’t want to. What sticks is not the opinions but the texture. The taste of cheap sangria. The weight of having cared very much about what was cool. The stupidity and rightness of it all at once. The way scenes happen and then they’re just memory.