Are You Having Fun?
the cobra snake, the blogger girl I never knew and a rubric
All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die
A timeless statement from Sheryl Crow, mumbled across loose percussion and slippery lap steel guitar. Relatable. The song won Best Pop Performance at the 1995 Grammys, along with Record of the Year. 30 years later, All I Wanna Do still finds its way onto countless Best Of lists.
This ain't no disco
It ain't no country club, either
This is L.A.
The song’s intro plants us firmly in the City of Angels, the chorus brings us back each time to Santa Monica Boulevard. But this sentiment, the desire for a little bit of fun before we die—that’s universal. The song hit gold and platinum on international airwaves.
The month of May always brings the tension between work and play into focus. Warmer weather begets social inivites. This week we have my Boyfriend’s birthday, our first date anniversary (6 years tysm) my parent’s anniversary (36 years woah). May always wants to be lavish. I want to drive to the beach and feel deep into the sand and run into the water. The year is defrosting but it’s also very much in motion. How can I ensure that FUN is had? What amount of work time can I sacrifice to frivolity, even when I know, pleasure should be a priority? The balance of time is a constant negotiation, lawyering up to secure pockets of pure existence. To quote the trending tiktok sound, I almost forgot this was the whole point.
At my incredible age of 32, my idea of fun is in flux. It’s always been a process, finding what actually conjures my fun. For so many years, circumstances had to be just so. The only world I knew was a bedroom with a sick mother and a television. Outside of that, the possibilities were daunting. Something had to be experienced over and over before I could relax and parse the strands of fun. I don’t say this with pride. Only in recent years have I found enough confidence to have actual fun in new social situations. When I get home from a night of revelry, scenes don’t play themselves on repeat in my mind. There’s no longer a pressure to get it right. Fun is a flower blooming at 3x speed.
With May in the chat, I’m feeling the stirrings of a different sort of fun. Winter and Spring are internal. There’s incubating and spreading roots and growing in the gentle warmth. Summer asks us to hang up our coats, it’s getting too warm to hide. Summer fun can be demanding but she’s willing to reciprocate.
My mother always warned me against living to work. She encouraged me to apply at a restaurant. You clock in and clock out. You work to live. Instead going to a restaurant, I got hired at American Apparel. This didn’t align with my mother’s vision. She believed the retail space asked too much of me. I had to buy the clothes—at a paltry discount—I had to learn the seasonal styles, the cash register, the sales techniques. It was too involved, for not nearly enough money. My mother loved cash tips.
After 10 months of American Apparel living, including a promotion to KEY HOLDER thank you, I was fired. It was a targeted purge. They cut out the five people with the lowest monthly sales. Sure, I was giving discounts to friends that came in to buy fisherman sweaters, but the top sales girl showed up every day high on Xanax, smoking joints in the back stock. The American Apparel suits not only kept her around, they promoted her to Assistant Manager. Anyway it was good to be set free. I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the Spring collection.
After that jarring retail experience, I followed my mother’s advice and got a job as a hostess. It was a classy restaurant, which my mother said was key. Big checks meant big tips. Cash would certainly trickle down to the hostess. I cried after every single shift. It was serious business, seating people in turquoise mohair booths. The CEO of Disney hated to wait more than 15 seconds for anything. Brunch was an overbooked bloodbath. No one liked to sit in the middle tables, except for the Emhoff kids and their mom during their Sunday night dinners. When Spielberg or Sandler or Apatow came in for breakfast, the bartender would shield her face, in case they ever saw her at a call back.
Every Friday and Saturday night I wanted to party. Get the Brunch sadness out of me, scrape the restaurant onto the curb. My mother warned me against spending my tips the same night I made them. Don’t go to bars with your coworkers. Instead, I drove far across town to weird garages and ventless basements with loud music. I picked up cheap beer cans at the liquor store. It wasn’t enough to be at the show, I needed to be deep in the mosh pit, vibrating with other people’s motion. All I wanna do, is have some fun.
This morning I woke up thinking about town criers and The Cobra Snake. I was in middle school during The Cobra Snake’s break out era. His muse Cory Kennedy was all over the web, her tousled brown hair and big brown eyes. Looking up at the camera, crouched in a sticker smeared doorway. Party girl supreme. While Cory Kennedy posed for Nylon and flew to Paris fashion week, her sisters went to my middle school. One of them was in my Humanities class. The girls were already recognized as cool, but this blood connection transformed them into something otherwordly. The kind of popular you only talk about in hushed tones. Style dripped from the ink doodles on their Converse. A nonchalant aura radiated from their voluminous side bangs.
Cory Kennedy was our Twiggy. The Cobra Snake was our Warhol. Instead of creating a thousand prints of Campbell Soup cans, The Cobra Snake distilled social events into 20 flash photos. Each set was uploaded to his website on a 12 hour delay. He was the keeper of our memories. These people were here. They wore this. It was fun. We used to have town criers to get the word out. Bellowing men clanging bells in the square. This role dates back to Ancient Roman times, iterations appeared around the world through the centuries. Sure, the town crier wasn’t reporting on the latest party gossip, but he was a spring of communal knowledge. Everyone was on the same wavelength. They knew the societal dirt to build their fun around.
Structure is a crucial part of fun. That’s why millions of people flock to crowded amusement parks in overheated cities for expensive turkey legs. Rigid and predictable shapes allow certain people to really let loose.
Now we can all document and post. We can fill our 128GB of phone storage with fun evidence, before deciding which angle to share. In our self-curation, finding an off kilter expression is rare. It’s the ambivalence toward spectators that I miss. That’s why the youth are stacking their phones in the center of the dinner table. Shutting the external eye, for a moment. The Cobra Snake said something about iPhones destroying the ability to take a real candid photo. A flashing camera freezes a single breath, you move on. No looking back. Real fun is crystalized in the light. I tried to find his exact quote but I ended up on an old blog I used to read when I was a teen.
This blogger girl was a little older, charming, messy but seemed sharp and aware. She had an advice show and told teen girls how to go on dates. The only advice that stuck with me was don’t hold your phone too close to your face. The blue light has a ghoulish effect.
Years later, the blogger girl tried to fuck my then-boyfriend (let’s call him Norton). Norton and blogger girl got dinner as friends. Dinner and lots of drinks. Then blogger girl invited her friend to Norton’s house. Then Blogger girl left Norton alone with this vine-star-turned-cam-girl. Maybe that girl tried to fuck him. I’ve lost most of the details. Either way, this girl who doled out advice to younger girls actively tried to mess up my relationship.
Somewhere between drinks, Norton told the girls he wasn’t sure about his feelings for me. This was true. Norton spent most of our relationship wondering if it should end. So the blogger girl decided to push Norton’s decision over a cliff. A true social experiment—how much damage can we do in a single evening? She never even met me. She hardly knew Norton. She was just looking for a fun night. Her version of fun.
Maybe the blogger girl didn’t see it that way—we never see ourselves as the villain. For all I know, she heard Norton’s anguish and decided it was time for a mercy killing. What was this guy doing, spilling tears into his beer around random girls? She had to crush this pathetic situation. Put everyone out of their misery. That sort of reasoning could be placed within her purported girls girl brand.
Whatever her motivation, it didn’t go to plan. The next morning, Norton confessed everything to me in vibrant detail. He revoked the “free blow job” and thus renewed his desire for monogamous commitment. I was shaken by the near-cheat, but this crisis actually kept me and Norton together for another few months. An entirely adverse reaction to the experiment. We simply cannot control the lab rats.
Strangely betrayed by this girl I’d never met, I blocked her on Instagram. Seeing her face in those digital squares made my stomach acid sizzle. I needed to detach from the illusion that I knew her. To understand that the situation wasn’t personal. And it worked. I actually have a hard time remembering her name. It’s wild how quick you can forget someone when they’re removed from sight. That entire situation lives murky in my memory like a melatonin nightmare.
Now, a decade later, this girl’s face started popping up in other people’s IG stories. Instagram never forgets. It’s created a whole generation of town criers. So many people delivering their version of news to their town square. The facts are no longer distilled, they’re diffused into the atmosphere with a sticky scent attached. Too particulate for digestion, we exist within clouds of social ephemera. Who am I to say what matters, what will help and what ventures will stick? I don’t need to make a decision when the information is just a wash, nothing to hold.
Like this info—that girl I blocked now lives in NYC. That’s good, LA wasn’t concave enough to hold her energy. In New York, there’s a lot more walls to bounce off. She directed an indie movie. She’s solidly in her forties. Still holds her classic look. Maybe she’s found peace in her new environment. Or at least, a new way to have fun.
People talk circles around attachment styles and love languages, but fun language is equally important. If our experiential intentions aren’t clear, we might run into disappointment or even heartbreak.
After a week of writing this piece and chewing on FUN, I decided we need a concrete reference point. Something that allows us to communicate exactly what type of fun we need.
And so, I present to you, Fun Archetypes. Please utilize. Mix and match. Let me know how it goes.
Here’s to a summer of fun— for all our Archetypes xx
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