Going Somewhere Else: Ascending into Nothing With the Help of a Spotify Playlist

Have you exploded? Do you know what it feels like? Do you like it? Are you scattered now, across the room and the air and every piece of static? Can you even get close? I can. Everything’s chaos. Everything’s in the air, floating around. Everything’s in space and in the stars and it’s all in the walls of my teenage bedroom and my college dorm and my first apartment. It’s all happening at the same time and never and it doesn’t make any sense. And it’s hard to get to a place of understanding, a place of sitting in my dorm and bedroom and my mother’s lap all at once. But I can. And I can show you how.

I am a fan of niche music genres—unhinged classical, yearning, songs that played in my dad’s apartment in 2011. I have always searched for the feeling of falling away from my life and from my body, and have found that niche genres will bring me exactly where I want to go. There are countless playlists in my Spotify — songs that changed my life, songs I would show to aliens, songs that make me relive middle school (that last one is brought out only in my darkest moments). My interest in dedicated playlists waxes and wanes, but the pull toward songs that explode is never-ending. I’m speaking of songs that build into chaos, sure, but also ones that become completely unhinged within half a second. Songs that make me jump and reach for the volume button and wonder if I’ve accidentally changed the song to something completely different, like it’s my fault. Think Night Shift, think Happier Than Ever. But think beyond those, to a niche genre that spreads across time and space into somewhere else. That’s where I want to go—somewhere else. Doesn't everyone?

Bubbles by Hippo Campus is the first on a playlist called “songs that explode” and has held the first spot since my junior year of high school. It was a big year—the tumultuous and cult-like nature of a high school musical program, a flip flop back to bisexual from lesbian, a satire essay about “killing my mom” that almost earned a wellness check. Don’t you just hate your mom? Typical teenage chaos that piles up and up. You need somewhere else to go within the walls of a bedroom the previous inhabitants died in. Anyone would; there was an energy.

Bubbles begins with palatable pitter-patter and some lyrics about being broken or unfixable that are somewhat vague and poetic.Any overdramatic teen would feel right at home in the lyrics—especially if you hadn’t gotten the lead in the musical and couldn’t recreate the magic of that risky satire piece in any other writing. You, too, would surrender into melancholy without protest.

Exactly halfway through the song, it is chaos. It is startling every time. Everything breaks down and reshapes and spins and dissolves at the same time. The lyrics are almost unintelligible and buried under distortion, but they are still frighteningly unambiguous —I don’t love you and I’m fucking sorry. It is a soundtrack for the overly-hormonal. Let go, explode, be angry at your mean friends. Nothing matters, it’s all just chaos and noise and distortion and anger anyway. Any teenager would let their eyes close and imagine themselves careening into space and rapidly circling the Earth like an angry cartoon, traveling forward in time to when they’re living in New York with adult friends, becoming the actualized version of themselves for a minute, floating around in space and watching as the teenager grew more and more angry and let their face move and twitch as the music pleased. Any teenager would do that. It is a gift to not be in the bedroom that someone died in, not in high school, not on Earth, but in space and time and nowhere and everywhere. It’s okay, be mad at your friends. Leave this plane, let go. But only until the distorted voice stops letting you do so. Then back to palatable pitter-patter to bide time until it’s all over. 

And then it’s not over. And then it’s the middle of college, and you’re battling a situationship post-grad fear and you’re trying to feel good about yourself despite receiving the fifth “you’re going to hate me” cancellation text of the month, so you put on Me and Your Mama to try to feed into a fake superiority complex to help soften the blow. Fuck them. I’m hot and better without them. And then the song starts and you begin to sway from the consolation vodka-soda and harmonizing repetitive vocals. And then you let yourself be comforted by it, by the guitar and power until you dissolve from a puddle of tears and Sobieski into something else. Until you ascend into nothing. You feel your head tilt upward and let your eyes close, and you’re in that place again. Not in your college dorm, not on the floor staring at your Target mirror leaned against the stark white walls. You’re exactly where you need to be. You are a beauty that exists outside of this world, outside of the confounds of space and time. You’re eternal and nothing and everything and tomorrow when you get a text asking to hang out somewhere hidden, you won’t respond. You will have healed after this journey. And then the chaos ends, and you’re sitting on the floor with your eyes open, and you get a text saying “are u free tomorrow night?” and you respond “maybe…why?” and hate yourself for it. And then you sway with the wavy synth and drum beat and wait for it all to be over.

And then it’s not over. And then it’s a day before college graduation, and “songs that explode” is queued up. Half a bottle of wine deep, grieving the loss of the college bubble, struggling to decide which tokens to leave behind in a dark green dumpster. Different Kind of World by Maggie Rogers plays through noise-canceling headphones and drowns out the sounds of twenty-person liberal arts parties outside. 

One last song, it begins. There’s a slight whine to Rogers’s voice, one that feels like a genuine response to the state of the world, as she puts it. One that’s tired and overwhelmed and ready for something to change for the better. Her voice overlays a soft guitar and some oohs and hums in the background, and there’s one final when we’re ridin’ all together, I’m a different kind of girl. 

You find yourself hugging your own arms, finding comfort in being a different kind of girl in a different kind of world. Then there’s a buzzing from an electric guitar as a sign of something big coming, and then it happens.

It explodes and you go somewhere else again. Soft guitar and humming becomes drum banging and sizzling guitar. There is no time, no graduation, no party outside, no old writing class essays in my hand. There is only noise and chaos. You are nothing, just part of the chaos—just scattered across the universe. And then you are brought back down to Earth from somewhere else by the same gentle acoustic guitar. And then you stare at the trash bags filled with old essays from your writing class and you wait for the moment your youth is over.

And then it’s not over. And then you’re out of college, living in an apartment with your friends. And you’re happy, and you’re with someone who never cancels on you, and you just wrote something funny, and you no longer want to kill your mom. You decide to put on some music after a particularly exciting night out, and you feel pulled to songs that explode. You press play, and Bubbles by Hippo Campus begins, and you laugh a little at the sad lyrics, thinking about how small your teenage issues really were. And then it explodes, and you go somewhere else, and you see your teenage self looking in the mirror at you. You are unburdened by time and space and get to stare at yourself as the actualized version of yourself that you looked for as a teen. You get to tell her that she can be mad at her friends and explode and let go and that one day she’ll be a grown woman in the city and in love and in the middle of a new piece of writing. And then you get to come back to Earth from space and nothingness and the explosion and go about your day. You get to come back together from being scattered. It’s a skill. And then you get to share it with everyone else.

Written by Lindsey Cate Madden

Photography by Mia Scagnelli, @miascagnelli_photography

Talent: Justine Checo, @justiyxd

Production Manager, Creative Director: Sophia Querrazzi

PA: Mark Bluemle

Isolation is the Universal Language of Technology

We live in a time that everyday human interaction is not the everyday norm at least not as it used to be. So many people including myself use our phones as a defense against awkward moments, even if that means scrolling through your weather app just to appear busy. I know that I am not the only one, if not the weather app…settings. We take comfort in our phones just holding them, knowing it is there to keep us from those awkward encounters, the silence, it is our generation's security blanket. And maybe I am just addicted to my phone but I don't know many people that aren’t. Perhaps I am late to the party in realizing this but isolation is the universal language in our technology consumption. The need to be alone, the need to avoid those we do not know, why it is so hard to socialize. Technology, specifically our phones are marketed for that very reason. Even when I try my hardest to beat the avoidance I still catch myself in those moments phone in hand. The things that should not feel so awkward somehow do. 

I know this is ironic to mention in an essay about isolation and technology but during one of my many TikTok scrolls, I stumbled across a video about modern dating which inspired this essay. Within this TikTok, the girl spoke on dating apps and why those are the reasons it is so unnatural for a person to make a move in real life, why it is now odd to just approach someone and say hi. This got me to think about when was the last time I had just approached someone to say hi and not just in a romantic matter. It is so normal to follow each other on Instagram, see each other in person, and not even glance at one another. Socializing has become more unnatural with the more technology we consume. People are now viewed as numbers or followers, and not friends. Of course, not every follower has to become your new best friend yet to not even acknowledge a person that lives we follow on social media is sort of odd. Technology has desensitized us to each other. We think ten comments is low but imagine ten people coming up to you to give you a compliment. It changes your perspective. 

The isolation of technology is something that has seriously affected my personal life especially during and after the covid pandemic. I had been fifteen turning sixteen at the rise of covid and had already dealt with social anxiety and depression. Yet during the pandemic, I found myself in the worst mental state I’ve had in my life. Instead of processing these issues, I spent hours on social media… twelve hours of screen time or more every. single. day. A large part of me felt comforted by the media I had been consuming until the algorithm caught up to the way I had been feeling which only led me to spiral more into my toxic mindset. I had felt so alone and though I had viewed videos that made me feel seen. I had also faced the other side of the media which heavily romanized mental health disorders only causing me to spiral deeper into the depression and anxiety I had been facing. To spend hours self-isolating or bed rotting had become my new comfort instead of speaking up on my thoughts. If it had not been for the isolation that technology brought upon me I could have gotten the help I needed sooner than I had. 

As I have grown older, now nineteen, I have seen the effects that social media/ technology is having on our younger generations as well. My little cousins, now thirteen and twelve were the first actual “IPad babies” and to see how they react to the world as well as children their age or younger on social media is very strange. Children can work iPhones better than some adults but cannot read properly in middle school according to educators online. Many of the younger generations lack empathy or the ability to properly read social situations or emotions. And yes this has a lot to do with the parents but also the fact that technology is all that they know. At eight I wanted to be a princess dancer pop star. Eight-year-olds now want to be TikTok influencers and use retinol, and vitamin C. Even though they have no skin issues and retinol is for twenty-five-year-olds. Children now have no real childhoods, even children's toys are fake Airpods, iPhones, and Stanley cups. This may just be me getting older and finally understanding how older people felt with me as a child but….their humor and slang. I don’t get it. My cousins in this age range will send me a TikTok video they find hilarious and all I can do is give it a thumbs up with the straightest expression on my face. But this worries me, the younger generation is so chronically online and lives in a reality that is strictly based on technology that it leaves me to wonder. What is to come of our future, or of theirs? 

While I am guilty of many of these behaviors I've listed above, I still find them important to speak on because this cannot be healthy for us. So just in case you forgot, it is a must to socialize no matter how awkward you are. Go outside, enjoy the sun, blue light is horrible, and remember at the end of the day we are more than just the technology we carry so close to us every day. Say hi to someone you follow on Instagram who may not be your friend, let yourself have silence, maybe even awkward moments because that is not only normal but healthy. 

Written by Celeste Nieves

Photography by Brett Brunner

Talent, Creative Director: Sophia Querrazzi

My Experience with Feeling Alienated in NYC

Alienation isn’t a fun feeling, as I’m sure many of us have experienced. New York City is the most densely populated city in the United States (Heacock, D. The Most (and Least) Densely Populated Cities in America), so maybe you’d expect to find friendship fairly easily. Although many events happen around the city, some free, many not free, it can feel very isolating to be here for an extended period of time–even if you have friends.

I would argue that going to a college or university is the best place to find friends, and on top of that, going to school in New York City provides an even larger background of people than your traditional college or university that has its own, distinct campus, not tucked in between other buildings or even sprawled out across an entire city. New York City in itself is diverse, and so is college. You’d think you can fit in anywhere if you’ve got both going on, right?

This isn’t to say that you won’t–this is to say that you absolutely will find your place. But that can be hard at first, or even after you’ve already established yourself.

For me, I’m waiting on my friends to come back to school, and all summer I’ve either been by myself or trying to go to local events that are interesting to me. I’ve gotten along with some amazing people, but I can’t seem to put myself out there and maintain the connections that I’ve made. I follow countless Instagram accounts, I message people whenever I am able to, and yet I find myself feeling lonely and even alienated at times here in the city.

It feels ironic, doesn’t it? With eight million people living in five boroughs of a city, the last thing you’d expect would be to feel out of place, but it happens. It’s hard at times to motivate myself to get out of my bedroom and out into the city, and while I absolutely love spending time with myself and traveling, humans are social creatures! We’re supposed to socialize with one another and connect.

Of course, I have a social battery that doesn’t last very long at times–and there are times I prefer to keep to myself rather than to go out with other people, but I shouldn’t let that get in the way of making meaningful memories and connections with others. In fact, I want to make these connections and memories most of the time. How do I do so when I feel like no one wants to be around me? Or maybe the people I’d rather be around are all busy?

I consider myself a confident person, of course! I think I’m a pleasure to have in class (as assured by many teachers throughout my formative years), but there’s just something so alienating at times in regard to being in the city. It’s hard to find events that I want to go to, I don’t talk to people as much as I’d like to, and everything costs MONEY!! Plus, everyone’s getting jobs and have less time to make plans–myself included, it feels.

It’s good to remind yourself at the end of the day that you’ve got yourself, but I’m afraid I don’t have much of a solution to solving this alienated feeling–rather sharing my own experience with it and how I’m navigating it (mostly solo travels to rejuvenate and reminders to stay true to myself). Be kind to yourself, and be confident that this too shall pass–you’ve got a place here on this Earth.

Written by Patty Murrill

Photography by Rose Miller

Talent: Taylor Miller