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THE statement
A
fter the semester finishes and I’m home — sleep-deprived, brain
fizzled out — I usually binge-watch a show on Netflix. This time
around, I binge-watched a girl’s YouTube channel.
She’s 23 years old and pretty. She films her videos in her Manhattan apart-
ment replete with Christmas lights and exposed brick. Her videos cover
everything from contouring tutorials and New Year’s Eve lookbooks to sto-
ries on how to feel beautiful and anxiety attacks.
It’s a little like escapist television, but it’s also a looking glass in a life I could
— and want to — have. When I’m her age, I could be living in New York in a
stylish apartment, with a stylish boyfriend and an Instagram account that
gets more than 20 likes on a photo. Most of all, I admire that she’s confident
enough to make a YouTube account starring herself and her life; I can’t bring
myself to post a selfie on social media for fear of being seen as egotistical.
What’s weird is that I know I would hate her if I knew her in real life. I’ve
hated random girls for as long as I can remember. While quite a few of them
were truly irritating people, many of these girls had something I was jealous
of that also, for some reason, made me dislike them — a past with my boy-
friend, “stealing” my friend or some other thing that made me panicked.
The ex of a current hook up is the easiest target. Stalking the social media
accounts of the “annoying little bitch who isn’t even that pretty” is a guilty
pleasure of mine and my friends’. We have an excellent ability to find despi-
cable things about the people we hate.
If my husband’s ex-girlfriend was Mother Teresa, I could reframe her as
the devil in my mind. Why was she so giving? Like, we get it, you like all the
attention, can you just calm down?
I’ve found that the girls I admire and the girls I hate have a lot in common:
they are well dressed, beautiful, smart and confident. It seems like the cooler
they are, the more we hate them.
But, surprise surprise, this is not very healthy!
It’s a loss to hate on a girl that could be our friend just because of some weird
insecurity. The more I cut other girls down, the easier it is to cut myself down.
We’re scared above all that someone — a friend or a love interest — will see
that there’s someone better out there and leave us. We’re scared that the per-
son who used to make us so happy found someone who makes them happier
than we did.
But self worth doesn’t work like that. The fact that our friend found a new
friend, that our boyfriend touched some other girl sometime during his
20-something years of existence doesn’t mean we suck. So there’s no need to
stalk this girl’s Instagram from freshman year and screenshot and send the
stupidest captions to three different group texts.
I can’t really picture my weird YouTube girl crush doing that — and I think
we would all rather be friends with someone who spends her free time giving
life tips to thousands of people online rather than digging through Facebook
circa 2012.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMILIE FARRUGIA
Amid election year nonsense and a perilous international
environment, Barack Obama outlined several policy
goals for the upcoming year in his last State of the Union
Address Tuesday. We’ve outlined a few notable ones.
THE LIST
NO-COST COMMUNITY COLLEGE
“Providing two years of community college at no cost for every
responsible student is one of the best ways to do that.”
JOB TRAINING FOR THE UNEMPLOYED
“Say a hardworking American loses his job — we shouldn’t just
make sure he can get unemployment insurance; we should make
sure that program encourages him to retrain for a business that’s
ready to hire him.”
MORE FUNDING FOR CANCER RESEARCH
“For the loved ones we’ve lost, for the family we can still save, let’s
make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”
FORCE TO FIGHT ISIS
“If this Congress is serious about winning this war, and wants to
send a message to our troops and the world, you should finally
authorize the use of military force against ISIL.”
TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP
“With TPP, China doesn’t set the rules in that region, we do.
You want to show our strength in this century? Approve this
agreement. Give us the tools to enforce it.”
END THE CUBAN EMBARGO
“We restored diplomatic relations, opened the door to travel
and commerce, and positioned ourselves to improve the lives of
the Cuban people. You want to consolidate our leadership and
credibility in the hemisphere? Recognize that the Cold War is
over. Lift the embargo.”
BUZZFEED, BUT BET TER
BARACK OBAMA’S MAJOR POLICY GOALS
FROM THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
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Wednesday, January 13, 2016 // The Statement
B Y R A C H E L P R E M A C K
A Filtered Life: My YouTube Crush