The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com b-side Thursday, January 30, 2020 — 3B Only the lucky ones get to experience the highs and lows of human existence. Despite how special your parents insisted you were when you were a kid, some emotions are universal — happiness, sadness, nostalgia, heartbreak — these emotions that simmer in our core are what bonds us as humans. But emotions are delicate. The same happiness you feel when you get accepted into your favorite college can easily be elicited by your two favorite fictional characters finally confessing their feelings for one another. The same deep sadness you get from failing an exam could easily be duplicated by an unexpected fatal car crash in your favorite television drama series. The cause for these emotions may change over time, but the feelings they stir within us remain the same. I remember being devastated by Troy and Gabriella’s separation in “High School Musical 3,” which, over time, evolved into the way I felt when Nick and Jess broke up that one time in “New Girl.” Different causes, different stakes, same pit of emptiness. In hindsight, sure, I can now judge things more realistically. Troy and Gabriella probably should have gone separate ways. By the time I watched “La La Land” with my early-teenage sister, I could tell I was old by how I appreciated the realistic ending whilst she was heartbroken over it. At her age, I would’ve likely felt the same way, but now, I can’t even imagine being so hung up over something that wouldn’t have been right. I tried to help her appreciate the reality behind it, but to her, it was a cinematic tragedy. Though we’re only four years apart, there was something about our age gap that made us different enough to see Mia and Sebastian’s amorous demise in opposite ways. I’m not sure when the switch happened. Maybe it’s because I realized “Gossip Girl” was feeling a little incestuous, or more practically, maybe it was because sometimes in my later teenage years, I was given a glimpse of what adults have been threatening me with my entire life: the real world. All of a sudden, I was expected to know not just my career path, but also my five-year plan and how to avoid scams. Life wasn’t so glamorous anymore, and I started to watch television in the same way. Call me jaded, but “The Office” became funniest when I realized that coworkers could really be that stupid and offices really do waste that much time on a daily basis. “Parks and Recreation” is at its peak when you realize that characters like Councilman Jamm exist in real life and make up over half of Congress. When shows can cleverly mimic the chaos we experience on a daily basis, it becomes more real to us the longer we live. Still, everything feels like a finality. When I was younger, and mass- consumed “Riverdale”-esque shows thinking that they were the epitome of television, nothing else appealed to me. I’ll watch shows like this for the rest of my life, and it’s all I really need, I thought. Embarrassing, but there’s a reason why I can barely remember the shows I was addicted to when I was a teenager. They were iterations of one another, and looking back, they were as micro in perspective as we are when we’re younger. I suppose I can’t bash on these shows entirely. For teens, they provide comfort — an escape from mundane life. Their impracticality isn’t exactly what teenagers are worried about when they watch them. For a lot of teenagers, raw emotion is really all they need to feel when they watch television. All they need is a stretched image of the life that they secretly hoped they could live — a high school drama they could vicariously live through, despite the absurdity of it all. There’s a side of me that wonders whether there’s any nostalgia tied into this mess. I’ve rewatched plenty of shows too many times, and while I don’t get the same intensity of reactions that I did from my first time, I’m temporarily brought back to the headspace I was in at that moment. There are few shows that bring me back in the same way that music might, mainly because we listen to music to match our emotions, while we often watch tv to make us feel emotions. Most of the time, I watch television in random places: in bed, on the treadmill, when I’m supposed to be working. Watching a show straight through means that, no matter what mood we’re in, the show can be factored into our schedule. When we listen to music, or even watch movies, it’s more of an emotional commitment — most people carefully tailor them to act parallel with how we feel in an instance. I realize I might have contradicted myself multiple times throughout the duration of this recorded stream of consciousness. The reality is that television serves different purposes in our life: a distraction, white noise, a mood booster, an excuse to bond with a loved one. As we continue to grow older, our search for more doesn’t stop with television, and it likely never will. This doesn’t mean shows like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” or “The Bachelor” lose all value — even a trash fire is entertaining sometimes — but it will never be as satisfying as a show that draws you in from the deepest parts of your core and keeps you there for reasons that you might not be able to explain. When a creator loves their show, you can tell. And that care is what we search for when we’re older, because it means that our microscopic presence in the world is acknowledged. We’re seen. B-SIDE: TV NOTEBOOK The TV of our youth and how it shapes our realities SOPHIA YOON Daily TV Editor There are few shows that bring me back in the same way that music might, mainly because we listen to music to match our emotions, while we often watch TV to make us feel emotions. When a creator loves their show, you can tell. And that care is what we search for when we’re older, because it means that our microscopic presence in the world is acknowledged. We’re seen. I am not the first to say that the later years of middle school and early high school were hell. Nor will I be the last. That must be one of the few universal truths of childhood. And as someone who has struggled with mental illness, especially so in those oh-so-cringeworthy years, those pains of adolescence were only amplified. Mental illness is by no means uncommon — my experiences aren’t unique — but there are still a few emotions and sensations that I have never been able to translate fully into words, nor have I seen others have much luck with the feat. So, when I read Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel “The Virgin Suicides,” I was caught off guard. Narrated by a group of now-grown neighborhood boys several decades after the events of the main story, the novel is about the successive suicides of the five Lisbon sisters and the boys’ desperate attempts to uncover why these girls of American suburbia killed themselves. The novel explores themes of sex and sexuality, femininity and misogyny, mental illness and emotional isolation, taboos and all the weird, gross and sticky feelings that accompany the early teen years. What was so interesting about this novel is that, somehow, both the narrators and the sisters articulated some aspect of my own experiences with mental illness in middle and high school. The experiences of these characters obviously don’t perfectly align with my own: I can’t speak to the experiences of those who are objectified, sexualized and repressed, nor can I say I’ve ever shared the misogynistic views of the narrators. However, the community and characters portrayed ring familiar nonetheless. From the obsessive and insulting way the community sensationalizes and elevates the five young girls following their deaths, to the deep social anxiety and desperate loneliness that both the neighborhood boys and the five sisters exhibit, this book was an emotional echo of what I experienced and saw in the early days of my struggle with mental illness. Most reflective of my adolescent years was the novel’s depiction of the Lisbon sisters. In particular, the physical and emotional isolation the remaining four sisters endured in the wake of Cecilia’s death captured my own persistent, pre-teen feeling of estrangement. After about a year of the community’s collective obsession over Cecilia’s suicide, the other four Lisbon girls fall into a passive acceptance of their grim reality and grow cynical of the world around them. They seem disillusioned by the superficiality and hypocrisy of the community, their feeling of disconnect only amplified further by their entrapment in the echo chamber of suicidality. I felt trapped in a similar mindset for years, but the similarities run even deeper. Towards the end of middle school, I began to notice that when tragedies and deaths occurred, people who never associated themselves with the individuals in question began to reflect on how well they knew them. And while this is not something that is exclusive to youth, going through such a difficult time myself made me see these fairweather mourners in a different light. The narrators note that a bench donated in honor of the girls’ memory labelled them as the “daughters of this community, despite how secluded the Lisbon sisters were from the rest of the community,” Moving beyond the clear irony of the bench, the most frustrating phenomenon the book depicts is the narrators’ reductionary idealization of and projection onto five girls who they, in reality, seldom talked to. “They were too beautiful for this world, they were perfect, they were so kind…” As I mentioned earlier, performative claims of personal connection in the aftermath of a death are a very common phenomenon. One could chalk it up to any number of reasons: selfishness, illusions of importance or even blatant hypocrisy. Regardless, “The Virgin Suicides” highlights the superficiality inherent in this reaction to tragedy. In contrast to the clear parallels I saw between my experiences and those of the Lisbon sisters, the similarities I found between the experiences of the neighborhood boys and my own are a bit more indirect. The neighborhood boys are problematic to say the least, but they do embody the agony of being an emotional and distraught pre-pubescent middle schooler. As someone who has always been shy and, consequently, never great at making new friends, I recognized the longing for friendship born out of their emotional isolation. Though my own experiences with this were more akin to what my friend terms “friend crushes,” (or, meeting someone who you think seems really cool, but you are too nervous to actually try to be their friend) the underlying social anxiety, over-analyzation and daydreaming that the narrators experience rings familiar. It’s been years since middle school, and I’m guessing that for most people reading this, looking back on those times isn’t at the top of your to-do list. But, with a book as entrenched in the nuanced horrors of middle school as “The Virgin Suicides,” it’s difficult not to remember that time period. As opposed to the community depicted in “The Virgin Suicides,” we, as readers, don’t need to remain stagnant, obsessing over the past. From those terrible adolescent years emerges (hopefully) an individual who can look back on that time and appreciate how much growth has occurred and how much growth there is to come. From stories such as these, of those who can never hope to understand why suicides occur, of others who are disillusioned and objectified by the world around them, we can recognize why growth beyond our adolescence is so important, and how much clinging to narrow and reductionist views can warp our realities. As we move into the future, the problems we face will change, and we will as well. B-SIDE: BOOKS NOTEBOOK Adolescent angst and Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides’ PARAMOUNT PICTURES TATE LEFRENIER For The Daily The experiences of these characters obviously don’t perfectly align with my own: I can’t speak to the experiences of those who are objectified, sexualized and repressed, nor can I say I’ve ever shared the misogynistic views of the narrators. However, the community and characters portrayed ring familiar nonetheless. DISNEY