It took guts. It took all-nighters and endless e-mail threads and a wifi connection. It took teaching ourselves PHP and Javascript, reteaching ourselves CSS and HTML, and writing style guides with lines like “NO OXFORD COMMAS.” It took Photoshopping and line-editing, stressed out Gchat messages and harassing contributors over e-mail about missing deadlines. It took coordinating editorial content and web design plans from four different timezones; I haven’t even met two of the editors (Kyle and Jess) with whom I worked so hard in person. Naturally, we met on the Internet.
It took all of these things and more, but we officially launched Millennials Magazine today, and I couldn’t be more proud.
I wrote about Foster & Joe re-energizing The Village Voice and LIFE; I expanded on the analysis of our generation’s collective malaise; I let Wikipedia define the heart; I coined a new disease, Phantom Red Light Syndrome.
Flavorwire gave us a very kind review/analysis; The Awl unleashed its commenters on us and the results didn’t make me cry. This is GOOD!
Please read through it. I hope you like it. And get in touch if you’d like to contribute to Issue Two!
I am 19 and I have moon-pale skin and I have only been in love 0.5 times. The .5 accounts for my high school boyfriend, who bristled at the term “boyfriend” and whose palm sweated profusely when we held hands. I do not think he–or any of them, really–should count for a whole point, even if we lost our virginity to them or cried our first heartbreak tears over them or got spontaneous, outrageous haircuts just to regain some form of agency after they broke up with us.
I am 19 and I live on the corner of Broome and Centre in SoHo, and I wake up every morning to a five-story ad of a woman in gigantic Prada sunglasses. I have a blog that no one reads; I stay in a lot smoking weed and watching Six Feet Under; I wear very short dresses and still write poetry, earnestly. In the Spring, my stepmother gets pregnant and miscarries. My father tells me to stop writing about sex on my blog and I make him promise not to read it anymore. He doesn’t listen. I see Sonicvision at the Natural History Museum’s planetarium three times in four months and go kayaking on the Hudson. I get a Gawker commenter handle but am too intimidated to use it. I am selective about who is allowed to touch me, who deserves to peel my clothes off. I learn the terms “hetero-normative” and “pro-sex feminism.” At home in Pennsylvania, I sneak Klonopin from the medicine cabinet to help court sleep. Otherwise I wake up wheezing, clutching my chest, unsure of where I am.
My grandmother has something lodged inside her, a tumor in her intestines that tests and charts and wires tell us is cancerous. Doctors with protective masks will have to operate on her, slice her open and gingerly remove the knotted mass. Radiation that at rates just slightly higher would mutate her will attempt to chase the disease from her frail body. She is almost 80.
My grandmother is Catholic in the way that people who make fun of religion disdain. She went to secretarial school and calls pants “slacks.” She married my grandfather when she was very young, and even though he died of a heart attack almost 25 years ago, she has never taken off her wedding band. Once, when she was suffering from seizures that meant we spent Easter in the hospital waiting room, the doctors had to remove the ring to run tests. The skin beneath was pale and papery, a permanent, luminous band around her finger. The first thing she did when the tests were over was put it right back on.
In the bath, my knees are the first part of my body to turn red. I don’t know why, but it’s always been this way. My feet hit first, the veins blue and papery, the bottoms waxed and beginning to take on the color of salmon. But it’s my knees that change the quickest, turning bright red the second they break the surface. I tell this to David.
“Why is that?” I ask. “Why are my knees so quick to turn red?”
“Because they’re embarrassed,” he replies.
*
This weekend I did little but lay in bed, trying to stave off the willowy feeling of crying that pressed like a jewel against my ribcage. I dreamed all night of my Grandmother’s old farmhouse, its delicate china and billowing curtains, the puke-green carpet she traded up for white just before selling the house and moving to a retirement community in New Jersey. We weren’t allowed to wear our shoes inside after that.
In my dream I saw the reflection of my 10-year-old self in her oak vanity, dripping in her jewelry, the elegant scarves she used to wear tied sloppily around my prepubescent waist like a tiered apron. I open the drawers and lift up her silks, her perfume bottles lined neatly in a row. Everything in her bedroom smells like baby powder. On the piano in the living room I taught myself to play chopsticks. She had an antenna TV and a couch wrapped in plastic. It was ritual that at least once each visit she would scold me for rifling through the glass box of potpourri that sat on the living room coffee table.
I was 13. It was nine years ago but how much longer does it already feel, groaning, freighted memory, that undeniable sense of collective history lapping at our ankles? I was in eighth grade and was beginning to wear dark nail polish; I had had my first kiss just a few weeks prior, my first sip of whiskey would come a few weeks after. It isn’t true that we didn’t understand what it meant, that we were too young to grasp the importance. We knew everything would be different by the small gestures of anxiety we caught in the unguarded reactions of adults: the timbre of the office aid’s voice as she tilted her mouth to tell our Ancient Civilizations teacher, the clacking sound the media cart made when they rolled the TV in so that we could watch the smoke billowing, spewing. That night my Dad’s face was weary and there was an exhausted, wound-up energy in his voice. “Everyone will remember where they were today, just like we all did when JFK got shot,” he said. I was 13 but I understood then the importance of remembering.
How many of us were afraid of flying before that day? Less than are now, I’m sure of it. The school didn’t send us home early, but parents started showing up in the hallways and taking their kids home without even notifying the school secretary. All of the kids whose parents worked in New York City got called to the office, and when I walked by I saw them huddled in shaking masses, their sorrowful bodies melting into each other, cell phones glued to their palms. By the end of the day, though school was never technically called off, it was so quiet it felt like a Sunday morning.
The weather had changed by the time I got to New York last weekend. Variations of “too damn hot” had stopped trending on Twitter, no one was standing haughtily with their hands on their hips before the air conditioner, wrists fluttering in front of their reddened cheeks like a makeshift fan. “You came at the right time!” everyone said. “It has been so hot.”
I was scared that going back to New York would strike close to a reality I’ve tried hard to fend off: I miss New York terribly, sometimes. Its conveniences, its inconveniences; its arrogance and its rottenness. I thought going back might trigger something in me. Perhaps the desire to give up everything I’ve built in San Francisco the past few months would swell so strongly I’d finally be willing to admit defeat. It would be so easy to give in, get out, move back. Settle in with the same people, nab an easy 9-5 editorial job, reacquaint myself with delivery.com.
But it didn’t happen that way. I still felt crushed by the buildings, I felt myself growing unnecessarily angry at faceless pedestrians with that high fashion swagger. My nostalgia for New York did not outweigh my distaste for it. Climbing into the cab at dawn on my way to JFK I thought, “So this is relief.”
Unless you have recently (god forbid) taken a vacation from the Internet in order to enjoy IRL, you’ve probably run into my self-promotional jabbering about Millennials Magazine on one social platform or another. As one friend put it over Gchat, “What is this millennialmag thing?” Glad you asked!
Millennials Magazine is the brainchild of Kyle Chayka, a recent college grad currently working at an art magazine in China, who went to Tufts with a friend of mine from high school. Along with Kyle’s friend Jess Bidgood, NYU Local Editor and Voice blogette Rosie Gray and I have decided to team up with Kyle to help him edit and churn out the online mag. We’re all located in different time zones– me in San Francisco, Kyle in Beijing, Rosie in Prague and Jess in Boston. We’re doing this armed only with Gmail/Gchat, Wordpress, Submishmash and Twitter. It’s a true millennial experiment.
The Internet has given us a platform to speak out in a meaningful way against stereotypes, incorrect information and bunk studies perpetuated by most news media organizations that like to slap on generalizations like “millennials hate jobs” while simultaneously overlooking the obvious fact that because of the economy, there are no jobs. By soliciting contributions from young people from all over, we hope we can serve as an effective mouthpiece for the current zeitgeist to voice their opinions about The Way We Live Now.