I Officially Give Up. For the past few years, I have spent far too much time and money doing things that I thought made me cool. I began reading socialist-yet-somehow-still-vaguely liberal articles on my laptop in cafés, looking like I didn’t want to be disturbed. I developed a bad habit of ordering Pabst Blue Ribbons at bars even though I was never a huge fan. I’ve purchased several $60 t-shirts from various designers because GQ recommended that I do so. I even expanded my musical horizons, buying Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon, and LCD Soundsystem albums in an effort to have something even remotely cool to talk about with the cute, femme-rocker clerk at a nearby record store. When that didn’t work, I branched out more: purchasing via iTunes, God help me, Pitbull and T-Pain singles. The logic here was simple: I wanted to have Top 40 music on my laptop/iPod in case anyone, you know, ever went through my digital library.
However, at the end of all of these escapades, I have come to a single conclusion: I’m tired. I’m folding, or whatever it is they say when they give up in poker, which I’ve never really made the effort to learn and has surely only increased exponentially in coolness since my having started writing this article. Does folding mean quitting?
