"I am thirteen years old", she thought, as she looked out into the sea of acne scarred, crossed eyed, baggy-pantsed kids. It was the first day of 8th grade.
"Most of them are thirteen. Another year has passed for me while they are trapped in their blissfully vacuous youths". "Plus," she thought, "school is way less cool than my Bat Mitzvah".
The rest of her friends wondered why she was so constantly dour. Except they didn't say "dour", they said things like "sucktastic", "EPIC DOLPHIN", and upon occasion, "TEXT FART". Did I mention that this story takes place in 2019 and slang then makes even less sense than it does now?
When they mentioned this to Jen, she just retorted by saying that "my feelings don't matter because this world is dying in a sea of loneliness anyway".
When she was told to "lighten up?", she snorted: "like a bulb that will burn out like a flash the day I die?". Jen was the death of the party; an abstract ornament on a mantel of unimpressive misfires.
Jen knew her friends were probably pretty sick of her, so she figured she should at least TRY to win them back.
That's why she spent her Friday nights planning the perfect 140 character (or less) Tweet. After 7 1/2 weeks of trying, she felt she had something pithy that would impress all the tweeny boppers: "Tweeting is like whispering really quietly; people can't hear you and you're probably saying something you shouldn't anyway."
No one @ replied and it made her even sadder. "I'm not even worth an @ sign!"
"It's time to reevaluate my life", she thought. "It's time to fucking DO SOMETHING MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKER!"
She took a deep breath. "I think I'll just write a great American novel".
So she sat down and channeled her abstract miserable misery into poetic prose. Words poured out of her like unusually brown urine from an alcoholic.
Her final work, "Pork On My Plate: Confessions Of A Guilty Jew", was a macabre, depressingly insightful book, made all the more compelling by its jacket: a pig eating a pig in the stomach of a Rabbi with irritable bowel disorder.
It was never published, and seldom read; but one advertising executive saw it and figured Jen's passionate, "from-the-heart" approach to writing would be perfect for his new "Schlumpy's: the world's 15th best mattress outlet" internet campaign.
Jen signed on the dotted line and began attempting to work her insightful insightfulness into Schlumpy's. She wrote and wrote and wrote; weeks turned into months, months turned into years, years into decades.
Suddenly she was 43; her friends from 30 years ago had all moved on; had kids, got married, vacayed on tropic island paradises while dining largely off the backs of well-oiled Pygmies...yet she still wrote.
And wrote.
and Wrote.
Jen began to think that writing for a living was actually worse than being a depressed teenager. It was more equatable with running on a giant gerbil wheel, except the gerbil wheel was made from barbed wire and covered in loose stool. And the loose stool was poisonous.
All of this made Jen a very philosophical person. "Where am I going? Where have I gone? Can anyone explain the popularity of neck tattoos? If a pimp has hemorrhoids does his "bottom bitch" become his "bottom bitch?""
Unable to figure out the answers to these questions, Jen sat down and wrote a big book, aptly titled "Questions I Can't Answer": 146 pages of questions.
It immediately caught favor. Soon, she become a major national celebrity (especially after starring in Oprah-Bot's daytime talk show) and all those 13 year olds who asked her why she was so dour asked themselves why they asked her why she was so dour (that was a question on page 142).
Jen finally understood: the people who had answers all their lives were the people that never bothered to ask any questions. People who are satisfied just don't think hard enough, until it's too late.
Things tend to even themselves out, and in her middle age, Jen was finally happy and satisfied, while all her old friends began to be massively depressed.
Life has a funny way of making you the same person that you've always been while everyone else changes around you. This is true for everyone.
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