There need to be weird-as-fuck, niched Spotify playlists. I just did a Spotify search for “feeling fucky and dumb but also hopeful” and nothing came up as a potential playlist. And rather than create that playlist myself, I am complaining about it on the Internet. Because I am a consumer, I am an American, and I am lazy.

I had kind of a shitty day. Actually, it’s been kind of a shitty week. And part of me is like, “Oh don’t put this on your blog, don’t show human emotions.” And part of me is like, “I’LL DO WHAT I WANT, I AM THE SUPREME OVERLORD”—which I almost just spelt as “overload”—“AND I WILL DESTROY THE GALAXY.” It’s one of those weeks where my barometer for knowing what is appropriate internet content and what is not is way fucking off. I don’t care right now. All I want to do is eat Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, watch The Mindy Project and stab someone. In no particular order.

But no, I cannot become the slob I desperately crave. Instead, I am sitting in the study lounge, not writing my paper and listening to a playlist that does not adequately convey the fractious state of my psyche. I don’t want to write about Sir Gawain or the Green Knight. We have to respond to a critic critiquing Sir Gawain, and it is taking EVERYTHING I have to not start a rant, that would go something like this:

Like, what is Gawain even doing? He’s being a total coward, kissing Bertilak’s wife. But we are supposed to think he’s heroic because he’s exerting self-control. I exert self-control ALL the time when I don’t bully people to tears. And no one’s writing a poem about me.

It would basically just turn into a rant about me.

I know that my life is short and that even the shitty moments are good because at least I’m experiencing something. For so long, I felt nothing, and now I’m opening myself and feeling all these emotions and I’m just thinking, “Holy crap, how does anyone do this? How can we all walk around with all these emotions roiling around in us like oceans, with microcosms and algae and fucking blue whales and the entire time we’re supposed to act like we’re fine? I’ve swallowed the Atlantic and I’m supposed to be okay with that?” But I guess the whole point of feeling everything is that you feel everything and that the shitty moments are like cold currents in the ocean. They push you around and you notice them more, but they don’t make up the entire ocean. There are worlds we haven’t discovered in the ocean.

Now I’m just thinking about the ocean, and hoping that what I just wrote above was a complex metaphor and not a meta-bore.

And that’s why we need weird Spotify playlists. Because sometimes oceans feel like cold currents and you just need someone to scream-sing in your ears.