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The following is a commentary on Generation Z and American life in the 2020s. Consider instinctive cognition and its exploitation. The piece depicts a student with unfortunate, but relatable or familiar characteristics, caused by the conditioning of contemporary social and economic models. While the narrator is not upsetting the system, the story calls out aspects of the system that often go unrecognized or unacknowledged—of which the narrator and all of the readers fall victim to in some way or another. All spelling and grammatical errors are intentional as part of the commentary.

Short Story                                                              Ava Croan,  4th Year Psychology Major, Writing Minor

th‌e first like second and a half of the interstellar piano theme blasted from my mf phone speaker you have got to be shitting me. i thought my phone was already connected to my airpods when i opened tiktok but this dumb shit just randomly disconnects whenever it wants to. i immediately closed the app to make the music stop playing and looked around to check if anyone was looking at me. thats the kind of thing where when it happens to other people i dont care in the slightest like i barely even notice it but when it happens to me my heart rate basically maxes out like what am i even taking valium for at this point. so anyways after i connected my airpods to my phone i opened tiktok again. the first video on my fyp was someone doing that filter that picks random celebrities and puts their faces around a table because its like a random celebrity blunt rotation thing. im like i dont even know who would be in my dream blunt rotation in terms of celebrities like i dont really care about any of them. itd probably be easier to figure out who would be in my nightmare blunt rotation. id probably put jimmy fallon in there because i used to like him up until he said that shit about lizzos met gala outfit and now i just see him as a woman-hater which is so gross and disappointing of him.

i heard someones phone ring somewhere else in the library so i looked up. idk whose phone it was but i noticed the girl across the room from me and i immediately was like,, her hair is really frizzy. and i feel like it could probably have a really pretty curl to it if she had the right haircare routine like if she used a curl cream or at least sea salt spray or something. my hair isnt curly but i know a lot about haircare for curly hair because for some reason i get a ton of videos about it on my instagram explore page and theyre kinda mesmerizing so i always watch them.

bro i am spacing out so bad i need to lock the fuck in rn. this is a 50 point assignment like im cooked if i dont do it and i need this class to graduate. which is also dumb because wtf does botany have to do with getting a communications degree but ig it meets a science gen ed requirement and i heard it was the easiest science class offered. i was complaining about this class to my friend thomas when we facetimed yesterday and he was the one who told me i need to lock in, he was like "you need to get your money up not your funny up its all about that grindset" lmao. so but like for this assignment im supposed to read five academic sources and summarize them like bitch if you want to know a summary of this shit why dont you just read the sources yourself?? and then you dont need me to summarize them for you like what is even the fucking point of this assignment. suchhh a mf waste of my time but i have to do it anyways ig so i typed "flowering plants" in to google scholar and clicked on the first one i found that had the full pdf on there for free even though i could probably summarize it by just reading the abstract because thats basically what an abstract is im pretty sure. and bro i shit you not this is the third fucking sentence of the abstract:

"Beyond the treatment of phylogeny and formal taxonomy, the author presents a wide range of information on topics such as the structural characters of grasses, their related functional aspects and particularly corresponding findings from the field of developmental genetics with inclusion of genes and gene products instrumental in the shaping of morphological traits (in which this volume appears unique within this book series); further topics addressed include the contentious time of origin of the family, the emigration of the originally shade-loving grasses out of the forest to form vast grasslands accompanied by the switch of many members to C4 photosynthesis, the impact of herbivores on the silica cycle housed in the grass phytoliths, the reproductive biology of grasses, the domestication of major cereal crops and the affinities of grasses within the newly circumscribed order Poales."

that is literally a WHOLE ass paragraph in one sentence. so needless to say after suffering through all of those meaningless words i picked up my phone to check my snap notifications like im literally 3 sentences in and im already wiped. basically the only snap notifications i had were ones that i had already half swiped a dozen times and i was just kind of avoiding opening them because i dont feel like responding to them rn. on the snapchat discover page there was a recommended story from fashion daily that was a guide on how to get the blueberry milk girl aesthetic. i didnt know that was even a thing but its honestly really cute so i clicked on it but it was kinda long so after like a minute i switched back to tiktok. i had like 74 notifications just from cate alone that i had been ignoring all day. she must do literally nothing else besides watch tiktok if she can afford to send me 74 posts in a day and theyre never even that funny or cool. im still curious about the blueberry milk girl aesthetic so i searched it up because i was hoping that there would be a better guide or lookbook or something on there that wouldnt take me literally over a minute to watch. the snapchat discover page is almost always ass so idk why i even tried before. probably because i was already on snapchat half swiping and then ignoring messages from people lol.

idk how much time passed but i was watching a video that was breaking down the drama between elon musk and aoc from earlier this week and my phone gave me the 10% battery notification. that was when i saw that the time was 9:30 which means the library is basically about to close and i still havent even started this gay ass summary assignment. im like ill probably have to just go to my room and finish the assignment there so i started to get up and put my stuff back in my backpack. my foot is hurting again and like im definitely gonna need foot surgery soon idk how tf im gonna pay for that but i also dont care enough rn to try to sort out my finances. its honestly fucked up that some people are billionaires and the rest of us are just left to struggle like i saw online that someone was explaining how there is no ethical way to be a billionaire and i was like that is so true! and billionaires just get to do whatever they want and have whatever they want. i wish i could be a billionaire. walking to my room i walked past a girl talking to her friends about taylor swifts tour. speaking of billionaires. i dont get why people care so much about taylor swift like i literally could not fucking care less about her. she straight up dated the dude who played theo in the movie adaptation of that one book everyone was talking about a few years ago, i cant remember the name. but basically she dated him but like the internet hates him i dont remember what he did but i know it was something really fucked up. probably something pervy. and when taylor swift started dating this pervy guy i thought for sure shed finally get canceled but her army is so loyal she like cannot be stopped. she has released like 8 albums in the last 3 years and theyre all so ass i refuse to even listen to the full versions because the tiktok audios of her songs are all stupid and none of the trends for them are even good. anyways i dont care about her at all. especially because of the billionaire thing like thats really fucked up of her too. being a billionaire and dating a pervy guy. very lame of her.

i wanted to get a monster from the vending machine in my dorm building and when i went to pay for it it said the total was $4. 4 fucking $. they used to be 3. i hate getting my card out so i did tap to pay with my phone but i had to do it twice because it didnt work the first time which was super annoying like bro i just want my drink its been a long day and the only caffeine ive even had today was in my latte this morning. so when i got to my room i was like now its really time to lock in fr on this summary thing. as i was getting my laptop back out my phone buzzed and it was cate asking me if we had anything due for botany tomorrow. she doesnt ever keep up with things like she could literally check the course schedule. after i responded to her i opened instagram and the first thing on my home page was a meme about foot surgery lol the algorithm knows me so well its crazyyyyy. then a few mins later i saw a picture of a sleeve tattoo with snakes and mermaids and it was literally so cool. i think im gonna get something like that soon. i just need to figure out how to pay for it idk. working at the student store sucks because my boss was always on my ass about being on my phone while i was working but like,, if no one is in there for me to ring up then what fucking difference does it make?? and she ended up basically cutting my hours so now i have to figure out a different way to make money. my friend kayleigh was in a situation like this last year and now shes a cam girl and makes bank off that. im like i could probably do something like that, like at least sell foot pics or something. if guys are going to sexualize me anyways i might as well profit off of it. the thing about being a cam girl is that when relatives or anyone like that asks you what you do for a living what the fuck are you supposed to say? tbh it doesnt really matter tho because people are always asking me what im going to do after i graduate with my communications degree and nothing annoys me more than that mf question. like uh idk i want to do something thats easy and makes good money so you tell me. working is just a way to pass the time anyway because the earth is literally dying around us and our species probably wont even last much longer. sometimes i see influencers doing like shopping hauls and thats like their full time job apparently. id kill to have a job like that. especially because then companies just send you free shit for you to review and then you get to keep it.

i ordered like $85 worth of stuff from amazon a few days ago which is supposed to arrive on thursday and tbh thats like the only thing keeping me going rn because lately everything in my life just sucks. yesterday i was outside walking through the parking lot from my car to the store because i had to get new shoes and a mf bird came out of nowhere and swooped down within like 5 feet of my head. it freaked me out so bad that i dropped my phone from my right hand and my literal $7 latte from my left hand. idk who decided that me getting my work hours cut and then getting attacked by a bird was the move but,, i need to just have a relaxing night tonight. i deserve that and like im under a lot of stress rn from school so i have to remember to treat myself once in a while. i just wanna spend the rest of the night relaxing like i can put south park on my laptop and finally go through all the tiktoks cate sent me.

opening my laptop to put on south park and being greeted with a fucking screen full of google scholar was a disgusting experience. this stupid fucking mother fucking assignment. theres no way in hell i have the energy for this rn. i copy pasted the assignment prompt into chatgpt and then copy pasted chatgpts response into the assignment dropbox. i probably should have at least read through it before hitting submit but at this point im already annoyed at how much time ive spent on this assignment. i kinda expected to feel a weight lifted off my shoulders after hitting submit but i didnt. ig i never really do if its an assignment that i used chatgpt for. but where i did finally find relief was when i hit play on my south park episode. as im watching the show i also started going through the unopened tiktoks from cate. i also noticed i had a bag of tortilla chips on my bedside table which was such a dub. watching tiktoks while watching south park while eating these chips is the perfect self care night that ive been needing. ig i ended up falling asleep like that because i woke up the next morning with my laptop open but dead, my phone next to my pillow, also dead, and a chip on top of my blanket with the open chip bag near my feet. and im like bruh this is not the grindset that thomas was talking about lol. even tho i fell asleep without brushing my teeth or taking my meds, it was worth it because at least i got to have my relaxing self care night. plus brushing your teeth is the kind of thing where if you skip it once in a while its not the end of the world, same with my meds. i wasnt running late necessarily but i had a class starting kinda soon so i needed to get dressed really fast and go if i wanted to make it on time. before i got out of bed i plugged in my phone and waited a min for it to turn back on. im just gonna respond to these snap notifications really quick and then ill get up and get ready.

Works Cited

Kellogg, Elizabeth Anne. Flowering Plants. Monocots : Poaceae. Springer, 2015.