Maria Bustillos:

David Wallace was a person who dwelt in darkness either by nature or compulsion, or maybe even by mere habit, or maybe just because he’d been given the wrong medication. Depression is a very inward-turned and self-loathing thing; he trapped himself in this sort of interior abattoir. But like all depressed persons, Wallace loathed himself in error.

7. Make vague physical advances toward your love interest.

Sex and twee don’t correlate very well. That’s why people who are twee don’t have sex. They ‘make love.’ And if that’s a little too 1975 for your liking, you can use other adorable little euphemisms like “touching bodies until [name of love interest] makes a noise”.

My school is kind of a never ending stream of this.

I promised myself that I’d not mention this particular fad. But:

“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”