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If there is one thing that I enjoy more than obsessively reading the blogs of emotionally stagnant teens (Please, no more white backgrounds and personalized cursors, you dreary little punks), it’s reading the same material in a vaguely early-modern format.

I recently finished reading The Coquette after having put it off for some time because of an irrational fear that someone might think I was reading a saucy novel in my cube on my lunch break. However, I have lately whittled down the unread portion of my main squeeze’s collection to only novels with compromising names (current furtive cubicle read: Sons and Lovers) and so after a few suspicious glances at the cursive-handwriting font of the title, I started in on The Coquette.

It saddens me to even make this comparison, but the periodic letter format full of romantic drama and parental reprimands was delightfully similar to the electronic epistles of some of my favorite teenie-bloggers. Get it? It’s like teenie-bopper. I’ve just made it up, but mark my words, that media-savvy new president of ours is going to be dropping “teenie-bloggers” before long to prove his groovy vocab.

So where was I? Yes, indeed. The Coquette was what a teen blogger would write, if teen bloggers where clever and well-spoken. Also, it was what a misery-blog would be if blogs had morals, which perhaps they should.

To prove my point and show my earnestness, I’ll tack the same moral onto this one as was slightly more obviously tacked onto The Coquette.

Don’t go around rejecting pleasant clergymen just because you are charming and used to be engaged to an old fellow. Relishing autonomy and sexual freedom will only end in one way: dying in a shabby roadhouse birthing your illegitimate baby while your mother and god-fearing friends sob into embroidered handkerchiefs in parlors across the eastern seaboard.

Out of practice, in a hurry

If I ever got it into my head that I was going to write some scathing and hip-ish novel about the real suburban youth, I would have plenty of terrible scenes to pepper it with.

Not that I’m not tired of people trying to tell me (statistically, artistically, televistically) that the ‘burbs are about the roughest place to live. I recently fled my midtown apartment for the suburbs, and let me tell you: it’s not nearly as hard-core as the WB primetime teen line-up wants you to believe. Another lie from that stupid dancing frog with the top-hat (Am I dating myself a little much here? Viva Roswell. )

These people aren’t plotting and adulterous; these people have garages. And people with garages have plenty more to do than enable their druggy, inevitably promiscuous and so terribly jaded teenagers. They can stand in their garages. And I simply won’t believe that anyone who can wash their clothes without having to hike a few blocks could really be unhappy enough for any real wrong-doing.

To return to my point (and make a quick exit to more sociable waters), I have the perfect scene for my scathing hipster comedy. Within this scene the protagonists go down to the drug store and hang out, wandering down all of the aisles and feeling the shoe-inserts.

Whatever spazoid came up with Napoleon Dynamite wishes he’d thought of that one. And probably also wishes that his lasting legacy wasn’t a bunch of twenty-something’s in ski boots over emphasizing the word “Gosh.”