There’s a weeklong #1000wordsofsummer challenge happening. Usually, these challenges are 14 days long, which feels impossible to even attempt. But seven days seems doable, especially since I have so few other responsibilities these days. In all honesty, I’m not doing great. 23 hasn’t really been the most fun so far. I feel somewhat like the world feels: unstable and unclear. When I was younger, I associated getting older with feeling more in command, as each subsequent year was associated with new privileges to get used to.

A few years ago, I would pop onto a website called turntable.fm, where you could pick a cute little avatar to represent yourself in a room and choose to either be a DJ and play music for the room or just vibe as a listener. As a DJ, you could pick from songs from an existing catalog or upload your own, which made the service popular with DJs like Diplo. With each song, every person in the room had the option to vote on whether or not they liked the song, a form of instant feedback.

I spent a lot of summers listening to deeply depressing music by Sufjan Stevens, Frank Ocean, and The Antlers, among others. For the brightest months of the year, I would be buried under a cloud of sad. Eventually, I graduated high school, and started to find more joy in my summers (I made some friends!). Classic summer music suddenly was more appealing than ever, and I got into the habit of making summer playlists to announce my love of the sound.