Previously in this series.
It’s almost 2:30 and you’ve been waiting since noon for your call to go through. You’ve used the time, though.
As children, you and your siblings were featured on a radio quiz show. According to listeners, you were the most consistently rewarding speaker.
You’re going to burn your fingers if you don’t put out that cigarette.
You’ve just felt so destructive all week. It’s awful. You’re horrible.
Your mother is ever so slightly insane.
Your sister asks you to refer to her as a Tuckahoe homemaker.
There is a room in your apartment that you never enter, and nailed to the door is a sheet of snow-white beaverboard covered in carefully lettered literary quotations.
You like to wear a red hunting hat, but you tend to remove it around people you know.
You enjoy lengthy telephone conversations and even lengthier letters.
You’re always arranging secret meetings with family members at the Museum of Natural History.
You could recite the works of the Buddha Gautama and Lao-Tze before you understood how to parse a sentence.
You are probably not over the age of twenty-five. You may even be under ten.
If you are an adult, you’re most likely a phony, and your intelligence cannot compare to that of your younger peers.
You are completely surrounded by phonies.
You go home to study Greek or Latin and all you can think about is how goddamn insufferable your presence must be for other people.
You can tell right away upon seeing someone whether they’re from Vassar, or completely Sarah Lawrence, or Brown, for crying out loud. They’re all the same, these crummy rich-kid schools, full of people who are just so sure they are doing something so absolutely consequential and important.
You find your summer camp such a bore. How on earth are you supposed to endure six weeks of boating and archery without your library of Eastern literature?
You can’t sit down to a meal without saying the Four Great Vows under your breath.
You’ve flunked out of three prep schools, and are about to be expelled from your fourth.
The weekend of the Yale game you make plans with a nice girl, one’s who’s not just like every other girl on campus, but she’s been acting real funny ever since she stepped off the train. Hopefully whatever bug she’s got isn’t going to go and get the whole weekend all bunged up.
If you had to pick your greatest skill, it would probably be lying.
When you and your husband go on vacation, he spends the entire time hanging out with a four-year-old kid. You assure everyone that this is in no way creepy.
You are an American soldier, and you maintain a close friendship with a thirteen year-old girl. This is not creepy, either.
You’re just so sick of ego. You’re sick of everyone who wants to make some kind of a splash. It’s not enough to like someone — you want to meet someone you can respect.
You’re kind of a paranoiac in reverse — you suspect people are plotting to make you happy.
You’re only seventeen, but the right side of your head is covered in millions of little gray hairs.
Everyone around you is so hopelessly foolish and trivial, sometimes you think you just can’t take it, but you cannot help but love them all, the phonies.
On your way home from the dentist you almost stepped into traffic. Just stood there and thought about it for a while. You’re still not too sure why you didn’t.
You’re a twenty-one-year-old professor of philosophy and your school is a repository of soulless pretension.
You move to Quebec and start telling people you are a widower from the south of France and are close friends with Pablo Picasso, even though neither is true.
You don’t have a telephone in your office, but of course you always keep one connected in your dead sibling’s bedroom. Your mother never gets off your case about it, but she will simply have to cope.
You’re always starting things that you can’t seem to finish, just like all the other lousy phonies in the world.
All around you, people are busy in the pursuit of knowledge, but not once have you heard any of them mention what should be the final goal of knowledge: wisdom.
Olives and wax: you never go anywhere without ‘em.
Phonies. Phonies everywhere.
Tags: books, genevieve michaels, how to tell what novel you’re in, j.d. salinger
Nailed it.
Also,
you go to the beach and see more glass.
Love it!
“You’re a twenty-one-year-old professor of philosophy and your school is a repository of soulless pretension.”
With a twenty-one-year-old professor of philosophy, I don’t know how it could possibly be anything else.
Yes, and you sneak into the restroom to mess up your hair before lectures, to give off that air of, “I think deep thoughts and couldn’t care less about physical affectation”
“I just swear he goes in there to muss up his hair on purpose!”
The professor of philosophy who taught my logic course when I was an undergrad was 22. Does that count?
(He was not soulless. He taught symbolic logic in terms of tasty rats and the original Battlestar Galactica.)
You can’t find your goddam orange stick!
Cuticles, the bane of your existential existence.
I… still relate to a lot of these.
you and me both! Thanks for reading, this was my first article for The Toast!
All of this, except:
*You’ve just felt so destructive all week. It’s awful. You’re horrible.
Nailed it!
You go home to study Greek or Latin and all you can think about is how goddamn insufferable your presence must be for other people.
Yep, that’s the last 10 days for me…..
Somebody has just snuck up and written “fuck” under your nose.
you keep sandwiches in your pockets. somehow this doesn’t make a mess.
This is what I’ve been waiting for!
Yess! So glad you liked it.
Wow, I’ve never come back to reread one of these posts later in the day but this one was so spot-on I’m laughing all over again.
Phonies. Phonies everywhere.
This is the BEST thing to hear. I love Salinger from the bottom of my heart but damn is he ripe for satire.
Thanks so much!
Wow, I've never come back to reread one of these posts later in the day but this one was so spot-on I'm laughing all over again.
Phonies. Phonies everywhere.
Wow. I love Salinger so much; this was great. Also: I relate way too much to his young male protagonists to be healthy? I totally see why many find them problematic, but I can’t help myself: really smart people not giving any fucks is too inspiring to give it up. Any Toasties know of books where very smart and disaffected young women just can’t be bothered to care about anything besides their own problems? Seeing my life represented in literature would be really rewarding.
There’s always The Bell Jar. For contemporary, I just read How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti and Vida by Patricia Engel. Can’t say they’re LIKE Salinger, exactly, but still good reads.
It’s a fine day for bananafish.
You do it for the fat lady.
I have a strong compulsion to be a martin, even though others keep telling me not to.
You make observations that seem smart-aleckey, but are only made from your love of truth and statistics.
You Are Constantly Angry at Everyone and Everything For No Apparent Reason
By the Age of Three, You Were Smarter Than 99% of the Planet
You Have An Unhealthy Obsession With Your Dead Older Sibling, To the Point That You can Describe, In Detail, For At Least Five Pages, the Way His Nose Represented His Kind Nature
You Write Stories as Thinly Veiled Autobiographical Journals, But No! No! The YOU Are Not the Narrator, The Narrator Shall Remain Nameless
Your Haiku Represents Your State of Mind
Your Heart Is An Autumn Garage
Psychoanalysis Makes Everything Worse
You Are Going Through a Mental Breakdown and No One Cares
Your Fingernails Are More Than Just Fingernails
Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy.
You’ve been run over, twice, on the same goddamn street.
DIGRESSION!!!
These are awesome! Someone should write a How to Tell if You’re in an L. M. Montgomery Novel next . . .
Only three of the “Nine Stories” deal with or mention a member of the Glass family. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is about Seymour Glass. “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” mentions Walt Glass. “Down at the Dinghy” has Boo Boo Tannenbaum (nee Glass). There was some speculation that Sergeant X in “For Esme-With Love and Squalor” was one of the Glass brothers but dates in their various lives don’t quite match up.
Only three of the "Nine Stories" deal with or mention a member of the Glass family. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is about Seymour Glass. "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" mentions Walt Glass. "Down at the Dinghy" has Boo Boo Tannenbaum (nee Glass). There was some speculation that Sergeant X in "For Esme-With Love and Squalor" was one of the Glass brothers but dates in their various lives don't quite match up.
Some of them are about the Glass family, but I don’t think they all are. “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” certainly is. Fitness Subscription Box
Some of them are about the Glass family, but I don't think they all are. "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" certainly is. Fitness Subscription Box
It would be more accurate to say they are about the Salinger family than the Glass family. (in my opinion) Workout Subscription Box, Healthy Subscription Boxes, Best Supplements for Muscle Gain
It would be more accurate to say they are about the Salinger family than the Glass family. (in my opinion) Workout Subscription Box, Healthy Subscription Boxes, Best Supplements for Muscle Gain