I grew up in a Connecticut suburb and had a very small group of sheltered friends. We liked being sheltered, because it allowed us to do our homework without the distraction of boyfriends and popularity. But the lack of boyfriends, popularity, and having any kind of interesting experiences started to weigh on us by the time we were seniors in high school. That year we started seeing bands, being slightly less responsible, and occasionally (twice) having parties where more than six people showed up. It was around that time, the year was 2002, that my friends and I went to a Rusted Root concert at a nearby college. It [...]

The Strip is probably just the part of I-10 that goes through Panama City, or "P.C." as we called it ("PC 2K2!!" was what we wrote on all of our burned CDs), and is a huge traffic jam no sane human wants to drive through. But to the enthusiastic spring breaker this is not a setback but rather an opportunity. You roll down your windows, your sunburned forearm hangs out the window, you wipe some sand out of your eyebrows, rub the eyeliner out from under your eyes, and stare at yourself in the rearview mirror, wondering if you are the pretty friend or just The Friend (you are [...]