Heavy Metal and You -- Christopher Krovatin

I adored this book.  Really adored it.  Really, really adored it.

It's just your basic boy-meets-girl, boy's-friends-don't-like-girl, girl-doesn't-like-boy's-friends, girl's-friends-don't-like-boy, boy-doesn't-like-girl's-friends story.  Except that the boy is a metal head and the girl is a prep. 

I fell in love with Sam Markus, not only for his ability to wax poetic about Death Metal (seriously, he gave better monologues about music than that guy in American Psycho) but for his perspective:

Oh my fucking GOD.  Hipsters.

I'd met these kids all over the place.  These are the kids who are so sure that they're so ahead of everyone else, and that they're so much more intelligent than most other people because of their music choice.  You know one of those kids, I bet.  Y'know, the kid who thinks because they like Brainiac or the Specials instead of KISS or Jay-Z, they're the great minds of their generation.  I've always thought that, as much as I utterly loathed some of it, music was still music, be it Annihilator or Good Charlotte or Ja Rule or Sigor Ros or Christina fucking Aguilera, and that assholes are assholes, regardless of their musical taste.  Hipsters, though, were the anti-what-I-just said.  There are hipsters for every musical genre: metal hipsters, Goth hipsters, rap hipsters, even country hipsters (well, a few).  And by the look of it, I had two emo/indie megahipsters in front of me - the worst kind.  I don't know why, but it just seemed like those two genres of music bred more hipsters than any other.

It's so TRUE!  (And all of you emo/indie hipsters know it, too.  You know you do.)  I also fell in love with him because of his adorable friends and for his life philosophy:

I was about to flip out.  My blood boiled in my head.  My ears felt like they had fire ants inside of them.  Don't let that side out, I told myself.  Don't let that side out!  You're more than that!

Thank God, though: Brent and Irish had no such desire to restrain.

"Hey, fuck you, you hipster trash!" snarled Irish, throwing up a stern middle finger.

"I think I hear a Sk8er Boi calling in the next room," cackled Brent, flipping the girls an equally stern bird.   "How about you go wax existentialism with him, you screaming infidelity skanks?!"

"Hurry!" laughed Irish.  "He might started crying otherwise!"

And me?  I just smiled, waved, and said, "Bye, ladies."

"Ugh," scoffed Sweater Vest, stomping away.

And that was why I loved my friends.  Because when it all came down to it, they shared the same Holden Caulfield ideals that I did:  Live how you want, feel how you feel, and fuck all the phonies in your way.

Lovely.  Read it.