We’ll explain “cheugy” and subliminal peanut butter messages in a minute, but let’s start with “Sesame Street” — Elmo in particular. He represents our youth, full of innocence, laughter and marketing opportunities. Appreciate him, embrace him and then move on, because life gives us four more stages after Elmo:
Venmo, BevMo, Slo-Mo and Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’.
As the New York Times explains, cheugy (pronounced chew-gee) is essentially someone who is out of date or tries too hard. “According to people who have embraced the word, the following are also cheugy: The Hype House, Golden Goose sneakers, anything associated with Barstool Sports, Gucci belts with the large double ‘G’ logo, being really into sneaker culture, Rae Dunn pottery, and anything chevron.”
If you don’t recognize half the words in that list, you can’t possibly be cheugy, right? Asking for a friend.
Let’s explain our stages: Venmo is when you go out with friends and live life to its fullest, even if your wallet is at its emptiest. BevMo is that vast expanse of relative stability (except for, you know, changing jobs, buying a home, getting married, having children, thinking about mortality). Slo-Mo is when you leave the BevMo treadmill, and Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ is when even the heavens don’t seem to be on your side.
They’re mostly chronological, but you can’t get to Slo-Mo if your wallet says “oh no.” Elmo envy and vicarious Venmo can strike at any age. Unfortunately, so can Ain’t Gonna.
Life’s biggest reality check is when you shift from Venmo to BevMo. Instead of being on the cutting edge, you’re a little … bit … dull. For those in their 30s, that can be crueler than a pair of skinny jeans.
“For more than a decade now, millennials have been the ‘it’ generation,” Washington Post columnist Christine Emba writes. “We joked darkly about our avocado toast as we were shafted by the boomer-controlled economy. But at least we could be safe in the knowledge that we were being talked about.
“Not so anymore. The favored generation is now the one after us: Gen Z. They’re here with their wide-legged jeans, impenetrable slang and disdain for our Obama-era trends.”
If I post a GIF of Kermit the Frog drinking tea here, that would be cheugy, right? So let’s just hear from today’s unofficial sponsor:
Emba writes that people her age don’t have to be bothered with trends anymore because they’re no longer setting them. “We’re not cheugy — we’re just aging like a fine rosé.”
Or, as a Slo-Mo might put it: There are only so many flying rat’s asses in one lifetime, and I gave at the office.
Here’s what we do envy: You have so many sources of information and so many pop culture options, it’s like having the director’s cut of a Cheesecake Factory menu. When we were young, our options were more like the “cheeseburger, cheeseburger” skit from “Saturday Night Live.”
Sure, we all have those options now, theoretically, but we’ll never get around to 99% of them. When you’re in Slo-Mo, you could open your calendar and have a tumbleweed fly out of it, and you’d still feel like you were too busy.
Of course, when you’re young, having all those options can be intimidating — especially if an entree could give you emotional heartburn for 40 years. You have a bazillion Chrome tabs open at the same time, and are too paralyzed with anxiety and FOMO to close any of them. So you overthink and feel overwhelmed.
You see stuff like this every day, usually from Venmos:
Tweets like those make me think of Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ — death’s biggest reality check — and a friend from my teens. In an ideal world, all of us linger in Slo-Mo, then hobble to Ain’t Gonna when the time is right. But he went there in his 30s, and never came back.
Even sad tweets are oddly comforting, though, because tons of Venmos and BevMos rush in with suggestions and moral support and shoulders to cry on. They’re helping each other — and getting help — in ways that older generations never did. Rapper Logic even had a hit song, “1-800-273-8255,” the number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
The wonderful thing about that Cheesecake Factory menu is that you have so many ways to be inspired, from Oprah interviews to Billie Eilish songs to “Dear Evan Hansen” scenes. You can find people just like you who made it back from Ain’t Gonna with a fresh sense of purpose. You might even find yourself.
Believe it or not, some people have managed to close most of life’s Chrome tabs and not regret it. You might have a lot in common with them, like dreams and demons — and maybe DNA. If they’re a little cheugy, that’s OK, because when it comes to helping someone you love, there’s no such thing as trying too hard.
Someday you’ll realize that if a Methuselahistic woman of 50 feels Olivia Rodrigo’s pain in a phantom ventricle, she’s not being cheugy. She’s being human.
Rodrigo writes wonderful songs about teenage love and angst and heartbreak, but an old guy’s favorite is “hope ur ok,” about those who grew up in abusive, intolerant homes — and those who look out for them.
Older generations have built roads and cities and subdivisions and internets, but we’ve also built cruelty and bigotry. If hers can build compassion and empathy, that would be enough.
Well, I hope you know how proud I am you were created
With the courage to unlearn all of their hatred
God I hope that you're happier today
Cuz I love you
And I hope that you're OK
Murphy Slaw
Something old:“Star Wars” fans: See if you can figure this meme out. I’ll explain under the tweet.
Those aren’t just benches, they’re pews. As in: Pew! Pew!
Something new: Other than hugging friends, what a lot of us have missed the most over all these months is our collective joy: concerts, ballgames, movies, musicals. Lin-Manuel Miranda was Jimmy Fallon’s first Zoom guest 15 months ago; on Tuesday, he was on again, in person, for a little collective joy.
Something borrowed: This “10 Percent Happier” podcast episode with Yale University’s Emma Seppälä has some great suggestions about happiness and breathing. One quick tip: When you take deep breaths to relax, they’ll help more if the exhale lasts twice as long as the inhale.
So maybe breathe in five seconds and out 10 seconds. Think of your exhales like blowing through a straw if that helps.
Something blue: A New York Times story includes seven podcasts that might help people with the anxiety of returning to our “normal” world, including ones on sleep and meditation.
Here’s an example from Kara Loewentheil in “Unf*ck Your Brain”: “Women are socialized to find it so much easier to say no to ourselves than to say no to anyone else. And that is what we have to work on reversing because it leaves us living our lives for other people, not for ourselves.”
For more podcasts focusing on mental health, this list from The Lily might help, too. I also had this column in The Chronicle a month before all the virus madness, back when I was even more long-winded.