Letter from the Editor 02.22.2021

“We’re never done with killing time,” sings Lorde on “400 Lux,” a casually evocative pop ditty about a couple savoring a pretty silence. I’ve been replaying this lyric a lot in the first month of my 20th year, but definitely not as the song intended me to. 

I’ve been thinking about what it implies for adulthood—namely, is life just about waiting until you're happy, or fulfilled, or energized again?

Maybe it’s just the mood that comes with settling into real life, but I’ve been feeling an electric kind of anxiety lately. You know, the perpetual buzz that drones at the back of your head when you’re paranoid about missing an extra assignment, or when you’re pretty sure you either left your car keys on the kitchen table or they’re lost forever. 

I worry that I’m missing out on an existential type of something—some divine explanation as to why I struggle to keep friendships, or if I will always guilt–trip myself for needing to relax. Simply put: I’m worried that my life will never get better in the ways I want it to. 

For comfort’s sake, I tell myself this feeling is universal to being 20 years old and angsty. I’m going to venture a guess that a lot of us were misfits in high school, so a lot of us grew up conditioned with the advice, “You’ll find your people/place/passion soon. Just wait.” And I’m also going to venture a guess that a lot of us—myself included—still haven’t found any of those things.

If you’ve spent almost a decade waiting for things to fall into place the way your parents told you they would, it’s nerve–racking when they don’t. And that feeling still stands, regardless of whether you’re 25 or 45. Waiting sucks, especially when our whole existences are categorized into fits of patience. 

We wait for summer. We wait for the semester to start. We wait to find the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend, and then we wait to find the perfect time to break up with them. We wait, and we wait. And for what? More waiting?

This edition of Street is about the passage of time, and how we trick ourselves into thinking endless waiting is enjoyable. We have commentaries on rom–coms about futile time travel and revenge bedtime procrastination. Our feature, as funny as it sounds, is also about waiting. Only this time, it’s about the high–stakes kind of anticipation, where analysts and organizers alike are—you guessed it—waiting for Pennsylvania to decide its political identity.