Ashlee let me down. All that time I spent cheerleading teen-pop, defending her honor and persuading people that “really, she’s not bad at all!” and then she gives me this, this mess of an album. Sigh. I wanted Pete to be her Benji and/or Joel (I always get those Good Charlotte boys mixed up, and now that they’re double-dating Paris and Nicole, it’s like 2005 all over again). See, once he got involved in Hilary Duff’s work, she went all Killers-lite with interesting synth squiggles and electro musings, and Fall Out Boy may be approaching their cultural nadir of annoyance (shilling for Walmart? With Rumur Willis and the awesome-yet-undeniably-Z-list Kristin Cavalleri? Oh really!), but they write damn good pop songs.

But it was not to be.

Other than that, spring is finally springing. There is green on the trees, and in the afternoon, I can sit bare-legged on my balcony and eat home-made grape popsicles and try not to drip pink splashes onto the pages of wonderful books like ‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’. I enjoyed E Lockhart’s Boyfriend List books, but they pale in comparison to the magnificence of this tome, which is more explicitly feminist than any YA I’ve read in a while and yet maintains joyfulness through steam-tunnel escapades, sassiness, really well-written boys and a blissful absence of any silly morality concerns. Seriously, seek it out. Read it. Marvel.

(She’s right over there in my links list.)