I RECENTLY INHERITED a Fisher Price record player from a coworker, which makes me not only childish but also a pretentious indie rocker – and one known for it around the office, I guess. I left it at work so we could play Belle and Sebastian's "Lazy Line Painter Jane" over and over just to nail down the point. The Aislers Set's monophonic "Hey, Lover" single sounded best, almost as if it had been born to play there, but for variety we tortured one another with bassless renditions of Hot Fucking Jets and Total Shutdown songs.

All week long people walked into the room and said, "Oh! Cool!" And it didn't hit me until the other day, when I was waiting for the sneak preview of Not Another Teen Movie to start, what a bad idea all this was. KSJO-FM "the Rock" was playing "Hot for Teacher," and I looked around at all the other regressed adults in the audience. My apologies for putting X-Ray Spex in the same paragraph as David Lee Roth sneering "I don't feel tardy" and a movie full of used-up pie-fucking jokes, but as Poly Styrene says, "I am a cliché." During the movie my life flashed before my eyes – in segments of John Hughes films, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Dawson of Dawson's Creek proclaiming "I don't want your life!" in some dumb football flick I once paid money to see – but I didn't die.

I'm not growing up. And it turns out I learned most of what I wanted to know about life and love and whatnot from repeated listenings to "Thunder Road" and viewings of Reckless, where Daryl Hannah dances through her empty high school to "Kids in America," has sex in the boiler room with surly, disaffected classmate Aidan Quinn, and jumps on the back of his motorcycle to ride off into the wild Ohio yonder while Bob Seger sings "Roll Me Away." Life, these texts informed me, is learning to hate your peers, and love is nothing more than getting out of town.

I blame everything on rock and roll, of course, as if Iggy and Poly Styrene and Joan Jett and Springsteen are to blame for my arrested development, my disdain for small children, and my addiction to MightyBigTV.com recaps of shows like My So Called Life and Freaks and Geeks that went off the air because I am not a member of the Nielsen family. Love stinks and I'm so unsatisfied.

And it's not just the rock and roll of my impressionable youth. It's anything that triggers a memory of my impressionable youth, and that covers a lot of territory. So that listening to Korea Girl's "Reunion," where Elizabeth Yi sings, "Why would I spend more time with people that I hate, couldn't wait to leave behind?," allows me to dredge up once again the day I got beat up by a senior on the soccer team because my best friend threw an egg at him. This in turn makes me feel better about the fact that I still bristle in the presence of sweater sets and backward baseball caps – when clearly my emotional energies could be far better spent.

There are other, more probable explanations for my wholesale lack of interest in growing up. But I catch myself in moods I've picked up from songs all the time. And the habit strikes me as somewhat adolescent, maybe because decreased susceptibility looms large in my vision of adulthood. I can't listen to the Gits in public anymore because I'm prone to pick fights with loved ones. I think about Corin Tucker back in Heavens to Betsy singing, "Nobody has a good enough excuse. I'm just fucked up and so are you," and I'm just insane enough to accept this as some sort of resolution, admitting in someone else's words that it's all a never-ending mess.