Frosted Tips

Have you thought about the title of your future book? You know the one I’m talking about — that mythical book all of us have imagined someone else writing about us, or us somehow writing about ourselves some time in the future when things “finally slow down” (lol, Yeah things are gonna slow down soon, honey. Keep telling yourself that every Thursday of your adult life.)

Anyways, if you haven’t thought of a title for your book yet, it’s time we do this together. You may already know it, like your friend in middle school who already knew they were going to be an endodontist. Or, you may spend the next 3 days scribbling ideas on a legal pad until you find the one that suits you. Or, you won’t actively think about it again for weeks, and then, one day… you’ll be walking into Target and it’ll hit you like the diving stick I threw at my sister when I was 6: “We Need K-Cups: Finding Joy in the Mundane.” Now THAT is a book title, baby.

For me, any sentence has the capability of becoming a book title (or ebook, I’m hip), so I’m constantly listening out for the next context-stricken one-liner I can turn into an unwritten book of poems and short stories (that someone else can write). It’s something I’ve accidentally found myself doing since I was little, and, while I’ve never written a chapter of any book ever, I’ve thought of enough titles to at least fill out a (short) forward of someone else’s book. And heck, if you look at self-help books these days, as long as you have a carefully placed “f*&%” in the title, you’re 80% of the way to a best seller, so it’s not an entirely useless exercise.

Anyways, about 10 years ago, my biography/auto-biography title hit me in the baby face like a blast of room temperature vape clouds, puffed from the mouth of that guy Dave who stands outside my building:
“Frosted Tips… and Other Questionable Decisions.”

Why ‘Frosted Tips’? Well, if you were alive in 2002, then you know there was still enough meat on the “90’s frosted tips hair trend” bone to last well into the early 2000s. I not only had the “front spike” (think Lizzie McGuire’s little brother, Matt), but I also had adorned that spike with glorious frosted tips that eventually transitioned into true, bleach blonde hair… which honestly put Slim Shady to shame — I literally glowed in the dark. However, as I matured, my hair became an “alternative” bowl cut with tasteful highlights — worse than frosted tips, this was never cool. (If you need proof of all of this, go to my Facebook.)

The point is, these are just my hair mistakes (and I haven’t even covered my high school perm yet). And there are essentially countless other mistakes made in my short, uneventful life, so focusing on those seems like the quickest way to fill a book.

Other books titles I’ve considered:

“Also, That’s Pee: What Living in New York Has Taught Me About Puddles”

“Baaa-dahhh, bada dadadahhh, ba-da dadadada: I Was Raised by Theme Songs”

“He Looks Like He Has Asthma: It’s Okay to Judge a Book by Its Cover”

“Literally: You’re Misusing This Word”

“It’s Called a PDF: Why RollerCoaster Tycoon Made Millennials Better at Parenting Than Boomers”

“Short Shorts: The Last Accurately Named Thing in American Society”

These aren’t necessarily my best, but I hope they at least provide you with the necessary inspiration to get moving with that trashy romantic novel, that book of short stories about your grandma, or the children’s book you’ve been putting off writing.

The truth is, life’s never slowing down, and you’ll probably never not feel tired again, so there’s no time like the present to get started. And as we all know, the title is the first thing we use as an excuse not to do something. You know how many people invented AirBnB but got stuck on the name? They couldn’t get “Mi Casa Es Su Casa” out of their head, so it never got off the ground. Don’t be the “Mi Casa Es Su Casa” guys. Go Nike it, people!