My brother had it first, way back in ྚ. But I rediscovered it, dusty and forgotten among the tapes in the cardboard box he took to college. Weezer's "Blue Album" will always be a tape. No CD can claim the same sensation. Four unassuming guys against a bright blue background, with all the pure rough edges and tinny dynamics of an audio cassette tape - that is my "Blue Album," in all its glory.

The songs were ingrained in me when I was little, listening through my brother's ears to the tape on long family car rides. Picking up the tape and listening to it eight years later was like rediscovering some ancient period in history that had belonged to my brother, but suddenly was mine.

I could write endlessly about the album, but I'd rather keep it to myself. But I can't for too much longer, because one song has infected me.

One of the worst questions out there is "What's your favorite song?" How can there be one answer to that question? We are so multifaceted, so incessantly changing, that yesterday's favorite is an embarrassment tomorrow. But I know today what my favorite song is, and I don't care if it isn't forever.

"Only in Dreams" is my favorite song, if only for the ending, which encapsulates in less than a minute the whole of teenage existence from the beginning of time, generation by generation. (How is it that no one found a way to express it completely until 1994? These guys were genius.) The music is like the age itself, screaming, yearning, wanting; the desire, the insecurity, the desperately wanted breaking free from all confines of the cage of teenage body and disposition.

The end ... that build-up of the same bass riff, over and over, then the screaming whine and victory of the lead guitar, the triumph of the drums, the zeniths, the release!

No music could be more clear. This is it. Adults who have forgotten, or who have never understood (is that possible?) the angst, listen to the last minute of "Only in Dreams" and you will know! It is my mantra. I want to live every second of high school with that song screaming in my head.

There I am, the true me, in a black dress screaming Janis Joplin songs in the corner of the bar with all my heart and soul, gripping the mic for dear life, clutching eternity in my sweaty palms, immersed in the pain and sacrifice of entertaining the world, inhibitions erased.

Now there I am - I wish I could watch me - on the wooden waxed stage - flying and heaving and crying and dying, stomping and ripping, and there's no one in the world but me and the rest of the world, who are all watching me, and I am the medium, I ignite pain and I receive the pain of the universe (though I have felt none), and I transfer it through my veins, and it mingles with the joy of centuries, and exudes itself, slithers and quivers and spits from my growing fingertips, and I deliver it, sweating and aching and full of power, to each individual, and they cry and cry and cry, and I give myself to them, every cell, every fiber, every nerve I force upon them, my energy pulsing through the veins of the people and the stars and the planets, and shooting out, through a universe that never ends - when does it end? When does it all end? Tell me when does it all end? I dance each day about the failure of the individual to soar beyond human capabilities, to change the ways of the world.

We are so limited to our bones and our skin, caged in, while energy, the young energy of the desperation of teenagers, soars beyond our fingertips into the black holes of infinite space ... ten billion beacons. River Cuomo, lead singer/guitarist of Weezer, you are the pulse of my blood. Thank you. .