Guten Tag, Friends! Today, Schadenfreude, A Love Story releases to the world. (It’s true! You can buy it!). Each chapter of this book is titled with an untranslatable German word that I then attempt to illustrate by way of my bumbling adventures with Germans (or the German-adjacent, or Teutonophiles). Each chapter also contains a multitude of (often-embarrassing) musical, cultural and fashion-related references. All this week, I’ll be supplementing Schadenfreude with the most embarrassing audiovisual reveals from my personal collection and/or the annals of YouTube. Viel Spaß, und viele Schadenfreude.

Chapter 1: Jugendsünde, from “youth” and “sin.”

Once upon a time, there was an angsty teen named me, and she fell in love with an even angstier teen named Dylan Gellner (or at least that’s what the lawyer and I decided he was called).

Not pictured: Dylan Gellner’s Adidas in the exact shade of my dress.

Soundtrack: Smashing Pumpkins, “Disarm.”

The killer in me is the killer in you
my love

It’s got TWO MEANINGS, see — like, the killer in me is the killer in you COLON my love (i.e. the love IS the killer), AND the killer in me is the killer in you COMMA my love (i.e. statement of fact simply addressed to someone).

Man, Dylan Gellner was deep AF and (spoiler alert, not really) he broke the FUCK out of my heart. You can read alllllllllllll about how — and why — that heartbreak resulted in twenty-plus subsequent years of devotion to Franz Kafka in “Jugendsünde,” a.k.a. a smile I send over to you.