No self-respecting individual should ever feel pressured to give into the social media-driven craze of making every day a branded #holiday, but there are two fake holidays that I voluntarily celebrate each year. One is April 30, the day on which Justin Timberlake’s adolescent gawkiness is plastered across the internet with a resounding refrain of “it’s gonna be May.” The other is Mean Girls Day.
For the random straggler who has somehow managed to go the past 12 years without watching the classic 2004 film, there’s a scene in which protagonist Cady (Lindsay Lohan) finally talks to her crush, Aaron Samuels, during math class. It doesn’t matter that he’s just turned around to ask her what day it is, nor does it matter that she doesn’t win the boy right away with her answer, “It’s October third.” The date has become a memorial to Mean Girls’ representation of the seemingly mundane yet eternally memorably moments in every teenage girl’s life. But yesterday was no ordinary Mean Girls Day.
Lindsay Lohan will always be remembered as someone who had amazing potential in every imaginable way, and her meltdown in the aughts was a vital lesson on how not to tank your career in full view of the American public. To this day, the 30-year-old actress continues to be weird, wild, and genuinely baffling in a way that I find to be endlessly fascinating. On Twitter, where everyone is generally strange and offputting, it should come as no surprise that Lohan herself has a tendency to take strong stances on random issues, and to back those thoughts up with little to no context. See, for instance, her enigmatic tweet from yesterday:
Lohan typically takes to social media on Oct. 3 to flaunt her now-infamous line, so this gruesome fact-check came as quite a surprise to her fans. What could she possibly be talking about, the internet collectively wondered, in awe of the seeming non-sequitur. And what did this have to do with Mean Girls?
Nothing, it turns out: Lohan injured her finger in a boating accident over the weekend, and she took to the evanescent social media platform Snapchat to share the news with her fans. By the time Monday rolled around, the image had disappeared from view, as all Snaps do, and so nobody on Twitter knew exactly what she was talking about. But thanks to the convergence of a made-up holiday from a Lohan movie and an enticingly strange tweet from Lohan’s account, all things Lindsay Lohan began trending on Twitter.
As it happens, Lohan had already brough these two disparate threads—Mean Girls Day and her injured finger—together on a different platform altogether: Instagram.
This post has it all: a subtle allusion to Lohan’s injured hand, a hashtag reference to the Mean Girls scene that made Oct. 3 worth celebrating, an Instagram filter that has nothing to do with either. If Mean Girls Day is all about memorializing mundane moments, then every day is Mean Girls Day for celebrities on social media.
