"Add It Up" (Violent Femmes)

I inherited a cassette tape of the Violent Femmes' compilation Add It Up (1981-1993) from my friend Kerri after high school.  I still have it in a crate of 90s curios that I browse through every so often.
We were hanging out at her house one afternoon not long after graduation, reminiscing about stuff—laughing at the good, cringing at the bad—when she had that moment I'm pretty sure every 18-year-old has (I know I did), where you look around your bedroom one day and go, "What the hell was I thinking the past 4 years?"  
I remember her picking up a pile of clothing that she'd just gotten from a mail-order catalog for grunge grrrrrls, and she shook her head.
"I can't even look at this stuff anymore.  Maybe I'll give these to my step-sister.  Think she'd wear this?"
She decided that a good, cathartic purge of her closet was in order.  We filled a couple of Hefty bags with clothing: one to donate, one to ditch.  And then there was the pile of tapes.  She told me to look through the small mountain of cassettes to see if anything caught my eye.  It didn't take long for me to realize that our collections were nearly identical.  After all, I'd pretty much bought all the music I owned while hanging out with her and vice versa, so it made sense.  (If either of us ever wondered, "How did I end up with a copy of 'Gypsy Woman' by Crystal Waters again?" one of us was able to fill in the details.)
But then I spotted something I didn't own in the "expunge" pile: Add It Up (1981-1993).
"You're getting rid of this?  I thought you loved Violent Femmes?"
The look on her face was all the explanation I needed.  It wasn't the Femmes that she wanted to get rid of; it was the emotional baggage that went with the album.  She couldn't even look at the album cover without wanting to take a blowtorch to it.  So I took it off her hands.
Strangely enough, as I listened to it afterward, the song sequencing actually brought to mind stuff she'd told me about her breakup (we told each other everything in our Clarissa and Sam friendship).  I'd find myself listening to the live version of "Add It Up" in my car, and I'd start feeling my temper rise.  
"That idiot really thought she would believe that he was just 'hanging out' with his ex-girlfriend?!"
After awhile, I couldn't take hearing those songs in that context either.  So I sought out the Femmes' self-titled debut from 1983.  (Funny, Violent Femmes contains many of the same songs as the Add It Up compilation, but it's amazing how different the scenery looks with the furniture rearranged.  I still love the entire Violent Femmes album; I still can't listen to the Add It Up compilation the whole way through.)
Anyway, the studio version of the song "Add It Up" is still one of my favorite tracks by the Milwaukee-based band.  It's such a perfect specimen of teenage frustration and nervous energy.  (Probably because frontman Gordon Gano wrote it when he was a frustrated, nervous teenager.)  
Every time I hear the song's anxious, unvarnished folk-punk and Gano's pleading warble, it instantly transports me back to my teen years, for better or worse.