Not the Mermaid

To the women who drink wine alone at home

2014-07-21T09:00:00.000-04:00

30 is a weird, in-between kind of age. Some people have stopped going out entirely, others still go out a fair amount, and I think we can all agree that none of us can drink like we're 21 anymore.

Among women, there seems to be a clear line in the sand between two camps: those who drink at bars and those who drink at home alone. People in the second group seem to be the most vocal, saying things like:

"Yeah I just can't do the bar scene anymore. Everyone is so immature."

"All my friends are going out and I'm at home with a bottle of wine. #fridaynightwin"

"Eh, I'm over bars, they're so boring. Give me my wine, my pajamas, and my Netflix."

As someone who still goes out to bars, albeit much less often than I used to, I'm a little tired of being made to feel like I'm some sort of child for still enjoying my alcohol in public, as if going out to bars is a phase we all just have to get through on our way to being a "real" adult. You know, like playing mind games with potential romantic partners, using text speak when we want 2 talk 2 our frenz lol, or wearing tube tops. Sure, going to bars is definitely a phase you can grow out of, but so is bikram yoga and I don't think I'm any more mature for having moved on from that part of my life.

When I go out to bars, 99% of the time this is what goes down:

- Arrive at bar
- Order a drink. Sometimes vodka soda. Sometimes beer. Sometimes maybe even something else. THE SUSPENSE.
- Talk to friends
- Order another drink
- More talking. "How's your job going?" "What else are you up to this weekend?" "Oh my goddddd let me tell you about the creepy message I got on OK Cupid."
- I love this song! Let me dance to it while shoutmangling the lyrics! (Shoutmangling: verb. To yell song lyrics incorrectly)
- But first, let me take a selfie
- Shall we have another beverage? We shall
- I'm tired. Time to go home. "Love you girl, bye!"

It's all pretty harmless, and what it really boils down to is having some drinks while talking to friends and maybe shaking your shoulders and/or booty to that Jason Derulo song that you love too much to even be embarrassed about loving it. It's not getting wasted and doing stupid shit (most of the time) because it's not college. I'm almost ashamed to admit how low the ratio is of crazy-times-at-bars to regular-unmemorable-but-still-pretty-fun-times-at-bars.

So there are women out there who sit at home alone, drinking wine and feeling better about themselves because of it, and honestly, I'm not sure why.

Is it because of the quantity of alcohol consumed? Because a bottle of wine is a lot of wine, ladies.

Is it because they're alone and some of us like to hang out with friends? Unless today is opposite day, drinking alone is never going to be the most widely accepted alternative (though I pass no judgment. You do you).

Is it because wine is classier than beer? (And why is it always wine, anyway?) The boxes of wine I used to drink when I was 19 21 beg to differ.

As someone who still enjoys the occasional night out, I harbor no ill will towards women who drink wine alone at home (and flaunt it). I too love a good night in with sweatpants and Netflix (although I never drink at home for no reason other than I just don't feel like it). Is there an insecurity issue at work here? Are there feelings of, "Ack, I'm super old and instead of embracing it I'm just going to make those who act less old feel badly about themselves"? Whatever it is, I wish people would just admit that maybe they don't have the energy to go out, or just don't like the scene anymore, as opposed to trying to act like they're above it. Judge not lest ye be judged, amiright? Especially those of you ladies drinking alone with cats. Thank your lucky stars that we don't get on our high horses about that one.

I went somewhere and didn't take a picture

2014-06-30T15:29:00.002-04:00

This past weekend I had the opportunity to partake in one of my all-time favorite summer-in-NYC activities: walking over the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Brooklyn Bridge is awesome! It's the perfect Goldilocks-approved distance - not too long, not too short. It's pretty. It has nice views. It takes you from Brooklyn to Manhattan. And vice versa! I love it, especially when the weather is nice, and I will go out of my way to walk over it if I have the time.

When I walked over the bridge on Sunday it was particularly hot out, and I was running particularly ahead of schedule, so when I got to one of the nice shady pylon areas, I stopped. I leaned against the railing and I watched the traffic and stared at lower Manhattan while enjoying the breeze.

All around me, people took pictures. Of Brooklyn. Of Manhattan. Of the bridge. Of the water. Of the ferries. Of each other.

I did not take any pictures.

I didn't take any pictures because I didn't feel like rifling through my purse for my phone. I was also just enjoying the fact that I was doing nothing, standing there listening to my new obsession, The Floozies, and looking at stuff.

Even when I saw this cool Tetris-y building, which I swear I had somehow never seen (though how could I have missed it all these years?), I didn't take a picture.

(I'm thinking that perhaps I hallucinated this building because I cannot for the life of me find a picture of it but I assure you, it's a white building with geometric lines drawn on it and I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP).

I'm certainly not the first to say this and I know I won't be the last, but it is utterly insane how obligated we feel to document Every. Little. Thing. As if people, landscapes, experiences, and life itself cease to exist if we don't Kodak the shit out of the moment. So even though I am totally guilty of taking pictures all the time, and even though I was standing on the bridge thinking about how I wasn't taking any pictures and is thinking about not taking pictures really any better than just taking a damn picture already, I somehow feel a little better about not taking a photo.

After all, how many times have you looked back on a picture you've taken - of a touristy site, a sunset, or something else that you thought was so beautiful or majestic - and thought, "Wow, this picture really captures what I was looking at!"

I take pretty bad pictures, so for me, this is almost never. The photos I take on my phone never do the real thing justice. I've also realized that when I stop what I'm doing to try and document it, I inevitably stop paying attention to the thing I'm watching and only pay attention to what my phone is doing. Which is stupid. And silly.

I'm not really sure what the point is here. Will I never take photos from the Brooklyn Bridge ever again? I doubt it. Will I try to document my life less often? Maybe, but I might not succeed and I won't make any promises about how hard I'm even willing to try.

But can I at least acknowledge that sometimes, enjoying some good tunes and a good breeze and some pretty sights is just as valuable an experience even without photographic proof that it ever happened?

Hell yes.

I want a DJ logo

2014-06-21T23:27:00.000-04:00

It's finally summer in these parts, and that means a few things: that I no longer wear actual pants, I take my coffee iced, and I spend a hell of a lot of time on music festival websites. Even if I don't plan on actually going to said festivals, I still, for some reason, spend a lot of time reading about them. Even I don't fully understand why I do this but let's just accept it.

There are 2 main types of music festivals that I go to: all-genre festivals (Lollapalooza, Governor's Ball, etc) and EDM festivals (Electric Daisy Carnival, Electric Zoo, you get it). After spending so much time on different festival websites, I've noticed something interesting. Here's the lineup site for Governor's Ball:

And here's the lineup site for Moonrise, an electronic music festival that I have no intention of attending yet seriously why am I at this website like twice a week?

Do you see the difference? One has the artist names listed in the same font, and the other has actual logos!

This isn't the case 100% of the time, but what I realized was that I almost never see a non-EDM artist listed using their logo, but this happens a lot more often when it involves DJs. Why? I have no idea. And frankly I don't care. Because the point of this discussion is that I've decided that I want a logo. For me. Not for my DJ alter ego (though I wish I had one), just for the name "Arielle."

That would be awesome, right? To have your own badass logo and any time you signed an email or really put your name anywhere you could just have that logo appear instead. Why have I never thought of this before as something totally logical that I really want in life? It's probably the second best idea I ever had, right after making it a goal to marry someone with my last name.

If any of you are so graphic-designly inclined, I would like to request that when I turn 31 this October you create for me a sweet DJ logo. In return you will have my eternal gratitude. I can also throw in a hug and a lollipop. And a beer!

Until then, I suppose just a regular font will have to do. For now, peace out!

-Boring Font Arielle

A Tale of Two Job Offers

2014-06-06T07:04:00.000-04:00

At the end of January my boss told me that my job was being eliminated at the end of June.

"You'll be fine," she told me. "You have 5 months to find something new."

"You don't understand," I replied. "I was unemployed for an entire year just a little over a year ago. 5 months is nothing."

And then, after being told I was taking the news very graciously, I couldn't hold back anymore. For the first time in my life, I cried at work. Hard. I went home early, stopping briefly in my coworker's office to give her my puffy-eyed, sniffly 30-second version of the news and explain why I wouldn't be joining everyone for lunch.

Unemployment sucks, as I have chronicled here and sort of also here. Just when I thought I had settled into a nice cozy spot for awhile, the big U was looming, again (I also got laid off at the end of 2011, for those that are not intimately keeping track of the details of my life).

I gave myself 24 hours to wallow, and then got to work. I updated my resume. I asked friends and friends-of-friends and friends-of-friends-of-friends to let me know if they heard about anything. I contacted headhunters. I bought a new suit. I wrote cover letters.

Oh, did I write cover letters.

When I used to work in banks, cover letters weren't necessary. They aren't necessary at most for-profit companies, as is the quasi-general rule I've learned through my many bouts of job hunting. But I'm in the non-profit land now, and every non-profit wants a "thoughtful cover letter." Some also want writing samples, references up front, test scores and probably a DNA swab, but the cover letter was non-negotiable. So I wrote them.

I wrote cover letters at every free moment. Evenings, weekends, sometimes early mornings. I said no to weekend plans so I could write cover letters. For months, that's all I did, with the occasional interview thrown in, if I was lucky.

And then, a few weeks ago, I had two job offers.

Having not one but TWO organizations that wanted to hire me was the craziest and most unanticipated thing to ever happen to me. I got to actually compare and contrast the jobs and CHOOSE which one I wanted and I GOT TO SAY NO. For the first time, it wasn't the company rejecting me. It was the other way around. It was beautiful. I would like to say that I cried at some point because that makes it sound more emotional, but I'm not typically a crier and so I didn't. But believe me, I was all punching my fist triumphantly in the air like Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club.

At this point, I feel like I'm supposed to say something like, "I felt so blessed to have two offers." But I don't feel blessed. In order to feel blessed you have to believe in an entity that can bless you which is a discussion for another day, but mostly, to feel blessed you have to feel like something was sort of unworthily bestowed upon you. And I do not feel unworthy, because I worked my ass off. I wrote countless versions of my resume and worked briefly with a career coach and networked in ways that are way outside my comfort zone and feverishly researched companies and took all sorts of crazy notes in my interview notebook and when I wasn't doing all those things, I was writing cover letters.

On July 1st, I start an amazing new job that I'm insanely excited about. Not because I was blessed, but because I worked for it. And even though there was never a competition, I feel like I've won.

I went to a sound bath so you don't have to

2014-04-30T07:00:00.000-04:00

I was on one of those sprees where you click a link that leads to another link that leads to another link and you find yourself falling down an internet black hole that often ends in instagram photos of men wearing cat slippers or reading impassioned blog posts about Lena Dunham's boobs. This time, though, I was reading about sound baths. It sounded like an interesting concept, and I took to Google to see if we had them in New York.

Whether you live in New York or not, you know as well as I do that if you read about a weird thing, it exists here. I knew I had to try it.

A sound bath is, according to the sound healer I saw, an opportunity for "deep listening." Both of sounds that are there, and of sounds that aren't (I don't understand that last part either).

I walked into the entryway, removed my coat and shoes, and took a seat in the sound bath room. It had carpeted floors with pillows strewn around and a whole set of differently sized bowls in the middle. I made a comment to the girl on the pillow next to me about how we were wearing essentially the same outfit - fuschia pants with black and gray striped shirts. Besties! We kept talking, and her friend and his dad - or, I suppose, it could have just been a much older male friend - joined in when I mentioned my Jewish place of employment. Because if there's one thing Jews like to talk about, it's Jew stuff.

Before we began, our leader passed around a bottle of lavender essential oil, which is supposedly good for relaxation. She said to massage it into the soles of our feet, and also to just smell it from our hands.

I massaged that shit into my feet and it felt amazing because, hello, fragrant foot massage! And then I put my hands up to my face and I got a big ol' whiff of lavender and feet stank because I had been walking around in my smelly TOMS all day. So that was pleasant.

Finally it was time to get started. We were told that this would be a special sound bath because they had a reiki...person (?) there to work with us. To be honest, I have no idea what reiki is, even now, after having it done to me.

We all stretched out on the floor, and our sound bath specialist started making all sorts of crazy noises using the bowls, which were made of rose quartz. Going into this experience I had this idea like, "So she's going to clang the bowls and there's going to be a BING BONG kind of deal and what is even the point of this?" But let me tell you, friends. The sounds that those bowls created were the weirdest things I have ever heard in my life.

For the first ten minutes I had to keep my eyes open because the bowls' sound vibrations felt like they were coming from INSIDE MY BRAIN and it was incredibly disorienting. I thought that something had gone horribly wrong and that the first 5 seconds of the sound bath had fucked up my ears so much that my brain was buzzing and I was going to hear alien hum noises for the rest of my life. SPOILER ALERT: this did not happen and I got used to it.

So the buzzing continued, along with the very melodic BING BONGs that I had predicted (high five, self). Then the reiki person started going around. She would put her hands very gently on your head for about a minute, and it was supposed to do something with your energy and the energy in the room.

Can anyone tell me what the deal is with energy in rooms and how I'm supposed to feel it? Serious question. I don't know what it is about energy that I don't get but I have no idea how to tap into that. I would like to learn though because maybe then I would care about feng shui, or whatever. Anyway. When the reiki lady put her hands on my head, I felt my muscles relax a lot. It is entirely possible (nay, likely) that I was doing this on purpose because what is the purpose of an old lady quietly resting her hands on you if not to feel something?

So the bing bongs and the crazy "the call is coming from inside the house" head vibrations continued for awhile, and then our sound bath leader got up to go around to everyone with tuning forks. She had explained earlier that they were different tones, and holding them up to each ear would do interesting - but positive - things to our brains. And then she would wave the tuning forks around our bodies to - wait for it - clear our energy fields. So even with my eyes closed I could sense her waving her hands back and forth in front of my face, and I will not pretend that I understood what the hell my energy was doing at that moment. But I still enjoy the mental image of me lying on the ground in my fuschia pants and having someone wave tuning forks around my lifeless body like some kind of deranged air traffic controller.

At some point, multiple people fell asleep, so the snoring added a nice little addition to our sound bathing. Bing bong CHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH SNORT buzzzzzzz. Something like that.

The last part of the bath was for us to work with vibrations from the inside. We sat up, and the leader played some kind of weird instrument while we all experimented with various vowel sounds. So I, along with everyone else, spent about 15 minutes sitting with closed eyes, crossed legs, and one hand over our hearts, going:

"AaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAyyyyyyyyyyyyIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII"

And then it was over.

We left the room, and in the foyer there was some tea that one of the participants had provided, so we sat around drinking tea and comparing experiences. My outfit twin and new Jew friends were super into the reiki and the tuning forks, so they are clearly both lightyears ahead of me as far as detecting energy is concerned. I will say though that the mood after the sound bath was super light and relaxed and happy and I could have sworn that maybe I was picking up on the energy in the room and not just my own mood. But who even knows.

I left the sound bath completely relaxed, which was more or less ruined by the fact that it was cold outside and I somehow managed to walk in the wrong direction for 10 minutes before even realizing what I was doing. But overall it was an interesting experience. I would be tempted to go back, mostly to see my sound bath besties again, who swore they would return each month. But I'm not 100% sure if I want to spend another twenty dollars for an hour and a half of bing bongs.

My "fuck you" to ignorance

2014-04-11T06:34:00.000-04:00

A month or so ago, I was invited to write for a site that I won't name. It was a group blog with a decent readership, authored by a diverse group of people. The owner approached me because he thought they could use the voice of a "young, urban female" and he liked what he read here.

I was extremely flattered, as no one ever asks me to write anywhere. More than that, I was intimidated. The posts that I read there were well-written and intelligent, if somewhat bordering on intellectual to the point of being dry. It was a far cry from the occasional storytelling and whatever else it is that I do here, but I was excited about the challenge and signed on for their standard requirement: 3 posts a month about anything I wanted.

I wrote a few posts but never linked to any of them because I didn't care that much about them, and I ended up mostly skipping or skimming the posts from the other authors (that whole "dry intellectual" thing is really not what I like to read in my free time). A few titles caught my eye, though, so occasionally I read some things.

And frankly, I was disgusted.

I found myself reading a post talking about how Equal Pay Day is "hooey." I read a post about how feminism is a bunch of bullshit because men have been the oppressed gender all along. I read a rant about "lefties" and their tyranny in forcing Brendan Eich out of the top spot at Mozilla because of his past donation to Prop 8. And that wasn't even all of them.

I read these posts and fumed. I wrote, and never published, angry retorts. I decided I didn't want to get involved in a comment war that would surely end in nothing but frustration. Where does one even begin in trying to reason with someone who doesn't believe the data saying women are paid less than men?

The more I read, the more I hated myself for being a part of that site, and the less I ever wanted to link to any of my posts and drive traffic there. I knew that this site encompassed a diverse range of perspectives but, perhaps naively, it had never crossed my mind that among the diversity would also be bigotry. Living in a city as wonderfully liberal as New York, you never really encounter those people. You know, the ones who don't believe in things like, oh I don't know, fucking equality.

I sent the site owner the following email:

While I never thought I would last forever on the site, I certainly thought I would make it longer than this. But alas, here I am, tendering my resignation as an author on ----. In my short time there I've seen a few too many ignorant, hateful posts that stem from people leaning so far to the right that they're actually just leaning backwards. I've never been one to mind those of different political leanings when it comes to, say, fiscal conservatism or the debate over universal healthcare, but I can't get down with anyone who legitimately does not believe in a) all humans being treated as equals, and b) that there is so much work to be done towards said equality. While I realize that others' opinions don't reflect on me, I have no desire to share the same virtual space as them. And so I thank you so much for this opportunity, as you have been nothing but gracious to me, but I cannot continue with this. I apologize for all the effort you went through to get me on board, and I do hope you find a new "young urban female" voice soon. Perhaps one that is a little braver than I and wants to tackle the challenge of converting the ignorant over simply choosing to surround herself with people who believe in equality, open-mindedness and tolerance - and only those people.

Arielle

Our exchange went on from there, and included the owner linking me to a photo of the offending author's son and his African American prom date, which he had posted as a comment elsewhere on the site. The intent was to make me see that this person is not, in fact, a bigot. I told the owner that I was glad that at least this man had evolved enough to accept racial minorities as equals. And after a few more back and forths, we had said our goodbyes.

At first I thought maybe I should have stayed on as an author, using my "young, urban female"ness - 3 qualities which seemed to be underrepresented on the site - to make some impassioned arguments in favor of some of those values that we "lefties" hold so dear. But I didn't join the site to go to war. I didn't want to read posts by "colleagues" and feel outrage. Writing is a hobby for me; something I do for fun. And so I said my non-literal "fuck you" to ignorance and left. It may have been the quietest possible "fuck you" I could have mustered in that situation, but I was making my point.

If having tolerant, accepting, loving friends and family is a bubble I'm sheltering myself with, I will happily stay cocooned in here most of the time. I like to believe that in the moments when I do choose to fight the good fight, it has been, and will be, in ways more powerful and effective than a petty comment war could have ever been.

Yes or No?

2014-04-03T08:30:00.000-04:00

I recently saw several people post a link to this article from O magazine, called 20 Questions Every Woman Should Ask Herself. It sounded like exactly the kind of article that I would start reading and get bored of halfway through, because as someone who used to blog for a life coaching site, and who is friendly with other people who used to blog for that same life coaching site, and who has also seen a few more people become life coaches, and let me see how many more times I can say life coach in this sentence life coach life coach life coach, I feel like I've hit my saturation point for woman-oriented life advice.

Plus, as much as I think Oprah is a total badass, I'm not sure she can really give me advice. Oprah is a self-made billionaire. Until she can tell me how to find a job so I can stop waking up in cold sweats worrying about the impending end date of my current job (June 30th) and my looming descent into ANOTHER round of unemployment, I'm not interested.

But anyway, I clicked on the article and, as predicted, lost interest halfway through. But not before I arrived at question #8, which was: "Do I know how to say no?" This, of course, arrived after question #7: "Do I say yes enough?"

The yes/no continuum seems to be polarizing in the realm of women's life advice. The two sides look like this:

SAY YES TO LITERALLY EVERYTHING
Open your heart to new experiences! Don't be afraid! When an opportunity comes along, say yes! Discover your gorgeous truth through the power of "yes"! If you feel like saying no to something, say yes anyway! It will change you as a woman FOREVER!

SAY NO TO EVERYTHING, BE A HERMIT, HERMITS ARE COOL
Do you not want to do something? Say no! Do you want to maybe do something but you also maybe want to sit on your ass eating Ben & Jerry's and Netflixing the shit out of House of Cards? Say no! Don't let anyone force you out of those pajama pants, girlfriend!

I would like to meet a woman who isn't tired of reading stuff about saying yes or saying no. Whatever happened to maybe, the ugly stepsister of yes and no? Let's all be non-committal! I'm kidding. Don't be non-committal. That sucks.

For what it's worth, which may be nothing, I'm always on the side of saying yes. I love pajama pants not just as much as the next girl but even more so. But I also love actually living life. You know what's not living life? Netflix. Look, I'm not saying you should partake in every single activity that comes your way. I have a friend who constantly invites me to super trendy clubs, and while I love killing my feet in uncomfortable heels and paying $16 for drinks and being so close to other people that there isn't any room to dance WAIT HAHA I HATE THOSE THINGS. So I don't go. (I went once. It was okay, but I'm all set now for at least a year).

But if someone asks you to do something that legitimately could be fun, and you're all, "Weeeeeell I have laundry to do" or "Weeeeell Game of Thrones is on" or "Weeeeeell I have to wake up in 16 hours," then, amigo, you should just fucking go. I recently texted a friend to see if he wanted to join me for a last minute free concert of a band I knew he liked. He hemmed and hawed and said no. And then changed his mind at the actual last second. The concert was great, and as we walked towards the subway, he said, "I'm really glad I ended up coming to the show. I was really tired but I knew that I never regret saying yes to stuff like this."

Supremely long digression aside, in this Oprah article, the "yes" question had some BS verbiage that I didn't read. But the text after "Do I know how to say no?" had only the following quote from Martha Beck:

"Here is the crux of the matter, the distilled essence, the only thing you need to remember: When considering whether to say yes or no, you must choose the response that feels like freedom. Period."

If ever there was such a succinctly beautiful statement in all of life coaching literature, I've never heard it.

Choose the response that feels like freedom.

Amazing.

What women talk about when they don't talk about men

2014-03-23T20:27:00.000-04:00

When I think of something that I might potentially want to blog about, I write it down in the notes section of my phone. ~~Often~~ Sometimes I come up with these ideas when I'm drunk, so many of them never get used because while I do believe "in vino veritas," I also believe, "in vino, what the fuck was I thinking that idea is dumb." (My Latin is limited, I apologize).

One of the blog ideas in my phone says, "Are we only going to talk about dating for the rest of our lives?", which I think was written down after a boozy brunch many many months ago and which sort of accurately reflects the sense of mimosa-fueled despair that I was feeling at the time. Not despair about actually dating, but despair about the fact that sometimes it seems like no one talks about anything else. And I'm not sure I can go on like this.

Don't get me wrong - I love complaining about the lack of nice, normal men in New York. I could be a regular contributor to any site dedicated to creepy OK Cupid messages, and I spent all of 3 days on Tinder before I decided that I'm not cut out for the type of flirty repartee that it requires in order to be successful. In fact, here's a sample convo I had from those 3 days:

Tinder guy: What's your bra size?
Arielle: What's YOUR bra size?

See? I just can't indulge these people. But I digress.

Brunch is the perfect time to talk about dating - the weekends are when all the dating-y stuff goes down, and Sunday afternoon with your besties is a perfect time to dissect all that. The problem for me is that it's all the same. And it's been all the same ever since we were 22 and had just moved to the city. I love my friends and want to know what's going on in their lives, and of course I want to be able to talk to my girlzz about what's going on in my life, but how many times can we hear the same, "met a guy at a bar, we exchanged numbers, I never heard from him again," story before we feel like we're in some kind of Clockwork Orange-esque torture chamber?

So I kind of just have to wonder - is this all there is for us? For the rest of our lives? Or the rest of our single lives?

I'm not even unhappy being single. In fact, I think us single folk are doing a service to society. If not for single people in New York, what would happen to all the TV sitcoms? And rom-coms? And chick lit? And other 'coms' or rhyme-y things that always seem to focus around dating in New York?

So I'm happy to be doing my civic duty, navigating the city's choppy romantic waters, fighting the good fight so people can have their unrealistic movies about relationships that never seem to reflect anything real but that we consistently expect that real life will turn out that way anyway. I do this for YOU, America! And I do it proudly, except I guess I'm getting a little tired of all the repetitive discourse around it. The guys who didn't call, or the "should I wait at least 24 hours before responding to this text?" and that kind of nonsense.

I still want to hear the stories, of course. The good ones. Like the time you went to a show and a hot guy started talking to you and you were all, "What? Hot guys never talk to me, what is this and who are you, guy with the sexy blue eyes?" and you talked for like 15 minutes and then the hot guy dropped a casual, "I'm a student at NYU..." and you realized that this person was literally about 10 years younger than you.

If stuff like that happens to you, I want to hear about it. That actually happened a week ago to someone I know. Her name may or may not be similar to that of a fictional mermaid and she may or may not be the owner of this blog but NO MORE REVEALING DETAILS.

So what's the solution here? I guess I don't really have one because as long as women are single and as long as the men in New York are creeps and/or jerks, we're going to need to vent about it. But maybe instead of harping on things, let's think of some potential alternative conversation topics. For when the going gets really rough. Here's a starting list.

- Ironic hipster glasses - redundant, or an oxymoron?
- Puppies - if you had one, what would you name it? (Dr. Theodore Waffles). Sub-question: if you already have a puppy, can I come play with it?
- Benedict Cumberbatch - why do people think he's hot? He looks like an alien.
- The Winter Olympics - aren't we glad they're over? (Yes)
- The world - there's important stuff going on! Let's discuss in between complaining that our mimosas have too much OJ.
- Colors - what the fuck is chartreuse?
- Books - are you reading a good one? Recommend it to me so I can add it on Goodreads!

Etcetera.

Arielle's Top 8 New (to me) Artists of 2013

2014-01-07T07:30:00.000-05:00

2013 was a year in which my musical tastes changed - or I suppose I should say broadened - quite a bit. I went to more shows, became a more active consumer of music and made more of an effort to learn about what I was listening to.

"Arielle, you go to a lot of shows," many people have noticed.

"Who are some of your favorite new artists?" no one ever asks. Well, no one, I'll tell you!

So even though no one seems to write these "year in review" type retrospectives once it has actually turned the new year, I will run the risk of being gauche and list my 8 favorite additions to my iPod in 2013. In no particular order...

1. Vampire Weekend

While much of this whole list will qualify as "Arielle, you are absurdly late to the party on this one," this is probably most true of Vampire Weekend. These indie rock guys are upbeat and fun and even Ezra Koenig's lack of stage presence cannot bring them down (it helps that his Twitter is hilarious, though).

2. Bassnectar

Bassnectar makes me want to get down and dirty. I mean this literally. It makes me want to dance low to the ground while covered in mud. His stuff is sick and filthy and lots of other words that are supposed to mean bad things but are actually good things.

3. Pretty Lights

I downloaded some Pretty Lights stuff early in 2013 because I was supposed to go to a festival he was playing at and I wanted to familiarize myself with the music before I went. Well, I didn't go to that festival, or the other festival I was supposed to go to, or the other other festival I was supposed to go to where he would be, but I kept listening to his stuff anyway and by the time I finally saw him in October I was long since hooked. Every EDM fan I've met in the year since I got into this scene loves Pretty Lights, as well they should. His live shows are unparalleled. And they involve top notch use of lasers. I take the shittiest ever concert photos and even I was able to capture these:

As a bonus, in case any of you happen to be cool enough to own a turntable, I was told his music sounds amazing on vinyl. So, there's that.

4. Gramatik

One of the reasons I love Gramatik is because his music is so diverse. You can get excited about 10 songs that all sound different but are all wonderful and chill but hip-shakey. Plus, his guitarist looks like Bret from Flight of the Conchords.

5. Alex Clare

You know Alex Clare. He has that song in that commercial. You know that song. "And it feels like I am just too close to love you...WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB." I went to listen to him at Lollapalooza solely for that song (what commercial even is that?) and ended up loving his entire set. He was blues-y and rock-y and many things in between. His entire album is amazing. And he's Jewish! What what.

6. Knife Party

Drink an extra cup of coffee before heading to see these Aussies work their magic. This is some high energy crazy nonsense flail around dance party stuff. "You blocked me on Facebook! And now you're going to die." (Around 1:40ish in the video) (And for anyone who cares, my favorite song by them is called Sleaze)

7. Brillz

Brillz was a Pandora find, which is pretty exciting because hey, isn't that the point of Pandora, kind of? He's classified as trap music, which is a term I only really learned how to use in the last few months. While I was underwhelmed with his live performance when I saw him a few days ago, I don't even care because I will gladly just listen to his album over and over again at home.

8. Big Gigantic

Walk, don't run, to Big G's website where you can download all their stuff for free (this is true of several artists on this list, actually). They are amazing. This is like EDM/jazz fusion with one guy on the drums and one guy on the sax AND doing all the production. It's super dancey but not clubby dancey. Groove dancey. I got into Big Gigantic when I bought tickets to see Brillz (see above!). Big G was the headliner so after buying the tickets I downloaded some of their stuff and before I listened to it was all, "Well, I'll just leave after Brillz if I don't like this because I'm sooo alternative, leaving before the headliner and shit," except I loved it so much and that show was SO MUCH FUN. When it ended my soul filled with tears because I wanted it to go on forever and even though I had barely heard of them a month ago, I cannot imagine my life without Big G in it now.

And there you have it. I was initially going to do a list of 10, but I had trouble narrowing the last 2 spots down from a number of contenders (also I got lazy). So, honorable mentions go to:

- Passion Pit
- Matt & Kim
- Showtek
- Atlas Genius
- The Glitch Mob
- Flux Pavilion
- The Black Keys
- HAIM
- Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

What new music did you discover in 2013??

Goodbye, Roxy

2014-01-02T15:54:00.002-05:00

In my junior year of high school, my family adopted an 8 week old german shepherd mix from a shelter. I didn't think she could replace our golden retriever, who we had lost a few months earlier, but I quickly grew to love her for all the things that made her similar to - as well as different from - our first dog.

That was 14 years ago, and I cannot imagine my New Jersey home without Roxy's face greeting me in the window, sitting under the table hoping to catch some scraps during meals, or resting in the den while my parents watch TV. I loved playing games with her around the house, and even as she got older and less energetic, I would always spend a fair amount of time at home sitting next to her on the floor, petting her and trying to get her to pose for pictures.

14 is pretty old for a dog, but Roxy was surprisingly healthy. She was lazier, sure, and we were pretty sure she didn't hear as well as she used to, but she was still pretty youthful for her age. I knew, though, that it couldn't last that long, and for the last few months I've had a sneaking feeling in the back of my head that she was due to start declining pretty soon. I sometimes felt preemptively sad for the pain I knew was coming - I had seen my last dog's health decline (he was only 7 years old, sadly) and knew it was a heartbreaking process. But I would accept and enjoy Roxy's good health as long as I could.

What I did not expect was the New Year's Day phone call from my dad. It started with, "there was an accident," and even though it was only an 8 minute phone call, it felt like the world's longest story. I started sobbing long before he reached the end, because I knew what the punchline was going to be.

All this time I was worrying about my dog getting sick, but instead I should have been worrying about her getting hit by a car.

And so I've spent the last day crying hysterically, partially because the dog I've known for almost half my life is gone and I didn't even get to say goodbye, and partially because the end of her life was so tragic and unfair. I've been crying for the pain and fear I hope she wasn't conscious enough to feel, and for the fact that if she was conscious, there was a span of several hours between the time of the accident and the time that she was put down at the vet's office after they determined that her back was broken. She deserved so much better.

Roxy, you were a great friend and pseudo kid sister, and you brought so much joy to our family for so many years. I will always miss you.

The Grinch Who Hates Christmas

2013-12-24T17:41:00.004-05:00

That's me.

Because yes, as impossible as it may seem, I really, truly, from the bottom of my cold, black heart, do not like Christmas.

I certainly don't begrudge anyone their Christmas cheer and celebrations, I just wish I didn't have to be privy to every detail of it. This isn't entirely because I'm Jewish - plenty of Jews love to get all up in the Christmas biznass. The reason I personally hate Christmas is because for probably 2 full months out of the year, I can't escape it.

You know how when your whole Facebook newsfeed explodes with people talking about some dramatic episode of ~insert popular TV show here - Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, whatever~, and you don't watch that particular show so you just want to scream and slap a few people and maybe just shut down the internet for awhile?

Christmas is the TV show I don't watch. Only it doesn't stop at Facebook. It's everywhere. I can't walk into a store without being bombarded by Christmas music and I would tell you how many Christmas-related store promotion emails I've gotten in the last few weeks but I'm pretty sure I can't count that high. Christmas does not leave me, or anyone, alone. It's holding us all hostage and somehow I seem to be the only one who hasn't developed Stockholm Syndrome.

Also around this time of year is when people with real, grown-up lives, and also occasionally single people with their shit together, start sending out cards. Some of them are holiday cards. Some of them are Christmas cards. Every year I get some holiday cards, and every year I get some Christmas cards. I love getting cards and am totally down for this, especially because I like to see the ways in which my friends alter the Christmas cards for me (and I love people trying to adapt Christmas for me in general - see photo below), but I also can't help but feel like some oddball freakshow at this time of year.

So this is why I feel all Scrooge-y around Christmas, like I'm lacking in whatever the "Christmas spirit" is supposed to be. Except what is Christmas spirit, really? Going off what I read on social media, here's a list of Christmas things that seem important to people:

- Black Friday. Is this in the spirit of Christmas? Trampling Walmart workers so you can get your hands on a flat screen TV that probably isn't even for someone on your gift list?

- Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You." Why is every woman obsessed with this song? Stop it, ladies.

- Love, Actually. I know this movie is the talk of the town right now because there's think pieces galore on why this movie actually has a terrible message. Not to sound all cooler than thou, but I've hated Love, Actually since the first and only time I saw it in 2004. Why? Because it's boring. And it's over 2 hours long! I have a firm belief that chick flicks should be no more than 90 minutes long, and I made this rule after seeing this movie, which seemed to take a lifetime to end.

- Spending all your money on presents, often for people you don't care about. "What am I supposed to get for my boyfriend's aunt?" I don't know, but this is a question I hope I never have to ask myself.

- Getting engaged and/or hating on people who are cliche enough to dare get engaged on Christmas. As if.

In the interest of fairness, here are some Christmas things I like:

- Eggnog! This shit is delicious. I will drink those 4000 calories and ask for seconds, thank you very much.

- Advent calendars. I've never owned one, but they seem fun. Windows that reveal chocolate? Sign me up.

- Secret Santa. I always participate in at least one. Secret Santa is fun and a good excuse to make whole groups of friends hang out.

- Not going to work. Yay!

And that's pretty much it. Because all the eggnog in the world could not make me more excited for December 26th, when Christmas finally gets out of my face and people can start complaining about how they have no plans for New Year's Eve.

(PS, to all my Xmas-friendly loved ones out there - Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals)

In Lena Dunham's Corner

2013-11-08T07:45:00.000-05:00

Lena Dunham is a pretty polarizing figure. Anyone familiar with her seems to have a pretty strong opinion - love her, hate her, love Girls, hate Girls, too much nudity, love the nudity, she's gorgeous, she's a troll.

Usually the Lena internet chatter is pretty minimal when there isn't a current Girls season airing, but the other day I came across this NY Post article about why Lena shouldn't follow through on her talks with Anna Wintour about posing for Vogue. The argument is that Vogue only puts heavier women on the cover as a way of occasionally showing, "oh hey, look at us, we're edgy and revolutionary because we put an ugly chick in our magazine," and not as a way of showing that those women - who, by the way, include Oprah, Adele, and Serena Williams, to name a few - are smart or talented or sexy or otherwise worthy of being on the cover of a famous fashion magazine.

I think this logic is totally flawed, and let me explain why (did I just ask for permission to write something on my own blog? I guess I did).

Lena Dunham is the shit. I don't know her personally, of course, so my opinions of her consist largely of what I can glean from a) Girls b) her Twitter account and c) Miranda July's We Think Alone project, where every Monday for 20 weeks you received an email digest consisting of personal emails from the archives of 9 celebrities, including Lena, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and Kirsten Dunst, among others.

From what I can tell, Lena is smart, funny, hard-working, humble, and passionate. She's a feminist role model, a confident woman, and does not appear to give a fuck what you think. I love all of these things about her. And sure, though it may not resonate with me 100% of the time, I think Girls is one of the best representations of life in New York that I've ever seen on TV. Though she may not have gotten the opportunity to write, produce, and star in her own show at age 26 without well-connected parents, I fully believe that she deserves it.

Though people have a ton of negative things to say about her, most of the controversy around Lena Dunham stems from the fact that she dares to walk around in her underwear on television despite, *gasp*, not having a perfect body. Ignoring the fact that the internet seems to think she wears a size 8, which is several sizes smaller than what the average American woman wears, I have to say - so what? Unless you live in Clockwork Orange, no one is forcing anyone to watch anything. If you don't want to see a size 8 woman play topless ping pong, you don't have to! It's a beautiful place we live in, isn't it? America the beautiful! Land of the free!

Frankly, I would give a lot of things to be a fraction as confident in my own skin as Lena is. I love the fact that she writes sex scenes for her Girls character much the same as she writes sex scenes for the other, super skinny characters. Maybe this shouldn't be necessary in order to demonstrate to some ignorant folks out there that you can be a "larger" woman and still be seen as sexually desirable, but I guess it is.

You know what else apparently needs to be very clearly explained to people? The fact that "fat" girls (I keep using quotation marks here because again, despite never having seen her in person I'm pretty sure Lena Dunham doesn't fully qualify) can take themselves seriously. I laughed just as much as the next person when Melissa McCarthy's character in Bridesmaids shamelessly hits on the air marshal. The only reason this bit landed with audiences is because we're not supposed to find her attractive. While I adore that movie and I really adore Melissa McCarthy, I appreciate that Lena doesn't feel the need to constantly poke fun at herself. She and her character Hannah are full and complete individuals who have lives - and relationships and problems and other real concerns - outside of their weight. But some people seem to think that if you're heavy, that's the be all and end all of who you are. As someone who is also in the not-even-close-to-size-zero range, I can always tell the difference between someone who views me as a normal human being and someone who views me strictly as a "fat chick." While I love the moments when I'm able to make my friends laugh (and I swear there was a time when I used to be funny on my blog), I resent the occasional pressure I feel to always be funny, partially because I'm not always funny, and partially because my weight doesn't preclude me from experiencing other emotions or eliciting those emotions from others.

But back to Vogue!

I think Lena should absolutely pose for the cover of Vogue. I'm not concerned that Vogue typically only puts the ultra svelte elite on their cover, even though this is true. If they truly only wanted Lena on the cover to prove that they don't feature thin girls 100% of the time, they wouldn't need to put her (or Oprah, or Adele, or Serena) on the cover - they could feature any overweight Jo Shmo. Or Jane Shmo, I guess I should say. But they choose women who are powerful and remarkable for exactly that reason - these women are powerful and remarkable and thus, worthy of recognition. They may not look like the typical Vogue cover model, but they're still worth highlighting.

Think about it this way: let's say Lena Dunham really wanted to be on the cover of Vogue, and they initially said no because she has curves and thighs that rub together when she walks. Then Vogue reverses its decision and says yes. Should Lena then refuse on principle because they didn't initially want her? Or should she seize the opportunity to do her small part in setting, or at least continuing, the precedent that you can grace the cover of Vogue by virtue of your accomplishments and not your tiny waistline? (Even if Vogue does a kind of annoying thing and photoshops you to the point of making it look like you have a tiny waistline. Baby steps, small victories, etc etc). Is there anyone out there who truly believes that the only reason anyone would ever put Oprah in a magazine is to prove that they don't have an anti-fat stance? I mean, Oprah is kind of the unofficial queen of the world.

I'm pretty low on the spectrum of people who follow celebrity news, but even I am tired of the anti-Lena rhetoric. I'm weary of reading comments about how fat she is, how she looks like a "sea cow," or how Girls is so unrealistic because no one who looks like her could ever have as much sex as Hannah does. Why can't we applaud someone for being bold and for kicking ass despite not conforming to conventional (and bullshit) standards of beauty?

Lena, I hope I do see you on the cover of Vogue one day. I probably won't buy it, because a Target-clad lady such as myself has no interest in high fashion, but it would certainly be the first issue of Vogue that I ever flip through while standing in the aisles of CVS.

Get it, girl.

2 Fruit Baskets and 2 Friendships

2013-10-30T09:17:00.000-04:00

Those of you who followed along when I was a Stratejoy blogger may remember the worst birthday ever. If you don't remember, then click the link in that last sentence and read about it.

Usually when I post external links and reference them in my blog posts I say, "I know you won't click on that so here's a synopsis," but I'm not doing that this time. I refuse to summarize that blog post because I hold that one pretty close to my heart. Writing it, and experiencing it, was emotionally both a high point and a low point, and I won't boil it down to one sentence. So click on "the worst birthday ever" before continuing or you'll have no idea what the hell is going on. Ready? GO.

Insert muzak here. La la la.

Are you back? Marvelous!

Right, so. That happened. My 24th birthday sucked like a big bag of assholes. There were a few people who had been made aware of this story prior to my publishing it on Stratejoy a year and a half ago, but even most of my closest friends didn't, because it's really fucking hard sometimes to talk about someone doing something really cruel to you, especially when that someone was a person you considered a close friend. And even though I made up for it in my own self love-y kind of way, thinking about what happened 6 years ago still stings. I have a feeling it always will.

As I've mentioned once or twice on here before, tis the season of my 30th birthday! In fact, it was just a few days ago. My 20s are officially behind me.

My birthday was great. I got pampered at a spa, had 2 nights out with friends, got lots of calls and texts and Facebook messages and even some presents. Among my birthday bounty was this amazing display, from my bestie of 25 years (!), Lacey.

It's no coincidence that I got yet another Edible Arrangements basket on yet another birthday. Lacey did this intentionally, to make up for the other really hurtful one. Her card, instead of being short and mean, was actually thoughtful (and she signed it, unlike that other coward). This time, my birthday Edible Arrangements made me really happy.

It was nice to be reminded that even if sometimes the people you love can make you feel as low as you've ever felt, there are other people out there who can bring you up and remind you that yes, you're a worthwhile person. In a world full of shitty people, you have to be thankful for the good ones. And frankly, I know some of the best ones.

Yet Another New York Love Letter

2013-10-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

"I read somewhere that 50% of people in the U.S. have a fantasy about living in New York City."

My friend said this as we were sitting in Central Park, listening to Alicia Keys at a completely free festival that also included the likes of Kings of Leon and Stevie Wonder, among others.

I have no idea if what she said is true, but I do know that I'd believe it if it was. It was in response to something I was thinking aloud, along the lines of, "What do people who don't live here DO with their time?"

It's naive, I get it. Most people don't live here and the vast majority of them probably don't lose sleep at night wishing they were New Yorkers. But even after all the time I've spent here I still sometimes look around in child-like amazement thinking, "I live in the greatest fucking city on earth."

It's not even that living in New York is some kind of utopian dream. We pay too much money for tiny living spaces, the air reeks of garbage in the summer, our transit system is often messed up to the point of being incomprehensible to even seasoned subway riders, and anyone who has ever tried online dating here will have a bevy of stories for you about the weirdos just waiting to send you a creepy or flat out bat shit crazy message (this is nowhere near the worst I've encountered).

What really continues to impress me, time after time, is the sheer number and diversity of stuff that goes on here. I mean, I got to spend a gorgeous Saturday in an iconic park listening to iconic musicians all for the price of zero dollars. A few weeks ago I dressed up in all white and had a flashmob-esque impromptu fancy dinner in Bryant Park with 4,000 other people thanks to Diner en Blanc.

Brie is my friend.

On Saturday night, my friend and I trekked from Brooklyn to Queens to go to an art show, which, as we found out when we arrived, featured a dark room with two men spray painted silver from head to toe, standing on turntables rotating slowly around in circles while an artist occasionally draped ribbons around them and there was a soundtrack of a woman, performing live, wailing and breathing heavily. I can't make this up.

The whole art show was pretty awful. It was so bizarre that it almost seemed out of a sitcom, a parody of what people think life in New York is like except that it's real. Shit here is sometimes extremely weird. Sure, we managed to turn a disappointing night into a fun one by grabbing some well-made cocktails at a speakeasy nearby, but it doesn't change the fact that we both traveled really far for something we really didn't like.

This is part of the appeal of this crazy city, to me. Sometimes you get to spend your Friday lunch break at a swanky ass club dancing to a Major Lazer DJ set, and sometimes you get silver, ribbon-clad turntable men. Sometimes you go to a warehouse party with a 30 foot inflatable slide, and sometimes you wait in line for over an hour for what you think is a party but ends up kind of being a job fair that, by the way, you can't even get into. For every online dating weirdo who thinks its appropriate to turn his webcam on and dance around with no pants on, there's a friend you met during an overnight scavenger hunt at the New York Public Library. The disappointments are still often great stories, and for every disappointment there's some other equally exciting or fun thing that makes you feel like all the bullshit is worthwhile. That's the amazing part.

I never know what a day in New York is going to hold. This place is totally unpredictable, but I don't think I'd have it any other way.

Sometimes I Wish I Smoked Cigarettes

2013-10-05T17:01:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I wish I smoked cigarettes. Sort of. Maybe. Not really.

I'm not exactly in the market for a new expensive habit, and certainly not one that turns my teeth brown, makes my whole life smell, or, you know, causes lung cancer. But there's still something slightly intriguing about the thought of being a smoker.

Smoking in the media seems to fall into 2 categories: smoking out of stress and smoking just to be cool. So often in movies and TV we see someone with a high-power job, or with some insane amount of interpersonal drama, smoking a cigarette at some key moment where it legitimately makes me think, "Wait, that's all I need to do to calm down? When work or whatever is stressful I can just...go smoke a cigarette?" As a non-smoker, I don't have this option. When things blow up at work the only tool I have at my disposal is going into a coworker's office and gesticulating wildly like a crazy person. Only venting to coworkers doesn't calm me down, it just fuels the fire. The crazy, wildly-gesticulating fire. But what if I could smoke a cigarette and then come back all relaxed? Is that a thing? It sounds tempting.

As far as the coolness thing goes, I can't help but think of my sophomore year of college. One of my friends would buy these fancy Nat Sherman cigarettes, with a black body and gold filter, and she would call me over to sit outside her dorm and smoke them. We called it "stoopin' it." One time when we were stoopin' it she said, "You know it sounds stupid, but I really feel like I look cooler when I smoke." And I had to agree - somehow we're sort of trained to think that people who smoke are more badass. I guess the marketing department at Philip Morris can pat themselves on the back for that one. But apparently I don't care that much about looking cool, because aside from a few cloves sprinkled throughout college (what girl didn't go through a clove phase in college? Come on now), I definitely haven't had a cigarette since those stoopin' it times when I was 19.

(Was that 10 years ago? Barf)

Another thing about cigarettes is that there's this very romanticized ideal of being a writer and sitting at a desk, typing - and puffing - away. The specific image that comes to mind is Carrie Bradshaw, in her pajamas, hair in a sloppy bun, smoking a cigarette and narrating to us her latest piece of relationship wisdom. Despite the fact that I always hated the character of Carrie Bradshaw and it's not by any means something I want to aspire to, there's something about that image that makes me almost think that I would feel like an actual "real" writer, and not just a girl with a not-widely-read blog, if I had a cigarette here. After all, I'm already all over the pajamas and sloppy bun thing, and I can even add some glasses to look even more writerly!

Why yes, since you ask, it is totally normal to stay in on probably one of the last nice days for awhile so you can write a blog post and watch TV and generally not make yourself look presentable during the daylight hours.

All of this being said, I think I will continue to not smoke cigarettes because of the whole not-getting-lung-cancer thing. But what if I tried just having a candy cigarette in my mouth? One of the ones that even produces a teeny bit of fake smoke. They might not relieve stress or make me feel like a fancy writer (note: candy in general is probably not a good way to make yourself feel like a grown-up), but I think they would make me look super cool. Because those things are awesome. The end.

Don't Rain On My Parade

2013-09-30T16:53:00.000-04:00

Over the last few years, Facebook (as well as other social media) has become so much more than just a place to share photos or stalk people you haven't seen since 5th grade. It's become a marketplace of opinions, both of the solicited and the unsolicited variety. This is heightened during important moments in sports, TV, current events, general pop culture, politics, and whatever else.

Sometimes Facebook opinions make me happy, like when someone says they just started reading the Harry Potter series and they remark about how great it is. Other times, Facebook opinions clue me in to things I would have otherwise had no idea about - as someone who isn't particularly tuned into the Batman franchise, for example, I don't think I would have ever heard about the Ben Affleck casting selection had people not been (mostly) up in arms about it.

And yet other times, Facebook opinions make me want to tell people to stop raining on my fucking parade.

For every person out there who obsesses over Dexter, there's another person who delights in telling you how they hate Dexter. People will even delight in telling you how they have no interest in Dexter because it seems like it sucks, which is the same as saying, "I have no knowledge of this thing but I'm going to shit all over it anyway."

For the record, I've never seen Dexter, but I've certainly seen this same scenario play out with Breaking Bad, with every woman who happily has her first pumpkin spice latte of the season*, and with just about any other thing that people get excited and vocal about. And it's never in the form of intelligent discourse, it's just in the form of "I'm better than you because I think this thing you love is terrible."

After getting a little annoyed over people who take pride in hating things I'm excited about, I had a mildly disturbing realization: I do this all the time.

I am the asshole who tweets something like, "So, like, there's a sports thing happening?" during the World Series or the Superbowl or one of those other things that literally millions of people look forward to and care deeply about. I am the first person to talk about how lame sparkly vampires are even though I haven't read a single page or seen a single second of Twilight. I do this because for some sick reason it makes me happy to act like I'm above these things and oh, look at you plebians who spend your time caring about such silly pursuits.

Why do I do this? I'm not above sports, and as much as it loathes me to say it, I'm probably not above Twilight either. They just don't interest me, and that's fine. Everyone else's enthusiasm for these things doesn't have any impact on my life, and those people certainly don't give even the tiniest bit of a crap that I don't care about Twilight or sports or Lost or the Batman franchise or any of those other things that I just haven't incorporated into my life because hey, there are only so many hours in the day and no one can possibly be into all the things, ever. Yet I still insist on making sure everyone knows my stance on these things instead of just letting everyone talk amongst themselves (speaking of talking amongst ourselves, let's all discuss Breaking Bad from now until we die, okay? Because...!!!).

Now that I'm aware of what I'm doing and how much it probably pisses other people off, I'm going to try and stop. Because there is no reason and no excuse for raining on someone's parade.

* Do men like pumpkin spice lattes too and are just less vocal about it?

Why I Should Officiate Your Wedding

2013-09-27T13:07:00.002-04:00

A month or so ago I was sitting around with some friends from high school, talking, as women our age are wont to do, about weddings.

"One of my life goals is to officiate a wedding," I said.

My friend turned to me and goes, "You'd be really good at that."

"I KNOW!" I replied. And then I proceeded to intensely stare down everyone at the table, as if to say, "When you get married LET ME OFFICIATE YOUR WEDDING." Everyone got the message. And was also pretty creeped out by my stare-down.

I don't have a ton of big life goals, but I really want to officiate a friend's wedding in a major way. Are you reading this? Are you my friend? Are you not yet married? Great. Here's why you should let me officiate your wedding.

1) I'll do it for free! And free is always better than not free. If you aren't planning on having an open bar at your wedding, we may need to discuss some payment in the form of vodka. But otherwise, totally gratis!

2) I am more than willing to become one of those ordained-via-the-internet ministers if you insist on having some kind of official religious person run your wedding. This should show you my full and total commitment to the cause, because if a Jewish girl who works for a Jewish organization is willing to become a minister for you, that's love, friends.

3) Everyone will think you're cool for having a friend officiate your wedding. Weddings are all about showing off how awesome and unique you are, and having a friend perform the ceremony says to everyone, "I have the coolest friends in the world because I'm willing to let one of them have a pretty big role in one of the most important days of my life," and also, "Look how alternative and fun and young I am! The person officiating this wedding is my age!"

4) By far the most important reason - I will write a seriously amazing ceremony. It will be personalized but not inside joke-y so as to alienate your friends and family. It will be poignant but not cheesy. It will be funny but not tasteless (see: most best man speeches that recite a laundry list of the groom's most embarrassing moments, making everyone uncomfortable). I've given 2 speeches at weddings and both got really good feedback. After the most recent one last September, I was approached by a family member who told me how great my speech was, and then said, "It was one of the best wedding speeches I've ever heard. And I'm a wedding planner, so I've heard a lot."

If you think I'm telling this story just to brag, then I mean DUH that's obviously why I'm telling this story. If a positive review from a person who plans weddings for a living isn't a kickass reference, then I don't know what is.

Got it? Awesome. Now, someone go get engaged, pronto.

The Person I Will Never Be

2013-09-24T17:11:00.000-04:00

I like to entertain the idea that one day I'm just going to change something about myself. I'll see a friend do something or pass someone on the street or hear a story and think, "This is a thing I should incorporate into my personality." But I think it's time to admit to myself that there are a lot of things that, as cool as they would be, are never going to be part of my persona. Here's a list! (Incomplete, but whatever)

1. I am never going to be someone who winks. This is pretty sad because I'm awesome at winking and if you don't believe me, ask my friend Elyse because I used to wink at her excessively during our 10th grade history class (Elyse also likes when I shout her out on my blog. Hi!). And any time someone winks at me in a non-creepy way I'm all, "Note to self: do this." But I never have because I never think to do it. I should just admit that it's not going to happen.

2. I am never going to look nice for work. I am completely incapable of putting together a really sharp outfit and in the 10 months I've been at this job I've worn makeup to work 0 times. I used to have to wear a suit to work every day and I'm sure I managed to somehow even make that look mildly sloppy. I leave my house between 23 and 25 minutes after I wake up in the morning (showering at night: best thing ever) and I have no desire to add any time onto that.

3. I will never get seriously into yoga. Yoga is supposed to be all zen and calming but zen and calming are just euphemisms for BORING. As many of you know, I went through an obsessive Bikram yoga phase so this might seem like a weird thing for me to say, but Bikram yoga is anything but zen or calming because it's basically 90 minutes of feeling like you might die at any moment. I am nowhere near chill enough for the calming, spiritual type of yoga. I'm the kind of person who watches TV with her phone, her laptop, and a bowl of mac and cheese because if I don't have multiple things entertaining me at once I don't even know how to handle myself LOOK A SHINY THING.

4. Sarcasm will forever escape me more often than I'd like. This is totally baffling because I'm a supremely sarcastic person. But I probably miss at least a third of the sarcasm that people direct at me. And then I go, "WHOA REALLY?" and that person is all, "What? No." I don't understand it, but I've come to accept it.

5. Feminine wiles. Never going to have those. As a woman you're supposed to be able to flirt yourself into or out of any situation but I think I slept through that class in How-To-Be-A-Woman school. Also the one about crying on command. Which pretty much means I'm screwed and cannot get anything I want unless someone already wants to give it to me. Damnit.

6. Whiskey. I went through a phase where I tried really hard to become a whiskey person. I am not. Give me vodka or give me death. Or beer. Or wine or gin or tequila. Or even whiskey in a shot glass or a delicious mixed drink. Just not as something I'm supposed to sip and pretend like I enjoy the burning.

Somewhere Between Bullshit and Settling

2013-09-23T20:45:00.002-04:00

Everyone wants a perfect life. At least I do. Perfect friends perfect significant other perfect job perfect apartment? Sign me up.

Obviously, perfect is pretty hard to come by. So in any aspect of your life - friends jobs whatever - you have to accept some negatives. Sometimes these negatives aren't so bad, and these are just the bullshit things we have to put up with in order to have a semi-decent life. Other times they are flat out, deal-breaker awful. If these things are in your life, you're settling. Since my upcoming birthday has clearly had me doing a lot of thinking, I've been spending a lot of time contemplating the line between bullshit and settling.

If you're dating someone who has a habit of stealing blankets in the middle of the night, that's silly bullshit.
If you're dating someone who constantly lies to you, you're settling.

If you work at a job where the dress code isn't as casual as you'd like, that's bullshit.
If you work at a job where your boss berates you for no reason, that's settling.

The distinction, though, isn't always that clear. And even if it is, sometimes you can't walk away from something just because you know you're settling and could in theory do better.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this is something that keeps me up at night (that, along with fantasizing about getting a puppy or wondering how someone can possibly be smart enough to write a show as nuanced as Breaking Bad). I wonder about every aspect of my life and whether I should be striving for something better. All the articles and blog posts I've read about turning 30 (my Facebook feed has been rife with them all year) talk about how your 30s are a great time in your life because you know what you want and demand it. No more dating assholes! No more stupid jobs where all you do is fetch coffee! No more toxic friendships! AKA, no more settling.

The people who write these things are either looking at their 30s with rose-colored glasses or just have their shit way more together than I do. Because they just make it seem so obvious, like it's a really clear distinction between something being worth your time or not. And it doesn't matter if you're 30 or 22 or 100, it's going to be a constant battle between how you allot your time, energy, money and love to these things.

Most of the people I know hate their jobs, at least occasionally. And sometimes it's hard to determine whether, on the days you hate your job, if it's just a little bump on the way to an awesome career or a soul-crushingly bad match that will cause you to hate not just your job, but your life. It's even harder with interpersonal relationships. Do I love each and every one of my friends 100% of the time? Of course not. But there's a difference between someone who has a tendency to run 10 minutes late to everything and someone who talks shit about you behind your back. It's even harder with romantic relationships because people can get so desperate for those that they'll settle for anyone, no matter how unworthy, over having no one at all.

I sort of go back and forth between where I think I fall on the bullshit-settling spectrum. I don't think I have any supremely caustic components to my life, but I'm sure there are some where I could hold myself to some higher standards. As I approach 30 (and I promise, this is the last time I'm going to write an introspective blog post that has to do with this birthday), I'm going to try and figure out how I can improve, making sure my life is only full of blanket stealers, and not liars.

After writing this blog post, I'm also going to try and get this song out of my head.

Going Public

2013-09-09T22:31:00.000-04:00

Some of you may have noticed that links to my blog posts now show up on my Facebook page. In fact, according to a very cursory glance at my blog statistics, most of you are reading this because you saw a link on my Facebook page (hi friends! welcome!).

A lot of bloggers add an RSS feed of their blogs on Facebook and it seems like to many of them it ain't no thang.

Except it is totally a thang.

"Make blog Facebook appropriate" has been on my to-do list for probably 2 years now. I would put it on my actual to-do list, let it sit there festering for awhile, take a look at my old blog posts, freak out, and then remove it. Rinse and repeat.

It's not like my blog has ever even been all that inappropriate. Aside from some cursing it's not particularly vulgar, and while in my 11 years of blogging I certainly have a history of talking about copious amounts of drinking, even that has slowed down as I head into old age.

I think any personal blogger can relate to the fact that there is a certain level of paranoia that can come with knowing that people are reading your shit. I never experienced this paranoia when I had my business blog because frankly, I don't care if you enjoy my discourse on the difference between the Dow and the NASDAQ. But when you put your own personal stuff out there, you may as well be giving people access to...everything. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had those moments where someone mentions something they read on your blog, and you had no idea they knew it existed and you sort of blanche for a moment before realizing that, um, this is kind of what you signed up for.

Some people learn this lesson the easy way, by having a friend mention a totally innocuous blog post when you didn't know they were one of your readers. And some people learn it the hard way, by almost getting kicked out of business school for blogging (truthfully!) about your program.

Unless you're really adept at keeping yourself anonymous, there comes a point where every blogger needs to say to themselves, "Why am I posting stuff for people to read if I don't actually want people to read it?" What I mean is, it seems totally illogical to have had a series of blogs all these years yet somehow try and preserve this arbitrary distinction between the people who read it and the people who don't. "Real life" friends have always had access to my blog, just not necessarily all of my real life friends. But there was never really a rhyme or reason to it.

So a few weeks ago, I cleaned up my act. I deleted a whole lot of posts, saving some of them in a Word document. I committed to using this space for more appropriate, will-not-get-me-in-trouble-or-embarrass-me content. I also committed to using this space not solely to chronicle my life, but as a place to actually do some real, thoughtful writing. The kind of writing that, if you're someone like me and you need to write to keep yourself sane, is fulfilling. Because even if it's a stupid blog post about why you decided to add your blog's feed to your Facebook page, it's still something you put effort into as opposed to just saying, "here's what I did last weekend."

It's scary, to be honest. I have less control over who reads my blog now than I ever have, because even if only 5 people click over here from a Facebook link, I have no idea which 5 people those are. Maybe it's my besties, or maybe it's some random person that I only met once at a party and will never see again (still, either way, hello!). But it's one of the few ways in which I'm starting to exercise some maturity.

Maybe one day I'll even get to the level of not cursing on here.

Eh. Fuck that.

The Thing About Thirty (part 2)

2013-09-08T23:12:00.001-04:00

Back in July I wrote a post about how while turning 30 doesn't bother me, the fact that it doesn't bother me...bothers me. I wondered if I lacked strategic direction in my life, and that maybe my friends were all freaking out about turning 30 because they hadn't accomplished the goals they had set out for themselves. Whereas I'm totally cool with this upcoming birthday because I never had those big, must-do-by-the-big-3-0 dreams in the first place. So while my personal freakout isn't about entering a new decade of life, it's about the fact that maybe I'm not putting any effort into figuring out where I want my life to go.

Thinking about the future opens a whole other can of freakout worms, because when I actually try to think about what I want in life, I seem to be in this sort of pattern of arrested development, like my brain stopped maturing at around age 25.

As a general rule, my waking non-work hours are spent trying to do every possible fun thing I can find in New York. Bars, restaurants, concerts, events, you name it. This part of me that prioritizes fun over everything else has been relatively consistent since I was 22 years old and first moved to the city. And while I certainly have a lot of friends who feel the same way - or who will at least indulge me and join in on a few of the myriad things I invite people to do - it's definitely getting a little harder to find people willing to accompany me to stuff. Because, this pains me to say, I think I'm getting too old to do some of the things I want to do.

At 29 I'm hardly over the hill, but those around me are trying to settle down, and when you're trying to steer your life towards a spouse, a house in the suburbs and a family, you're naturally going to stop being quite as interested in going to random events, particularly when those events are late, or on a weeknight, or involve copious alcohol consumption, or otherwise interrupt your life as a real, responsible adult. Furthermore, because the 30 year-olds are...doing whatever it is that 30 year-olds who don't go out do with their time, I'm pretty much older than everyone. A lot of the time. In a lot of places. I would guess with a pretty high confidence level that the average age at each of the 5 festivals I went to this summer was well below 29.

So this is another thing that worries me. I'm turning 30 in less than 2 months but I am no more interested in having children or buying real estate than I was last year or the year before or any year before that. Even in New York City, where seemingly everyone gets started on this path to being a "real" person much later than they do everywhere else in the country, right about now is the time that my natural interests are supposed to shift from the irresponsible to the responsible. But...they aren't shifting. This is upsetting because a) what's wrong with me? and b) I realistically only have a few more years at most before I will officially be too old to live the life I'm leading now. I can hold on as long as humanly possible to this Peter Pan-esque dream of being in my 20s forever (or at least acting like I am), but at some point, the jig is going to be up.

And then what? Will I be stuck in this weird purgatory somewhere between being young and settling down? What exactly happens if, in 5 or 10 years, I am still without a family or a house but then I'm also without any friends in the same boat? Do I have to become one of those people who lives for her career and that's it? (Please say no).

Perhaps the most important question is, am I being melodramatic? I'm not trying to sound like the world is going to end on that hopefully-gorgeously-crisp October day when I leave my 20s forever, but I can't ignore the fact that everything and everyone around me is changing. And I don't know yet what my place is in all of this.

For the moment, though, I'm far from alone in being 30 and unsettled. So I guess I'll embrace 29 as long as it lasts, and just see where it goes from there.

Electric Zoo and Made in America: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

2013-09-03T20:49:00.002-04:00

For Labor Day weekend I decided to kick my 2013 festival schedule into overdrive by attending not one, but two festivals over the course of the weekend.

On Friday I hopped on the ferry over to Randall's Island for the first day of Electric Zoo. If you don't know what EZoo is but feel like it sounds sort of familiar, you've probably read about the fact that the festival was canceled on Sunday after 2 people died on Saturday due to possible drug overdose. This blog post is not about that, and while the deaths are certainly tragic and my heart goes out to those individuals' friends and family, I'm going to risk being a little insensitive by talking about how much fun I had on Friday.

I was a little apprehensive about going to EZoo because while I was originally supposed to go with a friend, some circumstances changed and I ended up going alone. I had briefly contemplated selling my ticket and then realized that I would much rather experience the party by myself than recoup my money. So I got out my panda hat, my neon flip sunglasses, and off I went.

Let me tell you something about Electric Zoo, my friends. Listen closely.

This festival is AWESOME. Other. Level. Awesome.

- The music is amazing. It is one big day-long high energy dance party. Wear sneakers.
- The people are fun and friendly. I may have gone alone, but it certainly didn't feel that way.
- The stations where you could refill your water bottle for free had so many spouts that there was never a line (and I would know, because the dancing and the panda hat and the sun led me to be so hot that I refilled my water about 7 times).
- I never had to wait for a bathroom.
- The actual festival grounds are so tiny you could walk from one end to the other in probably 5 minutes yet they still fit in 2 main stages and 3 tents. And those 5 stages? Had music CONSTANTLY. Later in the day I think they started putting 10 or 20 minutes between sets, but every other festival I went to this summer had an hour in between acts on any individual stage. Not having to wait around for more music makes everyone very, very happy.

In short, aside from the fact that it's sort of a pain to get to, EZoo is EVERYTHING. A+, would buy again.

On Saturday morning I went down to Made in America. MIA is a 2 day festival spanning multiple genres that takes place smack in the middle of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, causing road closures that are probably really annoying to locals.

If EZoo was the good, Made in America was certainly the bad (we'll get to the ugly in a minute). Here are my complaints:

- They sold way too many tickets. The overcrowding was absurd and there was never a moment when you were able to walk comfortably, even when you weren't trying to get to a stage. The crowds from the stages backed up right into the food vendors and the walkways. At one point the crowds were so bad I couldn't even get close enough to the stage to be able to hear one of the DJs I wanted to see. The beer lines were a madhouse, they had run out of food when my friends tried to get some chicken fingers, and I read one review that said they ran out of water at one point. Oh, and the lines for the free water refills? Longer than the cronut line.

- The main stage has a STATUE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE VIEWING AREA. My friends and I left during Beyonce's performance because we got so tired of watching her from only a screen. If you had told me I would ever leave a Beyonce show early I wouldn't have believed you. Because...BEYONCE.

- The lineup. Let's say you spent an hour dancing and jumping and otherwise going crazy to Calvin Harris. Do you want to go see Nine Inch Nails after that? Nope! Buzzkill. So for the second night in a row, we left during the headliner.

- The scheduling was only loosely adhered to. Lots of people started early. Lots of people ended early. Macklemore ended 15 whole minutes early which is a whole bunch of BS when it's the artist your posse is most excited about and he only had a 45 minute set to begin with (he was great though, so, still a W).

All of this being said, I will fully admit to The Ugly. Which was that I missed a few of the artists I wanted to see on Saturday because I was taking an involuntary champagne and Fireball-induced nap on the grass. Oops. So that part is on me.

All in all, still a fun weekend. If EZoo comes back next year, I'd definitely consider going again. And next time I'll buy a 3 day pass instead of spending those other 2 days at Made in America.

Unemployment Woes

2013-08-29T23:07:00.002-04:00

I've been going through old blog post drafts and I think I'll start publishing them every so often. I have no idea why I didn't pull the trigger on this one from January 2012 - I probably had more to say. But...here goes! Unedited.

______________________________________________________

Unemployment does weird things to a person. I may not be fully qualified to talk about this seeing as I've only been without a job for 3 weeks, but..here we are.

You can fill your days and fill your days and fill your days and yet somehow, there are so many hours left. You can sleep until almost noon, run all the errands, power through half a season of Mad Men, apply to jobs, call your grandma, and there's still time left.

We all wish we had more time. We fantasize about what we would do if we didn't have these pesky JOB things to go to every day. And then suddenly, the wish is granted. You realize that these paltry unemployment payments don't do anything as far as allowing you the lifestyle you imagined for yourself and so...more Mad Men episodes. But then you wonder if maybe you should cancel your Netflix subscription because, you know, budget reasons. The same reason you don't have a job anymore.

Unemployment is lonely. There are no coworkers to interact with and your communications between 9am and 5pm become relegated to a series of gchats from people saying, "Soooo what are you doing with your day?" The fact that you no longer have an official THING to do all day suddenly makes everyone want to know what on earth you're doing with your day. The irony. And so you spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking and worrying.

All the minor things that maybe didn't bother you before now bother you because a) you have all the time to dwell on them and b) all your problems seem magnified a million times when you're worried about money. Your printer runs out of ink and there's a dire printing situation because the unemployment website wants you to print this information RIGHT NOW because if you don't you'll lose it forever and so you run to Staples and drop $20 on ink and then you panic because that $20 could have gone to something better. Or you go to sleep not having done something on your to-do list and instead of your usual, "eh, I'll do it tomorrow," you beat yourself up over it because WHAT DID I DO ALL DAY THAT WASN'T THIS ONE THING. It probably wasn't even that important but you have this compulsion to do at least one really productive thing every day because you can't possibly tell someone that all you did was wake up at 11:30 and then watch TV all day. Even if you have the worst case of bronchitis you've ever had in your life, you still feel compelled to at least leave the apartment to mail a letter, even though you're going to practically cough your lungs up by the time you get to the top of your 2 flights of stairs on your return.

There's another compulsion you have when you're unemployed - the compulsion to drink. Going out and having a few beers makes you feel like a person again. Because you may not have an answer to the "So, what do you do?" question at the moment, but you can at least still be social and see your friends and let loose. And there's nothing you have to wake up for in the morning so sure, I'll go see this random cover band and come home at 3:30am on a Tuesday night (you do this, of course, with your other unemployed friend). And as unhealthy as the sentiment may sound, the ability to really enjoy your social life kind of makes not having a job totally worth it.

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It's pretty weird to read that now, knowing that this was the first 3 weeks of 11 crappy months of unemployment. While this post doesn't address how unemployment makes you feel like the scum of the earth, and while I would hardly call unemployment "worth it," I think this is a pretty good summary of what the rest of those 11 months were like.

Defending Macklemore (and why all of us, gay or straight, have to look out for each other)

2013-08-26T22:33:00.000-04:00

Perusing Facebook as I often do, I came across the following headline, posted by one of the NYC music pages that I follow:

Le1f just blasted Macklemore for "Same Love"

I had no idea who Le1f was, but the notion that someone was "blasting" a song about legalizing gay marriage certainly got my attention. I assumed Le1f was one of the many sad people out there who think homosexuality is a sin because it says so in the Bible, right there with women daring to open their mouths in places of worship ("Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak" - 1 Corinthians) or, um, the bulk of American eating habits ("The eating of fat is prohibited forever" - Leviticus).

I clicked the link and was pretty surprised to learn that Le1f isn't shitting all over Macklemore because he hates gay people - he's doing it because he IS gay and how dare a straight guy make money off someone else's issues?! He's also pissed because Macklemore didn't donate any of the proceeds from Same Love to pro-LGBT charities.

Photo via

Before I really get down to it, let's address some of the more minor issues that arise here.

1) Macklemore and Ryan Lewis aren't signed with a major label and release all their music independently. While they certainly have a ton of money at this point, artists who voluntarily choose to forgo big name representation are probably at least slightly less in it for the money than others. Maybe he thinks that they wrote this song with the express purpose of making money off it, but I'm not convinced.

2) I did some googling and discovered that Le1f thinks Macklemore and Ryan Lewis ripped off his song Wut in their song, Thrift Shop. I assume you're all familiar with Thrift Shop, so here's Wut, for comparison:

There's a pretty strong horn section here. Just like in Thrift Shop. Are they similar? Sure. The same? No. Is there a rich history of sampling other people's songs in rap music that dates back to the beginning of rap itself so even if Thrift Shop did directly sample Wut it would be totally normal? Yes. Know your roots, Le1f.

3) A day after I originally published this post, I learned from a friend of Lacey's that Macklemore did, in fact, donate some of the proceeds from Same Love to Washington United for Marriage. So that point is totally bunk.

And now, on to the good stuff.

Though my immediate, visceral reaction to reading this slew of hateful tweets (all of which Le1f has since deleted) was one of disgust, I tried to put myself in his shoes before even entertaining the idea of writing this blog post.

As a woman, what I can or cannot do with my own body is a subject of national debate. What if a man, lacking a uterus, came out with a pro-choice rap song? What if he gave not even a single penny from his profits to Planned Parenthood? Would this anger me?

No, no it would not. In fact, it would be make me pretty damn happy. Sure, money to Planned Parenthood would be great, but so is verbal support and awareness. Because we don't live in the kind of society where it's perfectly acceptable to throw your hands up and yell, "NOT MY PROBLEM, SUCKA" when we witness injustices happening around us but not to us. Change will never happen if we only look after ourselves and don't stand up for our fellow man (or woman!). So if a man wants to champion a woman's right to choose even if he is not now, and will never be, a woman? High five, brotha. Happy to have you in my corner. I certainly don't have any poll results to draw from, but I would imagine that there are lots of gay men and women out there who are overjoyed to have a celebrity straight ally in Macklemore. Look at Lady Gaga - some people love her for the music and the meat dress. Some love her for the LGBT activism.

Furthermore, the issue of gay marriage represents so much more than giving people some legal rights (albeit very very important and meaningful ones). It's an issue of equality, and equality is EVERYONE'S problem. And while many of us have been fortunate enough to have never been discriminated against in our lifetimes, it doesn't mean that no one in our situation ever has. Identifying as a Jewish person certainly has different ramifications for me than it did for my grandparents. Am I allowed to just sit back and relax now that I live in a place where being Jewish is totally acceptable, even though not every minority group is quite so comfortable? The short answer: no.

My wholly unsolicited advice to Le1f would be as follows: stop hating on people who are trying to help you. Promoting a message of equality, especially through such a stereotypically un-LGBT-friendly medium as rap music, is never a bad thing.

Why I Hate Chick Lit

2013-08-25T17:20:00.000-04:00

I'm tired of modern chick lit.

As someone who spends 1.5+ hours a day on trains, I get a lot of reading done. I'll read pretty much anything - fantasy, sci fi, historical fiction, biographies, social science books, you name it. I love when people give me book recommendations and very frequently I select my books by seeing what my friends are reading on Goodreads. Even if I know nothing about them.

Sometimes, yes, I end up being blindsided by chick lit.

Here's the thing about it. Chick lit can be highly entertaining, and those are frequently the books that I can't put down, finishing them in 1 or 2 days because I just NEEDED to let the drama unfold. The problem, though, is that I come away from these books feeling dumber. Because I didn't learn anything, didn't feel inspired by the quality of the writing or the creativity of the ideas, and as realistic as the heroines are supposed to seem, I never get the sense that those women are real people.

Frankly, I'm tired of reading this bullshit. I'm not even super well-versed in chick lit because I make a point of trying to avoid it, but I've accidentally or not-so-accidentally read enough over the years that I can tell chick lit from just the first few pages. Yet, like a deer in headlights, I just can't seem to extricate myself from the oncoming horror.

I'd like to read more books about women who aren't awful. Who are smart, nuanced, independent, and yes, flawed. And I don't mean flawed as in "oh teehee I spilled some coffee on my blouse on the way to work so I just artfully tied a scarf around my neck and totally rocked it because it ended up looking faaaaabulous." I mean actually flawed.

After years of reading books by the likes of Lauren Weisberger (who, in my opinion, went majorly downhill after Prada) and Emily Giffin (who, to be fair, at least gave me the inspiration for the best blog post title I've ever come up with in 11 years of blogging), I'm tired of the formulaic heroine who is supposed to be the opposite of your stereotypical damsel-in-distress but ends up being just another cliche.

Giving a woman a fancy Wall Street job does not make her smart.

Having her put on 10 pounds so she is now a size 4 instead of a size 2 does not mean she has real problems.

Surrounding your main character with some vacuous friends - the goody two shoes, the effortlessly promiscuous one, and the sensible one who is actually the main character's closest friend but the other 2 don't really know about it - doesn't mean she has deep, meaningful personal relationships. It means she's a ripoff of Sex and the City.

I've read a lot of books about women in New York, yet I've never seen myself or my friends reflected in any of them. Not because we're all unique snowflakes, but because we're REAL PEOPLE. We're ambitious women who, despite being smart and motivated, may never see our dreams come to fruition because this is real life and you cannot just MacGyver a wildly successful cupcake bakery out of some flour, some fondant and whatever money you have left over from last week's paycheck. We lose our jobs (raises hand, what up 2012) and we don't have a sassy gay friend to barge into our apartments, produce an amazing outfit out of the Forever21 crap we have in our closets and send us on our way to a job interview he magically set up for us. And when I say we lose our jobs, I don't mean we quit them in a flurried, climactic moment of both high stress and clarity about how much we really want that cupcake bakery.

In real life, not everyone wants a cupcake bakery. Seriously. The presence of the bakery dream in chick lit is as ubiquitous as the bitchy coworker who's always trying to take the main girl down a peg.

And it should probably go without saying that in real life, the perfect man does not materialize just at the very moment that we've gotten our hearts broken by some shithead. We get our hearts broken and we drown our sorrows in vodka and then maybe we spend time with more shitheads and often also the original shithead.

I wish we could go back to the time when chick lit was more Jane Austen and less..this crap. Or maybe I should just do a better job of avoiding it. Hmph.