03.30.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

In the course of the past four weekends, I have given my phone number out to probably three or four different dudes at bars – don’t judge me – and I got one text, more than a week later.

‘yo this is alex from the other night.’

First of all, by the time I got the text, it was not only Monday, but it was the next Monday. Like, I had given my number out on Saturday. Then there was a full week, where I went to work, and then went home to Connecticut, then came back, and then later that night, I got a text. And my thought was this:

Why would you even fucking bother?

I mean, I don’t mean to be a bitch, and yes, beggars can’t be choosers, but here are a few things. One, I’m not a beggar; two, I am a bitch; and three, seriously. You take someone’s number at 3:15am on a Sunday in the basement of a bar where they’re playing Madonna’s seminal thinly-veiled blowjob metaphor (‘Like a Prayer’, if anyone hadn’t caught onto that innuendo before). They’re drunk, you’re drunk, you had a fine conversation, they provided their phone number. You get home. You go to sleep. You wake up sober.

You don’t text that person for 8 days.

Why? I mean, seriously, by the time this shit actually rolled around, I had to Google the dude’s phone number, and even then, I only vaguely remembered him, or the conversation we had at this shitty-ass bar. I remembered giving my number out, because I don’t really do it all that often, and allowing someone the ability to contact me at literally anytime is kind of opening the door for them to be the most annoying person ever. Or, you know, to start a conversation and see if you have anything in common.

And I know that there’s the rule, the three-days-so-you-can-look-cool rule, but fucking eight? Eight isn’t cool, eight is frigid. Eight is a new Ice Age. I mean, thank God I didn’t actually like the guy. God forbid I’d actually really wanted to hear from him – then what would I have done?

In all honesty, spent about thirty-two seconds waiting for a text message, gotten pissed, and ordered Chinese food. My course of action doesn’t really change all that much. What can I say, I’m a creature of habit.

But fucking eight days? Eight days.

Men these days.

03.21.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

It is currently 35 degrees outside, there is some snow on the ground, and this morning I saw a grown-ass woman wearing FLIP FLOPS as she walked down the street. She was wearing a down jacket, jeans, and motherfucking flip flops. 

Sure, I wore a leather jacket this morning. But I also am wearing tights, long sleeves, and boots. I’m not wearing FUCKING FLIP FLOPS. 

I kind of thought this shit ended in college – the overzealous late-March Jack Rogers sandals coming out to play, or the dudes in shorts as soon as the temp crawls over 40. But honestly. If you are over 21, you have lived too much life to make these kinds of rookie decisions. Shit, if you’re old enough to read a thermometer, you’ve lived too much life to make ridiculously out-of-touch wardrobe decisions like the 35 Degree Flip Flop. 

And what’s worse: she was flaunting some hardcore, gnarly winter toes. 

If you’re going to whip out your tootsies too early in the season, at least slap a coat of paint on them first. Come on. 101.

03.06.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

It’s March, there is still damn snow on the ground, and I am drinking an iced green tea because FUCK the system. Or maybe because I was parched this morning, and coffee doesn’t quite quench the way you want it to. 

Caffeine enema will have to wait. 

So here I am, at work, freezing because our janky-ass heater can’t hang, waiting to find out who wants to have dinner with me tonight because that’s the way the world works. 

What’s funny is, since I’ve started on this experiment with online dating (ugh ugh ugh I hate that term), I’ve had more success with the dudes who were already in my life before. My Ex (the Ex, everybody has them, they’re more than an ex, they’re The Ex) who more or less would ignore me for 2-3 months at a time in favor of his budding tech startup, the premise of which I still do not fully understand, nearly 18 months after he introduced the idea to me, is now calling me almost every other week, and what’s more, texting me the day after we’ve gone out, like, to chat. 

Meanwhile, precisely none of my first dates have merited second dates. Well, maybe sort of, but no one is tripping over themselves to arrange it. So, really, they haven’t been successful. Mind you, I once dated a guy I met on Tinder for about 5 months, and it was pretty in-depth for the short time it existed, so it’s not a platform thing. My matches have just all been duds. Not all “total fucking duds” but a mix of “apathetic” and “total duds”.

The one good date I had, the guy took my number and never called me. 

Total fucking dud. 

But hey, maybe when nearly infinite cyber doors close, one real-life one opens. 

Right?

02.22.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

When I was in the sixth grade, I got my very first desktop computer for Christmas.

At the time that I received this desktop computer, I was grounded, and therefore barred from using said computer, but three days later, I was allowed to begin exploring my newfound desktop-bound freedom. The first thing I did was to fill my music library in Windows Media Player (as you do). The only music I had was ripped from CDs (a word I knew, but none of my friends did, because I was cool) and most of these CDs were my dad’s, mostly. I had ripped most of the Now That’s What I Call Music! series (this was the revival-series 1-8 or so) and the remainder of my library was one Beatles compilation I’d nabbed from my grandparents’ house and every They Might Be Giants album I could thieve from the bottom shelf of the pie cabinet where my dad kept all of his CDs and cassette tapes.

“Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Ana Ng” were my favorite songs.

About two years later, when I received my first iPod–a Mini, pink (of course)–and iTunes became the thing, and came along with your first iPod as a CD-ROM that you would then install on your computer and never had to insert again, which baffled me, because in spite of having installed the Sims on my computer within literal moments of being allowed access to it, you still needed to put in one of four discs every time you wanted to play. If the Sims had incorporated some of the iTunes magic, perhaps we’d hear more about them today.

Anyway, when iTunes became my main method of music consumption at Christmas during eighth grade, one of the first things I did with it was to create a playlist which I dubbed the Harry Potter Soundtrack (Part One). The playlist was, of course, completely and totally unrelated to Harry Potter and the at all, but was compiled entirely of They Might Be Giants songs.

I know what you’re thinking: why didn’t you think of this sooner?

The all-TMBG HP soundtrack was, sadly, not picked up by Warner Brothers, but I still felt it was, in many ways, better suited than that symphony bullshit they came up with. Please.

The only things I truly remember from the playlist, specifically, were that I included “Pencil Rain” as Hermione’s theme song (ugh) and I felt “Stand on Your Own Head” was an appropriate ode to Draco Malfoy’s lackeys, Crabbe and Goyle.

Contrary to popular belief, I only had a very small group of friends as a child. I know, one would think, with such devastating creativity and innate coolness, I must have had an enormous fan base. You might say I had more of a cult following.

I, of course, burned copies of this opus for all of my friends. As you do.

When I was a kid, I loved the whole Harry Potter series so much–from midnight movie showings (wearing robes or hand-made t-shirts, without fail) to book releases, to preordering, to birthday parties, to desperately writing fan fiction, convinced I would land a deal for a hit spinoff series. I completely immersed myself in my bubble, holed up with books. And They Might Be Giants provided the soundtrack to my life. That they shouldn’t also provide the soundtrack to the adventures of my favorite young wizard never crossed my mind.

And as I watched them just completely kill it for the third time, twenty feet in front of me, playing the Music Hall of Brooklyn, I was thinking about that playlist I made. Mostly because tonight’s show was the entire first album, in its entirety, as well as selections from Dial-A-Song, which included not only new songs, but some old favorites as well, and about 75% of the setlist had featured into the inspiration for the Harry Potter playlist, if they weren’t featured on the playlist. I was standing, drinking a Naragansett tallboy, next to my dad, both of us bopping our heads and taking videos on our phones and screaming the lyrics along. This has been my childhood, my awkward tween years, my still-worse teen years, and my early adulthood. This has been my life–swinging my elbows and bending my knees rhythmically in time to “Don’t Let’s Start”; shouting along to “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).

They Might Be Giants has been the soundtrack to my life thus far. And I got to see them play most of my favorite songs, some of the first songs I ever knew all the words to, some of the first songs I ever bounced my leg to, sitting in my carseat in the back of my dad’s car when I was who-knows-how-young, for the third time tonight. And that was something just so mind-blowingly awesome, so just totally rad, that I had to share it with the world.

Also, this might be the first time since 2003 that the Harry Potter Soundtrack (Part One) has been mentioned. Probably for good reason.

Memo to myself: Do the dumb things I gotta do.  (“Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head”)

02.19.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

Gone are the days when you’ll see my bright and shining face on Tinder – oh no. But, under the influence of rum punch and loneliness, I was inspired to put myself out there on a new platform.

OkCupid, I’ve arrived.

Now, it’s not all bad. Drunk me created a compelling profile, with a nice picture, some funny jokes, and the explicit instruction only to message me if they could provide an interesting piece of trivia about a US president.

You’d honestly be amazed how many people are apparently unwilling to Google “interesting trivia about a US president” and choose, instead, to go with: “Gorgeous” or “Lol nice profile”.

Can you not read fucking directions?

Also, “JFK was the 35th president” and “George W Bush went to college” are neither interesting nor trivia. Get fucking real.

I happen to know that Millard Fillmore invented soap on a rope, and that Taft had to have a custom bathtub installed in the White House because he was too fat to fit in the normal-sized one that was already there. And that Abraham Lincoln was the first president to wear a beard.

THESE ARE TRIVIA FACTS, OKCUPID.

My instructions are firm, but simple.

I’ve started replying meanly to people who also admit they’ve never read a book.

Who the fuck has never read a book? Any book at all. Not one book in their (sometimes as high as) 33 years of life?

Not one book.

Mind-blowing.

02.08.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

Oh, the times they are a-changin’.

And by that I mean I had a come-to-Jesus moment this morning while walking back from buying milk, fighting a vicious hangover, reflecting on some choices from last night. I decided to re-evaluate my relationship goals/criteria/whatever.

I’ve been in this lazy spot lately, something like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, and I wind up just stressing out about whether I did the right thing or the wrong thing or whether the rules matter or if there really are rules at all. And what I realized is that I guess there might be rules, and they’re kind of more like guidelines than actual rules, but I need to make rules of my own. So, rather than just thinking that maybe because I have thirty minutes of okay conversation with somebody in a bar and he’s not hideous we could be something, I started compiling a list of qualities/criteria that dudes need to be all about before they can get at me.

1) they need to actually call me or text me if they take my number, and within the span of 48 hours from initial meeting; if they don’t attempt to make a plan within five days, they’re probz a loser

2) he’s gotta have a job. Like a real job. Like an actual job with a paycheck and a place where he goes during the day or night and maybe has to like wear something unusual, like a tie (actual garment or accessory is, of course, negotiable, provided the unusual article isn’t, for instance, a Dunkin’ Donuts visor)

3) he’s gotta be smart; i.e. has read a fucking book in the past six months

4) he’s gotta be funny/fun/witty/clever/a little quirky (no one I’ve ever dated is not quirky in some fashion; people I’ve had useless flings with have been un-quirky and therefore boring and therefore unworthy)

These are just sort of the non-negotiables, I guess. I’ve been watching a lot of The Millionaire Matchmaker recently, which admittedly is where I got this whole system of non-negotiables from. There’s a lot of shit about “rules” that I’m not 100% on board with, like this rigid system of number-of-dates-before-sleeping-together (not that I don’t think there’s some merit to it, I just also think that some relationships are different, and sometimes things happen and wind up being a lot more than you thought–in fact, there’s a whole Buzzfeed article about one night stands that turned into relationships).

It seems like it might be time for my willy-nilly, freewheeling lifestyle to come to a close.

RIP.

02.06.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

Valentine’s Day is in eight days.

My greatest dread has morphed from spending an evening alone, ignoring the calendar, watching something morbid and bloody–I was thinking No Country for Old Men, maybe–and giggle-sobbing into a bottle of Yellowtail merlot, to fearing a fate worse than death: getting asked on a date by the wrong person.

Now, this is a bit of a conundrum because I’ve got a pretty strong argument that, on this particular occasion, there is no such thing as the right person, given that the right person for me would want to spend Valentine’s Day eating pizza in our underwear in my apartment by ourselves; also, this occurrence would normally be referred to as “any night of the week”. The wrong person would do something stupid, like try to take me out to drinks, or worse: dinner. And, as though that couldn’t get any more revolting, they might try to give me something, like flowers, or chocolate, or a kiss. The whole thing just makes me cringe.

I mean, I might be allergic to romance. But either way, nobody who would successfully get me to go out with them would ever try some horseshit like flowers or candy or singing me a song or writing a motherfucking poem. Honestly, if someone ever arranged some random act of romantic theatrics for me, I think I would drop dead of pure shame.

I’m watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and they’re at the part where he takes her home and then tries to teach her how to ride a motorcycle and it veers a little too close to a Ghost moment and I sort of shivered. Half the reason I end up dating these groty assholes, I think, is because I’m completely repulsed by anyone who even gives the idea that they might have been raised right and might–God forbid–go the extra mile to make me feel “like a queen”. I mean, I get the concept, and  I guess I’d like the notion of being somebody’s queen, but only if that entails being brought Chinese food when I’m hungover; going to a cool concert for a band, consisting of humans playing musical instruments that aren’t powered by an iOS; drinking beers and watching Netflix on Tuesday nights. It would be somebody who wants to watch Bob’s Burgers and hang out in our pajamas. Somebody who never wants to take me to the fucking movies–somebody who knows never to bring me flowers because I’d rather pick them out myself. Somebody who’d bring me a cactus in a pot, maybe a terrarium with tiny plastic dinosaurs, or a slug. Somebody who’d buy me some weird little owl statuette when they saw it out somewhere.

Somebody who hates Valentine’s Day as much as I fucking do. Mostly because every year Valentine’s Day fools me into thinking I want to have a boyfriend way worse than I really do. I mean I guess I want a boyfriend. But more than that, I just want to find somebody to be happy and quirky and lame with. And naked. I guess a little bit naked too.

01.30.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

Alright, now I know I don’t have a perfect life, by any stretch of the imagination.

I have a shitty, annoying job. I make shitty money. I’m single and have really mixed emotions about it. I live in one room, and occasionally I see a mouse or cockroach in the basement when I go down to do laundry or do a shitty job of sorting my recyclables.

But my shitty, annoying job that pays me less money than I actually need to survive, and my one-room apartment that is cockroach-adjacent is in New York City. And, better than that, it’s in Manhattan. And better even than that, it’s in the East Village. One might say I’m living the postgrad dream.

There’s no good way to say this, so I’ll just come straight out with it: why aren’t more of my friends jealous of me?

Ok, ok, ok, I promise, there’s a reason this has come to mind, because, trust me, this isn’t something that crosses my mind on a daily basis. What I mean is, why aren’t more of my friends, who live at home, in their childhood bedrooms at their parents’ houses, in our boring-ass hometown where nothing is open past ten PM except for the bar where my friend once caught a frog and where the owner has been caught repeatedly fucking waitresses in the bathroom. Half of them have jobs that are somehow even less relevant to their areas of study or interest than mine (which I honestly did not believe was possible) and the other half are just still scraping along, trying to find that first gig.

So why is it, when I text my girlfriends’ group message telling them how I got stuck in a commercial shoot for over twenty minutes because I was first yelled at for being an actress fucking around and not assuming the position or whatever it is that the actresses in this particular shoot were supposed to be doing, and then when they realized I wasn’t a part of whatever Cadillac or Nike or Beats by Dre commercial they were working on, yelled at me a second time for being in the way, that I get no response, whatsoever? I was just trying to get to Starbucks to buy myself a tea, and this! The hijinks! The drama! The proximity to stardom (maybe)!

The whole story went unnoticed until about six hours later, when another one of the girls in the group announced that she was going to a WWE performance (performance?) at the Civic Center in the shitty city that our mind-numbingly boring hometown is adjacent to with her boyfriend of five years, and I got the following response: Interesting?

Meanwhile, her WWE tale got like 18 responses and about 3 net hours of discussion.

I swear I’m not a jerk. It’s just, you know. Rockn’roll lifestyle against faint-hearted vodka cocktails over staged wrestling competition. Any suggestion that any of them move down here with me and start getting stuck in movie sets and running into celebrities without makeup on goes completely unheard.

“You’re crazy.”

Humph.

01.27.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

They usually tell you any time you need to make a decision, you should make a pro and con list. And lately, I’ve been thinking I might want to acquire a boyfriend, so I’ll do as ‘they’ say, and make a list of the (many and varied) pros and cons.

PROS

-would be less alone, less frequently, resulting (of course), in being less of a weirdo in general; also, I probably would have to do something about the hair in my shower drain on a more regular basis

-incentive to cook fresh, healthy dinners rather than sustaining myself on egg rolls and tubes of Pillsbury cookie dough (punctuated with venti Americanos and your every-so-often English muffin PB&J)

-a sex life that would involve eventually not needing to obsess over hair removal and not being bloated and whether or not I’m wearing Spider-Man underwear

-having some serious arm candy to roam around the city with and go on quirky, romantic adventures with me on the weekends, (thus meaning I will definitely get way more mileage out of my Met membership), and resulting in a far more interesting Instagram life

-late night antics at sleazy bars will no longer end with disappointment; they will end with me making out with my cute boyfriend on the dance floor and then staggering home together

CONS

-requires me to continue to shave my legs, armpits, and chachi on a regular basis in order to catch a boyfriend

-requires putting up with someone on a semi-regular to regular basis

-requires changing sheets at an exponentially higher rate, resulting in more laundry, and thus a cash outflow

-requires revealing to another human being (at a later date, of course) that I am the kind of woman who goes to the bathroom with the door open while brushing my teeth, although of course only when I’m home alone

-late-night antics at sleazy bars would end with me sloppily making out with the same person every weekend before acting as their human crutch on the way home to then sit in my bathtub while they whine into my toilet bowl and get the tequila shits the next morning

Now of course, the goodness of the good shit does outweigh the badness of the bad shit–for instance, I would, of course, rather have a companion to watch the dogs in Tompkins Square Park than have a bathroom that doesn’t smell like toxic, hungover man shit. My bathroom doesn’t smell like toxic man shit now and that’s not something I’m really trying all that hard to preserve. They always say it’s not good to want to get a boyfriend just because you’re lonely, and I’m not really lonely. I just know that I used to be physically repulsed by the idea of having a boyfriend.

Gag no more.

01.25.2015

Posted on by thegraduate

Alright, it’s 20 days until Valentine’s Day, and that means, obviously, that I’m prepping my body, mind, and soul for the perennial soul-crushing disappointment that is February 14th.

Obviously, the part of me that has to exist in the real world is way too fucking cool for Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday with no meaning, no intrinsic value, just existing for the sake of capitalizing on the fact that people are obsessed with this superficial dick-showing contest of how great their relationships are. Valentine’s Day doesn’t matter. Valentine’s Day has been engineered as a time to do shit that doesn’t matter to prove to someone you might care about that you care about them more than their friend’s partner cares about their dumb friend.

But also, like, there’s the whole thing like, I’m always alone on Valentine’s Day.

And as much as I’m like yeah fuck it I don’t even care Valentine’s Day is for losers bleh, I’m also like I wish I had a boyfriend who was cool and nice and wanted to do cheesy shitty things on February 14th ironically (or maybe unironically, I guess it doesn’t really matter) because it’s just a thing people do. Like, it’s gross and stupid and whatever but it’s something people do. Like posting engagement ring photos on Facebook. It’s annoying, but if I had the opportunity to do it, I honestly probably would.

Maybe I’m just jaded because my Valentine’s Days have been roaring shitshows, generally. High school doesn’t count (although those all sucked too) but my freshman year, I was alone, I think at the movies with my roommate who would regularly have playful arguments via Facebook with her sister who looked goddamn identical to her about who was prettier (“YOU’RE so pretty” “No, YOU’RE so pretty!”); sophomore year, my boyfriend had slipped in a puddle of beer and gotten a concussion slamming his head against the floor and was at home and forgot about Valentine’s Day (the next day I received a hand-made card using my printer paper and my markers reading, “Happy Thursday Day” and some mittens); my junior year the coke dealer I was dating got me a bagel and a bottle of gin (far and away my most successful Valentine’s Day ever); my senior year the crazy model-actor I was dating was in France, and I’m 98% certain I spent the day hungover with my friend after his 21st birthday celebrations the night before.

Basically, if this year anything better than a fucking bagel comes my way, I’ll have set a new record. Honestly.

Let’s just hope this hottie I went out with on Friday pulls through with a clutch shot.

The countdown begins.