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I’ve never understood the compliment “effortless.” People love to say: “She just walked into the party, charming people with her effortless beauty.” I don’t understand that at all. What’s so wrong with effort, anyway? It means you care. What about the girl who “walked into the party, her determination to please apparent on her eager face”? Sure, she might seem a little crazy, and, yes, maybe everything she says sounds like conversation starters she found on a website, but at least she’s trying. Let’s give her a shot!
I think it’s a federal crime parking meters won’t accept pennies. Yeah, government, we know pennies suck. But you made them! You have to accept them! Parking meters are literally one of the three things anyone uses coins for and you decide you don’t want to deal with them?
There are so few nonreligious rituals we have with our best friends. We can marry our boyfriends and we can baptize our children, but we can’t do anything “official” with our best friends, except get matching tattoos of clovers, which no one actually does because who would let a friend do that? So the only real ritual we have is asking each other to be maids of honor or bridesmaids.
I do not, however, throw nearly enough dinner parties. But if I ever do, you will never be asked to bring anything. I believe the potluck tradition of entertaining is the equivalent of a teenage boy wanting to have sex with his girlfriend but who is too scared to go to CVS to buy condoms. If you can’t handle providing all the courses for your dinner party, you can’t handle the hosting duties of a dinner party.
Of course, Nate was there, and he was making animated chitchat across the bar with a briefcase model from Deal or No Deal. She didn’t have her briefcase with her or anything, but people kept marveling about it. Something about having the prop of a briefcase made this model go from simply “hot” to “hot and interesting.” It was like the briefcases were fooling people into thinking all these models were not human display cases but in fact accomplished businesswomen.
If I ever give birth naturally (never going to happen), I will never sit upon a bike again. I’m not very in touch with my body, but I would never do that to my vagina.
The party moved inside, where there was nothing to do but drink. Unfortunately, for me, “nothing to do but drink” tends to mean “nothing to do but get into trouble.”
BOY-MAN MUST FACE THE ADULT WORLD Carter can’t keep a job. His girlfriend left him for smoking too much pot. His dog ran away because he never went outside. He high-fives his African American roommate while they play Xbox. He lives in filth. He sometimes wears his pants inside out. This is the story of how he became the attorney general of the United States of America. THE STAUNCH OVAL OFFICE DAME This briskly paced show centers on our heroine, a tough, highly educated woman in a high-pressure job full of gross, sexist men. She is the very best person at her job, and she is so moral she would
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DAD! MOM! You know that thirty-eight-year-old guy in your office who falls to pieces when his seventy-year-old parents get a divorce? Then Dad moves in and has to learn Internet dating? And Son reverts to behavior he did when he was ten! No? Well, you’re the only one, because there are usually five pilots about this very subject at any given time at every network.
THE ABANDONED SPINSTER CLUB A confident workaholic woman named Marcia or Alex comes home to find her husband cheating on her in her own bed with his secretary. It’s always the middle of the afternoon and it’s always happening in her own bed. I find this little detail especially horrifying. It’s bad enough that it’s happening, but we need to wring out as much humiliation as we possibly can. “You know what would make the cheating even worse? If it were happening in her own bed next to photos of their kids and stuff.” The rest of the series explores her journey to accepting a new life as a
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HOT SERIAL KILLER WHO’S KIND OF LITERARY He leaves sonnets pinned to all the corpses. The murdered prostitutes all have the first names of Jane Austen heroines. The kindly police commissioner’s name is Chuck Dickens. The whole thing takes place in a tough housing project in Newark called Stratford-up-by-Avon. A melancholy English actor plays the lead in this mystery drama, and h...
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NEUROTIC SENSITIVE GUY IS ALSO SUPER UNHAPPY Usually a half-hour cable comedy show. This wealthy L.A.- or NYC-based man, who makes his living doing something creative, is miserable despite having suffered no traumas or having any immediate health problems. If there are kids, they are only invoked to interfere with sex life. The pilot will always involve a child’s birthday party with a bouncy house, or a clown wh...
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“I learned nothing in college. It was really kind of my own fault. I had a double major: psychology and reverse psychology.”
Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled. Listen to no one except the two smartest and kindest adults you know, and that doesn’t always mean your parents. If you do that, you will be fine.
