How To Be Generic Girls I Went to High School With Who Are Now My Facebook Friends

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Constantly be excited about something, and express your excitement whenever and wherever possible. “Just booked tix to see Maroon 5 & Train with @caseybebe!!!! Sooooo pumped!!” or “TGIF!! :-)”

Keep a blog. Write three entries and post some shaky iPhone photos of “brunch with the girls!!” and then begin every future entry with “Sorry it’s been ages since my last update! Things have been soooo busy!” Alternatively, start a tumblr and blog about your dating experiences. Call it “Little Girl, Big City” and describe yourself as “just another girl trying to make it in the big apple <3”. Live only by the words of your idol, Carrie Bradshaw.  Somehow get 230 followers and go to a blogger meet-up and drink chai lattes with a whole bunch of other generic bloggers with whom you have little to talk about. Take photos and blog about what a great time you had and about how you have to do it again soon. Do not do it again soon.

Only listen to music that other people listen to, like Adele and Lady Gaga. Don’t listen to anything written before 1990, unless it’s ABBA or The Beatles, whom you only listen to so that you can say, “I LOOOOVE The Beatles” when someone brings them up. Post the music video for Willow Smith’s Whip Your Hair Back and Forth one month after it has already circulated the internet. “Soooo good! =)”

Watch Grey’s Anatomy. Watch Lost. Watch Bones. Watch How I Met Your Mother. Watch True Blood. Have parties with your girlfriends where you just stay in and watch True Blood. Update your Facebook status to “Watching True Blood with @Katie Ferguson and @Renee Hall!” List everything you like on Facebook and do not be ashamed that anyone will judge you for your choices. Under Favourite Books, list The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Lovely Bones, Harry Potter, Eat Pray Love, Bossypants and The Great Gatsby, just so that people don’t think you’re someone who only reads things recommended by Oprah. Under movies, list The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Mean Girls and I AM SO EXCITED FOR THE NEXT TWILIGHT!!! Under interests list “going to the gym, dancing, wearing gigantic heels (so I’m tall!), staying in and reading (lol I am such a nerd), brunching.” Or you could try, “I’m a Libra…pretty unpredictable! ;)”

Shop at The Gap and TJ Maxx, and Bloomingdales when your grandparents give you gift cards for Christmas. Send your girlfriends an email every time you get a coupon for Ann Taylor Loft with the subject line, “So tempting I know…!” Lust after things at J.Crew and Gilt Groupe but rarely buy them. Have no sense of irony.

Have a boyfriend. Refer to him as “the boy.” Get engaged in your early 20s and spend a year planning your wedding. Talk about it to anyone who’ll listen. Get married in a dress from David’s Bridal, at your family’s church, and honeymoon in Fiji or Disneyworld. Continue to refer to your husband as “the boy” or just “hubby.” Change your maiden name and relationship status on Facebook almost immediately after the wedding. Embrace married life by tweeting about sales at Crate & Barrel and weekend trips to Ithaca to visit the in-laws. Tag your husband as often as possible in your Facebook statuses to remind everyone that you have a husband. Realize that now you are married there is little to look forward to but having babies.

Have a Facebook profile picture of you drunkenly holding a mic and singing karaoke, or of you holding a cocktail, or of you and your BFF holding cocktails and microphones, because you are such a party girl and just love going out with the girls and having a good time. If you are already married, change your profile picture to one of you and your new hubby at your wedding and wait for the comments to roll in.

At bars, order Cosmopolitans because you can’t think of anything else to say when the bartender asks what you’re having. Wear strapless dresses and too-high heels and spend the entire time taking photos of yourself and your friends pouting and drinking cocktails. Dance briefly to the one song you recognize (ABBA’s Dancing Queen) and then sit out the rest of the evening because your heels are killing you. Make sure you get plenty of photos of you and the girls dancing so that everyone on Facebook thinks you had an amazing time.

Go to the gym. Hate the gym. Tweet “Off to the gym!” but end up not going because you hate it and all the other girls in your spin class are thinner than you. Stop going to the gym. Start going to Zumba. Tweet “Just did my first Zumba class! OMG SO FUN! I think I’m addicted!!!” Go to one more class and then stop going, realizing that it takes more than doing something once to get addicted to it. Go to Yoga. Tweet, “That Yoga class was amaaaazing! So nice to find my center again :-)”

Say things like, “I don’t go to Brooklyn, it’s full of hipsters.” Make jokes about how no one in Brooklyn takes showers or washes their hair. Confuse the concept of “hipsters” with “hippies” but decide it doesn’t matter anyway. Go out to brunch one day in Park Slope and realize that it’s actually reeeeallllly cool out here!! Make a pact to go back, at least once a year.