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By most measures, I was never a heavy smoker. Even after seven years, a typical day of home to work to home would entail at most only six or seven cigarettes. This may be why the process of quitting, which I undertook two months ago, has gone smoother than I imagined.
“Hi, this is Sean from Debt Collection Unlimited, or DCU. While you’re shooting daggers at your boyfriend for handing you the phone even though I asked for you by your full name, which should have been a tip-off that this call was of the nefarious, debt collecting nature, let me tell you how your life will change for the worse from here on out.
Now, I’m not saying that mine was a childhood completely free of strife with my parents. For instance, I will never forget the time my mother would not buy me the top-of-the line $250 kevlar tennis racket I had my heart set on when I was 12, and instead made me settle for a mere $180 kevlar tennis racket.
It felt corny and clichéd when our friend came over with a box of my things and tripped over the words “he wanted to make sure you got this.” I didn’t think that actually happened, the brown boxed give back.
At some point, I learned something important: that being ill could dissolve the uncompromising infrastructure of your young life like so many bad dreams. Instantaneously, sympathy! Others to do for you what normally you were left alone to manage! And most importantly, liberty from obligation.
You don’t know why you didn’t get the job. Your outfit was impeccable — very “23-year-old who deserves a job” — and the interview went swimmingly. You talked about your favorite books and your respective hometowns. Time just flew. You were supposed to be there for only thirty minutes but it turned into an hour.
What adult with an IQ high enough to know how to text would choose to text someone he supposedly wanted to meet an instruction that she wear something sexy and choose to make the Y into two I’s?
Obviously, you can’t talk about politics or religion. Those topics are bound to incite some sort of animosity in someone. But with vegetarian and vegan lifestyles taking on more prominent political significance, food may also be off limits as a discussion topic.
I hope I recognize this guy, seems to be a recurring problem of mine. Hope I haven’t been betrayed by beer goggles again. I guess this issue would resolve itself if I quit drunkenly accepting dates but like, no one asks me out otherwise.
Use the Internet and watch it become even more amazing than it already is. Used together with a little improvisation, you can get almost anything you would be consuming back home—music, movies, books, food, clothes. Almost everything. Where I live the foreigners talk a lot about missing good avocados. You get over it.
Because I love her so much, I often imagine that she’s dead. I do it at night when my lights are off and I can’t sleep. I imagine it and then I cry. Huge tears, not just sleepy pillow tears.
While we taxied to the runway, you told me about how you used to have a cat named Tom that would attack your wife in her sleep. You searched through the pockets of your khaki travel vest to try and locate one of your business cards. Your business? Bridge-building. Hence, Bridge Man.
White Girl Problems. Sh*t Girls Say. New Girl. 2 Broke Girls. Girls. I mean, it sounds like these titles couldn’t possibly exist at the same time but they’re all actually the names of current popular Twitter feeds and new TV shows. Judging by their existence, I’d say it’s officially a bad time to have a penis right now.
Just because my parents don’t understand the value of tradition and sharing and humblebragging via annual family newsletters doesn’t mean I should follow in their aloof footsteps. So I’ve prepared a newsletter of my own.
Behold: 10 best farts! 5 coolest celebrity high-fives! 6.5 ways to hernia! 43 best “Rolling In The Deep” high-school choir covers! 3 trombones! With this orderly spirit in mind, here’s this edition of The Superlative Top 10 List of Lists of Things that Are Definitively in a List for 2011.
When I lived in San Francisco, I was the closest I’ve ever been to experiencing a real depression. There was a lot of pressure to make my freshman year of college great and tell all my friends back home amazing stories to let them know that I was moving on with my life, but things were actually terrible.
Have you ever seen a 1,000 CD Case Logic lying on the sidewalk? It’s upsetting. It’s like finding a corpse: someone made this, someone raised it, loved it, fed it, enriched it and, in return, was enriched by it. And now it’s lying here, unzipped, its contents spread over the sidewalk…
In the Observer profile Marie is quoted as saying, “I wrote to express my worldview/subjectivity because it felt then that no one had any idea.” Isn’t this why people write?
Remember that summer we didn’t eat? We felt absurdly large in our size four swimsuits and cutoff shorts, so we starved ourselves. We climbed over rocks and over backseats. We let the summer sun touch our new skin and the summer boys feel our new bodies.
Lines like, “Where are all of my clothes,” and, “I have nothing to wear,” and, “Do you have a black top I can borrow,” or maybe, “Christ I’m fat,” and simply, “Goddammit” are uttered at alarming frequency.
The sound was pure sex. We writhed like we had never writhed before, like a bunch of sexy, sexy snakes. All 500 male bloggers and 25 female bloggers truly enjoyed themselves, letting our minds and bodies melt into one.
I bet you woke up this morning wondering what hell Junie Browning is into these days. If you didn’t, tomorrow is another day. In Junie’s world, though, things are rather complicated. Tomorrow, for Junie, really depends on whether he can make it over the Thai border before someone kills him.
Is Lana Del Rey a ‘product’ that has been put together by larger forces in the music industry to cater to the increased demand for indie-yet-easy-to-consume artists? Or is she an overly dramatic young woman expressing her saccharine emotions?
Rand’s dislike for the phrase “I’m only human” was more specifically a rejection of the premise of the phrase, which is something like “Humans are inherently lazy and lacking sufficient willpower to uphold personally or culturally assigned values…”
Lie in bed with someone at 1:00pm on a Sunday morning. It will feel like five shots of espresso and finding the perfect Internet connection. Here you are! Doing the life thing! And all of these changes are starting to feel a little bit more manageable. You don’t feel the need to grieve every single thing that’s left you.
How can I make you my girlfriend in this split second? I saw your face, and I thought, ‘That’s her. That’s my girlfriend. Forever.’ You saw my face, and you thought, ‘That’s a person.’ The fact that my momentary presence failed to catch your attention strikes me as profoundly horrifying and against the will of the universe.
They seem like they’re into you — on even days, most holidays and when the moon is waning — but on the odd, typical and waxing days, they’re nowhere to be found. Elusive. Vague. Slightly mysterious. Generally attractive. You’d say they’re totally leading you on, except that would be admitting they’re doing anything at all.
New Year’s Eve is a delicate occasion. With the need for balancing the impulse to see as many friends as possible with the constraints of your budget and time, it’s tough to figure out how to make the most of your night. That’s why this year you should just give up.
A person is not a prize. You can’t earn or win them by being good enough, fast enough, smart enough or special enough. You can’t keep them on the mantle to remind you of how good, fast, smart or special you were. They do not prove your worth.
And one by one, the elevator empties; the temptations dissolve and the whispers quiet and there’s just you left, you who set your sights so high, you who is best suited to take this thing as far as it can go, you who wants to soar.
Make sad Facebook updates and tag unflattering pictures of yourself drinking at your hometown bar knowing full well that your friends are going to be judging you. They’re going to be sitting in their grown up apartments with their grown up jobs and they’re going to feel flashes of pity go through their young professional work clothes for you.
Death is a figure so deeply transfixed in our existence that it’s a miracle that it does not readily consume us day in and day out. It should. We should be afraid of death, see it creeping around every corner, hear it creaking up the stairs at night.
Go with the flow. Take your time. Don’t judge your own worth by comparing it to the person next to you. Life is a practice, not a competition. There is no winning, no losing. All you have to do is show up and try.
Signed to Red NY Management, Bradley Soileau starred in the new viral Lana Del Rey music video, “Born to Die,” which currently has over 3 million views on YouTube.
The 2012 presidential election has already become a media circus. The Republicans have debated each other roughly once a day for the past seven years, and the actual voting doesn’t take place for another eleven months.
This thirty-minute show would air either before or after Jeopardy. It would consist of 2-5 contestants running around an urban area with laptops in search of working and unprotected WiFi hotspots. The show’s host will be a Scandinavian bro named Sven.
In Episode 3 of their series we see a different ‘format’ of sorts — this one lacking the cut scenes we’ve come to expect and composed of two ‘skits,’ both featuring Juliette Lewis, who made a cameo in Episode 1. It’s also about a minute longer than the first two episodes, both of which definitely left us wanting more.
When Rayanne overdosed on E at her house party, Angela decided to call her mom for help before she called 911. I mean, I get it. You’ve never seen anyone OD before and you want your mommy but, like, please just get the poor girl medical attention first.
Did you want to immortalize your birth on Facebook with a picture and a list of family members? How about a photo album of your mother’s C-section? Great news, dummy — now you can. Somehow Facebook has managed to trivialize even the act of giving life itself.
I turn to be greeted by a very familiar-looking TSA officer. Why, it’s my old high school rival, Jim! (He’s the dirty dog who stole my best gal and took her to the Homecoming Dance senior year.) “Hey Jim! How are you? You’re looking good, my man!”
I have friends who refuse to talk to each other for this very reason, and that magical spell will only be broken once one of them misguidedly hooks up with another friend and can transfer that awkward tension to yet another in a series of human mistakes.
We need to just chill out about New Year’s Eve. We should just wait until the day of and then just go to whatever plan sounds the easiest to execute. Our world is not going to end if we have a bad night. We won’t be doomed to celibacy for an entire year or get hit by a train.
She was pretty, definitely, but more important was the book she kept in her bag. A girl with a book is innately attractive; men understand that if she can tolerate the act of reading for the sake of pleasure, she’ll likely put up with all manner of nonsense for the sake of a relationship.
No doubt, there are plenty of pleasures to be had today. But is it possible to enjoy yourself, to live through yourself rather than through the ubiquitous corporate Hollywood haze of images, desires, and emotions? Is this a question even worth asking?
No doubt, there are plenty of pleasures to be had today. But is it possible to enjoy yourself, to live through yourself rather than through the ubiquitous corporate Hollywood haze of images, desires, and emotions? Is this a question even worth asking?
Already the air around me feels different. If you are a secular adult and you want to know limbo, stay in New York City for Christmas.
They foster annoying internet debate over what’s missing. Or worse, smarmy smug snarkers will share it with self-congratulatory asides about how they like the thing that’s missing the best. Of course, things are going to be missing from something that is only five things. There are more than five things in the world!
If those insane divas the Mayans are right, the world is totes gonna end in 2012, which is really…annoying. I don’t know about you guys but I was looking forward to getting a dog and a boyfriend and buying an expensive leather jacket or something. But now I can’t because the Mayans said so. Cool!
Jack Keroucat. Leopardo Dicatrio. Nelly Purrtado. Pawl Walker. John Cougar Melloncat. Hillary Muff. Feline Dion.
Because you’ve never left smudged fingerprints on the walls, and you’ve never hidden a report card in your pillowcase, and you’ve never sat in the driveway waiting for some boy to pick you up, some boy whose name you’ll forget in five years.
