Tag Archives: breaking up is hard to do

Dear “The Loved Ones”: High School is Hard Enough (Mitt Romney, I’m looking at you)

14 May

Some things about this trailer are perfect. The music in the first 30 seconds, the boys’ unwashed hair, the way conversations about prom happen at lockers (I got asked to prom standing at my locker wearing an old sweatshirt, and no, there wasn’t a speech prepared, there weren’t flowers or a sign, I knew he was asking me in a half-panic after his first choice had said yes to someone else during lunch).

You know what else is perfect? The fact that Holly looks about 10 years older than her boyfriend Brendan. Eighteen-year-old boys are BABIES, you guys. Are they not drinking milk? Because the hormones in milk are not doing to boys what they’re doing to girls.

And then at 1:28, fake-Lena-Dunham goes all American psycho on her crush! Watch:

THE BRITISH ACCENT. THE “SUCK IT” FINGER. THE HAMMERED TOE. The conjunctivitis eyeliner. And then, because they couldn’t resist, they threw in the girlfight in the prom dresses. Special to Adam Best of Flicksided: while I buy the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reference, I somehow really doubt this ever “meets Sixteen Candles.”

How does this end? My prom night ended when we got kicked out of the hotel room where we weren’t even drinking (and not planning to stay the night, it was just a party thrown by my date’s first choice) and went for pancakes at IHOP and then I was dropped off at a very respectable hour. No one that I was close to lost anything that night– not toenails, nor virginity, nor sense of humanity. Maybe an earring.

What’s with this prom-horror genre? Do we have such a strong sense of prom as an American rite of passage that we’re all, “If they can ruin PROM, then nothing’s sacred?”

Please.

Read on to see how I magically work this around to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s childhood bullying and what it means for America:  (more…)

Dear Nice Guy Who’s a Better Person Than I Am But I Don’t Want to Date

25 Apr

This is one of those posts where you’re either going to hate me or like me more after I tell you what a terrible human being I am. (Here is where you say, Is there any other kind?)

So I went on a date a couple of weeks ago. Nice guy. Wore a button-down shirt to our coffee date. Let me pick the time and place (oh come on, did you expect me to wait for him to do it?). Brown curly hair, brown eyes. Graduate student in history (my undergrad major). According to his email, which was basically an online dating profile: “Hiking, playing frisbee golf, and drinking lots of Twinings black tea are the hobbies I’m most involved with at the moment.” 

Obviously, halfway through the date we started talking about Twilight. He asked me my favorite poet, and I said Elizabeth Bishop. This was the only question he asked me all night. The rest of time he spent answering my questions with interview-ready responses. When I asked why he went back to graduate school, he gave me his “list of qualifications” off his resume, did not ask why I was in graduate school or anything about what I was studying, and then he said, “I feel like I’m at an interview!”

To my credit, I didn’t mock him. Then.

Therefore I was desperate to string my one question out as long as possible, so I said, “Of course, a little farther down the line of favorite things to read…you know, Bishop at the top, but about ten down you find Twilight.”

He hung in there. “Of course,” he said, “that makes so much sense.” Or something like that. The fact that I can’t recall the conversation perfectly (one of my greatest skills in life) tells you pretty much all you need to know about how things were going at this point.

“No, really,” I said.

“Totally,” he said. I nodded. “Oh…” he said. “Really.”

I love talking to people about how much I don’t hate Twilight. You can find just a few of the reasons here. I think Stephenie Meyer writes a nice, clean sentence that doesn’t get in the way of me chanting make out make out make out. And no, I don’t care if it’s with Edward or Jacob. I just think people should make out more. I’ll save the rest of my reasons for when we talk face-to-face. I find it’s a good litmus test, and I don’t want to ruin it before I have the chance to see if you turn red or blue. So I told him that yes, I have in fact read all 4 books, but woefully have not yet made time to catch up on the movies. 

He said— I kid you not— “Well, I guess all this really does is reflect badly on me, that I’m judging something before I even give it a chance.” He said this sincerely. About Twilight. As if the hype hasn’t give him a pretty good idea of whether it’s his cup of Twinings black tea.

I should’ve known: in the email he sent me asking for the date, he wrote, “If I had one wish I would ask that the everyone on the globe have access to quality education considering many of the world’s problems are due to ignorance.”

I really, really hope he gets that Mr. America sash. That’s such a good answer. 

xxo,

MM

Dear Confessions from a Girl who is Moving in a Month

20 Apr

I’ve stopped doing laundry. I haven’t vacuumed in a month. 

Should I even bother to replace the olive oil? What size should I get? How many ounces of olive oil do you use in a month?

I have the strangest impulse to keep buying books. This is my last month of graduate school! I should leave here with a complete library of every book I’ve ever loved and ever meant to buy, every book on my reading list. I should read all of the books I own that I have not read before I am allowed to leave. 

The stacks of paper in my apartment are taking over. I live in a studio. When there are stacks of paper and books on every flat surface, there is nowhere to sit, no other room to go to. I’m surrounded, essentially, by failed drafts. 

On the other hand (there is always at least one other hand, if not more)…

(more…)

Dear Joseph Gordon-Levitt

28 Sep

Dear Joseph Gordon Levitt,

Ok, I have a crush on you from when you were in Brick.  Even though I still can’t understand half the dialogue and was still asking questions throughout the entire movie by the third time I saw it, the nerdy-nerd-bird from Third Rock From the Sun and sweet-yet-dweeby boy from 10 Things I Hate About You had clearly grown up.

Or just gotten a haircut.  I don’t know, you’re slightly confusing, I don’t think your face has changed from 14 to 29.  But the haircut is clearly working for you!

And somewhere in there I read an interview that convinced me that you’re smart and choose smart scripts and that made me like you….smarty-smartpants.

Right! And I was willing to overlook (500) Days of Summer: Not a Love Story But Obviously Still a Love Story with Just a Slight Twist But Hardly Groundbreaking Like The Filmmakers Claim.  Don’t even get me started on that movie.  Yada yada yada it was so different it was new so refreshing…hellooooooo people it was a rom-com with a slightly shifted timeline.  And JGL, how clingy can you be?  She even warned you. She never lied, never said she changed her mind.

(Also: Ikea? Please. The grocery store is sexier. I’ve never seen anybody looking that happy in Ikea.  You know why?  Ikea is like hell but with worse lighting.) And then yes, ok, she turned around and was a total hypocrite because heaven forbid we have a girl who actually doesn’t end up in love with somebody at the end of the movie.  Heaven forbid those stereotypes go unenforced once! Yeesh.

It’s possible I’m biased against the movie.  It was summer.  I was dating the nicest guy ever— someone who would have willingly gone to Ikea with me, for example, to hold my hand against the onslaught of desk choices (ask any writer about the mania involved in choosing a desk. They’ll know).  And I was about to leave for graduate school.  Without him.  And I didn’t feel all that conflicted about it.  I’d warned him! He’d watched me apply! Anyway, I’m pretty sure we watched the movie together and then I cried and told him I felt mean and heartless (because I sometimes was). He forgave me.  I had the decency to feel worse.  But then I felt better.  Then I left.  And we broke up.

Like I said: I may have been over-identifying with the movie.  Or maybe I wasn’t.  Maybe it was just the right amount of projecting my life into fictional big screen drama, because there clearly is such a thing as the right amount of that.

Anyway!  Every other girl in this world apparently caught up with me when Inception was released. Facebook Status Updates July 2010:

“Can Joseph Gordon-Levitt come marry me already?”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me Joseph Goreden Levitttt is sooo hotttt?”

“JGL is super cute! He’s ‘dreamy’! Ha. Ha. I know what a pun is!”

I just saw Inception.  And JGL, your haircut is as compelling as ever.  But your character is about the blandest thing in that movie.  You barely say anything, you’re stiff as a board, you register almost no emotion, including when you find out your BFF is maybe going to kill you all.  You apparently don’t know much about the field you’re working in, and you “have no imagination.”  Including the fact that you can’t dream about big guns.  Ummmm.

Which is fine!  That was your role!  But what was the attraction?  Had no one seen your face before?  Was everyone else as turned off by the clingy, lovesick puppy in 500 Days as I was so that even this was an improvement?  Do we really, really, really just want to see a man with a gun in his hands?

Or do we as a culture have a secret fetish for anti-gravity wrestling in hotel hallways?  If so, the future holds great promise…

Anyway, call me. I’ve got an idea for a rom-com that doesn’t end with falling in love.  It actually will be groundbreaking.  I’ll let you wear the leather jacket from Inception if you want and there will definitely be a song-and-dance number and some crazy-fast noir dialogue.  No need to change what works.

I’ll even put a number in the title to tempt you to the project.

Love,

MM

Dear Seeing a Movie Alone

18 Jan

Dear Seeing a Movie Alone,

Well. Another adventure in the life of being a single, living-alone adult. Or maybe just in being an adult. Or maybe just in being a human. Other adventures to be found here, here, aaaaaaand here. Oddly enough, all seem to have to do with eating alone. We’ll explore that later.

But today! Today, I decided to go see a movie alone. It was a gray day this morning, and a holiday, and so nothing was open: and by nothing I don’t know what I mean, plenty of things actually were open today. But I decided it was a movie day. And I decided that I would go see An Education because nothing else looked good and it is playing at the little indie arthouse theater next to me which is actually just the second floor of a very pink bourgeois shopping center that mostly struggles to contain a massive 24 Hour Fitness. I did not want to see An Education. But the reviews are so good and ugh.

Anyway, both of all of the 2 people I could think of to call were busy. So I decided to do it. I am going to do this, I thought. I am going to go see a movie alone today. It was a brave move, considering. It’s been an empty couple of days here, a bad week last week, a lonely run of nights watching VHS’s in my apartment alone. (Yes! I still have a VHS player! Yes! The thrift store down the street sells VHS tapes for $2. Yes! I did buy Top Gun and Hook and A League of Their Own and The People vs. Larry Flynt.)

So I put on the one dress I own from Paris, because I thought that might help– isn’t going to see movies alone something people do in Paris? Possibly Parisians? Well, David Sedaris does it in Me Talk Pretty One Day and I stand by my choice of dress. And I put on my red boots (you know, the ones that make everything better). I made myself a chicken sandwich with garlic mayonnaise and I put on the radio and I listened to Aretha Franklin sing RESPECT because that was on the radio and I did the dishes and I put on my favorite cozy gray sweater over my one dress from Paris and I tapped my red boots and I almost went back for my raincoat because it was a rather gray day but I left without it (this will become important).

To tell you the truth, I almost didn’t go. I almost turned around and went back inside my little apartment and put another VHS in and curled up in the armchair I had been in all morning. The only reason I went, to be honest, is because I had already started writing this letter in my head, and if I didn’t go, I did not feel I could rightfully write this letter.

There was a long line, and a little theater with a little screen, and it slowly filled up with people as the previews ran their artsy indie preview-selves, as in keeping with the movie I was about to see. And the movie I saw was good and deserved its good reviews and I highly recommend it.

I am not, however, going to tell you to go see a movie alone. It’s a personal choice. And, personally, I like to talk during movies (I know; I know). This is frowned upon in theaters no matter what, but especially so if you are alone. In fact, talking when you are alone is generally frowned upon in most places. And the fact of the matter is, while I still cringed and hid my eyes in the awkward places, there wasn’t a shoulder there next to me to hid my eyes behind (I’m a very interactive movie watcher. Deal with it).

No. You know what? I am going to tell you to do it. Go see a movie by yourself. Whether or not you have someone to go with you. Because, like eating dinner alone, and living alone, and moving to a new city, or learning how to cook, or learning how to play an instrument, there is power in the knowing that it can be done. Perhaps not always with great joy or ease, but it can be done and what’s more, I am a person who can do it (you can too).

And if, by chance, the slightly gray day has turned into a monsoon (the way that only Southern California in an El Nino year can monsoon) by the time you come out of the movie, and you did not take your raincoat with you at the last minute, and you have to run the three blocks home, literally jumping over puddles because they are actually rivers not puddles, while some man watches you and laughs as he smokes a cigarette under dry cover, and you are so wet by the time you arrive home there is nothing to do  but take off everything you are wearing and swap it for PJs and a cup of tea and bless the fact that your windows were already closed— well then, all the better.

Have a cookie while you’re at it, to reward yourself.

Bless,

MM

PS– Look! I didn’t make some lame joke about how seeing the movie An Education was an education in and of itself. Ha! …..Oh wait….damn. So close.

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