Tag Archives: hipsters

Dear Saying Goodbye at Parties

11 Nov

Dear Saying Goodbye at Parties,

I hate saying goodbye at parties. Not, like, dinner parties or whatever. But parties at bars, birthday parties with more then 12 guests, Halloween parties, house parties, New Year’s parties, dance parties, 80′s parties, 70′s parties, disco parties, come-as-your-favorite-literary-character parties, pool parties, beach parties, bachelorette parties, holiday parties, barbecues, weddings, etc.

Any sort of party where I can’t wave to everyone at once and be done with it.

Before you start thinking I’m horrible, let’s review the facts:

1) You might already think I’m horrible.

2) Everyone’s always drunk, so saying goodbye is like herding cats. Or drunk people.

3) This is the thing everyone says, even if they haven’t talked to you once and you only met them AS you were saying goodbye to the person they were standing next to, and even if it’s 1:50 am and the bar’s about to shut down: “You’re leaving? Don’t leeeeeeave. Staaaaaaaay. We’ll have fuuuuuuuuuun.” Thus forcing me to say something mean (it’s unavoidable at that point!) like, “I’m going to have more fun being in bed than I possibly would with you.” or “The only fun you’re going to have is with your toilet. By the way, you might want to pull your hair back now.” It’s good to be prepared. And far away, asleep, while someone else is puking.

4) When you go to say goodbye to people, and it’s late, and they’re drunk, they start hugging you. Even if in normal social contexts, this person and you would never press your private parts together. And then the next person does it because they saw the first person do it and they don’t want to be rude, or something? So instead they grope you. 

5) When I decide I’m ready to leave a party, it means I’m ready to leave. It does not mean I want to leave 30 minutes later after you have engaged me in random conversation about where I got my coat after I came to say goodbye to you. First of all, this coat is four years old, so you’re not going to find it in any stores. Secondly, I’m wearing it for a reason. Thirdly, I feel like you’re holding me hostage. I mean, how can I walk away from a compliment? That’s right— I can’t.

6) But then I have to find something to compliment you on, and you have to shrug it off, and then I have to either insist or revert to mission and be like, “Ok then! Bye!” and look like a total asshole and like I completely 100% did not mean that thing you just forced me to say. And then you’ll remember me less-than-fondly.

Whereas if I just jet out the door, chances are good you won’t remember me at all. You won’t remember whether or not I said goodbye, or whether or not we talked. You might not even remember if I was there. You definitely won’t care that I took off– in fact, you might even blame yourself for being too busy to catch me as I was going. You’ll just be like, “That was a good party. I want Doritos for breakfast.”

And I’ll be like, “That was great! I decided I wanted to leave and then I walked out the door and was asleep 20 minutes later. I am definitely going to the next thing she throws.” 

Love,

MM

Dear Guy in the Coffeeshop

8 Jun

Dear Guy in the Coffeeshop,

It’s super sweet that you like Russian literature. I can imagine that it’s not often you overhear it being discussed in a coffeeshop (although, since you’re in Seattle, visit enough coffeeshops and you’ll run into enough graduate students and literati and you’re bound to find some Cossackophiles* in the pile).

And yes, I sometimes wish that coffeeshops actually were the community centers that we claim them to be. Perhaps they were friendly public spaces prior to the days of laptops and personal listening devices, good for meeting new friends and potential dates. And really, obviously I am asking for someone to start a conversation if I’m going to haul out Nabokov’s Selected Letters and flash it around like some sort of merit badge of intelligenstia. (God I’m making myself sick to my stomach right now, it really is for a research project, I promise.)

And often, I really am so happy to talk about the book that I’m reading, or the book that you’re reading, or the books that we both ought to be reading.

BUT. UMMM….if I am with a friend, and we’ve been chatting, then when you talk to me, you BREAK THE ILLUSION that no one can hear my embarrassing (but highly amusing!) stories that I am telling to said friend.

If you can hear me talking about Russian literature, then you also just heard me mangle the pronunciation of “lyre” and you heard my friend tell a joke about a class she took once which culminated in a middle-aged woman shouting PENIS, which, while an accurate identification of the literary symbol found in the text, was not the rather more gentle answer of “phallic symbol” that the professor was looking for.

None of which is PARTICULARLY a problem, but only because I got lucky. That is tame compared to the things I sometimes say in public and the personal problems I sometimes discuss with friends over coffee. You don’t even want to know what happens when I talk about the time I had whooping cough (I do an impression of myself coughing while naked that would make Jerry Seinfeld want to curl up and die), or hear me analyze what I consider to be the political and social implications of hair removal, and yes, sometimes friends talk about their sexual mishaps over lattes, it happens (have you ever thrown up on a guy’s dick? It turns out, one friend tells me this story about a friend of hers, I tell another friend, she has a friend of a friend who…. everyone knows someone! It’s like six degrees of sexual upchuck! I’m thinking about starting an anthology. It’ll be called, You Really Don’t Want to Do That After I’ve Had a Full Meal and a Few Glasses of Beer).**

And look, I’m a rational person, I know I’m in a public place, I can see how close your table is to mine, but I would like to pretend you can’t hear me, okay? It’s like when you go for a gynecology exam and they give you a gown and a towel. So that your belly button will stay modest? I don’t even know. If you’re going to have your hands in my business, I don’t really care if you see my stomach or exposed elbows. And yet– somehow, that stupid-ass gown (or stupid ass-gown) does help you feel protected, hanging out for an interminable amount of time waiting for the doctor pretending that you always read US Weekly naked as a bluejay while sitting on paper, as if you’re some sort of deranged hyper-intelligent puppy (smart enough to read and yet still being potty-trained. Sigh).

So yes, while I know you can hear me, it’s quite another thing to be confronted with it, and dear god, surely it’s not interesting to hear me go on about whether to cut my hair a few inches shorter (I’m going to), but it’s still none of your damn business whether I actually completed my fifteen minute run this morning (I did not, thankyouverymuch).

And no, I don’t have a favorite Tolstoy short story. But I can tell you that Russian scholars will just as often translate it as Tolstoi, and Mandelstam preferred the transliteration of his name without the “h” that you so commonly see it with (Mandelshtam) and that Gorky made up most of the encounters found in his Literary Portraits. (Academia is a special kind of useless trivia hell and won’t someone invite me to a cocktail party? I can tell you all about Nabokov’s synesthesia.)

And I’ll thank you kindly to forget that one other thing I said about that thing, if you know what I mean.

Love,

MM

*Cossackophiles: what sort of definition would you come up with if that word appeared in Balderdash? DIRTY, RIGHT?

**NOT ME. Mom, just avert your eyes and pretend you never read that.

Dear Twenty-Somethings

16 Nov

Dear Twenty-Somethings,

Hey.  Hi.  Yeah.  We’re adults.  I like to think of us as adults.  I know, I know, bad economic times and all that jazz, who knows for how many years we’ll still be partially (or fully) dependent on our parents–

(helloooo I’m what polite society calls a “poet”.  What impolite society calls “unemployed with hardly any professional experience and definitely without a suit”)

(possibly a “good-for-nothing” or a “nothing-good-for” as I once said in grade school about the boy who was torturing me…

Hi Mike!  What’s up?  You’re probably a perfectly nice human being now, properly socialized into not pushing people down on the woodchips or throwing water balloons in their faces when it’s supposed to be a soft-toss.  Your blog looks fantastic, much fancier than thishere business.  Then again, I hear you make (made? you’re done? retired? go to hell)  a living designing and selling digital icons, so chances are good you know a lot of things I don’t.  Hope you’re well.  Say hi to your family for me. )

Adults: adults wear real clothes to work, not pajama pants or workout clothes, even if they are graduate students and therefore still on university campuses.  (Exception: adults who work at home! Yay!)  Adults do not solely sleep on friends’ couches when they travel– look, if it’s convenient and people you know and love and a nice couch and you can be reasonably sure you won’t find a retainer stuck down between the cushions from 1983, go for it.  If it’s a bunch of guys you just met and they “seem cool” and their house smells kind of bad, pay for a hotel/hostel/shared dumpster space already.

Adults also clean their houses, have tables where they eat (rather than a permanent pyramid of beer cans), and sometimes clean out the refrigerator.  I know I know none of it sounds fun.  On the other hand, all of it smells decent and has the appearance of being able to handle life 60% of the time.

Sometimes I think the grocery store is going to kill me too, and then I remember other people my age have babies.

Entire squealing life forms hanging off of their bodies who are dependent on them for everything.  Just thinking about it makes me want to lie down on the floor for a while like I do when I’m vacuuming and I get tired.

MM

Dear Guys

3 Nov

Dear Guys,

What have your girlfriends been telling you about your clothes?  Hmmm?  Yeah.  You should listen.  You know why?

When you dress well, we get confused and then we want to make out with you on public transportation.

And as the article points out, there is a middle ground between your favorite ratty t-shirt with cargo pants and the perfect suit.  It’s called jeans that fit right with cool shoes and a (lady)killer jacket.

Here’s the thing: we read clothes as code— for your age, profession, success, sexuality, sense of self, ability to tie your own shoes and leave the house in the morning.  If you dress well… well, you just might confuse the social boundaries and find yourself in a whole new pond of fish.  The fisherwoman might think you’re a marlin when really you’re a guppy.  A shark when you’re a platypus.  A rare exotic catfish when you’re a bottomdweller.  Or a salmon.

I don’t really know how insulting I’m being right now, and I’m out of fish names.

My point is not that we should all be shallow (but we are), and we do rely on external signs as we size people up in coffeeshops.  And why not look as good as you secretly are?

Sustainable fishing is never a bad thing (I have no idea what this metaphor is at this point), so why not wear shoes that make her hit on you / try to make out with you before she finds out you’re unemployed and living in your parents’ basement?

I probably shouldn’t be encouraging this, actually.  Cool shoes really are a potent force in the world.  We should all use them responsibly.

xoxoxoxo (literally),

MM

Dear Kindle Readers

9 Aug

Dear Kindle Readers,

How am I supposed to know what you’re reading?  And therefore, how am I supposed to know if you’re smart?  Or shallow?  How am I supposed to strike up a conversation without being able to say, “Oh, I read that”?

(I guess I could try it anyway.  And then try to bullshit my way through it when you say in response: “Oh, really?  You read Everything You Need to Know About Elephants and Your 18th Century British Trading Company?”)

How am I supposed to know if you’re someone I want to date?

I mean, come on, I already can’t see you walking down the street and judge you by the music on your boombox.  Further into our relationship, I can’t walk into your apartment and check out your record collection, or even your cassette tapes, or your cds.

And now I can’t judge you by your book cover?!?  This. is. tragic.  This is a catastrophe for the modern world.

I mean, yes, you probably wouldn’t have spent $189.00 on a digital reading device if you aren’t a so-called “reader.”  And yes, with a Kindle, I too could avoid being judged when I want to read trash in public.  (And sometimes a girl needs to read a little trash. Why else do you think we get haircuts so often and it takes us so long?)

But what about when I’m reading something smart?  How will you know I’m intellectual and hip if you can’t see that I’ve got a sustainable food narrative in my hands?  That I’m scholarly and literary if you can’t see the frayed edges of my well-loved Aeneid?  That I’m sensitive and artistic if Collected Poems isn’t typeset across my book cover?

I mean, seriously, what’s next?  Do I have to judge you based solely on whether or not you have a fixed-gear bicycle? What’s going to happen to all the New Yorker readers when it stops printing hard copies?  Will they have to wear name tags to identify themselves to one another as being fit for cultural conversation?

Will we all stop wearing clothing so I won’t even be able to judge you by the stitching on your jeans pockets???

Say it ain’t so,

MM

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