In life, everyone makes mistakes. Recently, my former roommate Alycia made the mistake of giving me her password for HBO GO, a little website that specializes in ruining what little chance I had left at a social life. After a brief flirtation with the dozens of critically acclaimed and educational movies available for instant watch, I made the mistake of watching an episode of Sex and the City--not ironically, which makes it even worse--and since then, have spend a significant portion of each week wading in the dark side.
It started innocently enough. Now that I'm no longer in school, I have plenty of time to do the things I love: hiking, going to the Farmer's Market and making fresh food, salsa dancing, and chipping away at my bucket list of novels. What I'm actually doing with that time, however, is watching Carrie Bradshaw smoke Marlboro lights as she contemplates the benefits of wearing a diaphragm. As far as television goes, it's not even that great--the shock factor that 'made' the show in the first place is as outdated as its baby-blue UGG boots. However, not one to pass up a chance to flaunt my addictive personality, I've made a point of watching as many episodes of the damn thing as humanly possible, breaking only to refill my bowl of trail mix and occasionally check the back of my calves for leg sores. (The life of a post-grad... they tell me I'm educated. I don't believe them.)
The problem with watching too much of anything, as I have known for an embarrassingly long time, is that it begins to seep into your consciousness in ways that reveal themselves slowly. It never ceases to amaze me how, knowing this fact, I continue to seek out television shows that I KNOW will make me impossibly annoying--for example, the time I watched 3 seasons of Friends and promptly developed addictions to coffee, sarcasm, and layered hair. (I have since abandoned the latter, but have found the first two to be excellent companions to relative unemployment.) After watching The Hunger Games twice in two weeks, I found myself fantasizing about sleeping in trees, and imagining what available materials I would use to make a fire...you know, in a pinch. During the year that Jeremy and I were obsessed with Six Feet Under, I half-expected every phone call to bear devastating news. When I told Jeremy about my new friend Carrie Bradshaw, however, he gave me such a horrified expression you would have thought I'd informed him of my fun new habit of picking the wings off of flies. I told him that it was perfectly fine--I knew it was silly. "Doesn't matter. It's only a matter of time before it starts to affect you," he said--like it was one of those diseases that incubates in your body for months before you know you have it. Like syphilis. "Miranda has syphilis in Season 4," I told him, but I don't think he was amused.
Still, the question remained: how much does television affect my state of mind? It's not as though I've picked up any of the lovely habits that the characters have, such as smoking a pack a day or having sex in laundromats. Still, like Carrie with the cigarettes, I've been living behind the assumption that my addiction to this show is completely under my control--I can stop anytime I want. It's not affecting my daily life, it's just a way of unwinding after serving pasta to German tourists all day. Still, I found myself fighting the urge to order a Cosmopolitan from a bar that specializes in bottles of Bud, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't wear glitter eyeshadow to work. The way I see it, the invasion hasn't spread to every part of my being yet-- it's not as though I've started belting my overalls. And yet--in typical Carrie Bradshaw voiceover-rhetorical-question fashion--I couldn't help but wonder:
Am I pathetic?
It has only been a month and a half since I graduated college. In that time, I have gotten a summer job, traveled to the East Coast, started an Improv class, read three and a half books, and written a symphony. (Well, not that last one, but you get the point.) Yet somehow, given the choice between doing something creatively productive and eating an entire box of Mac n' Cheese, I choose the Mac n' Cheese. Every time. Is this the lovely part of post-grad life--the time between government-funded excursions to Bora Bora and candlelit guitar sessions in my Soho loft--that no one tells you about? They tried, I suppose. About one month before graduation, those of us lucky enough to have accumulated roughly $20,000 in student loans were shuffled into a depressing office for something called an "Exit Loan Counseling Session," which turned out to be about as fun as a pap smear. Still, now that I am actually home and faced with the looming reality of loans, major life decisions, minimum-wage jobs, and entire grocery store aisles devoted to creams that will make me stay "young forever," it's easy to feel trapped. I don't want to stay young forever. Besides giving one the ability to drink six margaritas and still go on a run the next morning, the twenties seem pretty damn wobbly. And pimply. And that's where, despite all that it does NOT do for women who can't afford to blow $300 on a pair Manolo Blahniks, Sex and the City does seem to get it right: the main characters are in their thirties, looking back on the twenties with a mixture of awe and good riddance. At 35, they may be embittered and completely delusional, but at least they know who they are... and honestly, at this juncture in my life, that's something I still have to look forward to.
On an average day, Carrie Bradshaw smokes approximately nine packs of cigarettes, uses her (ahem) WRITER'S SALARY to buy twice that many pairs of shoes, and wears at least one item of clothing on a body part for which it was not originally intentioned. And that's her prerogative. As for me, I have spent the past 4 hours completing a "Food Handler's Safety Certificate" online (did you know that spitting in the customer's face is considered a potential health hazard? And that one should refrain from smearing feces all over their hands before serving food?), recovering from a night spent at Old King's Road, where the whiskey sours are the size of Slurpees, and reading The Blind Assassin on the porch. HBO-worthy? Hardly. And yet, last night--while in the company of an old love, who spent the evening texting his very new, and very pretty, girlfriend--I began thinking about my particular brand of pathetic. Yes, I'm almost twenty-two, and I still do basic math problems on my fingers. However, I am old enough to have an old love--old enough to know better than I did then, and to forgo most inclinations toward bathroom-crying in favor of having an adult conversation. Pity is what pity does, and I've found--quite recently--that the line between pathetic and angsty, though sometimes translucent, is actually quite firm. Pitying myself at this incredibly fortunate and free time in my life is about as effective as hiding the bag of Cheetos in the back of the cabinet in order to "forget them." (As in... not at all.)
Pathetic would have been spitting my gum in my evil stepmother's hair when I saw her last Friday. Pathetic would have been telling my friend's brother, after he told me I had a "lesbian haircut," that he had Ugly Betty braces. NOT pathetic, however, was leaving last night with nothing but a wink and a smile, marching in my front door, and watching the Season 3 finale. At least I don't watch The Bachelor.
Yet.
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