Don't Rain On My Parade

Over the last few years, Facebook (as well as other social media) has become so much more than just a place to share photos or stalk people you haven't seen since 5th grade. It's become a marketplace of opinions, both of the solicited and the unsolicited variety. This is heightened during important moments in sports, TV, current events, general pop culture, politics, and whatever else.

Sometimes Facebook opinions make me happy, like when someone says they just started reading the Harry Potter series and they remark about how great it is. Other times, Facebook opinions clue me in to things I would have otherwise had no idea about - as someone who isn't particularly tuned into the Batman franchise, for example, I don't think I would have ever heard about the Ben Affleck casting selection had people not been (mostly) up in arms about it.

And yet other times, Facebook opinions make me want to tell people to stop raining on my fucking parade.

For every person out there who obsesses over Dexter, there's another person who delights in telling you how they hate Dexter. People will even delight in telling you how they have no interest in Dexter because it seems like it sucks, which is the same as saying, "I have no knowledge of this thing but I'm going to shit all over it anyway."

For the record, I've never seen Dexter, but I've certainly seen this same scenario play out with Breaking Bad, with every woman who happily has her first pumpkin spice latte of the season*, and with just about any other thing that people get excited and vocal about. And it's never in the form of intelligent discourse, it's just in the form of "I'm better than you because I think this thing you love is terrible."

After getting a little annoyed over people who take pride in hating things I'm excited about, I had a mildly disturbing realization: I do this all the time.

I am the asshole who tweets something like, "So, like, there's a sports thing happening?" during the World Series or the Superbowl or one of those other things that literally millions of people look forward to and care deeply about. I am the first person to talk about how lame sparkly vampires are even though I haven't read a single page or seen a single second of Twilight. I do this because for some sick reason it makes me happy to act like I'm above these things and oh, look at you plebians who spend your time caring about such silly pursuits.

Why do I do this? I'm not above sports, and as much as it loathes me to say it, I'm probably not above Twilight either. They just don't interest me, and that's fine. Everyone else's enthusiasm for these things doesn't have any impact on my life, and those people certainly don't give even the tiniest bit of a crap that I don't care about Twilight or sports or Lost or the Batman franchise or any of those other things that I just haven't incorporated into my life because hey, there are only so many hours in the day and no one can possibly be into all the things, ever. Yet I still insist on making sure everyone knows my stance on these things instead of just letting everyone talk amongst themselves (speaking of talking amongst ourselves, let's all discuss Breaking Bad from now until we die, okay? Because...!!!).

Now that I'm aware of what I'm doing and how much it probably pisses other people off, I'm going to try and stop. Because there is no reason and no excuse for raining on someone's parade.

* Do men like pumpkin spice lattes too and are just less vocal about it?

Why I Should Officiate Your Wedding

A month or so ago I was sitting around with some friends from high school, talking, as women our age are wont to do, about weddings.

"One of my life goals is to officiate a wedding," I said.

My friend turned to me and goes, "You'd be really good at that."

"I KNOW!" I replied. And then I proceeded to intensely stare down everyone at the table, as if to say, "When you get married LET ME OFFICIATE YOUR WEDDING." Everyone got the message. And was also pretty creeped out by my stare-down.

I don't have a ton of big life goals, but I really want to officiate a friend's wedding in a major way. Are you reading this? Are you my friend? Are you not yet married? Great. Here's why you should let me officiate your wedding.

1) I'll do it for free! And free is always better than not free. If you aren't planning on having an open bar at your wedding, we may need to discuss some payment in the form of vodka. But otherwise, totally gratis!

2) I am more than willing to become one of those ordained-via-the-internet ministers if you insist on having some kind of official religious person run your wedding. This should show you my full and total commitment to the cause, because if a Jewish girl who works for a Jewish organization is willing to become a minister for you, that's love, friends.

3) Everyone will think you're cool for having a friend officiate your wedding. Weddings are all about showing off how awesome and unique you are, and having a friend perform the ceremony says to everyone, "I have the coolest friends in the world because I'm willing to let one of them have a pretty big role in one of the most important days of my life," and also, "Look how alternative and fun and young I am! The person officiating this wedding is my age!"

4) By far the most important reason - I will write a seriously amazing ceremony. It will be personalized but not inside joke-y so as to alienate your friends and family. It will be poignant but not cheesy. It will be funny but not tasteless (see: most best man speeches that recite a laundry list of the groom's most embarrassing moments, making everyone uncomfortable). I've given 2 speeches at weddings and both got really good feedback. After the most recent one last September, I was approached by a family member who told me how great my speech was, and then said, "It was one of the best wedding speeches I've ever heard. And I'm a wedding planner, so I've heard a lot."

If you think I'm telling this story just to brag, then I mean DUH that's obviously why I'm telling this story. If a positive review from a person who plans weddings for a living isn't a kickass reference, then I don't know what is.

Got it? Awesome. Now, someone go get engaged, pronto.

The Person I Will Never Be

I like to entertain the idea that one day I'm just going to change something about myself. I'll see a friend do something or pass someone on the street or hear a story and think, "This is a thing I should incorporate into my personality." But I think it's time to admit to myself that there are a lot of things that, as cool as they would be, are never going to be part of my persona. Here's a list! (Incomplete, but whatever)

1. I am never going to be someone who winks. This is pretty sad because I'm awesome at winking and if you don't believe me, ask my friend Elyse because I used to wink at her excessively during our 10th grade history class (Elyse also likes when I shout her out on my blog. Hi!). And any time someone winks at me in a non-creepy way I'm all, "Note to self: do this." But I never have because I never think to do it. I should just admit that it's not going to happen.

2. I am never going to look nice for work. I am completely incapable of putting together a really sharp outfit and in the 10 months I've been at this job I've worn makeup to work 0 times. I used to have to wear a suit to work every day and I'm sure I managed to somehow even make that look mildly sloppy. I leave my house between 23 and 25 minutes after I wake up in the morning (showering at night: best thing ever) and I have no desire to add any time onto that.

3. I will never get seriously into yoga. Yoga is supposed to be all zen and calming but zen and calming are just euphemisms for BORING. As many of you know, I went through an obsessive Bikram yoga phase so this might seem like a weird thing for me to say, but Bikram yoga is anything but zen or calming because it's basically 90 minutes of feeling like you might die at any moment. I am nowhere near chill enough for the calming, spiritual type of yoga. I'm the kind of person who watches TV with her phone, her laptop, and a bowl of mac and cheese because if I don't have multiple things entertaining me at once I don't even know how to handle myself LOOK A SHINY THING.

4. Sarcasm will forever escape me more often than I'd like. This is totally baffling because I'm a supremely sarcastic person. But I probably miss at least a third of the sarcasm that people direct at me. And then I go, "WHOA REALLY?" and that person is all, "What? No." I don't understand it, but I've come to accept it.

5. Feminine wiles. Never going to have those. As a woman you're supposed to be able to flirt yourself into or out of any situation but I think I slept through that class in How-To-Be-A-Woman school. Also the one about crying on command. Which pretty much means I'm screwed and cannot get anything I want unless someone already wants to give it to me. Damnit.

6. Whiskey. I went through a phase where I tried really hard to become a whiskey person. I am not. Give me vodka or give me death. Or beer. Or wine or gin or tequila. Or even whiskey in a shot glass or a delicious mixed drink. Just not as something I'm supposed to sip and pretend like I enjoy the burning.

Somewhere Between Bullshit and Settling

Everyone wants a perfect life. At least I do. Perfect friends perfect significant other perfect job perfect apartment? Sign me up.

Obviously, perfect is pretty hard to come by. So in any aspect of your life - friends jobs whatever - you have to accept some negatives. Sometimes these negatives aren't so bad, and these are just the bullshit things we have to put up with in order to have a semi-decent life. Other times they are flat out, deal-breaker awful. If these things are in your life, you're settling. Since my upcoming birthday has clearly had me doing a lot of thinking, I've been spending a lot of time contemplating the line between bullshit and settling.

If you're dating someone who has a habit of stealing blankets in the middle of the night, that's silly bullshit.
If you're dating someone who constantly lies to you, you're settling.

If you work at a job where the dress code isn't as casual as you'd like, that's bullshit.
If you work at a job where your boss berates you for no reason, that's settling.

The distinction, though, isn't always that clear. And even if it is, sometimes you can't walk away from something just because you know you're settling and could in theory do better.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this is something that keeps me up at night (that, along with fantasizing about getting a puppy or wondering how someone can possibly be smart enough to write a show as nuanced as Breaking Bad). I wonder about every aspect of my life and whether I should be striving for something better. All the articles and blog posts I've read about turning 30 (my Facebook feed has been rife with them all year) talk about how your 30s are a great time in your life because you know what you want and demand it. No more dating assholes! No more stupid jobs where all you do is fetch coffee! No more toxic friendships! AKA, no more settling.

The people who write these things are either looking at their 30s with rose-colored glasses or just have their shit way more together than I do. Because they just make it seem so obvious, like it's a really clear distinction between something being worth your time or not. And it doesn't matter if you're 30 or 22 or 100, it's going to be a constant battle between how you allot your time, energy, money and love to these things.

Most of the people I know hate their jobs, at least occasionally. And sometimes it's hard to determine whether, on the days you hate your job, if it's just a little bump on the way to an awesome career or a soul-crushingly bad match that will cause you to hate not just your job, but your life. It's even harder with interpersonal relationships. Do I love each and every one of my friends 100% of the time? Of course not. But there's a difference between someone who has a tendency to run 10 minutes late to everything and someone who talks shit about you behind your back. It's even harder with romantic relationships because people can get so desperate for those that they'll settle for anyone, no matter how unworthy, over having no one at all.

I sort of go back and forth between where I think I fall on the bullshit-settling spectrum. I don't think I have any supremely caustic components to my life, but I'm sure there are some where I could hold myself to some higher standards. As I approach 30 (and I promise, this is the last time I'm going to write an introspective blog post that has to do with this birthday), I'm going to try and figure out how I can improve, making sure my life is only full of blanket stealers, and not liars.

After writing this blog post, I'm also going to try and get this song out of my head.

Going Public

Some of you may have noticed that links to my blog posts now show up on my Facebook page. In fact, according to a very cursory glance at my blog statistics, most of you are reading this because you saw a link on my Facebook page (hi friends! welcome!).

A lot of bloggers add an RSS feed of their blogs on Facebook and it seems like to many of them it ain't no thang.

Except it is totally a thang.

"Make blog Facebook appropriate" has been on my to-do list for probably 2 years now. I would put it on my actual to-do list, let it sit there festering for awhile, take a look at my old blog posts, freak out, and then remove it. Rinse and repeat.

It's not like my blog has ever even been all that inappropriate. Aside from some cursing it's not particularly vulgar, and while in my 11 years of blogging I certainly have a history of talking about copious amounts of drinking, even that has slowed down as I head into old age.

I think any personal blogger can relate to the fact that there is a certain level of paranoia that can come with knowing that people are reading your shit. I never experienced this paranoia when I had my business blog because frankly, I don't care if you enjoy my discourse on the difference between the Dow and the NASDAQ. But when you put your own personal stuff out there, you may as well be giving people access to...everything. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had those moments where someone mentions something they read on your blog, and you had no idea they knew it existed and you sort of blanche for a moment before realizing that, um, this is kind of what you signed up for.

Some people learn this lesson the easy way, by having a friend mention a totally innocuous blog post when you didn't know they were one of your readers. And some people learn it the hard way, by almost getting kicked out of business school for blogging (truthfully!) about your program.

Unless you're really adept at keeping yourself anonymous, there comes a point where every blogger needs to say to themselves, "Why am I posting stuff for people to read if I don't actually want people to read it?" What I mean is, it seems totally illogical to have had a series of blogs all these years yet somehow try and preserve this arbitrary distinction between the people who read it and the people who don't. "Real life" friends have always had access to my blog, just not necessarily all of my real life friends. But there was never really a rhyme or reason to it.

So a few weeks ago, I cleaned up my act. I deleted a whole lot of posts, saving some of them in a Word document. I committed to using this space for more appropriate, will-not-get-me-in-trouble-or-embarrass-me content. I also committed to using this space not solely to chronicle my life, but as a place to actually do some real, thoughtful writing. The kind of writing that, if you're someone like me and you need to write to keep yourself sane, is fulfilling. Because even if it's a stupid blog post about why you decided to add your blog's feed to your Facebook page, it's still something you put effort into as opposed to just saying, "here's what I did last weekend."

It's scary, to be honest. I have less control over who reads my blog now than I ever have, because even if only 5 people click over here from a Facebook link, I have no idea which 5 people those are. Maybe it's my besties, or maybe it's some random person that I only met once at a party and will never see again (still, either way, hello!). But it's one of the few ways in which I'm starting to exercise some maturity.

Maybe one day I'll even get to the level of not cursing on here.

Eh. Fuck that.

The Thing About Thirty (part 2)

Back in July I wrote a post about how while turning 30 doesn't bother me, the fact that it doesn't bother me...bothers me. I wondered if I lacked strategic direction in my life, and that maybe my friends were all freaking out about turning 30 because they hadn't accomplished the goals they had set out for themselves. Whereas I'm totally cool with this upcoming birthday because I never had those big, must-do-by-the-big-3-0 dreams in the first place. So while my personal freakout isn't about entering a new decade of life, it's about the fact that maybe I'm not putting any effort into figuring out where I want my life to go.

Thinking about the future opens a whole other can of freakout worms, because when I actually try to think about what I want in life, I seem to be in this sort of pattern of arrested development, like my brain stopped maturing at around age 25.

As a general rule, my waking non-work hours are spent trying to do every possible fun thing I can find in New York. Bars, restaurants, concerts, events, you name it. This part of me that prioritizes fun over everything else has been relatively consistent since I was 22 years old and first moved to the city. And while I certainly have a lot of friends who feel the same way - or who will at least indulge me and join in on a few of the myriad things I invite people to do - it's definitely getting a little harder to find people willing to accompany me to stuff. Because, this pains me to say, I think I'm getting too old to do some of the things I want to do.

At 29 I'm hardly over the hill, but those around me are trying to settle down, and when you're trying to steer your life towards a spouse, a house in the suburbs and a family, you're naturally going to stop being quite as interested in going to random events, particularly when those events are late, or on a weeknight, or involve copious alcohol consumption, or otherwise interrupt your life as a real, responsible adult. Furthermore, because the 30 year-olds are...doing whatever it is that 30 year-olds who don't go out do with their time, I'm pretty much older than everyone. A lot of the time. In a lot of places. I would guess with a pretty high confidence level that the average age at each of the 5 festivals I went to this summer was well below 29.

So this is another thing that worries me. I'm turning 30 in less than 2 months but I am no more interested in having children or buying real estate than I was last year or the year before or any year before that. Even in New York City, where seemingly everyone gets started on this path to being a "real" person much later than they do everywhere else in the country, right about now is the time that my natural interests are supposed to shift from the irresponsible to the responsible. But...they aren't shifting. This is upsetting because a) what's wrong with me? and b) I realistically only have a few more years at most before I will officially be too old to live the life I'm leading now. I can hold on as long as humanly possible to this Peter Pan-esque dream of being in my 20s forever (or at least acting like I am), but at some point, the jig is going to be up.

And then what? Will I be stuck in this weird purgatory somewhere between being young and settling down? What exactly happens if, in 5 or 10 years, I am still without a family or a house but then I'm also without any friends in the same boat? Do I have to become one of those people who lives for her career and that's it? (Please say no).

Perhaps the most important question is, am I being melodramatic? I'm not trying to sound like the world is going to end on that hopefully-gorgeously-crisp October day when I leave my 20s forever, but I can't ignore the fact that everything and everyone around me is changing. And I don't know yet what my place is in all of this.

For the moment, though, I'm far from alone in being 30 and unsettled. So I guess I'll embrace 29 as long as it lasts, and just see where it goes from there.

Electric Zoo and Made in America: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

For Labor Day weekend I decided to kick my 2013 festival schedule into overdrive by attending not one, but two festivals over the course of the weekend.

On Friday I hopped on the ferry over to Randall's Island for the first day of Electric Zoo. If you don't know what EZoo is but feel like it sounds sort of familiar, you've probably read about the fact that the festival was canceled on Sunday after 2 people died on Saturday due to possible drug overdose. This blog post is not about that, and while the deaths are certainly tragic and my heart goes out to those individuals' friends and family, I'm going to risk being a little insensitive by talking about how much fun I had on Friday.

I was a little apprehensive about going to EZoo because while I was originally supposed to go with a friend, some circumstances changed and I ended up going alone. I had briefly contemplated selling my ticket and then realized that I would much rather experience the party by myself than recoup my money. So I got out my panda hat, my neon flip sunglasses, and off I went.

Let me tell you something about Electric Zoo, my friends. Listen closely.

This festival is AWESOME. Other. Level. Awesome.

- The music is amazing. It is one big day-long high energy dance party. Wear sneakers.
- The people are fun and friendly. I may have gone alone, but it certainly didn't feel that way.
- The stations where you could refill your water bottle for free had so many spouts that there was never a line (and I would know, because the dancing and the panda hat and the sun led me to be so hot that I refilled my water about 7 times).
- I never had to wait for a bathroom.
- The actual festival grounds are so tiny you could walk from one end to the other in probably 5 minutes yet they still fit in 2 main stages and 3 tents. And those 5 stages? Had music CONSTANTLY. Later in the day I think they started putting 10 or 20 minutes between sets, but every other festival I went to this summer had an hour in between acts on any individual stage. Not having to wait around for more music makes everyone very, very happy.

In short, aside from the fact that it's sort of a pain to get to, EZoo is EVERYTHING. A+, would buy again.

On Saturday morning I went down to Made in America. MIA is a 2 day festival spanning multiple genres that takes place smack in the middle of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, causing road closures that are probably really annoying to locals.

If EZoo was the good, Made in America was certainly the bad (we'll get to the ugly in a minute). Here are my complaints:

- They sold way too many tickets. The overcrowding was absurd and there was never a moment when you were able to walk comfortably, even when you weren't trying to get to a stage. The crowds from the stages backed up right into the food vendors and the walkways. At one point the crowds were so bad I couldn't even get close enough to the stage to be able to hear one of the DJs I wanted to see. The beer lines were a madhouse, they had run out of food when my friends tried to get some chicken fingers, and I read one review that said they ran out of water at one point. Oh, and the lines for the free water refills? Longer than the cronut line.

- The main stage has a STATUE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE VIEWING AREA. My friends and I left during Beyonce's performance because we got so tired of watching her from only a screen. If you had told me I would ever leave a Beyonce show early I wouldn't have believed you. Because...BEYONCE.

- The lineup. Let's say you spent an hour dancing and jumping and otherwise going crazy to Calvin Harris. Do you want to go see Nine Inch Nails after that? Nope! Buzzkill. So for the second night in a row, we left during the headliner.

- The scheduling was only loosely adhered to. Lots of people started early. Lots of people ended early. Macklemore ended 15 whole minutes early which is a whole bunch of BS when it's the artist your posse is most excited about and he only had a 45 minute set to begin with (he was great though, so, still a W).

All of this being said, I will fully admit to The Ugly. Which was that I missed a few of the artists I wanted to see on Saturday because I was taking an involuntary champagne and Fireball-induced nap on the grass. Oops. So that part is on me.

All in all, still a fun weekend. If EZoo comes back next year, I'd definitely consider going again. And next time I'll buy a 3 day pass instead of spending those other 2 days at Made in America.