A girl's thoughts on GIRLS (and Downton Abbey, DUH)

I can't decide which I've been waiting for more impatiently, the new season of Girls that starts on Sunday or the third series of Downton Abbey that started this past Sunday, so I'm going to talk about both. Chime in! (Hey, remember when I was all, 'I don't watch much TV, you guys'? That was great.)

I was hesistant to watch this show. Anything that tries to define a generation can cause feelings of anger, annoyance or secondhand embarrassment when it fails (Quarterlife, anyone?). I'm especially a little sick of shows and movies set in New York City (I love you NYC, but young people do indeed live in other cities too). But this show, you guys. It gets a lot of things right.

 Here's an actual exerpt from an email I sent to a friend:

OMG this show. I'm only 3 eps in but I have to note:

- Falling asleep to Mary Tyler Moore.
- Cupcakes.
- Googling diseases in a towel.
- The stuff that gets up around the side.
- Rambling at the gynos.
- Guys making the girl apologize for dumb shit.
- Dancing to Robyn

For me, it's the little things that ring the truest. Writing something about your friend that you hoped she'd never find- every show's done that. Correcting her that, actually, it's not a journal, it's a notebook- that's hilarious. Some people can't stand the characters and their flaws, but that's what I love about them. That's me and my friends. Perfectly imperfect beings bumping around trying to not to hurt ourselves.

If this show's not your thing, that's fine. There's lots of different choices out there. This is no longer a world where 121 million people will watch the same thing at the same time. I won't deny that the show isn't perfect and I'm curious to see how the criticism at season one will be addressed (or not).

Honestly, I think Lena Dunham is very talented. She's been making videos and web series for years and I think she has a good ear for how people talk and relate to each other. She's aware of her flaws and not afraid to poke fun of herself. I know there's been a battle cry that nepotism got her where she is- along the other actresses on the show- and maybe that's true. Personally, I think growing up in New York City was a much greater advantage since her mother is heavily involved in the art world, not entertainment. And really, let's be real: As if no one else in the world has gotten ahead because of someone they knew. I guess this is where I confess that I got my first job at McDonalds because my uncle knew the manager. Someone else should have hosted those birthday parties and mopped urine off the bathroom floor, but instead it was me. Sorry, everyone!

 I'm interested to see where this season goes.

 

DOWNTON ABBEY DISCUSSION TIME.

Obviously, this is full of spoilers, so scroll at your own risk.

• Let's get the big turkey off the table: What'd you think of Shirley MacLaine? Personally, I'm not a fan (Sidenote: The Apartment is massively overrated), but she was pretty great. Part of me wished she had more screen time, though it's probably good that she didn't or else it'd be like GUEST STAR IN YOUR FACE and that gets annoying. The only part that was a little disappointing was having her as a foil to the Countess meant less Cousin Violet time (Sidenote: I'm surprised more Harry Potter actors haven't popped up in DA yet. Obviously, not Dan or Emma, but the kid who played Seamus could have been a footman, you know? (Side-sidenote: Did you know Mr. Carson is married to Dolores Umbridge? YEP. Imagine that cameo.))
• Edith, Edith, Edith. GIRL. I think I was the only one who liked Edith and disliked Mary in series one and now I'm opposite for both of them (same thing happened with Jack and Sawyer on Lost). I was totally Tyra, you know? ("I rooting for you, WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU.") Part of me HATES that she's marrying the old dude just to say she's married and the other part of me has to acknowledge that it's accurate for the time period. Most people didn't have the starry-eyed, lovey-dovey relationships like Mary/Matthew and Sybil/Tom but rather the at-least-we're-not-alone-kind like E and the Old Dude. Still, knowing that didn't stop me from being all, STOP TRYING SO HARD HE SHOULD BE CHASING YOU UGHHH EDITHHH.
• I can't help but feel icky toward Lord Grantham after last series' affair with Jane. It just felt so out of character to me and a total soap opera wrench thrown in for excitement. I like this series better so far because it's a good balance between the character driven first and soapy second, but I haven't forgotten what's happened. I also thought Lady Grantham telling Mary how much fun the wedding night will be was a little funny considering she once helped her daughter dispose of a dead devirginizing Turk. No one remembers the past but me! Damn Crawleys.
• Of course I teared up over Mrs. Hughes. Of course I rolled my eyes at Carson fawning over Mary. Of course I loved the brassy American maid kissing the shy British footman. Of course of course of course.
• I have to make a confession. I'm totally FREE BATES like everyone else, but I love his jail hair. He looks so much better when it's not polished and slicked back. Like, ow ow OW, double take kind of better. I want him to be free with Anna and keep his hair like that.
• I won't lie, when I first the next series was going to be in the '20s, I immediately went, "Flappers, prohibition and the Crawleys, EEEE!" Then oxygen went to my brain and I remembered, oh yeah, they're English, moonshine means nothing to them. I'm holding out secret hope that the Crawley sisters will take a girls' weekend to NYC to visit Grandmama and will end up in a swinging speakeasy. A gal can dream, right? (If you this appeals to you too, you should probably read Rules of Civility, it's delightful.)
• Best line of the series so far: "You're not popular downstairs, Thomas?" UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR.

Baby's First Lesson In Journalism

Let me tell you about the first real article I ever wrote for a newspaper. Unsurprisingly, this story overlaps with my first ever all-nighter.

Second semester, freshman year of college. After spending the previous semester writing exclusively first-person essays, I had my first real bit of 'news': The nursing department obtained some new training equipment through a grant and I was to cover it. Rather cut-and-dry and boring, but I was a happy little puppy when I left the office, finally with an assignment.

I wouldn't take a journalism class until the next year. All of my writing up to this point had either been MLA composition or free-for-all creative writing. I had always been an okay writer and that was the problem. I could write, but I hadn't considered the technical differences between a seven page paper on serial killers for composition class and a newspaper piece. Don't mistake this for confidence. It was all dumb naivety.

I met with a representative from the nursing department for an interview. I brought five pens and a full blank notebook. And wouldn't you know it, she was just so easy to talk to, like a friend, and so nice. Interviewing wasn't about asking tough questions- it was just talking! Talk, talk, talk, about life and nursing and oh yes, nursing is very hard, my mother is one, so I know, and my aunts too, and la la la, this new equipment is very important, la la la, something something about the grant funding, la la la.

"Oh, and one last little thing," she said as we wrapped up. "Do you think you could e-mail me a copy of the article before it goes to print?"

"Oh." I was stunned. "Um, I guess so?" I thought it was strange, but she so nice that I didn't want to not be nice back. Embarrassing to say I was still concerned with such crap at 18, but it's true.

Deadline was Friday, and as I do when I'm nervous about something I need to write, I procrastinated. I was terrified that if I didn't get it to them as soon as possible on Friday, it wouldn't run, and my nerves kept me from concentrating. After a few sentences in which I announced the nursing department's good fortune, I was stuck. I kept going back over my handwritten notes, trying to extract an extra morsel or two of anything. What more was there to say? They got new equipment, THE END. Still, I knew that I couldn't just hand in a couple of paragraphs, so I unpacked my adjectives. Fantastic! Helpful! Necessary!

My anxiety increased with the hours, until bleary-eyed, I emailed it at 3:45 a.m. But there's no sleep for a worried freshman. I was afraid if I went to bed that I wouldn't wake up for my 9 a.m. photography class. I worked on a class paper until it was time to trudge to the other side of campus. I had never truly stayed up all night before; even at my most insomniac, I still got a few hours of sleep. My ass hurt from hours in my desk chair and my eyes were dry from staring at the computer screen for so long. I didn't drink coffee back then and I truly cannot remember how I went on without it.

It was after photography when I was eating lunch with a friend that the editor-in-chief tracked me down. "We need to talk," she said. "Meet me back in the office."

She started off by slapping on the desk a printed copy of the e-mail I sent with 3:45 a.m. circled. "First off, why the hell are you sending this so late at night?"

"I wanted to make sure you got." I knew that was the stupidest thing I could say as soon as that came out of my mouth. Admitting that I e-mailed a copy of it to the nursing department was also a mistake.

"Never, ever, ever send anyone a copy before it runs. Ever."

Then she went over every error, each eyesore circled in red.

"You wrote out every number. You don't do that. It's 13, not thirteen."
"This sentence is in passive voice. Don't do that. The less words, the better."
"Why are you using adjectives?!"

Eventually I had to admit that I never took a journalism class. She gave me a copy of the AP Stylebook off the bookshelf and told me to study it. She also found something of interest in how the grant was obtained and called up the nursing department to ask a few more questions. I was to come along to see it was done.

One of the most uncomfortable moments of my life was sitting in that conference room with the editor and the nursing rep I had previously chatted like an old friend-- not interviewed, let's get real. I'm older now than the editor was at the time, but I'm nowhere near as tough. She didn't hold back, firing questions with confidence and authority. With the editor, the nursing rep was a different person, defensive and quiet. The only witness to this awkwardness was the tape recorder sitting on the table between them, something which I neglected to bring the first time around (Editor: "What do you mean you didn't tape record the interview?").

There turned out to be no shady business with the grant. We went back to the newspaper office and I worked on the article under the editor's guidance. Around 3 p.m., I finally made it back to my dorm and immediately passed out. I woke up hungry six hours later in complete darkness.

Tempted as I am to only play up my mistakes, I don't think that'd be fair. I was a kid. A trusting, eager-to-please kid, the kind who are pushed over by niceness. Looking back, that editor taught me that the threat of seeming not nice should never get in the way of doing a good job. Unfortunately, it took a few more lessons for this kid to get it.

One thing did stick right away. A week later, I bought my own tape recorder.

How to Replace a Broken Toilet Seat

First, break it. Doesn't matter how. Being drunk helps. You won't remember the details and until confronted with the reality, you'll think it was a weird dream.

Don't replace it right away. There are more important things: brunches to attend, commas to delete, Say Yes to the Dress to watch. The detached lid is as cumbersome as a Novocaine-injected tongue, always in the way, but you put up with it. You even get used to the wobbliness after a couple of days. But upcoming house guests are a good motivator to fix it.

There two options: Call the landlord or do it yourself. The landlord is a nice guy, but you have a feeling that he worries about you a bit, the building's token Single Lady. Mr. Roeper also has a tendency of not saying when he's dropping by and you'd rather not hear him buzzing your door while stepping out of the shower. It wouldn't be the first time.

Plus, when you mention to your most handy-dandiest friend that it broke, in an off-handed way loaded with meaning, he replied "That's really easy to fix."

At Target, when the redshirt asks what size you need, say "Toilet-sized." When he doesn't laugh, just pick one, any one, then take it and your dumb joke home.

Start unscrewing the nuts holding the bolt part of the seat in place. A wrench would be helpful, but you probably don't have one. We evolved to have five fingers for several reasons and here is one of them. Your mind will wander as your fingers move in circles.

You can't remember your parents ever replacing toilet seats. If they did it, it must have been at night, when they did other secret adult stuff that you had to learn on your own, like filing taxes and walking in heels. Or you may have been too busy watching cartoons (a possibility). In college, one of the maintenance crew fixed a broken seat in your dorm bathroom. He teased you for your 12-inch TV and the next week knocked on your door with a massive television he found nestled next to the dumpster. It was constructed during Reagan's presidency and still worked. Even though you can picture him- a bald Paul Bunyan with a hearty laugh who loved to tell dirty jokes- you can't remember his name. This makes you sad.

Quite some time will have passed with minimal progress. Frustration grows.

Enter the wishing stage. Wish you hadn't broken it. Wish you were sitting anywhere but this dusty bathroom floor. Wish you weren't sweating. Wish you weren't so proud. Wish you weren't alone. Wish you hadn't wished that. Wish wish wish wish. Turn turn turn turn.

Stop. Realize the entire time, you have been turning the screws the wrong way. The plastic is warped, but you can pull out the old seat, fit the new one in through the holes, and a minute or two later, the new seat is screwed into place, as if it was always there.

Stand up. Open the lid. Shut the lid. Open it, shut it. Wash your hands, please.

Have a beer, have a glass of cheap wine, have a tumbler of melting ice and sharp gin. Even a plastic mug of Kool-Aid will work in a pinch. The most important part is to stand a little taller.

(Thanks to the How-To Issue for the inspiration.)

I have measured out my life in Popsicle sticks.

It's mid-July. I've been 27 for two weeks.

What have the late 20s been like so far? Well.

You make buffalo chicken dip for the office potluck even though there will be too much food (there's always too much food) mostly so the other ladies in the office won't give you a side eye.

You line up your shoes in the shelves where they belong instead of lying in doorways where Hurricane Andrea disposed of them like fallen trees before blowing out the door, late to work, because tripping of them will only slow down the hurricane and make it angry.

You're still working on your punctuality. You'll always be working on your punctuality.

You buy bright pink lip balm. You think you look ridiculous but a controlled kind of ridiculous, like the temporary tattoos you used to doodle on your arms with a Sharpie when you were 13 and wanted something permanent that you could regret. You never got those tattoos, but you embarrass yourself by taking photos of yourself in public to make up for it.

It's not all buffalo chicken dip and lip balm, pals. Some of the not-so-good stuff that have been hanging around for years are still there, like outdated clothes meant to be dropped off at the Goodwill that eventually make their way back to your closet. You only really make your bed in the winter or when you know someone is going to see it. You cover your chin whenever possible because chins are to you what necks were to the late great Nora Ephron. You know it's not healthy to listen in on other people's first dates in coffee shops rather than going on ones of your own but my god, this guy is never going to get laid if he keeps talking about how awkward the date is going as it's happening.

Each week, a new article becomes the essay the internet can't stop talking about, and lately they've been ones that give me a mild anxiety akin to five cups of coffee. If it's not the usual topics (marriage, kids, and Having It All), it's about the how the youth are in financial ruin, how friendships after 30 turn to dust, or how having a cat makes you crazy. I'm thankful though that I'm not where I was five years ago or so, where it would have pushed me into 10 cups of coffee anxiety. I can take whatever worries the world throws at me and I think that means I'm happy. Or I'm happy because I can take the world's throws? I don't know, but I think I'm okay.

If this was a made-for-TV romantic comedy, I'd end this with something like Just because I haven't fallen in love doesn't mean I haven't tripped over it. I can practically hear Jennifer Love Hewitt saying that. Instead, I'll just leave you with this: I don't have the answers, I just have myself.

And I ask is for Lifetime to let me play myself in She Rolled Hey Eyes At It All: The Andrea Disaster Story. If Joan and Melissa can play themselves, anyone can.