If someone breaks up with you they suck and you should call your best friend so you guys can talk about how much they suck. They will remind you of all your ex’s flaws, like when they thought Al Jazeera was a city.
If you haven’t heard back after an interview, follow up, even if you think you’re bothering them. Who cares if you’re bothering a company?
Take ibuprofen and chug water as soon as you start crying or drinking. It will help the next morning.
Buy baby wipes. Have them on hand at all times. You’ll find all kinds of uses for them. Real adults own baby wipes. And the realest adults realize there is no such thing as a flushable baby wipe. You’re going to be paying for a new septic tank if you pull that.
When you reach your emotional limit, take a hot shower. When you’re exhausted, take a cold one.
Text your crush back right away if you want to. Who gives a shit? Anyone who gives a shit is weird and has no business dating you.
Learn how to apologize sincerely—listen to how you harmed someone; don’t defend yourself; take responsibility. Even more important, learn how to apologize when you didn’t intend to do anything wrong.
Voice your expectations. Do not wait on anyone to guess them. Do not get upset with people for not guessing them.
Sometimes you need to quit when things get hard. Don’t do shit you dread if you can avoid it. Don’t stick with things just because you made a commitment if it’s making you miserable. Get out. Life is short. Sure, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s also light everywhere if you get out of the damn tunnel.
The Idea Is to Look Like an Idiot
My father has a rule. He actually has loads of them: Never lean your seat back on an airplane, never stand up during a sporting event or concert, never use your horn unless it is the only way to prevent an accident. Another rule he has is that he will not dance with any of his daughters at their weddings; my sister got married last year and they did not have a father-daughter dance. He himself has been married four times and to my knowledge he danced at none of the weddings. In fact, I have never seen him dance, period.
I grew up, therefore, with the understanding that dancing was an embarrassing thing to do with your body, unless, of course, you were one of the titular seven brothers in the wood-chopping scene of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or you were in West Side Story as a horny, dancing, gang-affiliated teen, or perhaps if you were Cha Cha DiGregorio. In the movie musicals of my youth, of which I watched many, dancing was not just without shame, but celebrated. I mean, have you seen Vera-Ellen’s toe taps in White Christmas? But I understood that normal, everyday people were not to dance.
Especially if you had anything less than a perfect body.
Being a good dancer takes a whole lot of things: rhythm, practice, innate musicality. It does not take having a thin body. That is not a requirement. There are many, many phenomenal dancers who are not thin. But that is not something I was aware of growing up. The most I had seen of a fat person dancing was Chris Farley as a Chippendales stripper on Saturday Night Live in the ’90s. I recently rewatched the sketch out of curiosity and realized that Chris Farley is an excellent dancer. He’s keeping up with fucking Patrick Swayze. And still, the joke is: Ha-ha-ha, what if fat people were good at dancing and people took them seriously?
Growing up, I just knew that dancing, like many things, was something I was not supposed to do with my fat body. For fuck’s sake, some of my thin friends got made fun of when they danced. I was certainly not supposed to.
The thing about dancing circa middle school is that the environment in which it occurs sets you up to feel awful. No actually fun dancing is happening at 7 p.m. in a school gym under the watchful gaze of a vice principal. School dances are both heaven and hell. Movies and TV will tell you that they’re a place to hang your dreams. They’re a night for declarations of love and decampments of virginity. Supposedly.
In my experience, the school dance itself is rarely the site of any excitement. The only thing I ever remember “happening” at a school dance was in sixth grade, in the half darkness of the Nipher Middle School gym when Mrs. Miller pulled Lexi K. (who was “new,” in that she’d moved to the district three years prior) out into the fluorescent-lit hallway to admonish her for grinding on two eighth graders. Frankly, I didn’t even see it happen. I can’t even be sure that she was guilty of this infamous middle school crime. But I found out within minutes via the strong school-dance whisper network. After that, nothing exciting ever happened at a dance that I recall. And there were multiple dances a year! In high school, we had The Hatchet Hop (ostensibly a Sadie Hawkins dance, although that was loosely followed), prom for juniors and seniors and the various people they were dating, and then the Friendship Dance, a dance we shared with our crosstown football rivals before The Big Game. At Friendship my freshman year, I met Karlie Kloss, who was still attending high school at the time in between being an international model. She said nothing to me and talked to my friends for half a minute while I ogled her tiny clavicle. So, I guess that happened at a school dance.
Really, any and all intrigue happened either before or after the actual event. Beforehand, for weeks, you had to worry and wonder about getting asked to the dance. I, of course, did not. But some people did. Getting asked to a dance is a major thing. On the one hand, I can’t imagine anything else so benign as a promposal that I wish to eradicate from the earth with such fervor. On the other, I wonder if my outsize response to them is in some small way a case of sour grapes. I don’t think that had I been asked to a school dance I would all of a sudden find elaborate promposals sweet and not the deranged behavior of popular teenagers with too much time and money on their hands. But I do wonder if I would be less miffed. And then afterward comes the drugs and sex and alcohol. I presume.
The only thing I ever did at a school dance was stand on the sidelines and watch my friends engage in normal behavior. My most generous, patient friends tried to get me to join in, but I had no idea what I was doing since I’d never danced before—and in front of literally everyone I knew outside of my family seemed like a bad place to start. I used to mostly make fun of people for having a good time and take photos for my friends who weren’t deeply ashamed of their appearance. One entire school dance I spent in the girls’ bathroom comforting my friend Abbey about a boyfriend debacle. He was Mormon and therefore unwilling/unable to dance with her, which she was sad about. I remember standing outside of the stall, talking to her, hoping that she would be filled with gratitude for me spending the night with her when I could have been dancing. Although I think we both knew that the reason I was in the bathroom with her to begin with was that I was not really going to dance. Certainly not with anyone other than female friends in small, semiprivate bursts where I felt no one would see me.
The idea of dancing with a guy I went to school with seemed as likely as Tony Shalhoub walking into the school gym and doing a striptease. I think the first time I ever danced with a guy at all, I was eighteen years old and it was part of a school play. One reason I’m still so hung up on this is that it’s a rite of passage, I feel, to grind on a person. Should it be? Debatable. But dance is pretty intrinsic to human connection, if not human romancing. Even bigger than my grievance over not being a part of a Classic Youth Moment, however, is that it turns out that I fucking love dancing.
I know. I was as shocked as you are.
One of my biggest fears about getting older is how much less socially appropriate it is to go out dancing with your friends. People always push back against this and are like, “You don’t have to let that stop you!” But who wants to be the weird forty-seven-year-old in a bar for twentysomethings? Not me. And I’m not going to get into line dancing or square dancing or some other shit that older white people love. I’m not doing it. I do not want to learn choreography. I want to drink two to four glasses of wine and be a little dance-floor slut while “What the Hell” by Avril Lavigne plays.
I do not have any
desire to do a bunch of drugs or go actually clubbing like a cool, interesting young person. I do not want to go to anything that has a line out the door. I want to go to a bar where I know all the words to all the songs and I want to dance with my friends and only my friends. I do not want people (men) to come up and talk to me or even dance with me. Yes, I’ve evolved! Dancing with men no longer is of interest to me; men are, on average, shy and stiff about the whole ordeal, and almost never more enthusiastic or fun than my friends and I are. They seem mostly to be either uncomfortable or aggressive; I sympathize with the former—I was you! I was uncomfortable with this!—and I have no patience for the latter.
Not that I’m getting many offers to be danced with or anything. I go out dancing a lot. I try to go out almost every weekend, and very rarely am I in any way approached, be it to dance or to talk. (This may be in part because I mostly go to bars that straight cis men don’t frequent, more fools they.) I think this is somewhat true everywhere, but I’ve traveled to other cities and haven’t found men as chary as in Los Angeles. The men of Los Angeles stand in groups with the friends they already have, and the normal, kind, regular guys pretty much leave everyone alone. And then you’ll have one or two dickish ones who will follow someone around for the whole night, purposely ignoring any hints of disinterest.
And now I love it. I love being left alone. I love not being asked to dance by anyone. I love being able to dance like a complete fool and have not a care in a world whether it impresses, disgusts, or interests any man in the vicinity. I love that I get to do something with my body that I thoroughly enjoy doing that’s for me and no one else. I love dancing and I wish I would have let myself do it during all of those school dances with friends where I knew the words to every song and men left me alone.
Of course, it’s much easier to say that now that I have the help of vodka.
How to Hate Yourself Enough That Men Will Like You (but Not So Much That They’ll Be Turned Off)
I grew up in houses dominated by women. Not just headed by women, but numerically imbalanced in favor of women. At my mom’s, before we left for college, it was just her, Lena, and me.I And at my dad’s there was my stepmom and sisters Lena and Olivia and Giovana and me, outnumbering my dad and brother Angelo. Also, my dad is not exactly the traditional hypermasculine American dad; he is much more interested in fashion than in football. He likes philosophy and hair products in about equal measure. Like all good Italians, he wears a lot of jewelry and cries easily. We talk often about death and how hot Raquel Welch was in the ’60s. None of my friends’ dads or brothers were like this. I say this because it took me a while to understand how American straight cis men, as a general group, behaved. This meant I came late to the universal truth that the chiller you are the more (straight cis) guys like you. For a while, I was blissfully unaware of the near-universal veneration of the low-maintenance girl.
Everyone in my family talked all the time.II We talked quickly, we talked constantly, we talked over each other in collaborative, rather than competitive, ways.III Perhaps the most illustrative example of this is that Lena and my mom and I used to watch Gilmore Girls and none of us realized that the characters spoke really, really fast. It might not seem like talking is connected to being low-maintenance or chill, but I promise you, how much you talk as a woman and how fast matters. As soon as we’re around men, women are expected to match their conversation style. It’s not like men become more excitable or ask more questions or hedge their statements when they’re around women. Instead, we’re expected to speak more assuredly although less frequently; we’re expected to adapt to the communication patterns more commonly preferred by men.
Outside of my parents’ houses, I was friends almost exclusively with other girls. While I was boy-crazy from the age of about four, I wasn’t about to go as far as talking to guys, which left me with a dearth of knowledge of what they were like and what they liked. I occupied a weird space in my high school because I was fat but also really good at school and a theater kid and the class clown.IV This led me, bizarrely, to be friends with fairly popular girls. Not the pierced-belly-button, sleeping-with-guys-who-drove-jeeps popular girls, but like the straight-As and JV-field-hockey-team popular girls. I was hitting above my weightV when it came to friends. I was the one who very clearly stuck out in the friend group.
When we entered high school at fourteen, my friends—like me—weren’t doing drugs or drinking or having sex. We were all getting good grades together. The first year of high school, I wasn’t excluded from much other than clothing-related events—formal dress swaps, group Halloween costumes, borrowing pajamas for impromptu sleepovers—because the shit we were doing at that point was, frankly, too tame not to include me. We were all getting driven around in our moms’ minivans to play Wii tennis in someone’s basement. My friends were buying denim miniskirts and North Face jackets while I shopped in the adult section of Old Navy and Target for more modest and sophisticated (cringeworthy) clothing to try to hide how fat I was. We were having rapid-fire conversations that consisted of about 85 percent laughter and inside jokes. We were loud and no doubt “annoying”VI and incredibly free.
As soon as guys got folded into the herd, though, my position within the friend group became precarious. I was more of a liability. All of a sudden my jokes went “too far,” my voice was “too loud,” I was “too much.” See, once you’re around men, you’re supposed to modify your behavior. You’re supposed to give them the floor, to tone your shit down. All my friends knew this, and I guess in a way I did too. But while they were willing to demur, I couldn’t figure out how to modulate myself for very long. I wasn’t good at being quiet, at deferring. And I was not hot enough to get away with being annoying. When you start scaring off or bothering men, you become a problem.
Sophomore year, I was still mostly doing okay in the friend group. I was still funny and therefore sort of fun; we were all still in the same classes, too. More and more, my friends grew out of wanting to hang out with just girls; every Friday and Saturday became about doing what the guys wanted to do. No one wanted to hang out and play Sims in someone’s unfinished basement anymore. Now we could be drinking Smirnoff Ices and sitting on guys’ laps in someone’s unfinished basement. You know who you don’t need in the second scenario? Your loud fat friend who is making fun of the whole situation and pointing out (loudly—did I say loudly??) how stupid this all is, how juvenile. Vying to be the center of attention worked just fine in a group of all girls going for walks in the small downtown area of my hometown. It was great for when we were building firepits in someone’s backyard and I was making fun of myself, or when we were sitting in the back of Mr. Warren’s social studies class and I was going on a comedic rant about our dreaded science teacher Mr. Muckerman. It was decidedly less desirable when that group of girls was trying to impress a group of boys.
Around the guys, I had nothing to do other than to make fun of other people for trying to get male attention because I was not getting male attention. Honestly, even tacit male acceptance would have been cool with me. But I was, for a myriad of complex reasons,VII not even getting that. The more left out I was, the louder I got. The louder I got, the more left out I was. On top of it, I was convinced that the guys didn’t like me because I was overweight—which probably had a kernel of truth to it. When I was hanging out with all girls, I didn’t fixate on my weight so much, but now every single hangout felt loaded. I was either in a corner, seething about my station in life, talking shit to whoever was generous enough to hang out with me, or I was doing some obnoxious attention-seeking shit in the hopes that some guy would overlook literally every single thing I was laying out on the table and all of a sudden find me hot, fun, and fuckable. It quickly became apparent that no guy was going to do this, and I started to become bitter and resentful of all my friends who were giving hand jobs during movies and exchanging cheap plush toys for Valentine’s Day or whatever it is teenagers do.
Other women don’t ask you to
be chill, as a general rule, unless they’re in the presence of men. That under-the-table kick of “Be cool. We want them to like us” always felt like a betrayal to me in high school. I resented it. I resented that we were always the ones changing our behavior to fit the guys. I resented and I resisted at times, and it always backfired—most people want to fit in more than they want to make a statement. In high school, I wasn’t even necessarily trying to make a Big Feminist Statement as much as I was confused as to why we had to talk more slowly, more quietly, more deferentially when guys came around. I got the rules, but I didn’t get why they were the rules, and I wanted everyone else to question it too. Why couldn’t guys simply learn how to keep up with us? To talk over one another, but not interrupt? To weave stories together and collaborate instead of compete in conversation? Why were we always adapting?
By the end of sophomore year of high school, most of my friends had pretty much stopped telling me about their lives. By the end of junior year, they stopped inviting me places. It was pretty easy for them because all they had to do was say, “Oh, I thought you were at your dad’s that weekend,” because my dad didn’t really let me see friends. Because he got less time with Lena and me due to split custody, he always wanted us to be home during his days, so if we wanted to do anything with our friends, they had to come to his house, which is understandable, but he didn’t live in the school district—he lived fifteen minutes away, which is a lot to ask teenagers who live down the block from one another. Additionally, there were always young children at my dad’s house, so you had to be quiet, which meant that really only one or two people were allowed to come at a time. Plus if you ever invited anyone over, my stepmom would insist the entire house get both picked up and deep-cleaned, and because you were the one to invite people over, you had to do it. (Keep in mind that Lena and I owned about six items each in the entire house, none of which were in the common areas.) So I would have to clean an entire house of other people’s shit (mostly baby toys) to ask one person to skip going to an event with twenty friends and instead come over to my dad’s house farther away to eat a staid family dinner.
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