When putting my 30 before 30 list together, I intentionally made the goals as doable as possible. I could’ve easily written “get published in The New York Times” instead of “submit an essay,” but I’m a realist who knew that my only narrative writing experience was a tiny, self-centered blog read by my parents and a handful of supportive friends. An average blog post would get one to two hundred views, tops—one hundred of which were just my mom refreshing the page. All in all, getting my actual writing published in The New York Times seemed impossible and completely out of my hands. Submitting, though, that was something within my control. I attached my too-personal story to the body of an email, constructed a short message, and hit send from a small window-side table at Yaboo.
I felt accomplished and ready to return to work with the added confidence that comes with completing a goal you set out to do.
“Where were you yesterday?” Jerry asked when I came in.
“I took a period day,” I told him. And in a way, I kind of did. I put a period on submitting to The New York Times, a period on my unrequited relationship with Kevin, and a period on my frustration with work. A big bloody period.
Almost a month to the day later, Daniel Jones, the elusive editor of the Modern Love column, sent me an email. It was short:
This is a sweet, funny, and well-written essay. I’d like to work with you on it, if it’s still available. At the end, you say you’re leaving the country. Are you still away, and if so, where? Thanks for sending your writing my way.
I read that email fifteen times before it sunk in. “I’d like to work with you on it.” This felt better than when Otto wrote me a song, Erez kissed my face, and Carl greeted me at the airport, combined. A man, a stranger, an editor liked my writing. It was the cracked door needed to believe that maybe I could be a real writer.
* * *
STRANGERS
If someone doesn’t know you, but takes the time to give you their heartfelt opinion in person, you should listen. Strangers tend to be the most honest because they don’t have anything invested in your relationship.
CHILDREN
Children have not yet been marred by the rigidly cloaked world of adult etiquette, making them brutally honest. If you’re working on something, run it by a child first! Unless you’re, like, opening your own dildo factory, then maybe wait until they’re in middle school—the age kids learn about sex and dildos these days, it seems.
SUPERVISORS
People who are above you in the job food chain tend to give you a good evaluation of things. That is, if they’re good at their job. If they’re bad at their job, then they’re probably going to lie and manipulate you into a little bowl of jelly to delicately place at the foot of their hollow throne.
FAMILY
This is very dependent on the type of family. If your family is like my mom, then their opinion will cut into you with sharpened edges of brutal honesty. You’ll always know what your harshest critic is thinking, and that’s invaluable. If your family is like my dad, then everything you create exists in a vacuum of magic. You’ll have a hard time deciphering whether what you’re doing is truly magnificent or not, but your confidence will balloon into an indestructible bubble of light, ideas, and creativity.
SIGNIFICANT OTHERS
Usually, people who are trying to have sex with you are not going to give you a clear picture of their opinion and that’s fine, they shouldn’t. It’s very dangerous to seek the acceptance of your significant other. Just use them for body warmth, intellectual conversation, and procreating—if that’s something you’re into.
THE INTERNET
The internet is a diseased tumor growing inside of the colon of a murderous hobgoblin. The opinions there might be benign or malignant, but either way, you should cut them out of your life as quickly as possible.
* * *
My essay1 was published Sunday, April 7, 2013 and it changed my life. It really did. I never actually thought that anyone, besides my parents, wanted to read my writing—let alone pay money for it. I simply sent that essay to a vague address to check a number off my to-do list, not because I thought it’d get published.
As with all life-changing experiences, after the excitement died down I was left with the lessons. Here are the main ones:
• The things you are most scared to share are the ones that are most compelling—I guess that’s why gossip mags are so popular.
• It’ll take five to six edits (minimum) before a story is ready for eyeballs. Edits are tedious, but they are also the difference between a hobbyist and a writer.
• If you don’t have closure on a story in your life, write it for yourself. Force that closure with words and jokes typed onto a page.
• Some stories take years to live and only a couple of pages to tell.
• You may think you’ve reached the end of a story only to learn it’s the foreword to a bigger, better story.
• Sometimes, taking a “personal” day from a job can change the course of your career better than any eighteen-hour workday could ever hope to.
• Never censor yourself, and fuck anyone who tries to censor you.
Addendum: The day the article came out, Kevin went to Delilah’s in Chicago with four of his friends. One friend, Danny, a red-faced triplet with a swimmer’s body and a youthful demeanor, did a dramatic reading of the article for the entire table. The other friends leaned in to catch enough lines to use as ammunition against Kevin. Lucas, who is now a lawyer with a chiseled jaw and shaved head, drank a beer next to Danny. I didn’t know Lucas at the time, but I’d be at his wedding three years later. Jahd was there too; his real name is John but everyone calls him Jahd. He’s a soft-spoken sweetie who gets animated about the state of the world, probably because he ditched normal society for an isolated small-town farm life. Another friend of Kevin’s, Sam, sat across from Danny, sipping a bourbon and soda. Sam has brown eyes, a freckle on the bridge of his nose, and a brilliant mind. Remember him.
11
LEARN TO DRINK
I’ve come to understand that there aren’t enough dangerous situations and idiotic mistakes in the world to get me to stop drinking. I may have a problem, but it’s not something that really needs to be dealt with until my thirties, I don’t think. My complicated relationship with alcohol stems from the fact that there’s no such thing as alcoholism in Russia; drinking is just a natural way to keep warm and sane. That being said, my drinking has slowed down in the past few years, and I’ve finally gotten a handle on how to do it properly.
Before teaching you how to drink, I should level the playing field. (Parents, you can skip to the next chapter now.) In no particular order, here are the most embarrassing things I’ve done while drunk:
MADE OUT WITH A COWORKER
You know all about this one, so I won’t get into it.
TOOK A BATH
My junior year of college, my boyfriend at the time, Jason, a kind engineering student who was built like a tree, and shy like one too, threw a party at his off-campus house, the creatively named Campus View Apartments.
While friends were sipping on Natty Lights and sugary rums, I was doing vodka shots (and immediately throwing them up in the bathroom). This was the year I desperately tried to live up to my ethnic stereotype.
When the party began to pick up speed, I went into Jason’s bathroom and ran a bath. As the hot water filled the tub, I added some shampoo—poor girl’s bubble bath—and quietly slipped in. I was wearing light blue jeans, a free ResLife tee under a Mizzou hoodie, and ankle-high socks. My eyes shut as the warm water enveloped my fully clothed body. “If Jason doesn’t find me within the hour, I’m breaking up with him,” I told the fading bubbles. Jason found me twenty minutes later, my eyeliner running down to my collar, my clothes soggy. He leaned in to check if I was still breathing and I pulled him into the bath with me. Later he asked if that was some sort of breakdown. I wonder if he tells his new girlfriends
this story.
FELL ASLEEP … ON THE STREET
A few months into my new life in Brooklyn, I got invited to a Mucca Pazza show. If you did not come of age in Chicago during the mid-2000s then you might’ve missed out on Mucca Pazza—a still very-much active thirty-piece punk-circus marching band. One of the thirtyish members in the band used to be a security guard at my high school. Let’s call him Kent. He had an odd gait from years of back problems, and told me dirty stories when there were no teachers around. It felt incorrect, but fun too.
One day, I accidentally left my notebook at his security stand. When I came to pick it up the next day, “YOU ARE A GODDESS” was scribbled on the back page in Kent’s distinct handwriting.
A few months after he was hired, a rumor that Kent was inappropriate with the students spread through the hallways, ultimately leading to his dismissal. I was furious. The other girls didn’t appreciate his hungry glares like I did. I suspiciously eyed all my thin, blond classmates. Attention came so easy to them that they had the luxury of choosing what kind they wanted—Kent did not make the cut.
Kent texted me months after he’d been fired to invite me to a Mucca Pazza show. Yes, he had my number. “He’s harmless,” I told my best friend Lauren while looking for the perfect outfit, vagina-deep in her closet. It was the coolest thing to happen to me as a high schooler.
We left our crystal suburban nest and ventured into Chicago to watch Mucca Pazza. They blew our minds. They were big, loud, and unapologetic. It was the most joyous concert I’ve ever been to.
I saw them twice more in college. And one last time in Brooklyn, shortly after I’d moved. I went to the show alone and spent most of the concert drinking heavily to prove to Kent how adult I’d become. I danced with middle-aged cheerleaders and yelled “Hi” to Kent every time he looked my way. He had more character to his face; it didn’t seem like life was too easy for him. At the end of the night, I stayed back and hung out with the entire marching band.
“Can you believe it?” Kent asked them. “I’ve known this girl since she was fifteen!”
At a certain point, Kent and I left the Knitting Factory, walked around the corner to the Church of the Annunciation, and sat on a stoop to catch up. He pulled out a joint and asked if I wanted some. “Why not,” I answered. Grown-up Marina is fuuuuun and not scared of drugs. I took a hit, and my chest caught on fire. Everything slowed down. It became painfully evident how far I was from my apartment and that we were all going to die one day. Death. Death. Death. Kent took another hit and then turned to me, “You want to make out a little?”
I laughed. What a preposterous idea. “You’re married,” I said, confused. This was at a time when I thought married men were penis-less nymphs who only had love for their wives.1
“My wife and I have an agreement,” he told me. I laughed again and hailed a cab. As the car pulled up, Kent remained on the stoop, possibly emasculated. But it’s okay, I’m a Goddess and us Goddesses can do whatever the fuck we want.
This was back when you had to give cabs in New York directions to where you were going, a practice made complicated by the fact that I didn’t have a smartphone. I was too new, stoned, and drunk to know the first thing about where to go. So I just repeated Fort Greene until something looked familiar enough to barrel roll out of the cab. The last thing I remember is seeing a brownstone stoop that, to my fuzzy mind, looked like my apartment. (I didn’t live in a brownstone, nor have a stoop, but the apartment was so quaint and cute that my altered brain tried to convince my messed-up body that this was home.)
A few hours after finding “my” apartment, I woke up to a large man poking my butt with the tip of his sneakers. I’d fallen asleep on a stoop IN BROOKLYN. Not even the nice part of Brooklyn, but the shady nadir where angry immigrants and twitchy drug dealers rule the land. “Ey, yo, girl! Your underwears are showing!” he yelled. He had a friend with him who said, “Yo, that’s craz-zee” as I pulled down my skirt, proudly dusted off my clothes, and continued the search for my apartment. Two days later, I got a text from Observant Butt Poker asking me out. Apparently, I gave him my number during the exchange? We never went out because it wasn’t an ideal How We Met story.
* * *
As you progress toward your thirties, an unfortunate thing begins happening: your friends start getting sober. They say things like “Oh, I don’t really drink that much anymore,” or “My tolerance is so low now,” or “You know I can’t drink while I’m breastfeeding!” It sucks, but it’s going to happen.
No one wants to be the middle-aged, bloated mess of a friend who can’t hold her alcohol. It’s fine before the age of twenty-eight because no one knows how to drink yet, but drinking properly is truly a skill you should learn by thirty. The earlier the better, if not for the sake of your stomach lining, then for your love and social life.
Every Shifrin family dinner came with a lesson on drinking, but I didn’t start practicing these lessons until my hangovers started increasing in frequency and strength. That’s the thing people don’t know about Russians, their tolerance is high because they work at it, not because they have magical genes (their genes are only semi-magical). You can work at it too with these simple steps:
* * *
HOW TO DRINK LIKE A RUSSIAN
Always Have Zakuski (закуски)
I’ve seen my dad put back four to six shots of vodka at many a family gathering. Not once have I seen him drunk. “How does he do it?” Well, to start, you’ll never see a Russian taking shots without zakuski. Zakuski are like appetizers, but we use them as a food-form of chaser. Take a shot, eat a pickle. Take a shot, eat some rye bread with Swiss cheese. Take a shot, eat a spoonful of potato salad. My family likes to have pickles, bread, butter, cheese, potato salad, eggplant salad, herring salad (all three made with an obscene amount of mayonnaise), cold cuts, smoked fish, sauerkraut, eggs, cured pork belly—basically anything fatty—at the shots table. Eating smoked fish or a mini-sandwich with every serving of alcohol consumed can be the difference between a life-shattering hangover and getting up in time for brunch.
One to One
By your late twenties, you should get in the habit of having a glass of water with every glass of alcohol you drink. I hate water because liquids that don’t give me a buzz bore me. That being said, water is your best friend on a night of drinking. It doesn’t prevent you from getting drunk—my favorite!—but it does help lessen the effects of a hangover. Water also keeps your skin looking taut and youthful, something you won’t care about until you do—and then it’ll probably be too late to reverse the damage. Have a glass now. Go!
Never Try to Keep Up with Australians
Russians carry the Universal Stereotype Torch when it comes to being heavy drinkers, but it’s Australians you have to look out for—those people drink like there’s no tomorrow, or today, or yesterday. In general, you should never try to keep up with anyone. Even the phrase “keep up” implies you are not capable of setting the pace and therefore should not attempt to do so.
Don’t Drink on an Empty Stomach
If you’re drinking on an empty stomach to get drunk faster (I used this logic once upon a time): stop it. Why are you doing that? Save money by pre-gaming or bringing a flask to the bar. Get creative! They have bras that hold alcohol now. One is called the WineRack because I think they were legally required to call it that. It comes in three sizes: Small, Medium, and Drunk. Okay, I’m done. Anyway, this isn’t as much a Russian thing as something that I’ve had to train myself to stop doing.
No Mixing
Russians don’t mix their alcohol. It’s disrespectful to the alcohol and your stomach. If you’re location-hopping, make sure to stay with the same drink. Period. If they run out of what you’re drinking then it’s a sign to finish up. Beer before liquor will make you a stickler, or whatever the saying, actually is not supported by scientific evidence. Mixing alcohols is not inherently bad (Sangria, anyone?), I just prefer not to do it, which has w
orked out pretty well for me. There is an exception of course: celebratory flutes of champagne. But even those are danger pills waiting to ruin your next morning.
Why Are You Drinking?
I like to check in with myself before I go out for drinks. “Why are you opening that bottle of wine, Marina? Is it because you’re celebrating, sad, bored, happy, stressed?” I had a boss who said he only drank when he was happy. He had this theory that “if you drink when you’re sad, then you have a problem.” I do think there’s something to that. If you reach for a bottle every time you’ve had a bad day, maybe you should be getting your endorphins up through exercise instead.
Drunk People Are Categorically Not Cool
If you’ve never spent a night sober at a rowdy bar, you should really try it. It’ll open your eyes to how incredibly inane and obnoxious drunk people are. All of them. Even you, you beautiful, beautiful Empress. My friend Ryan once gave me some very, very good input: “You turn into the worst version of yourself when you’re drunk, Marina.” I was twenty-three years old and had no idea. I truly thought I was the ethereal Belle of the Ball during my riotous and frequent nights out. Russian people drink a lot, but they don’t like to appear drunk. It’s neither glorified nor idolized in Russian culture.
Know Your Drink
I’ve created an infographic for what and how much to drink depending on the occasion. (Please see next page.)
* * *
That’s about it. Russians don’t like a lot of rules because they won’t follow them anyway. Being a smart drinker can suck big time. I get it, it’s tedious, and not lit (or whatever the equivalent to that word is when you’re reading this). But there’s nothing hotter than a person who can hold their alcohol. You can still drink and have fun, but be smart about it, like a Russian.
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