Now, $250 seems like a lot, still. I mean, it’s your play money in this scenario, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it, right? Not so. See, as I’ve recently come to understand, a sizable chunk of that money is going to have to go into the rarely viewed bank account covered in cobwebs and dust labeled “savings,” to build something resembling a “nest egg.” You are supposed to have this money to fall back on should you need it, to make more long-term purchases, or to put in some fancy-people investment and “make your money work for you.” (I’m not sure what this means, precisely, only that fat Republican rich dudes my dad knows have always encouraged me to do this.) Let’s say you put $50 a month into savings, and that’s a fairly low estimate, as we should theoretically be trying to save much more, if possible.
Two hundred dollars—that’s what’s left. That should be enough to get anyone through a month of personal expenses and pleasure spending. Thinking logically, we could divide that $200 up a million different ways to allow ourselves both our occasional splurges and a feeling of overall responsibility. But I think we all know that $200 for an entire month’s worth of excursions and “just for fun” purchases is a shockingly spendable number, particularly when we account for how much we like to spend after a few cocktails. (It is a well-documented fact that money literally morphs into Monopoly money after the consumption of more than four glasses of wine. You could be on the brink of financial ruin and still insist on paying for everyone’s planned additions on their houses if the evening is going well enough.)
If you are prone to making impulse purchases, or engaging in “retail therapy” to repair deep, emotional wounds in your psyche, $200 is nothing. If you live in a city where a “reasonable” price for a cocktail is around $10 and all your friends have a profound fondness for going out and buying as many of them as the bar will sell them in good conscience, $200 is nothing. If you like doing things such as going out to brunch on Sundays, going on semifrequent trips out of state, or wearing clothes that did not, only a few moments before, fall off the back of a truck, $200 is nothing. It’s an incredibly easy sum of money to spend, and we only think that it is a lot when we deny just how much of life (from hanging out with our significant others to keeping up with the latest pop culture) is absurdly expensive. The truth is that if you’re juggling only a few hundred dollars of spending money every month, many things are going to have to be cut out in order to build any kind of financial foundation.
No matter how much we earn, though, we will always find a way to spend an amount that is proportionally detrimental enough to make the end of the month more difficult than necessary. And, whether we like it or not, planning for the future is about the only way to make sure that we won’t find ourselves at some undetermined point down the road with tears in our eyes, comically holding up a stack of red notices from collection agencies as oversized question marks bob over our frazzled heads. Having a decent amount of money to fall back on should you lose your job, or to put toward a retirement that doesn’t have to be delayed until you are wheezing feebly at death’s door is simply good sense. That means that all of us—yes, even you—need to make a decisive list of everything we spend money on in a month, as well as our long-term financial and professional goals, and start hacking away at that shit with a Weedwacker.
There are things in our daily lives that we can go without, or corners we can cut to make spending a more responsible affair, but it has to start with honesty. As someone who lived most of her life to this point in a state of willful financial ignorance, who is only now sifting through the pile of absurdly unnecessary debts and misguided purchases to forge a path of sustainability, I can tell you that this is not fun. It is never fun to have to look at what you’re doing with the keen, ruthless eye of a True Adult and strike off all the things that you could do without. But, ultimately, to pay bills on time feels good. To have extra money in the bank feels good. To have serious prospects for the future and a plan that enables you to go after the things you want without feeling stretched to your financial limits feels good. And we deserve to feel this way because even though it sucks in the short term, there is something really satisfying about knowing that you have things under control.
So make those difficult choices. Cut out those brunches. Say “no” to those ridiculous nights in those overpriced clubs that make you feel like not even a thousand scalding showers will wipe the smell of douchebag cologne off you and feel better about all the money you saved. While not everything has to go, and certainly not all the time, we can always make conscious choices to stop the hemorrhaging of money that living in a big city in our twenties is all about. Think of all the small steps you can take each day so that you can start hitting the more “significant” milestones in your life—such as partnering up for life, buying a house, making investments, or maybe even spawning—with the kind of serene assuredness that only someone who has been making positive financial decisions for some time now can do. You owe it to yourself to be one of those classy fuckers, treating yourself to a bottle of Champagne every now and again because you are responsible the rest of the time—and I want to see us all get there together.
Chapter 7
FRIENDSHIP
Or, How to Find Cool People Who Aren’t the Same Five Coworkers
The first time one of your friends announces her Big Grown-Up Life Change is something you will remember for the rest of your life. Outside of the occasional high school acquaintance getting knocked up/hitched at the ripe old age of eighteen, the moment where you realize that you’re all growing up is almost guaranteed to come in your early twenties. Whether it’s someone announcing her upcoming nuptials at an age where it is just barely considered legitimate, changing her Facebook profile picture to an unexpected image of a fetus on an ultrasound, or moving into the world of real estate, it’s going to come. And no matter what you do, no matter how much you think you may have grown up as a person yourself, you will not be prepared for it.
When I got my first “Oh, shit, my friends are changing” wake-up call, I was in a local dive bar at happy hour, enjoying my freshly minted twenty-one-year-old status by indulging in a Stoli blueberry and soda (which I perceived then, and in many ways still do, to be the Rolls-Royce of the call drink world). One of my friends announced, a little too casually for my liking, that he was in the final stages of purchasing a house with another friend. As I was just barely able to drink and still very much in the throes of “What the hell am I going to do with my life when I actually have responsibilities outside of not spending too much school money on alcohol?,” the whole thing seemed like some kind of elaborate joke. How could two people, one of whom I had “dated” when I was twelve years old, be in the process of purchasing something as demanding (and expensive) as a house?
Suddenly, there was a palpable divide between us, one that I didn’t quite know how to define at the time. I would later come to understand, having lived through many announcements of this nature, that every time someone makes a big life decision that puts her firmly on one side or the other of “adulthood divide,” it creates an automatic tension in the friendship, regardless of intent. The fact is that people are moving on, whether or not you are ready for it yourself. And this house my friends purchased, as with so many life-changing moments still to come, was happening whether I liked it or not. It didn’t seem realistic, and yet there it was, in all its fixer-upper glory, ready for the tireless attention of two eager young bros who were now going to be listed as “spouses” on half of their junk mail. (Full disclosure: I ended up living there for the better part of a year.)
In any case, once the floodgates have been opened on the idea that the friends you grew up/studied with are aging into new, more complex phases of their lives, there is no going back. The next few years will be replete with engagement photo shoots, pregnancy announcements, and moves into condos in more family-friendly neighborhoods throughout the city (and even the suburbs). People are going to move around (and you likely will as well), and t
he once-ironclad dynamics of your social circles will be called into question on every front. With some people moving onto bigger and better things (and not showing even a remote interest in keeping in touch with their roots), and others hanging back in a kind of stunted adolescence you don’t want to get dragged into, you’re left with a fairly sparse smattering of original friends by the time you all start establishing yourselves out in the real world. When you find yourself on the other side of graduation, several moves, and having to make some of these Big Grown-Up Life Changes yourself, reestablishing a social group in which you feel comfortable is one of the more difficult, yet essential, challenges ahead of you.
As with many things, making and keeping friends is much easier throughout your school years. Aside from being in constant, forced contact with one another and not having too much in the way of responsibility, there is an undeniable air of adventure in everything you do. As you go from grade school to college, you always encounter different, exciting obstacles to overcome and new experiences to undertake, and you’re all facing them together. The intellectual and social development that is imposed on us from birth to our early twenties is only navigable when surrounded by awesome people who are having just as difficult a time as we are. (It doesn’t hurt, of course, that you have a regular schedule of partying and irresponsibility to act as the cement between your budding bromances.) There is only one time in your life when a bunch of your closest friends are all going to get together and get drunk, run through a suburban neighborhood and draw dicks all over political lawn signs, and that time does not come after the age of nineteen.
We tend to trick ourselves into thinking that these relationships are meant to last forever. Because school-based relationships fly so fast and free (and can go from a midparty introduction to a mushroom-induced philosophical all-nighter in a matter of days), they seem to have a kind of rare charm. Yet even the most free-spirited friend is liable to get a Boston Terrier and move into a one-bedroom with her boyfriend at some point, only seeing you at the occasional brunch, which is spent mostly talking about your respective jobs. One after the other, these people are going to start splintering off, going their own ways and generally making the best decisions for themselves, which do not factor in the pinky-swears to “keep in touch” that they may have made with you at some point. While you are certainly going to keep a few select friends throughout your twenties and beyond, it would be irrational to expect the majority of them to stick around.
Few things, it should be said, speed up this process more palpably than moving away yourself. If, after you finish school, a faraway city (or even country) is your destination of choice, get ready to learn with shocking swiftness that about 80 percent of your “friends” would be more aptly described as “party acquaintances with whom you spent a lot of time because you both liked smoking weed and lived within two miles of each other.” The rate at which people will drop out of your life if you choose to move away is sad at first, and then makes a somber kind of sense. Yes, it’s kind of sad to realize that the investment of a Skype session every now and again is too much for most of the people you’d once considered very close, but how many friends does one person really need? You’ll be making new ones in your new city anyway, and it wouldn’t hurt to update your definition of friend to “someone who cares about me even on the rare occasion that it is not perfectly convenient for her.”
While you’re often tempted to go to Herculean lengths to maintain some of your long-distance friends whom you once really loved, it can be pretty pathetic in its returns on investment. If you are becoming the person who makes constant, unmistakable overtures to bond with an old friend—whether through prolonged phone calls or attempts to meet up in one of your cities—and aren’t getting too much in response, it’s time to call it what it is: friendship masochism. The truth is that some of these people, no matter how much you may have adored them when proximity wasn’t an issue, are just not going to stand the test of time or distance. Keeping close with them, if that proves to be depressingly one-sided, is only allowing yourself to get caught up in the scraggly cobwebs clinging to you from the city and social pool you initially tried to leave.
No matter how you end up fracturing off from the warm cocoon of your original social group, though, it’s safe to say that you will find yourself as a young adult at the beginning of a life with no real clue as to how to make new friends. It’s isolating and somewhat terrifying to realize that if you don’t play your social interaction cards right, you could end up becoming a recluse who only leaves her apartment on the rare occasion that she needs to restock the Fancy Feast. Acknowledging that you need to get out there and start carving out your own adult friendships is scary, but necessary. (If you think that this is sad, consider the alternative: You’ve stayed exactly where you have lived for all or most of your life, and remain closely intertwined with the exact same group of friends you’ve had for years and years, never exploring life beyond the tristate area or dating options that don’t involve people who have already slept with half of your incestuous social group. Is this really preferable? No. The answer to that question is no.)
So where do you find a friend? What is a friend? How do you friend? Up until your early twenties, friendships were something that just happened naturally. You kind of met people, and suddenly there were a million and one circumstances in which you kept happening to see them, and always an opportunity to make things easier on everyone by adding drinking or costume parties into the mix. Nothing was defined too clearly, there was little pressure, and you didn’t even have to arrange the times you saw each other. Something was going on all the time that you could attend or get involved in. You never needed a process of having to initiate repeated, prolonged contact. Now, think about it: You literally have to ask someone out on a friend date. You need to work through an entire process to go from meeting a total stranger in some adult context like work, public transportation, or masquerade orgy to making that person someone you could invite to your wedding some day—and the process must be followed fairly strictly so you avoid looking like a giant creeper. The steps to attaining adult friendship, at least in my humble experience, are as follows:
1. Meet a new person in a nonthreatening but still legitimate setting, such as happy hour, a meet-up group, or work.
2. Begin a conversation with her over something benign and universal, such as a mutual project you may be working on, your dislike of the music that is currently playing, or your disapproval of that woman over there’s choice to wear leggings as pants.
3. Have a discussion that incites within you an overwhelming feeling of OMG we are fucking soul mates, I bet she hates Keira Knightley just as much as I do.
4. Not know what to do with yourself because this isn’t like trying to pick up someone in a bar for the ostensible purpose of going out on a date/having sex, which has an established protocol.
5. Be unsure as to whether or not it would be weird to propose hanging out.
6. Feel as though you might want to clarify that this isn’t a sexual thing, that you just kind of want to become super good friends with her because she’s awesome.
7. Clarify that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to date her, and if you were interested in her gender, you would totally be down to asking her out, and you’re not a bigot or anything.
8. Realize that you may be overthinking this, and you probably don’t need to clarify that your interests are purely platonic in the first place.
9. Continue the discussion and become, as the minutes pass, all the more convinced that you two are totally meant to be friends.
10. Muster up the courage and quell the small voice within you that is whispering about how much of a weirdo you must come across as.
11. Ask if she wants to hang out sometime. (This step is made infinitely easier if you are both a bit lubricated socially, and have had enough drinks to be in that phase where everyone you meet is your new potential best friend. If that’s the case, both of you wil
l promptly tell each other how wonderful the other one is, how excited you are to hang out, and how honored you would be if she would be the godparent to your firstborn child.)
12. Get a tepid-to-excited agreement to your offer to hang out.
13. Actually hang out.
14. Start working her into your schedule; depending on her involvement in your life (such as a coworker or neighbor), this may either be extremely easy or nearly impossible. The number of adult friendships that have been rendered unfeasible through conflicting schedules is incalculable but undoubtedly very high.
15. Potentially start a new and wonderful friend-romance with your friend-partner found in the tense throes of adulthood.
The thing about developing friendships as an adult, though, is how awkward the first steps of solidifying the bond can be (even after you’ve jumped the first hurdle of opening conversation with a complete stranger). No one really warns you that, when you’re outside the social beginner mode, which is being in constant proximity with people your own age who share many of your more obscure interests, developing an emotional connection with someone is a difficult process. Much as with starting a romantic relationship, it is something that has to be eased into (tee-hee) and treated with a kind of cautious respect, lest you seem like a crazy, friend-starved hyena who has latched onto his emotional femur and begun gnawing away with impunity.
There is a delicate balance to be struck, one in which you are neither too invested in his attention, nor infuriatingly flaky about following up with things. The idea is that you are now a responsible grown-up who is capable of being emotionally forth-right and reliable, and yet no one likes the feeling of being friends with a walking day planner who wants to rush into the “close enough to expect frequent calls” stage of things. And unless you work with each other, the chances of things just evolving naturally are slim to none. You aren’t seeing each other all the time, you don’t have a ton of mutual people to discuss and dislike together, and your day-to-day activities are likely unrelated. (Hell, even your incomes are probably pretty disparate, which in adulthood may be as strenuous on a friendship as having sex with someone’s sibling.) If you are meeting people just while you’re “out,” the “keeping things up” process is going to be an uphill struggle.
I'm Only Here for the WiFi Page 10