#wobwg

Today on Twitter, Leslie and Haley are having an important conversation.

Somebody slap me for being so unforgivably stupid: I hadn't seen Reality Bites (viewable on Netflix Instant, FYI) until last night. But it's okay, everything's right with my world now. The above image became my desktop background approximately three minutes after the credits rolled. 

I was only five when the movie hit theaters in the summer of 1993, a good 15 years too young for it. But it feels a hundred times more relevant to my life than comparable movies from recent years. Nostalgia for the 90s is rampant, ever growing, and well deserved; can you count on your fingers the number of times you've engaged in a passionate "old Nickelodeon was so much better" conversation, or do you have to move on to your toes? 

As I catch up on my Generation X movies (others recently crossed off the list include Empire Records and Heathers), I start to feel nostalgic for a teenagerdom and young adulthood that I didn't technically live. As much as I adore Mean Girls -- my generation's glitzier and less violent evolution of Heathers -- how relevant to my experiences did it actually feel? If we're being honest... not very. 

For me, it comes down to the women. Which makes sense, because duh I am a woman, but also because this genre of film almost exclusively focuses on women and how they relate to the world in that moment. Lelaina and Vickie, Corey and Gina, Cady, Juno, Sam, Summer -- they are the center points in these stories. Even when we view them through the eyes of a male protagonist, they are the focus. The culture portrayed revolves around them, is informed by them. 

So when it comes down to it, these Generation X Movie chicks? They just feel more real to me, and thus their world feels more like world I actually live in. I don't sense so strongly that they are being packaged and sold to me. They don't wear their personality traits like big shiny badges - "I'm Quirky and Adorable!" "I'm Shallow and Plastic!" They seem less like a canvases or platforms or representatives, and more like people.

I've never met someone who quips like Juno or quirks like Zooey. But when Vickie looks into Lelaina's camera and goofily slurs, "Sometimes I get that not-so-fresh-feeling," I feel like this is a girl I could meet at a bar tomorrow night and joke with over a Rolling Rock. And would very much like to, if I could.

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Hope y'all didn't miss out on these laughs.

This blog, among other things, strives to promote a sense of positivity and empowerment in the female community, as well as -- ya know -- the general community! Therefore, the ladies of WOBWG know that an important component of that goal is the respect and admiration for our male counterparts. Therefore, we would like to do our part today in celebrating the men of these great interwebs by bringing you our Internet Man of the Week.

This week: Daym Drops was, obviously, the only acceptable candidate. Undoubtedly, you've seen him making the rounds this week -- reminding us how fantastic Five Guys Burgers are & getting autotuned. He's perfect and fun & has made us laugh at our desks while the time slowly inches by!

We're hopping on this bandwagon & loving you, Daym Drops! Stay beautiful.

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one day [soon-ish], I’ll move out of my parents house and stop going to dinners called “One Night In Spain!” where there are four courses of Spanish foods, five different Spanish wines, and flamenco dancers & getting really drunk, forgetting how I got into bed, waking up at five a.m.—still drunk—and having to sober up faster than any human possibly has so that I could drive to work and semi-function today.

One day, I’ll stop doing all of those things. Unfortunately, until that day actually rolls around, I’ll just say that I think everyone should move back in with their parents after college.

Summer in Columbia, Missouri, always started in early May. The humidity sets in a few days before the heat and refuses to break until sometime in September. May 15, 2010, was certainly no exception. My graduation gown seemed to flow especially beautifully to spite the heavy air as I walked across the parking lot outside of my apartment to my grandmother’s idling, Buick sedan. My cap sat on my head at just the right angle and my fraternity cords swung playfully in the breeze. We drove the couple of miles to my alma mater’s largest arena accompanied by thick traffic and excited chatter.

We pulled into the athletic complex later than scheduled, so I was dropped off at the door to go check in. My family went to park, I turned toward the entrance, and made eye contact with a small, mostly Native American boy with large lips. Very, very large lips. He did his best to skirt the glance, I could see shame in his eyes.

Before I donned my robe, before I had even showered that morning, I found myself walking out of one of Mizzou’s residence halls. Freshmen were pouring onto the lawn in droves in front of parents with strained faces and armfuls of dormwear. I was wearing the same clothes I had been out in the night before and it was very obvious that I did not belong among the throngs of underclassmen, on their way home for the summer, to spend three months wishing they were back in the town they’d come to love.

I stepped onto the roundabout pathway back to my apartment, a hearty six block jaunt adjacent to campus, and immediately felt queasy. With each step, the decisions of the previous night came back to haunt me more and more venomously. Until my body reached the golden tipping point that so many other collegiate binge drinkers had felt time and time before. I ran for the nearest trash can and vomited with such tenacity that I should have won an Olympic medal. Right outside of a freshman dorm. The morning I was to graduate.

The night before, I had decided to go, one last time, to one of Columbia’s two gay bars. This one catered better to the college crowd despite being further from campus than the seedier establishment. One of my best friends, Cory, and I had haunted the establishment many nights that we hardly remember. When I was 20, he would go with me on Thursday nights, when there was an 18+ drag show, and often sneak me drinks. True friendship. But this time, I was a month and nine days north of 21, so we decided to go on what might be our last night in town, our last night together.

We pregamed at his apartment, which was much closer to the bar than mine, like we had done so many times before. Half-a-bottle of vodka that he or I had picked up at the grocery store for the occasion later, we were discussing our collegiate sexual regrets. My biggest regret was that I didn’t have a lot of them. There was the backyard beej on my 20th birthday, Scott the manwhore, and pinky dick, but three for the three years I spent in undergrad really seemed like a disappointment. I honestly don’t remember what Cory’s were. He and I had one in common, though, that didn’t fit the category very well. We both regretted not fucking a boy by the name of Jake.

We suspected that he would be at the bar that night as well, so we made it a goal for one (or both) of us to hook up with him before we graduated. Cory and I got into my silver subcompact car and set out. I drove with the windows down, tipsier than I should have been behind the wheel, but really feeling freer than I ever had - classes were over and I was less than 24 hours from walking across the stage. Just enough time to remedy a regret or make one last.

We got to the bar and followed our normal course of action, leading us further and further away from sobriety. Cory was notoriously a lightweight, and as such he took the lead when Jake and his friends walked into the bar. We stumbled over to them and while Cory was talking to Jake, I started talking to his friend. His small, mostly Native American friend with large lips.

Columbia is a town of about 110,000 when classes are in session, the university making up about 33,000 of those people. The collegiate gay scene was very, very small despite this. There were a group of us that everyone seemed to know, for better or for worse. Arthur’s friend, Bryan, and I were in that minority. I’m not sure how or why I was, but Bryan was because he was the sitting president of the University of Missouri College Republicans. He was the natural final notch in my college bedpost.

The courting process, for those of you familiar, was aided greatly by alcohol and fueled by his friends telling him it was a bad idea. We piled into the back of a mousy homosexual’s equally subcompact Ford and headed back to campus. I was officially out of my element and loving every second of it.

He was an RA at one of the freshmen dorms. I had to sneak in, the night before I left college for good, to a residence hall across the street from where I spent my first year of school. He had a playful attitude and it took me some effort to bed him, but I finally placed my crown upon THE HEAD of the young Republicans. To this day, I’m surprised there weren’t tears from either party - pride and joy for me, shame for him.

I woke up before he did and realized where I was and what I’d done. I threw back on my loudly patterned button down and jeans and hightailed it out of there. I had two hours to get home and present myself to my family as a high functioning college graduate. Stopping only to free a few demons along the way.

When our eyes met several hours later, I couldn’t help but laugh. He wasn’t graduating yet, but he was there to watch his brother walk across the stage. After the ceremony, I walked out of the arena with my sister and once again saw Bryan, this time across the parking lot. We made eye contact the second time that day and I waved while he picked up his pace. My sister asked me who I was waving at. When I told her his position, the most she could muster was a chuckle and “...you didn’t did you?”