Let's Talk About: Random Things

I was going to write an eloquent post about International Women's Day and how much we put up with at work. I was going to say, eloquently, "Can someone tell the men of Transylvania County about International Women's Day please?" Yesterday I kept a tally. Comments from male patrons on my appearance: one. Diminutive nicknames: one (honey). Episodes of Creepy Staring: two. Aggressive Staring: One (from a man convicted of assault on a former employee). This was one six hour shift. If I had kept my tally last week, when my fellow red-headed coworker and I had opened the library together, the "comments on our appearance" tally would have been much higher. No less than three different dudes found the need to go on about our red hair and our pretty smiles. They were all old enough to be our fathers. My coworker loves Flannery O'Connor and is adamantly against censorship. She is working toward her MLA. Her display for the library this month says "Write Like A Girl" and she's kind of obsessed with the Algonquin Roundtable right now. She runs her own shit. I have a degree in English Literature. I wrote a book. I love modern western writers and Woody Allen films, despite how much I don't want to love Woody Allen films. I run my own shit. Neither of us shows up to work on a Monday morning hoping to impress some guy checking out David Baldacci with our pretty smiles. Neither one of us shows up to work with "looking pretty for the men of Transylvania County" as one of our goals, believe it or not, men of Transylvania County.

I'm not going to write that blog because I'm too distracted today. And I think you get my drift. I read this article yesterday and discovered the term "benevolent sexism". I think that's what's happening when a man thinks my coworker and I should be just tickled pink that he likes our hair. When I cut off all my hair last year, it was in very large part a reaction to these kind of comments and the attention I was getting at work (always from patrons and never from coworkers, it should be said). It was my way of saying that my appearance was not for them. My long red hair was not for you, creepy old man who goes out of your way to tell me I shouldn't have cut it. It makes me furious and sad that I felt I had to take such extreme efforts to claim ownership of my own body.

Then the other day I heard someone tell one of Noah's coworkers that this article written on her and several other women in the brewing industry was "cute", yes he was being purposely condescending, and I was just speechless with anger.

Men simply must do better. Someone please tell them that a good start for International Women's Day would be not to call me honey.

Moving on. Tomorrow I am flying to Paris. Before I go I wanted to tell you about my friend Sarah Neubert. That is her gorgeous piece of perfection sitting above. I hesitated a little to loop her into the same blog as my sexism stories, which went on much longer than I intended, but here we are. And in the end, is female art not the perfect antidote to sexism? Sarah has recently turned her artistic talents toward weaving, and the results are glorious. I'm helping her come up with a bio for her Etsy site, and in return I'm going to be the lucky recipient of one of her weavings. This kind of trade is such a cool way for creative people to support each other and I'm so happy that Sarah suggested it. I can't help but feel like I'm getting the better end of the bargain. If you want, you can visit her at her website or follow her on Instagram, s.neubert. Her weavings are so dreamy.

Tomorrow I'm driving to the Charlotte airport. I will fly to Atlanta and then hop a plane to Paris. I'm in kind of a state. I was weepy and nervous this morning but it wore off and now I'm good. I'm ready.

Let's do this. You know what they say.

Paris is always a good idea.







Now I Am On Bloglovin

March Must Haves: Let's Talk About Wellbutrin With Owl!

Well, why not.

Back in January when I said I was going to get on Wellbutrin, I meant it. But I never actually followed through. I don't know, and can't explain, why it's such a struggle to do something I know is good for me, except, you know, everyone does that. So much of the time we don't do what we know is good for us, and instead we do stupid things like try to be lifestyle bloggers. I thought I was doing okay in the brainpan because I wasn't hitting the really bad places. I was taking a shower every day, almost. Then we had this gorgeous sunny day after two weeks of miserable weather. I put on a song from my Paris playlist, a bouncy happy song that even has birds chirping in the intro, and drove down the street under the blue sky thinking that soon I would be in Paris. And I felt nothing. I didn't feel happy or excited. And then I realized it had been months since I had felt anything like happiness or excitement. I thought about how, in the weeks leading up to Paris, when realization hit me that I was actually going to be there, I would start to cry. So many times I had burst into tears as the thought would hit me that it was really, truly happening. This seemed not too out-of-the-ordinary for me, as this trip is the realization of a dream I've had for about 13 years. It's something I wanted that I had begun to doubt would ever happen. After a year of some major disappointments in the how I thought my life would go department, Paris was one thing that was happening for me. Of course I would feel emotional about that.

But it occurred to me that there should be some happiness mixed in as well. Not just, I'm so overwhelmed that I'm going to Paris I'm going to sit here and cry about it. And it occurred to me that it would be a waste of a very major trip to show up in Paris without access to my feel-good chemicals. Because that's where I had been since October. The feel-good chemicals all locked away in my brain behind a door to which I had no key.

Now Let's Talk About the Affordable Care Act With Squirrel. The wrinkles aren't all ironed out, you know. It's a new system. I get it. I fall into this weird place where the ACA thinks I have access to free health care because my husband has free health care. Long story short, I still don't have health insurance. So I called the discount clinic. They couldn't get me in until March 11th at 3:30, which is exactly when I plan to be checking in for a flight out of Charlotte. I got kinda panicky and Noah called around for me until he got me in to a place. I went to the place today. I spent 15 minutes with a physician's assistant answering questions about my health and family history, and then about 5 minutes tops with a doctor. I am so grateful the doctor didn't hesitate to put me back on Wellbutrin, as I'm always nervous the doctor is going to give me a hard time. The cost of the visit was $126. I think it's worth mentioning that that's how much it costs to spend 20 minutes talking about yourself in the hopes of getting access to the feel-good chemicals in your brain. I'm not complaining, I'm lucky we can afford it. They let us break it up it into payments, even. Though at this point I had decided I'd pay it out of my trip budget if I needed to. Then I went to get the script filled at Ingles. I hate Ingles. They wanted $117 for 30 pills. So I called the independent pharmacy in town. They wanted $26. Ingles had agreed to price match, but at that point it just seemed wrong to give my money to a corporation instead of the family-run pharmacy. Hooray for that! Whatever. The only reason I'm going into such detail is that if someone else out there is depressed and uninsured, I want them to have an idea of what it took to get help.

So here they are. My March Must Haves! For stylish but depressive moms on the go! Because lifestyle blogger now, remember? I live such a lifestyle. I don't even know.

I started taking the Elderberry syrup when I had that horrible two-month cough going around, but it didn't do anything for me and now I don't believe in anything anymore. Except for access to prescription drugs. I'm taking the probiotic because for months my stomach had been upset every single day, especially after coffee, and the probiotics made that all better from the first pill I popped.

Bupropion (I actually take the generic) hits me like a charm. Twenty minutes after I took one, I had a giggling fit. For no reason I laughed and laughed. That might make it sound like Bupropion made me crazy instead of better, but I think it was my body finally feeling a giddiness about all this, one that had been tampered down for months. It hit me this way last year too. One tweaky day and then smooth-sailing. Now, a few hours later, I'm all evened out.

I still want to be a lifestyle blogger, though. :-/

Let's Talk About Paris

One week from today I will fly to Paris. When I get off the plane all rumpled and dehydrated, I'll take the RER to the Metro to the Canal St. Martin (pictured above and in snow, below), where I'm renting an apartment from a lovely woman through Airbnb. I had originally booked a place in St. Germain des Pres, an ideal location for many, right in the heart of the city. Then I agonized for a week before changing it. (Sorry, sweet Sorbonne student I cancelled on). St. Germain, in the 6th, is classic Paris. It's also tourist Paris. So many of the new restaurants I was reading about were north of the Seine, in the 3rd and 10th and 11th, what is sometimes called "the Brooklyn of Paris", and I'm going to be perfectly situated for all of those. It's also a place where Parisians hang out, but tourists have not discovered yet in total droves. The 6éme is convenient but I was imaging myself sitting down to eat every night in horribly overpriced tourist traps. The 10éme has less of that. Plus, it's all Paris, so who cares where you stay.

The first full day I'm there, I'm taking a food tour with Paris by Mouth. I had originally thought to do a tour with Wendy Lyn, but she doesn't take solo travelers. Quelle horreur! Paris by Mouth is more affordable anyway, and I've spent hours researching restaurants and boulangeries on their website. It even influenced my choice to stay on the Canal, because their breakdown of restaurants by arrondissement notes that it's hard to find great food for reasonable prices in the 6th unless you are on a chocolate-only diet. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to be spending about a billion hours in the 6th. All the chocolatiers and patisseries are there, it seems. Just a few on my list are Ladurée (of course), Gérard Mulot (macarons), Pierre Hermé (macarons), Henri Le Roux (salted butter caramels), Patrick Roger (chocolates), Poilane (bread), Eric Kayser (baguettes)--and that JUST covers the 6eme. I'm a teeny bit worried that I might go to St. Germain des Pres, get sucked into a macaron-eclair-and-caramel vortex, and accidentally spend my whole budget over the course of a few hours, on sugar and maybe one Diptyque candle. 

Anyway, the food tour. The good thing about it is, you pay in advance so it doesn't feel like it's coming out of your trip budget per se, and then over the course of three hours, a guide takes you and a small group around the neighborhood of your choice (I chose the Marais), introducing you to a family who runs a 7th generation fromagerie, a "pig obsessed" butcher, and a MOF chocolatier, which I must insist stands for "Mother 'O Fucker" chocolatier, though really it means Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, something like Best Craftsman of France, and is a prestigious award only handed out every four years. Of course you get to eat all this on the food tour, and hopefully pick up some tips for selecting your own fromage and charcuterie during the rest of your trip. I am really so excited about the food tour.

 


I've been researching obsessively, mostly about what to eat in Paris. Finally I typed it all about by arrondissement, a six-page long list that I can print off and carry in my purse instead of a heavy guidebook. So many of the best restaurants are by reservation only, and I didn't want to be too pinned down. So I only have two reservations for now. One for Bones and one for Au Passage. Both allowed me to book online. I wanted to eat at Frenchie so badly that I asked a friend of mine to ask her brother, who I've never met but who lives in France and speaks the language fluently, to call and try to get me in. He kindly did, and it turned out Frenchie is closed until late summer so oh well, next time.

When I traveled to Paris in college, we managed to hit most of the major tourist sites, and I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to the Louvre or the top of the Eiffel tower. Both involve major crowds and lines, which make me cranky, and I'm all, why be cranky in Paris. Don't shoot me. I'm still planning to go the D'Orsay, which I saw the first time and loved, and the Orangerie, which I haven't seen before. I'll go back to the Rodin, because I remember being mesmerized as a college girl, even though they're doing renovations to the building and Camille Claudel's work won't be on display. I'm also going to the Carnavalet museum in the Marais, which is appealing both because it's in a 16th century mansion and because it's free, thanks to the mayor of Paris, who also provided free ice skating all winter for Parisians at the Hôtel de Ville. I'm planning to go to Versailles, maybe into the Notre Dame again, and maybe in the Sainte-Chapelle. I don't know. This is starting to sound like a lot of sites and I really want to spend good chunks of time wandering aimlessly, sitting in cafes, reading and writing and just being in Paris. And drinking kir, of course, even though it is apparently out of style. I don't care.

What I'm Wearing:

More than once someone has looked me up and down and said to me, "You'll have to get some new clothes for Paris!" and I've been like, "I am wearing my new clothes for Paris."  Obviously this doesn't bode well for how I'm going to fit in on the chic streets. What can a girl do? You either have the look or you don't, I guess. I have some black jeans and some black boots, I have a black leather jacket and a trench coat, I have two striped scarves. Recently I've become obsessed with lifestyle bloggers and I want to be one. I just want my life to look good from the outside. Then its like, who gives a damn how it feels on the inside? Leave it to me to get all angsty on a blog about Paris. Moving on.

What I'm Reading:

Rick Steves' guidebooks are the best. He is also hilarious if you read them through cover to cover which yes, I have done. So I'm taking him with me. Unfortunately his maps are NOT the best, so I went ahead and grudgingly ordered a second guidebook, Eyewitness Paris, for the map alone. It's laminated and easy to read, it has a lot of the smaller streets that Mr. Steves leaves out, and it covers almost the entire area inside the peripherique, instead of just the city center, which many maps feature solely.

For reading in cafes and on the plane I have three books, which is probably too many, seeing as how I want to buy one in Shakespeare & Co and get it embossed with their official embosser.

I think Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide To Getting Lost" is especially appropriate since that is exactly what I'm hoping to do. I also picked up the new editions of The New Yorker and Vogue (because hello, lifestyle blogger).

How I Prepared:

I've been practicing my French with the Duolingo app and a podcast called "Coffee Break French", which is produced by two cheery Scots who are probably inadvertently teaching me French with a Scottish accent. I know how to say "I have a reservation", "Can I make a reservation", "Do you have a free table" and "I'd like a glass of red wine, not too sweet, please" so obviously I am covered. Also "Where is the boulagerie", "Where is the patisserie",  and "Un café crème, s'il vous plaît". TA-DA.

What I'm Taking on the Plane:

Way too much stuff. Not pictured are the fancy purple damask compression socks I ordered on Amazon. COMPRESSION SOCKS. Wrinkle release spray. Tide To Go pen. Earplugs. Eyemask. Neck pillow. Why why why? Stupid lifestyle bloggers convincing me I need all these things. Last time I flew to Paris with nothing in my bag but a book and a discman and a tube of Dramamine. Dammit.

Of course new underwear, though. It's Paris.

Sorry I showed you my underwear.

Let the final countdown begin.

Things You Think About At Night Before Traveling Alone

When I was in New York with my dad, one day we were riding the subway and my dad was looking at a map. I was not about to look at a map on the subway and mark myself as a tourist, but my dad was too--we'll go with mature--to care, and rightly so. There was a man sitting across from us with his daughter in a pink stroller. She was about two. He got off at the stop we did and then he asked if we needed directions. We took him up on his offer. He picked up the stroller and carried his little girl up the steps of the subway station and out into the sunlight. We followed him. He had a light accent and Asian features and I realized he was probably an immigrant himself. But now he was at home, now he was the one who knew. He spent a few minutes with us there on the busy sidewalk, pointing in every direction and telling us what was to be found along each way. It was comforting to have a sense of place in that great storm of a city. I still think about that man from time to time. I think about how kind he was. I hope somewhere someone is being nice to him. I hope he felt good afterwards, and that he knew he was helpful.

Too Much

I woke to the white light of perfect winter. The house was quiet. Now it is snowing from a gray and blue sky, tiny flakes that fall lazily and will amount to nothing.

I can't sleep at night because I am buzzing with excitement to go to Paris. I'm like a child on Christmas Eve, but the trip is still more than a month away, and this kind of heightened state can't last long, it must collapse eventually into something, or it will ruin me. I whiled away the entire day yesterday plotting routes from the apartment I've rented on airbnb to all the restaurants I want to go to, realizing I don't have the time or the budget to eat EVERYTHING in Paris, though god help me, I will do my best. I will stop talking about it now, because the only bad thing about going to Paris is that people kind of hate you when you tell them about it.

It really is doing the most magical thing outside my window right now, with the sunlight turning to orange and the snow flakes falling so slowly they are almost still in the air, fixed like stars.

Noah was out of town over the weekend. I went to work, and then the girls and I went and hocked Girl Scout Cookies at the brewery. We came home exhausted and late and the girls went to play with their Kindles in their rooms, as they are allowed to do at bedtime on the weekends. It was around ten when Ayla came out of her room crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said her movie was sad. "What are you watching?"

"The Gabby Douglas Story."

I asked her what was sad about it. She told me how Gabby Douglas had had to leave her mother to go train with Coach Chow and how the family didn't have much money, I think--I don't really know, I just know that Ayla was overwhelmed. I wanted to laugh and cry a little bit with her. I asked her if she had finished the movie. She hadn't.

She did this once before with a Thora Birch movie in which, at the end, the girl very nearly loses her pet monkey before the monkey escapes from the bad guys and goes running through a park in L.A. to be reunited with the girl. Ayla turned it off at the part where Thora was crying and the monkey was distressed. It is too much for children, to see animals in distress. With Gabby Douglas, just as with the Thora Birch, I put the movie back on and we watched the end. Alicia Keys sang as a montage of Gabby winning competition after competition played on the screen, sort of hurrying the climax along if you ask me. I had to explain to Ayla at the credits that Gabby had won not only a team medal at the Olympics, but the gold medal for best overall. I wanted Ayla to be giddy with relief over this happy ending, and she was soothed, but I sensed that my cheery "see how everything worked out in the end!" attempts were falling on something deeper and softer within. Either way, I kissed her and put her to bed, and she drifted off, cheeks dry but a million miles away, that girl, buttoned away inside, just like her mother, unknowable to me even though our cells still live inside one another.

It's still snowing so prettily, but nothing will come of it.

It Has Always Been Raining

Yesterday we had big plans but they didn't pan out because we had to take the car in to the shop an you know exactly how all that goes. This time, they gave the car back to us in worse condition than it was in when we entrusted it to their care (Charlie's Tire in Brevard is the place to avoid) and so tomorrow we'll be dealing with the car again and may I add a few hundred dollars shorter.

We did have an awfully fun time eating ribs and playing Cards Against Humanity with some friends, and we did all this late into the evening like Europeans, not like the tired parents we all are. So it wasn't a total wash, even though it has been raining for as long as I can remember and the ground is soggy like food you'd spoon-feed to an invalid.

Tomorrow the girls have to go back to school and I feel like crying for them. They've spent the last two weeks blissed out, playing with new Christmas toys and art supplies, obeying the natural rhythms of their bodies, doing what they want when they want it. Mostly doing it in the house because of the whole Eternity of Rain thing, but still, it's been nice.

And I don't want them to go back because I will have to figure out what to do with myself in their absence. This used to be an easy task, but now it isn't.

I'm reading "Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar" by Dear Sugar who is in fact Cheryl Strayed. It is a gorgeous and wondrous book and the book I needed in my life, right now, this very moment. It's made me cry over and over again in the good way. And it turns out that the quote on the mug above is from Tiny Beautiful Things, from an essay Strayed wrote for a writer who was lost along her way.

I certainly can't write like a motherfucker right now but there's a time for everything.

So there is is, Brittany. This moment in your life. This day beneath the gray-washed sky.

January 2nd

Paris, March 2002

I thought maybe I would microblog, a little bit every day, even though I don't exactly want to. I won't hold myself to it, I don't make resolutions, I don't believe in all of that.

My brain is very sick. When my brain gets sick like this, I can mostly do a good job of pretending to people that it isn't. I can look like I'm home and sound like I'm home, but inside, my brain is in such distress that I can't find myself anywhere. It's like that scene in Home Alone (forgive me) when Kevin fools the robbers into thinking a great party is going on. The lights are on, the music's blasting, there are people moving inside. From the outside everything is normal--lit up, even. But in reality, the inside is empty. There isn't anything good. Anywhere.

So there's your John Hughes/Depression analogy of the day.

Finally I said all of this to Noah, which was incredibly hard, so so hard, but I felt better afterwards. I felt better today. I'll be on Wellbutrin again soon. 

Last night I was doing Yoga With Adriene and she said something about "trauma to the emotional body". That was it, exactly. My entire body felt bruised and sore, like I had been beaten. My brain had been beating me for weeks. 

Let's see.

In March of 2002 I went to Paris with three girlfriends. Travel has always been one of the most important things to me--I used to think it was more important, even, than writing. That was when I was writing but couldn't travel. Now I'm going to travel, but I can't write. Of course, now writing feels utmost, travel second. Of course. In March 2012, despondent that I hadn't been back to Europe in ten years, I made a solemn vow to myself that I would go again by 2022. (I know it is ridiculous to be despondent over not going to Europe) I called my best friend and made her witness to my vow. I assumed I'd be getting my passport stamped somewhere close to midnight on December 31st, 2022. Then, a few weeks back, my husband found himself in a position to buy me a ticket to Paris. Knowing how much Paris means to me, he did. He bought it for me and I'll be staying there for two weeks, by myself. Traveling alone is something I've always wanted to do and I can't believe it's going to happen. You probably can't tell from the tone of this blog but I am thrilled, I'm so excited, I could cry. I have bought lots of clothes in black and white and I am READY.

Okay. That day, the day I made the solemn vow, I still believed in signs, I was hungry for signs. I vowed that one day I would go back to Paris and then I put my tiny daughters in the minivan and got on the highway. A clear blue day, it was March, so I would have been coming out of my depression, or about to. I was wondering if I would really make it, would I ever really go back. A car passed me on the right. Its license plate said, "Oui."

on new years day I knew two things:

1) I am going to go on wellbutrin again

2) in 70 days, I am flying to paris

Happy Thanksliving

Ayla as Princess Mononoke and Indy as Junie B. Jones

Indy has been dreaming that our cat, Whiskey, is turning into a man at night, and that while she sleeps he takes her earrings out of her ears and puts them back in. I am not even going to BEGIN to touch the Freudian implications of that one. At dinner Ayla said that charming anthem of 4th graders everywhere: "whoever smelt it dealt it", to which Indy smartly replied, "Whoever made the rhyme is a bank robber", having mistranslated the usual reply in that swirling, nautilustic brain of hers. I know what you're thinking, but Indy is not a drunk.

While at work yesterday I realized that Thanksgiving is about to happen. I'm feeling melancholy about the holidays this year. Plans to go to Colorado for Christmas (the sound of that so cozy in a 90's sitcom way) fell through, which means we are alone here in Brevard for both of the major winter holidays. As if the holidays weren't already drenched in nostalgia and melancholy enough. I am one of those people who feels sad upon hearing Christmas music chirping in stores or seeing items that aren't normally attached to Christmas dressed up in green and red and carefully arranged in eye-catching displays. A few weeks ago at Barnes and Noble, the sight of Christmas-y tea and shortbread boxes made my heart sink. Not because it was "too soon" or disturbingly capitalistic, I'm long resigned to all that. I don't know exactly why the holidays make me feel low, they just do, and I'm feeling all the lower about spending them here rather than there.

Growing up, my mother always worked frantically to create a beautiful Thanksgiving, and as a teenager I began to implore her to call off all the work, to order Chinese food so that we could just relax together. (It was also as teenagers, I believe, that my sister and I began to call it Thanksliving, not as a paean to 'taking Thanksgiving more into our hearts' but in order to do impressions of drunks) Now as an adult, I'm perfectly happy to order take-out, but of course my daughters want the full traditional spread. So last night, Noah and Ayla and I stood in the kitchen and made a list (Indy was off somewhere hallucinating) and sometime this weekend I will shop for turkey and cranberries, either in the dead of night or by the first rays of dawn, like some poor translation of a pagan ritual, designed now in modernity not to appease the fitful gods but to avoid the wealthy retirees, who in Brevard are legion. I don't like Thanksliving food, any of it, except this horrendously wonderful, uh, thing, from Noah's side of the family that involves beating Velveeta with sugar, slabbing it on top of apple pie filling, and pouring condensed milk over the whole affair. It is nothing short of an abomination, which pleases me like Krampus does during this saccharine, canned-joy time.

I Know What I Mean Sometimes

Three easy peasy hairstyles
that I like to keep in my aresenal
are 1) the I Am Become Life-Giver, and
2) The Real Creator of Worlds.



Last night was awful. How can a school sponsored lasagna dinner followed by a book fair possibly be awful? you are wondering. But you are wrong. They can be the worst, when your kid decides to bank on you not wanting to make a scene in front of the whole town and accuses you of stealing money from her in the middle of the school library while using a tone. I know I shouldn't take this personally, but I did. Why does my kid think I'd steal ten bucks from her? Ayla has also recently challenged me by starting the Harry Potter series with the second book. She just skipped The Sorcerer's Stone and went straight to The Chamber of Secrets. I had believed that because I'm ambivalent about world religions, nothing she could do could trouble me on a deep existential level, but boy was I wrong. "We wanted strong women. We got them," a friend says at work. Ayla was born to challenge me. But no, of course this isn't true. In one sense, Ayla was born for her own purpose. In another sense, nobody was born for any purpose at all. This is a deep philosophical question not to be posed in school cafeterias on Thursday nights. Its a choose-your-own-adventure sort of question, one you can only answer for yourself. Christians and Oprahns seem most likely to believe we were born for a reason. I have been both. I still don't know.

When I go on Facebook I feel like opening a vein and turning it into performance art, something that might take my life but would also stop just one person from going on Facebook, thus creating a butterfly effect to save our world. The true hero of our times will be the hacker who destroys The Social Network completely and forever. Have you noticed that the world is falling apart on Facebook, but it's okay if you look right outside your window? As long as you stay away from lasagna dinners? Sometimes I go online and I fight with pixels. Sometimes I am enraged by ether. If I wrote a modern fairy tale today, the hero would be that hacker and the villains would be the comments section on Buzzfeed. Why are they so angry at people for being people? Why can't they understand that every generation thought something was really bad about their time, which means that nothing has ever been so bad as we thought, after all. (Except for Facebook.) If you want to be my bae, it's okay. If you go to Starbucks wearing your Uggs, I won't be mad at you for taking pictures of the red cup. Or of yourself in a mirror. Even yourself with the red cup in a mirror. These are the times we live in. I don't want to go back to some selfie-less past, before we were all totes adorable. I want to go to the future, where, if the earth is still here, we will all be more evolved. And the men will be like, "Remember when all the girls took with their iPhones were selfies, and not the essences of our souls?" They will still be policing us, but we won't care anymore. And the women will all say "tee ay, tee ay tee ay". And the old men will be like, "Remember when women were still totes adorbs?" What I mean is that we have to leave each other alone. We have to just let each other live.