"Girls" V. 2 Broke Girls

I recently was told I should check out the series "Girls" on HBO. Out of curiosity and faith in HBO I did check it out. However, I did so after viewing 2 Broke Girls: Season 1. I must say that while it is nearly an identical plot, the differences are vast.

You could say that a pessimist would watch HBO's "Girls," while an optimist would 'opt' (pun intended) for 2 Broke Girls.

Over at HBO, there are harrowing similarities to my life and the life of the character Hannah in "Girls." I, too, recently was dismissed from an internship- left with no place to go. Also an English major, also lacking what the world calls a "career path." Similar upbringings and similar parental styles, at that. I was haunted by the script; thinking who has been following my friends and I around all these months, writing down what we say? While it did have a freakishly accurate depiction of a recent graduate trying to make it in job land, there is no doubt it is intended for a voyeuristic audience. No girl, my age and in my position, would put herself through the agony of watching bad things happen to characters just like us. It's like waking up and immediately being forced to stare in the mirror. Everyone knows we'll spend hours in front of the mirror when we look good.

So, we wait until Sex and the City reruns come on after the show and live vicariously through them. Or, we flip the channel to CBS and take a second to laugh at ourselves with 2 Broke Girls.

While it sounds ridiculous, I know I am not the first girl I've heard say this of the show: "It gives me the courage to be poor." 2 Broke Girls is a caricature of our experience, something to laugh at, something to inspire us. At its core, it gently preaches the value of ambition, hard work, and that everything will be alright in the end. While over on HBO, we are watching girls complain about no longer receiving money from their parents, on CBS we are watching 2 girls attempting to make the most of it by working their day jobs, night jobs, and building a dream.

Sure, granted this is a cheese-tastic summary and my praise of a sitcom is a bit disproportionate and grandiose. I'm sure there is a professional TV critic out there who wrote this very review with the opinions reversed. Well, 50-year-old-man/woman, YOU are the voyeur. As for me, the "broke girl," the girl who just got let go from the internship, I'll stick to my optimistic sitcom and indulge escapism.

A tall drink of friendship

While my corporate job has done its best to destroy any modicum of creative spirit I maintain, I do think it is important to write creatively from time to time.

Today, the thought I simply cannot get out of my head is a tall, cold pint of Guinness. Namely, I want to sit with friends for hours at a quiet pub in Belfast and drink 4 or 5 pints of the black stuff. Talking about things like cooking, politics, and just anything that comes to our minds.

While in Belfast, I went out on a lot of dates. While I wasn't interested in them 99.9% of them, (with one very special exception) I think what I enjoyed was just sipping a Guinness that somebody else paid for, listening to, and telling stories with people I thought I'd never meet in my lifetime.

Today I'm craving not only the bitter-smooth taste of Guinness, but I'm craving the no-rush, casual intimacy of a pub. What I want is to sit with someone- an old friend or new- and say to each other, "I am in no rush. Let's talk, I know you've got interesting things to say."

I want to celebrate being excited about something. To talk about subjects not just because we are studying them, but because we care, and because we believe these things matter on this earth, no matter how big or small. I think that's really what I'm craving.

In the Mean Time

Did you know there are two definitions of the word "Intern?"

a. A student or a recent graduate undergoing supervised practical training.
b. To confine, especially in wartime.

Well, it may not be wartime, but I can definitel say I've been confined in the meantime. And oh, how the time is mean.

I do think that "career path" is a very luxurious term, and forgive me, a bit of BS. I've had little to no choice on my "career path," which has been less of a path and more like hitchhiking. Not to be dramatic (but hey, I'm blogging, so why not?) but this internship has left me on the sketchy outskirts of town, clutching my bag as the bus comes to a stop saying "oh...no..."

I've listened to this poem a hundred times before, just wanted to make a record of it here so I never forget about it. If you haven't heard Bob Dylan's poem about Woody Guthrie, and you've ever struggled, ever, you'll be happy that you did.

Joni Mitchell and Grocery Bags

Here I am, once more, a stranger to my blog. What prompts me to return to this is a definite and sincere feeling of Wanderlust once more. Today, looking out the window, I was thinking of how I feel like I am being blown around in the wind. No matter what I do, the wind is more powerful than I. More specifically, I am a plastic grocery bag that is stuck in the tree.

I am a source of annoyance to the tree as well as the passer-by. I am not there on my own accord, but rather, time, chance, and weather have happened to me. And here I am, bits of me stuck in a place I don't want to be. Waiting for the wind to blow the right direction to take me somewhere new, or some novelty tree-bagger removers to come and lift me out.

All this might sound a bit desperate, coming from the blogger who -literally- once said that the world is my oyster. Up in this tree I am inclined to feel differently.

I wonder what advice I'd give the bag. It's probably the advice most people tell me these days- "Hang in there." It's boderline offensive when all I can do is indeed, hang in here.

I know one thing: that all of a sudden, your life can change. It's my hope that the wind will soon carry me. I'm always thinking of Joni Mitchell songs nowadays (Let the wind carry me, for one). Mostly it's "Both Sides Now." Let's post my favorite verse:

Tears and fears and feeling proud
to say "i love you" right out loud,
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds,
I've looked at life that way.
But now old friends are acting strange,
they shake their heads,
they say I've changed.
Something's lost
but something's gained in living every day.

I think Joni must have been 23 when she wrote this song. I remember these blogs having an optimistic ending, but I'm afraid all I can say now is that even though I don't believe my upcoming change will be easy, I do have faith that it will happen. And I think that's something.

Epiphanista

A friend of mine recently was working on a grant application to do student/faculty research in Tunisia. After months of hard work, excitement, and stress I could sense 3,000 miles a away, a key recommender decided to back out at the last minute. Saying that he was the only faculty member with suitable experience to guide the project, and "didn't know enough about it."

The aggravating thing, is that my friend was very active in pursuing this faculty member for her project. She shared her hopes of the grant with him, and he consented to write the letter- only to back out at the last minute. And who knows why- despite his word that he would assist her with a letter of recommendation- he pulled out at the last minute. Perhaps pride. Perhaps paranoia. Perhaps sensitivity. Perhaps ego.

The bottom line is that I really feel badly for my friend, because a mirrored situation recently occurred in my life. Something seemed so close, too good to be true. Turns out it's true what they say- if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

But there is something that makes my friend's problem much worse than mine. In an email to her, I had a bit of an epiphany:

"I'm just glad that other things in my life are going well. Because I'd rather have a love interest go astray then have something else in my life screw up: fail school, gain weight, get in a fight with my family."

And I realized through this, that when given the choice between having my heart broken or gaining 20 lbs, I would choose heart break every time. When given the choice to fail school, or have my heart broken, I would choose heart broken every time. This is a sad, sad revelation- one which perhaps is too personal for a blog. But it shows me that relationships with the opposite sex is the one area of my life in which I allow myself to screw up. The only part in which I allow for errors. In this way, I create a masochistic catharsis.

My CV is great. I'm at my lowest weight since freshman year of HIGH SCHOOL and I exercise everyday. I eat very healthy, take my vitamins everyday, and don't smoke. I have a 3.9 GPA. I speak with family everyday. I take great care in maintaining my friendships. I take great care of my clothes, dishes, carpet, and all my possessions. I take care of my spiritual needs. I travel. I live in Northern Ireland. My love life- stinks. And it's because I place so much emphasis on the area in which mistakes and failures are the most commonplace. A dangerous place to focus my attention, but the squeaky wheel always gets the grease, they say.

My challenge to myself, after having this epiphany, is to take at least as good care of my heart as I do of my makeup brushes. My challenge is to open my mind so that I understand mistakes are mistakes, errors are errors, and shortcomings are shortcomings, and I can allow them to happen in all parts of my life. I am only human, and there shouldn't be a compartment of my life that is dedicated to times when I feel like screwing up. I challenge myself to take more risks in other parts of my life, not just the part where it is okay if it all "goes to hell in a handbasket." To level the playing field, to take some pressure off that part of my life.

And just to lighten the mood:

Incorrigibly Plural

Went to a reading tonight sponsored by the English Department at Queen's University Belfast tonight, where poet Paul Muldoon read a poem entitled "Snow" by Louis MacNiece. I thought it really captured how I feel about the world at the moment, and here it is:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.



There are many times when I walk down the street in Belfast, sun shining, and rain falling on my face. And I think, "Yup, that's about right." There is so much in life that is so rewarding, and so much that is more challenging than I have ever experienced before. Acknowledging my priorities, while at the same time feeling the urge to totally break from them. The world isn't black or white or even gray, as I've seen lately. It's a checked pattern of happy and sad- challenges and rewards. Love and heartbreak. And after reflecting on this during the poetry reading, I think the point of it is just to learn how to embrace the ambiguity.

Gilda Radner once said, and it has been my favorite quote for years, the following:

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity."

Living in Belfast is so full of challenges and sometimes I learn so much in one day I think my head might explode or fall off my neck from the weight of it. At the same time, there are so many wonderful things I am experiencing, many of which I think may fit into the framework of the rest of my life. It sounds incredibly vague and indulgent, yes. But my experience here in Belfast has been exactly those two things, along with being quintessentially grown-up. Learning where budgeting and studying and socializing fit into the timetable of my day, all whilst learning an abstract ideal that the world is much suddener than I am inclined to believe. Accepting that all this could change within moments, and learning to embrace it.

Things I Love

For those not on facebook, I published an album this week of photos documenting good food I've cooked and eaten this summer until now, an ongoing collection of culinary memory. Here is a public link to access it:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=264224&id=500492088&l=b2cdc8d9d1

Lately I have been waking up around 6 naturally, and it's quite strange. Usually I have just been going back to sleep, but today I decided to just stay up. And I found out why there are "morning people" in the world. Now, this isn't the first early morning of my life, but being an avid fan of sleeping in, usually when faced with an option of waking up or sleeping I pick sleeping.

This morning, however, I woke up at 6. I read some, took a shower, surfed the web, made breakfast, watched Frasier, and cleaned my kitchen. Next I'm going to work on some real homework.

I suppose that some people find spontaneity to be a treat,however, I find consistency to be rare in my life. I get up and go to sleep at different hours every day. I eat one meal a day, then the next, four meals. Sometimes I go to the library until late at night. This is the life of a student. But now I am going to make a refined effort to add some ritual in my routine. Is this what it means to grow up??? Oh well!