30 Things To Do Before I Pronounce You "Adult"

In 2007, Glamour published an article called "30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Know by the Time She's 30." According to the Huffington Post, this article took off like gangbusters - women were emailing it to their friends and coworkers, and the editors of Glamour eventually tracked down 30 prominent lady-types to write essays on each of the 30 entries.

 The list is divided into two sections: fifteen entries on things women should have, and another fifteen on things we should know. The "to have" section read like a shopping list, albeit one filtered through an empowered attitude: make sure you have a black lacy bra and a cordless drill by the time you hit your thirties, girls, or else Glamour won't think you've made it! The "to know" section is a little more loosey-goosey, but uses the same Zen-lite attitude that permeates women's monthlies (ew). There's an instruction to learn "how to kiss in a way that communicates perfectly what you would and wouldn’t like to happen next," which I'm sure is totally just as effective as using your mouth to say words like "no" and "I don't want to." The list is a spirited but hollow exercise in self-acceptance: instructive bullet points that don't offer any acknowledgement whatsoever that these things are a process.

I'm not yet thirty, but I've got some ideas on how I would write that list.

To Have:

1. A friend you can call to help you move. Don't let those people go - they are vital to your personal economy and should be handsomely rewarded.
2. "Your" addiction. What - sugar? Diet colas (yum - that's mine)? The gym? Cigarettes? HBO shows? What's the thing you do that drives most of the people around you mental? Pick one - you don't get to be addicted to cocaine and bad boyfriends.
3. A really great outfit. Glamour said this too, but I think they meant a really posh outfit, like for job interviews and other adult-style bullshit. This outfit is one that makes you feel totally fly. I love baggy sweats, skater shoes and a puffy vest, because it makes me feel like a mid-'90s backup dancer, and totally confident.
4. Your charity (NB: this is NOT YOUR BOYFRIEND). Maybe you do volunteer work, maybe you donate, but everyone needs to give back.
5. Some great female role models. Not models/actresses or other women whose primary value to the world is how they look; I'm talking about writers, musicians, politicians, business owners, and entrepreneurs whom you can admire.
6. Your signature dishes. Have one for brunch potlucks, vegetarians, picky kids, and impressing your date. I suggest bean salad, bean salad, buttered noodles, and a roast, in that order.
7. Your creative outlet. Non-negotiable. Gardening counts, as does blogging, cooking, making up cocktails, and re-arranging your apartment. Watching movies and playing Guitar Hero does not count.
8. A person in your life who makes things good for you. This can be a partner, a friend, a family member or a workmate - if you're lucky, you have many - but this chum is a source of laughs and support.
9. A game to whip out at parties. I like Munchkin for my nerdz, and Kinks for a drunken party game (everyone puts in two kinks or fetishes - one of their real ones, and a made-up red herring, and folks go in turns trying to match 'em back to their owners).
10. A library card and a credit card. They are both tools. Treat them as such.
11. The ability to be bored. Put down your cell phone and iPod, and try entertaining yourself in a doctor's waiting room, in line at the bank, and on the bus. Boredom allows your mind to wander and gives you a break.  
12. Your favourite body part. I've have gorgeous eyes and an unbeatable rack, which definitely helps balance out my chunky-ass curves. Even if you're not wild about your total package, your delicate neck or strong hands are a total asset and your crush is probably daydreaming about them right now.
13. At least one PG-rated story about a date gone horribly, hilariously wrong. Turn it into a cocktail party story where you are charming and self-deprecating. Tell it to the impressionable teenage girls who glom onto you at weddings.
14. A really cozy sweater, blanket, or duvet. I know I said this wasn't a shopping list, but seriously, just get one.
15. A hairstylist who knows what's up. If your cutter needs to straighten your curly hair before she can cut it, you're at the wrong place.

To Know:

1. Figure out how many drinks take you to tipsy, charming, bottom-of-the-ocean depression, fighting-mad, and asleep at the bar. Stick to the first two. 
2. Your sexual style. I loved my 20s, and they were a time of exploration, but as I approach 30, I know what I like, and how to bring it up with my partners. I rely on words to communicate preferences.
3.  How you like to stay fit. Yoga, Zumba, Nia, step, weights, long bike rides, sprints, stiltwalking, stripping classes, whatever. I don't care. Find a way you like to get sweaty. 
4. Whether or not you're good with money. Some people have spreadsheeted budgets, while others rely on  dipping into their purse and pulling out loose twenties. Either way, you have no excuse to beg your landlord for lenience.
5. Accepting that there is at least one person out there who hates you, and probably another who is envious of you, because of the person you're sleeping with. This has basically nothing to do with you. 
6. Are you a pet person or a kids person? Maybe both? Cool. Neither? Also cool.
7. How much time in front of the TV/computer you can handle before you go a little nuts. Aim for, like, 75% of that.
8. What type of place energizes you. Do you love the ocean or the prairie? Do know love office camaraderie or the calm of a home workspace? 
9. If you are actually allergic to gluten/dairy/soy/whatever. If you aren't, please, I beg of you: no more intensive conversations about your bowels at brunch. 
10. Whether or not you are a Diva Cup girl. And then seriously, can we all stop talking about our periods?
11. What not to apologize for. If you are a workaholic, own it; if you need a part-time job, cool. If you like women or kink or prefer to be alone, if you don't want kids, if you haven't put a down payment down on a house, you owe the world exactly nothing in way of explanation.
12. How to take downtime.
13. How to work really, really, ridiculously hard.
14. How to quit a job. Getting hired is tough; knowing when to walk away is tougher. Know your limits and work within them, and don't get pushed around because you "need the money."
15. How to be there for the people you love when they go through hard times. People are going to die, go to rehab, have terrible divorces and breakups, get behind the wheel of a car after four shots of Jaeger, cheat, lie, run up astronomical debt, have abortions, attempt suicide, drink too much, quit their jobs, get fired, go to jail, develop intensely irritating grad-school affectations (UGHH cocktail parties with these people are the worst), move away, throw tantrums, owe money, give you terrible presents, get married to people you hate, and generally fail. Cultivate your forgiveness, your grace, and your listening ears.

Post-Girls

My friends and I, in true post-hipster fashion, recently launched into a "what does it all mean?" conversation about the new HBO show Girls. There are a lot of critical narratives coming out of what we're talking about when we talk about Girls, like race, privilege, representation, money, the prodigy Lena Dunham and the problematic Lesley Arfin, New York, sexual insecurity, exoticism and the value of making this kind of television.

Girls rounds out the trilogy of shows launched in the last year, which also includes New Girl and Two Broke Girls. The titles might suggest that these shows are about children or students, but everyone here is in their mid- to late-twenties. I have a fondness for New Girl, because it's transformed itself from an "adorkable" (sigh) vehicle for MPDG Zooey Deschanel into a strong ensemble comedy; I have a neutral feeling about Two Broke Girls, because while I like Kat Dennings's deadpan delivery and real-girl body, I'm much less excited about sitcom tropes, like a laugh track and a secondary cast full of ethnic caricatures.

But Girls, with its indie/HBO pedigree, was purporting to be something different. Not a sitcom, exactly, although some of the scenes are painfully funny (awkward sex = comedy!), but a snapshot into the lives of single, underemployed, urban-dwelling young women. We are legion.

The conversations that have sprung out of Girls have mostly focused on three things: whether or not we are the kind of girls that Girls is about; the representations of race in the show's universe; and the responsibilities of the writers, network, and showrunners to identify and correct discrepancies between the real world and the show's world on both those points.

There is no question that I'm the kind of person who could easily go down a Girls rabbit-hole. Like the main character Hannah, I'm a small-town transplant to a much larger and diverse city. I came for school and stayed for work, which I hoped would be as a famous and well-respected writer. There's a scene in the first episode where Hannah, who has been writing her memoirs, produces the half-way-done product for her parents. She hands them about twenty pages of computer paper, which provoked a knowing guffaw from me. I have totally done stuff like that. My parents, like Hannah's, were generous; they also knew when to cut off the flow, which was much more recent than I'm proud to admit.

But Hannah is naive in other ways. She's convinced she's going to get AIDS, and she was working at an unpaid internship for two years - a mind-boggling length of time that led to a summary dismissal when she had the gall to ask for a paycheck. Like me, Hannah is not the prodigy she wants to be (Lena Dunham, at 25, is a different matter altogether). If the writing is good - and so far it is - this could be good TV. But there's nothing new here. Good TV requires that viewer learn something about the world - good, evil, man, woman, rich, poor, child, adult - that we didn't already know before. I'm not totally sure how Girls is going to accomplish that.

And then there's the race thing. Following a post on The Hairpin, in which the author lamented the lack of diversity in the cast of Girls, the outcry on the internet has gone something like, "What kind of cracker-ass New York are these girls living in, anyway?"There's the contingent of folks who say that Dunham is just writing her experiences, and if she's not tight with ladies of colour, she has no obligation to just, like, stick 'em in. There's the other side, that points out that cities are filled with all kinds of people, and someone who's "finding herself" the way Hannah is might bump against women who aren't exactly like her. But in the Girls universe, the characters of colour are bartenders and nannies, homeless men and receptionists - certainly not positions of respect or authority, and I doubt that Hannah would aspire to emulate them.

So what? Dunham, who is the show's writer, producer, director and star, has no obligation to represent women of colour onscreen. It hasn't been her experience!

Here's the thing: the show is presented as a work of fiction. Dunham and Hannah aren't the same person - for example, Dunham is a lifelong New Yorker, while Hannah is a relatively recent transplant. And since Dunham and Hannah aren't the same person, there's an opportunity for the show to branch out from Dunham's microcosm and talk about what it means to be a girl, in Brooklyn (where the majority of the population is not white), right now.

There's an excellent blog post by Kendra James explaining that she and Dunham have had the same background (raised in New York, Oberlin liberal-arts education, same kinda-money background), but James is Black and Dunham is white. The argument that Dunham is just "writing what she knows" doesn't hold water when she should be aware of the women of colour who populate her universe, going to the same small schools and running in similar social circles. The fact that Dunham's show ignores them completely - and that one her staff writers has actively and obnoxiously engages in "ironic racism" on the side - well, then, you have the makings of An Actual Problem.

So what? I'm a white girl. I have no horse in this race (ha ha, horrible puns). Well, here's the thing: not-on-purpose racism can be blamed on ignorance, and forgiven when corrected. It's not awesome, but it happens.

But if you are explicitly told - repeatedly, and in public - that the content that you're producing is hurting people by pretending that they are not part of your universe and their stories (so similar to your stories!) don't exist or don't need to be told, you hurt them. You send a message that you do not value you their narratives, or that their stories don't need to be told alongside your own - Girls at 8 PM, Black Girls at 8:30 - and that is damaging. And it's my place, as a critical consumer of media, and you know, as a human being, to say it's not okay.

A Cohort, Not A Competition

There's a type kind of music video that gets made sometimes, when folks don't have a lot of money, but they do have some really good-looking friends and maybe a cute baby to bounce on their knee. Everyone goes to the beach and gets silly and they shoot it on an iPhone, and the whole thing costs about a hundred dollars. These kinds of videos are often made by really tight guy friends who grew up being mind-blowingly cool and not aware of their coolness in any way.

These dudes seem to band together because they're all reasonably good-looking, and have weird, marketable-in-grade-school talents (drawing comic strips, constructing forts, or not looking stupid in sweatpants), and they have laissez-faire parents who will both give them video cameras and then throw them outside to play. The alchemy of all these things together creates hot artists who have no skills at all when it comes to girls.

Obviously, these dudes are hot commodities, so girls either get up on them, or they figure out that saying "hi" at house parties will likely lead to some heavy petting. But their primary and fundamental way of being isn't stereotypical artists' loneliness - it's surrounded by other creative dude types.

I, obviously and for a number of reasons, have not had this experience.

I wasn't ever really confident enough to let my freak flag fly at full-mast: I was the kind of weirdo who created elaborate stories about the fairies who lived in the front garden, and would spend hours acting out dialogue for all my imaginary playmates. This was helpful for my development as a writer, but it was cyanide for my social life.

Does creativity thrive in a vacuum? That group of guys churned out musicians, writers, and illustrators; on the other hand, they might be flukey freaks of nature who would've done fine even if they hadn't had each other to laugh at their silly cartoons and listen to their first attempts at the looping pedal. But part of the process of becoming an artist is growing your confidence: it took me until my late 20s to figure out I was supposed to do this. They put that issue to bed in elementary school. Their friendship probably helped.

There are plenty of famous creative male friendships. Think Gaugin and van Gogh. Think Hemingway and Dos Passos. Think Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola and Spielberg. These guys drank together, womanized together, and competed with each other for firsts and bests. They formed uniquely creative brotherhoods that left a lasting legacy on the arts community, one that isn't matched by a corollary sorority. Prominent girl-groups, like the Brontes, tend to be lumped together because of bloodlines, not because those ladies hung out and went shooting together. And they're far outnumbered by solitary female artists, like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf, who loom large in the artistic unconscious.

These days, I feel strange reaching out to fellow creative types. I rely on those who have come before me: I grill them on writing best practice and business questions, but we don't often get together and jam, just to have fun. Did I miss something? I still have loads of fun doing my thing, but I wish I had the kind of experience those music-video-making guys had. I crave a cohort, not competition.

Part of the thrill of freelance writing is that you get to be first, and best, at what you do. You need to be tough, and independent, and cultivate your brand. I know it's naive of me to yearn for collaboration - the writerly equivalent of homemade beach videos with friends - but that doesn't make the feeling go away. I want a room of one's own, sure - but I want it full of compadres.

Call Me

I am a dinosaur. Not only do I not have a smartphone, I don't even have a cell phone. While my landline is cordless, on the days when the power goes out, I use a phone that plugs right into the wall. It's complete with a curly little cord that, while adorable, tethers me to a three-foot radius in my bedroom. Often, when I'm chatting on those calls, I realize as I dial the final number that I desperately need to pee. It's glamourous, my life.

There's no definitive reason for not having a cell phone, although the spectre of being constantly in touch was pretty gruesome. I like privacy. I like returning calls at my convenience. I've never left my landline in a cab, or dropped it in a bar toilet after too many whiskey sours. I feel zero pressure to upgrade to a fancier handset every year. Like renting movies and tap water, landlines are a call back to a slower and less technologically frenetic time. It's not nostalgia that drives my commitment to my home phone; it's the desire to commit my whole brain to my task - talking on the phone - instead of fragmenting my time into a thousand slivers of unusable connection. I'm young - 28 years old - and I realize that my multi-tabbed, multi-tasking lifestyle needs monotasking balance.

I'm one of the 30% of Canadians who don't have a cell phone - according to one research firm, we're not likely to get one, either - and we're not exactly a growth market. But just in case you're friends with a throwback like me, here are some helpful hints and tips for dealing with us stuck-in-the-past weirdos.

Leave a message. I have an answering machine, the kind that results in hijinks on sitcoms because some hapless character overhears something he shouldn't, thanks to a machine that broadcasts the message into the room. Many older home phones don't have caller ID, so if you have the option of leaving a message, please do.

Understand that we will get back to you. My friends kvetch when I'm not home, but I get their messages and call them back. It may not be instantaneous, but it will happen.

Don't text us. I mean, you can--we get your texts, and they are read to us by robots, which is one of my favourite things ever. (True story: depending on your cell phone provider, if you text "LOL" to a landline, the robot will either say "loll" expressionlessly, spell out L-O-L, or - my favourite - cackle maniacally.) However, once we listen to the text once, it's over. It's not in an inbox somewhere. We can't refer to it later. If you're making plans or conveying important detail, call us. We'll get another retro tool - the pen and paper! - and take notes.

Somewhat disingenuously, I've done my best to cultivate a wide network of people who have cell phones, and encourage my friends and family to call them if they need to get in touch with me. My boyfriend has 10+ entries in his phone that link him to my friends and family. "I'll be with Rachel, you can text her to meet up!" is a common refrain in my house. I carry quarters for the payphone, and I try to keep plans and be punctual. There have been moments when a cell phone would have been useful - massive subway delays, last-minute change of venue - but these are few and far between.

It's 100% possible to have a thriving personal and professional life without carrying a cell phone all the time. Even if you need one, understand that just because people can reach you 24/7 doesn't mean that they're your priority. One of my pet peeves is when someone pulls out their cell phone when we're mid-conversation and texts. It's a blatant middle finger to our conversation, a not-so-subtle signal that I'm easy to dismiss. Landlines have two options - talking or not talking - and it forces me to acknowledge that I either need to talk the person on the other end or I don't.

It's important to remember than constant communication doesn't always equal good communication. Smartphones, cell phones and landlines are all tools to be used to that end, and so it doesn't really matter what kind of phone you have. I may not be fancy, but I will totally call you back, and that's the whole point.

Swap Meat

"Where did you get this?" my friend or boyfriend will ask, pointing to a new bracelet, a swanky new sweater, or a hitherto-unseen pair of jeans. I'll hem and haw for a minute and then admit, with some reluctance, that I found the bracelet on the sidewalk. The jeans? Piled with other clothing discards in front of a sorority house. The sweater came from a clothing swap. My whole outfit has come from other people's leavings. This exchange happens all the time.

Look, I'm not going to lie - I'm basically a hobo, and nowhere is this more apparent than in my wardrobe. My clothes come not from a florescent-lit shelf at the Gap, or from a well-curated boutique in a swish part of town. They come from church basements and school auditoriums - the holy places of clothing swaps - and from second-hand emporia like the Salvation Army. A lot of it is lifted from literally the side of road, set out by folks who can't be arsed to walk it over to a donation box. My friends give me clothes. So does my mom: gently used additions to my wardrobe that gives me nostalgia pangs for the 1980s.

This is mostly an economic choice. Why pay for one pair of pants at the mall when I can get four at the thrift shop? There's also a deeper-seated issue with changerooms, sizing, and self-loathing that comes roaring out in new clothing stores; that's more muted in a second-hand situation. Shopping is annoying and full of strangers, and I am lazy and easily enraged.

Plus, there's the thrill of the hunt. Found clothes feel like a gift from the universe; finding a good-looking pair of pants in a swap meet feels like bagging a trophy. Knowing your personal look makes clothing swaps much easier to handle - if all you wear is black, then your eyes can skip right over all the blue-and-coral striped sweaters. Similarly, I have a major jones for mini-skirts and booty shorts; combined with the purchase of new tights (even I have my swap-meet limits), I can reinvigorate my wardrobe. You have to wade through piles of pearl-encrusted mohair sweaters and baggy office-drone khakis, but fortune favours the quirky: if you can make a white-and-gold tunic work for you, grab it. You end up with a wardrobe full of unusual and interesting clothes for a fraction of the price that you would pay new.

There's a game I sometimes play called What's New? I usually rock an even split of new, gifted, used and found. Today: swapped jeans, gifted socks, a tank top that my mom threw at me one day and said, "All you wear is black tank tops, ever, do you want this?" (cue vigorous nodding), a bra that was delivered in a similar fashion, and a pair of Blundstones that I actually bought new. I love playing this game. Each piece of clothing has a little story - I got the jeans at a swap with my sister, who scored a dress made by a company called Gold Digger (hilar!) - and taken all together, they make me feel confident, stylish, and hot. Good clothes, no matter where they come from, should do that.

One

I've been writing this blog for almost four years. When I first started, I was a grimy undergraduate student who could barely hold down a part-time job and once called the corner store to see if they would deliver me Coke Zero and soup because I had a sinus infection and it was snowing. Despite being 24 years old, I was basically a feral teenager. I lived in a apartment-cum-clubhouse, where my clothes were heaped in middens on my filthy carpet and I scrounged money out of the dryer to pay for dive-bar pints.

I was, in other words, a wreck.

In some ways, since it forced me to shape up, being a wreck was good for me. I did some heavy work and quit some bad habits. I slowly stopped staying in bed 17 hours a day, and started eating three meals a day. I graduated. I met a swell guy. For the first time in my life, my plants haven't died as soon as they crossed my threshold.

I leaned on my parents a lot in my financially lean times - unemployment is one of the scariest things going these days - and they provided with a generous bounty. I hated relying on my parents. I used to love getting an allowance when I was kid (two dollars a week, provided I had been diligent about not leaving my nightie on the bathroom floor for houseguests to chortle over when I got dressed in the morning), but when I was 27 and getting an allowance, I felt sick. So I shaped up even more. I got a job - a real, non-waitressing job, with benefits! Adulthood!

Something magical happened on the way: I kept writing. This blog is more than 300 entries deep now. Some entries are just insane: radioactive with self-loathing and working-out-the-emotions bilge. But most are decent little time capsules, and I'm immensely proud of myself for consistently putting out good writing, week after week, year after year.

Another magical thing happened, too. I started writing for other people. I now write for dandyhorse, and I blog for xoxoamore, and the Huffington Post's Canadian arm. And I work a full-time job. Plus, I have a boyfriend; we like to hang out. Oh, and friends, too. I have to water my plants, also. And while none of these are particularly well-paying jobs (except for my day job, which is actually totally well-paying), they're things that I need to maintain. They're the end result of a lot of hard work.

I'm not quitting this blog. I fucking love writing Hipsters Are Boring - it's some of the most me writing I've ever done. But I am going to bring it back to one post a week. I'll do my best to cross-post when I have other stuff going up in other places (something I should have been doing all this time), and I'll use this space for things that can't go other places. Rants about Rob Ford, a love letter to the movies, and a meditation on clothing swaps are some of the posts I have planned. I've put too much of myself into this goofy little project to quit it like some bad habit.

When I first started this blog, I needed to write to hear myself think. And four years later, I do.

Sick, In Bed, Dreaming

I am sick - sore throat, congestion, tired 'n' achy, all the usual suspects - and so I am feeling sorry for myself. I've had a successful writing month, and have started planning a trip abroad, and have kept my room relatively clean and remembered all my appointments....and I just ran myself down. It happens. I feel like a bicycle with a flat tire, or a battery with no juice in it.

In any case.

My sick days are usually spent in bed, eating weird things (peas and gyoza, anyone?), drinking tea and listening to music. And in celebration of my upcoming trip abroad, here's a sampling of Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men, who are playing in Toronto next week and who will probably folksily bring the house down.

I'm sure there will be several more Icelandic bands coming at y'all in the next few months, so get ready for some Bjork! I'm going to go contruct a swan dress now. Please excuse me.