.SOMETIMES RAW.

Spring is here which is the season for drinking cocktails and devouring salads while wearing light summer dresses. So what do you do if you don’t drink anymore? We all know that only small children, recovering drunks, and people in ankle-length vintage skirts choose not to drink, right? To avoid the questions and concerned faces of your coworkers, friends, and family (who are whispering that maybe I am actually pregnant at forty-one), here are some suggested ways to turn down that glass of booze:

1. “I’m taking antibiotics”
Scratch your inner thigh to avoid further questions

2. “I’m training for an Ironman and I’m bulking tonight” 
Carry a tub of protein powder around the party for an extra distraction

3. “I pre-partied and I’m already loaded”
Knock over a lamp for emphasis

4. “I’m recovering from surgery”
Choose an organ that no one understands and you can probably live without, like the spleen or part of your liver

5. “I’m violently allergic to alcohol”
Wince as you say this as if remembering the last time you drank

6. “I’m chewing a piece of gum and I don’t want to stop”
If you don’t actually have gum in your mouth just chew on your tongue

7. “I’m doing a detox before my next ayahuasca retreat”
Add, “I’d love to tell you about my spiritual journey in great detail…”

8. “I have to check in with my parole officer in a few hours”
In your best Morgan Freeman voice, say, “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged”

9. “I just shit my pants”
Shit your pants

10. “FIRE!”
Run

More (Existentialist) Life Hacks I Think About

11. To believe in the power of habit. Wake up early. Eat well. Meditate. Destroy your idols. Stare into the void and face the anguish of choosing who to become.

12. To do twenty-five minutes of staring at a blank screen or into space, thinking that life is empty, followed by five minutes of strolling around my neighbourhood, thinking that life is empty.

13. Cook in batches. This way, you get vegan enchiladas all week and the benefit of asking, “Do I like vegan enchiladas, or am I a poser who cooks in bad faith, to impress a woman, thereby disavowing the freedom to eat a steak?”

14. To spend hours petting my cat named Schopenmiauer.

15. To tell people about my goals. This is huge. It holds me publicly accountable and keeps me perpetually terrified that you are alienated.

16. Six words: Tony Robbins, Brené Brown, Eckhart Tolle. Six more: Don’t want ’em, don’t need ’em. My true life coach is any baby who is crying hysterically, ever reminding me that life is a disorienting hellhole that defies explanation.

17. Whenever I will feel lost, I spin in circles until I vomit. Doesn’t really help, but it’s kind of fun.

18. Whenever I will hear someone start a sentence with “Why—,” I don’t wait for them to finish, I just scream, “Yeah, why!” while punching them in the face.

19. My books are my friends: Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche. My real friends are all sick of me quoting Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche, so we don’t talk anymore.

20. Instead of speeding through life like a maniac, I will pause to appreciate nature. I like walking in the park, sitting under a pretty tree, and staring at the bark for hours until it looks like an incomprehensible alien substance.

21. Once a month, I will run through a giant corn maze to remind myself that I’m free to take whatever path I choose but that it all leads to a bunch of fucking pointless corn.

22. Once a year, I will dress in a giant Elmo costume and get arrested for public urination, because I am embracing the life of the absurd.

23. I will take “me time” just to think. I think about how warm weather is nice, or a funny joke I heard, or how I want to become God.

24. Shorter showers! Sounds silly, right? Not at all. That’s six extra minutes per day to wear my Elmo costume, and scream my despair at an empty sky.

25. My bedtime ritual will be all about mindful relaxation: Dim the lights. Play some Enya. A little light reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Resign myself to the hard truth that I’ll never have faith in anything. Before I drift into a dreamless sleep, I smile a little as I realize I get to wake up tomorrow and do it all over again and again and again and again and again and again.

*but we still need to have the important “Executive-Bored” meeting.

9:34 a.m.

Good morning, everyone!

First of all, there is no “I” in team. It’s Jay from upper management, aka your boss, with a quick update about today’s executive meeting. Did I mention that there is no “I” in team? In the latest twist of our work-from-home adventure and since everybody has Omicron now, we’ve been having issues with our usual video conferencing Zoom software.

So we’ll instead be hosting this meeting using the popular online role-playing game Middle Earth: Shadow of Insanity

Feel free to drop a message in the chat if you have any questions!

9:38 a.m.

WOW. Okay, there were a lot of questions! Lol!

To enter the meeting, first, create a character by selecting a gender (several available), race and class. We strongly believe in championing workplace diversity, so rest assured that elves, centaurs, orcs, dwarves, pink unicorns, minotaurs, and gnomes are all equals in the eyes of management.

9:42 a.m.

Good question, Michael! There are eighteen playable classes including Sorcerer and Warlock. If you’re in hazard mangagement, just select Barbarian.

9:45 a.m.

Okay, next steps! Once you’ve created your avatar, it’s time to log into the game world for our meeting. I’ve set up a conference room on the ground floor of the Pigbelly Canteen, which is conveniently located on the edge of the Whispering Wastes just past the Witchblood Forest. Ask a peasant for directions if you can’t find it.

Please come directly to the meeting at 3 p.m. and don’t stop on the way to fight goat people or collect golden coins and weapons.

9:52 a.m.

I’ve been getting some concerning messages, so I want to circle back and resolve a few pain points.

While Middle Earth is a player vs. player game, we don’t want to foster a coworker vs. coworker environment. However, we all know that stray fireballs and unintentional discharge of crossbow bolts can happen. So if your avatar IS killed and looted by a team member—say, Daniel from the first-kral-tribe—the issue will be handled in a private message mediation session with HR.

11:24 a.m.

Creative colleagues, I’m seeing a lot of confusion about certain aspects of this, honestly, very minor venue changes for our meeting, so here are just a few more best practices to make sure things go as smoothly as possible.

11:26 a.m.

NO side quests! I can’t stress this enough. We should be able to resolve all of our agenda items in the scheduled three hours, but that won’t be the case if the “Coaching Department” decides to run off looking for the Great Axe of Narnia. Don’t be selfish and make everyone stay late because of your own lust for powerful magic items.

11:29 a.m.

Also, no killing interns. This meeting is all-hands, so Christine and Bernie will have avatars like everyone else but their characters will remain at level zero to realistically reflect their post-pandemic job prospects. Please make them feel welcome and remember that our interns are unpaid and are doing this for the experience points. That’s all from me. See you this afternoon!

2:27 p.m.

Okay, guys the meeting is in a few minutes, and I’m seeing a lot of messages in the chat to the effect of “Why are we doing this?” and “Zoom isn’t down!” and “What the (bleep!) are you talking about!?” So just a quick note:

You’re right. Zoom is working “fine” but I honestly can’t keep looking at you guys all day on Zoom as if I didn’t have important item crafting to do. When we were in the office, I played Middle Earth from 9:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day and ate at my desk while the interns did the work. But since we’ve been working remotely, not five minutes goes by that I don’t get annoying emails, help requests, or complaints from someone who doesn’t know how to unmute himself. I’m lucky if I can fit in forty minutes of dungeon-crawling during my lunch hour. My minotaur is barely levelling up anymore. Do you guys get that????

This is all to say that I’ve decided that all future meetings will take place via Middle Earth until further notice or until I reach level 75.

For any further questions, see above.

2:35 p.m.

See. Above.

Ultimately, do I think movie characters shaped me as a human? No, not entirely. That honour belongs to my parents, siblings, teachers, boyfriends, and tons of reading. But I do think that what we see on-screen shows as possibilities. Movies give us the lesson of what life might look like if you were like someone if you acted as they did. I took a hard look at some movies that shaped my teens and movies that I watched over and over again. There are way more than three, obviously. To me, anything Woody Allen is classic, for example. You either love or hate him. And my all time favourite Howl, a movie about Allen Ginsberg and his famous poem Howl. So, here are my three picks for this article.

You’ve got Mail.

Anything Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are in together rocks. Anything! In this movie, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) is trying to run the children’s bookstore she inherited from her mother while dating the world’s most boring man alive when she starts up an internet flirtationship with Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). Just- Call- Me- Joe is a very New York piece of shit who owns a book “superstore”. Unbeknownst to Joe and Kathleen, they are rivals in real life even as they’re falling in love online! Can you believe it? I can! The writing is, as per usual in a Nora Ephron movie flawless, but Kathleen is a bit of a sweet dope. Perhaps the best part of her character is that Joe Fox brings out the worst in her instead of the best, which is very fun to watch, if problematic in real life. Of course, as they spend more time together, Joe becomes a better, kinder person (the journey seemingly every single man ever must go on because they all suck before a woman helps them realize they need to not suck) and Kathleen stops having to be biting and mean; she submits to the grief of losing her business and tries to make a full life for herself, which weirdly includes a friendship with Joe before she finds out that she’s been cyber-dating him. Verdict: Supringsingly harmful? A lot has been said about this, much of it by my boyfriend every time (I force him to watch it with me) I try to watch this lovely, perfect film, but Joe Fox is less than ideal. He is a multimillionaire, first of all, and a dick to her. Plus, this movie gave me the idea that you could viably own a bookstore in New York and afford to live. She should have ended up with Patricia Eden. Or just single with Birdie.

Notting Hill.

This movie was groundbreaking because it featured an unlikable female lead! I have multiple friends who don’t like this movie because Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) is kind of a bitch and I am like… that is the point of the movie! Do you know how many unlikable male leads there have been? Come on. This woman gets to mess up and be powerful and be harmful and end up with a bangin’-hot bookstore owner who lives in Notting Hill? Are you joking me? Verdict: I want to say helpful because I am in love with a movie having an unlikable lead woman, but ultimately this was harmful because I am not a famous actress, I don’t have sex with 1999 Hugh Grant, and I am not getting to be a little bit of a bitch about it. Unrealistic expectations: set. And, obviously I identify mostly with a female Spike because I love eating my cereal with a diving suit and goggles on while smoking a cigarette.

When Harry met Sally

Nora Ephron said that this was her favourite movie and that she watched if fifteen thousand times and guess what? Nora Ephron is never wrong. I mean, she wrote the script!!!! This is obviously the big daddy of movies; the apotheosis. And it could never get made today. Why? Well, because it is mostly a movie of people sitting around talking. Very little “happens” in the way that Hollywood people want things to “happen”. (As sleeping with your best friend is not a thing happening). Regardless, the movie is perfect; there are some lines that are so brilliant they make me want to scoop out my eyes with a spoon. Anyway, this film brought to the mainstream the question of whether straight women and straight men can be friends. Most people think that the answer the movie gives is no, straight men and straight women cannot be friends, because sex always gets in the way (as it eventually, delightfully did for Harry [Billy Crystal] and Sally [Meg Ryan]). This is nonsense! The two are friends for years. They are excellent friends to one another. Anyway, one of the most key moments of Sally’s characters is when she is crying about an ex, Joe, whom she thought she was over, and she cry-yells, “I am difficult!” It’s hilarious and raw and real and every woman I know can relate to feeling like you are simply too much work to love. Verdict: Sally Albright is a gem. Helpful depiction of a “difficult” woman being loved. Altough if you think Sally Albright is difficult, God help you.

Just hang out with me for a while.