Let’s talk about that moment, the one where you’re all, “Ah ha! So that’s what being an adult looks like.”
It happened to me about halfway through third grade. We were living in London at the time (another story for another Wednesday), and my parents and I spent weekend afternoons exploring our new city and going on “family walks.” (Wait, mom, I’m only now realizing that it’s totally fucking weird how everything we used to do was preceded by the word family. Out for the day? A family outing! Trouble? Time to call a family meeting!) God, when I get pregnant can you all please remind me not to do that?
NO MOM I’M NOT PREGNANT, SIT BACK DOWN.
So, it was halfway through third grade and it was a weekend afternoon and we were on a family walk, which means I was complaining because I’m a brat and my mom pointed to an ice cream truck and was all, “If I get you an ice cream sandwich, will you shut the fuck up?” and I was like, “ICE CREAM IN MY MOUTH HOLE” so she pulled out a $5 bill and handed it to me and I realized that ah ha! the secret to being an adult means always, always having cash in your wallet. No matter what. Dollar bills and five dollar bills and twenty dollar bills. All the time.
How true is this though? Don’t your parents always have cash? Mine do and real adults do and yet I never have cash and therefore by this definition I’m an absolutely horrible adult. I just can’t carry cash around. I’m a meticulous budget balancer and once I’ve gotten cash out of the ATM and mentally deducted it from my budget, what I spend it on somehow doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I walk around and I’m all, “I have cash! Dollar dollar bills ya’ll! Gimme twelve Blow Pops and three copies of US Weekly and twelve more Blow Pops and stop judging me because I’m paying in CASH and I love Blow Pops and how do they get the gum inside there and when can I visit the Blow Pop factory and find out??”
Oh man, speaking of, a few months ago I was watching Unwrapped on the Food Network, that show where they do behind the scenes tours of all different food production facilities, and it was an episode all about candy and they actually did go to the Blow Pop factory and I was maddeningly jealous because everyone who worked there looked so goddamn happy and maybe it was just for the TV cameras but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because how in the how could watching those genius machines magically get gum inside a lollipop all day not make you completely fucking ecstatic? Those machines make my mind explode. It’s like, have you SEEN the equipment responsible for mass food production? It’s crazycakes. Like, who came up with that? How does someone just wake up one Thursday morning and go, “This is how to make there be gum inside a lollipop!” or “This is how to fill eleventy thousand Twinkies with weird fake cream in under an hour!”or “This is how to make planes fly!” and I know, I know, planes aren’t the same as Blow Pops and Twinkies and I don’t even like Twinkies but I don’t care how many times my engineering major ex boyfriend explained it to me, I SIMPLY CAN’T COMPREHEND HOW 147,000 POUNDS OF ALUMINUM CAN JUST FLOAT THROUGH THE AIR LIKE THAT AND YES THAT’S THE ACTUAL ACTUAL WEIGHT OF A BOEING 747 AND I KNOW BECAUSE I LOOKED IT UP AND IN CASE YOU WANT ANOTHER FUN FACT THESE SAME PLANES HAVE SIX MILLION PARTS.
Six! Million! Parts! FLYING THROUGH THE AIR!
Thinking about this makes my brain do the Helen Keller thing. Maybe I should just stop trying to figure out how planes fly and how the internet works and how to do laundry before I entirely run out of underwear and stick instead to being in the business of overdosing on iced tea and researching heinous sexual terms and stalking my name through Google Alerts except maybe NOT because the Google Alerts keep telling me about a woman named Antoinette Nicole Davis who was recently accused of selling her 5 year old daughter into SEXUAL SLAVERY before the girl was MURDERED and news about it comes to my inbox like everyday and I have the pleasure of learning things like how this same woman is pregnant AGAIN and my question for you is shouldn’t the people who make planes fly figure out a way to stop shit like this from happening and and and WHY ARE PEOPLE RUINING MY NICOLE ANTOINETTE-NESS?
At some point over the last, like, forever, I got added onto an absurd amount of email lists. So many email lists that I’m pretty sure there’s someone out there who hates me and gets off to repeatedly submitting and resubmitting my email address to all the possible newsletters in the history of newsletters and laughing maniacally about how I’m getting daily updates from the Republican Party and Monster.com and oh my god could I possibly be any LESS Republican or any less on the job hunt??
Initially, my technique was to just delete the newsletters as they came in, unopened, until I finally realized that um, if I want the horror to stop I have to actually unsubscribe to each newsletter individually. So I did. I diligently opened each one, scrolled to the bottom, clicked unsubscribe, got taken to a ridiculous webpage asking me questions about why I was unsubscribing that were always multiple choice when really they should have been fill in the blank so I could be all, “BECAUSE I’M AN EMPLOYED DEMOCRAT AND BESIDES WHICH I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR THIS OBNOXIOUS ASS EMAIL IN THE FIRST PLACE THANK YOU GO AWAY THE END.”
And then? Well, and then a sigh of relief. EXCEPT NOT. Because apparently clicking unsubscribe and telling the website why I’m unsubscribing isn’t enough. And so the emails keep coming and coming and coming. And not in the good “that’s what she said” way. In the bad way where it’s like, “oh my actual actual GOD, enough already with the never ending newsletters about frozen yogurt and shoes and why aren’t all customer service issues dealt with by the wonder that is OnStar where you simply push one single button and you’re connected to a REAL LIVE PERSON who tells you their name and asks what you need and then does that EXACT THING in a timely manner while being overwhelmingly pleasant and sometimes even asking about the weather??”
So yeah, I basically want an OnStar-like entity to follow me around and run my entire life and yes that’s exactly as Big Brother-ey as it sounds but I mean can you imagine? “Oh hello there Nicole, you’re looking exceptionally gorgeous this morning. Love the pigtails. Would you care for an orgasm and some French toast? And the most recent US Weekly? And a massage by John Mayer? And the ability to exercise while drinking tequila? And some new shoes? And an explanation as to which lips that Vegan Vulva Lip Balm should be used on? And to never be on another unwanted email newsletter list ever ever ever? Excellent, I’ll get right on it and in the meantime here’s $100.”
TELL ME THAT WOULDN’T BE THE ABSOLUTE GLORY HOLE LIFE
HOW CAN WE MAKE THIS HAPPEN
NO SERIOUSLY
HUGS AND KISSES AND LEPRECHAUNS FOR EVERYONE
I’M PROBABLY JUST GOING TO KEEP YELLING UNTIL I GET WHAT I WANT
OR UNTIL I LOSE MY VOICE
OR UNTIL SOMEONE BRINGS ME A BIG HOT SOURDOUGH PRETZEL BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS SO DAMN DELICIOUS RIGHT NOW
HI MOM
When I first got the email, I thought it was maybe some kind of joke. So I read it again and apparently no, it wasn’t a joke and the crazy people at Intel actually were inviting me to attend their Youth Rock Stars Summit at the Intel Headquarters and I was going to get put up in a hotel and by the by I would also be getting a FREE NETBOOK FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON and was I maybe interested in coming?
I mean, what? No seriously, tell me who is too busy or in possession of too many computers to be all, “You know, actually, I’m all set on a really nice hotel room and a delicious dinner and a behind the scenes tour of Intel and a tiny little computer that’s so cute you can basically put it in your pocket and pet it because it’s so little and oh yeah also it’s TOTALLY FREE??”
No one I know, that’s who.
Which is to say, of course I went to the Youth Rock Stars Summit last month and of course the entire time I was all darting around with my eyes, checking out the social media bloggers and the tech bloggers and the PR people and I was like, “Do they know that I’m wildly inappropriate and that I blog mostly about my vagina?” and I kept waiting for someone to kick me out but it never happened and apparently they really *did* know that I’m wildly inappropriate and that I blog mostly about my vagina and therefore no one was surprised when we went around the room and shared the things we knew about Intel prior to coming to the event and everyone was like, “processors and chips and blah blah computer stuff” and all I heard was “blah blah shit that I don’t understand but if you’d like to talk about wine and sex toys I promise I’ll have something much more coherent to say” and yet I somehow managed to put together a sentence that was more or less, “Intel = computers?” and everyone laughed and I’m thinking no seriously, give me some fucking techie CliffsNotes and then I didn’t know what else to do because the speaker, Mario Paniccia, went back to his presentation and he was off on some tangent about copper and conductivity or maybe it wasn’t about copper or conductivity at all but who the hell knows because everyone was live tweeting smart shit and all I could think to do was tweet about how hot Mario is and tag it #IntelYouth like they told us to do all day and I know I know, but WHAT THE HELL KIND OF SHENANIGANS DID THEY EXPECT WHEN THEY SENT ME THE DAMN EMAIL INVITATION IN THE FIRST PLACE.
And here’s the fucking craziest thing, IT HAPPENED AGAIN. The email invitation thing I mean, except this time it was less about computers and more about cars and food because Best of Tours was asking if I would maybe like to spend the entire day being driven around San Francisco in brand new Chevy vehicles, eating delicious street food for free and also there’s a gift bag at the end that has truffles and jam except they didn’t mention the gift bag up front but I went anyway and that was just a glorious surprise when it happened.
So that’s what I did yesterday. I drove around in a Camaro and ate hot dogs and creme brulee and all kinds of other street food and the moral of this story is that I’m pretty stoked that people seem to want me and my vagina at events that have nothing to do with me or my vagina but please keep it coming because I love free shit and I love being the person that everyone who is actually supposed to be at the event raises an eyebrow at as they’re all, “I checked out your blog” in a way that really means, “What the fucking fuck fuck are you doing here?” and I smile and say, “Oh yeah?” in a way that actually means, “DUDE I KNOW RIGHT??”
In conclusion, please keep inviting me to your really cool shit at which I don’t belong and I’ll keep coming and hitting on the presenters and eating the free food and enjoying the swag. Or, alternatively, if you don’t have a cool event to invite me to you should probably just invite me over to your house instead and we’ll bake coffee cake and drink tea unless of course you don’t like coffee cake or tea in which case we probably shouldn’t be friends in the first place.
This is probably a little redundant at this point, but I drink a lot of wine. Specifically, I drink a lot of Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, which isn’t necessarily relevant but might be something you should write down just in case you’re ever faced with needing to buy me a present and you’re all, “Does she maybe want a sweater?” and then that little voice in your head can be like, “No bitch, of course she doesn’t want a fucking sweater, she wants a case of Charles Shaw.”
And I do. Like, all the time. Like, I want a new case delivered every single week. I mean, wait, what’s the appropriate amount of time in which to consume 12 bottles of wine? Assuming you do it with a roommate. And sometimes with friends. But also sometimes not with a roommate or with friends because you’re having a college flashback weekend and you’re too cheap to pay for drinks at bars and you aren’t slutty enough to flirt your way into getting free drinks from guys in bars and so maybe you pour an entire bottle of wine into an empty Smart Water bottle and it’s white wine so it kind of looks like urine and you’re drinking it IN PUBLIC while having the audacity to wonder why you’re single and constantly hungover.
But I mean, whatever, that type of shit is SO NOT THE POINT RIGHT NOW.
The point is this: while I was sitting around wasting space and being a cheap drunk, some glorious person out there took the time to make a giant wine glass
that’s large enough to hold an entire bottle of wine. AN ENTIRE BOTTLE OF WINE. IN ONE GLASS.
When I first found out about it, I sat there staring at its pretty little picture, fantasizing over the endless possibilities for a future of me + the glass that was clearly sent to my computer screen by a brothel of angels and I’m scrolling through the page and I see the section where they try to get you to buy corresponding shit by being all, “customers who bought this item also bought…” and then listing things that would complement a big giant wine glass. Except instead of normal shit like a corkscrew or a wine rack or a one way do-not-pass-go ticket to AA, Amazon is all, “Customers who bought this item also bought Boston Legal: Season 3” and I’m like, “Wait, what?” and Amazon is all, “Customers who bought this item also bought the Omron Body Fat Monitor and Scale” and I’m thinking okay, I can maybe understand drinking an entire bottle/glass/bottleglass of wine while watching a season of fake legal drama on DVD, but if I’m going to drink an entire bottle of wine, and I’m going to do it regularly enough to justify purchasing a glass for this specific purchase, you can probably just assume that I never even weigh myself on a regular fucking scale and therefore have zero need to know what my body fat percentage is after I’ve been able to consume an entire bottle of wine without even exerting the tiny amount of energy required to, you know, STAND UP AND REFILL A WINE GLASS.
But Amazon is a persistent and snarky little whore and was all, “Fine, customers who bought this item also bought Oxo Good Grips Locking Tongs with Nylon Heads. And a Neiko Super-Bright 9 LED Heavy-Duty Compact Aluminum Flashlight in Gunmetal. And the 5th edition of a book called Plain English for Lawyers.” Which is when I realized that actually, these things aren’t random and it all makes complete sense because there’s obviously some guy out there who really wants to be a lawyer, but English isn’t his first language and so he’s reading this book and watching Boston Legal and he’s on edition 5 and season 3 because he’s wanted to be a lawyer for so fucking long that he already finished seasons 1-2 and editions 1-4, but he got rejected from law school and started drinking heavily enough to warrant a glass that holds an entire bottle’s worth of wine at once and he got a little carried away with it all and his girlfriend left him for someone who isn’t an alcoholic and drinks manly shit like beer from the can and speaks enough English to get into law school and so now he sits at home and jerks off in the dark with nylon tipped tongs and makes shadow puppets on the wall using his super powered gunmetal gray flashlight.
Which is to say, somebody please buy me this fucking fuck fuck wine glass, stat.
I mean please. I mean maybe not. I mean actually yeah as long as I don’t somehow wind up masturbating with kitchen utensils.