TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

The following was inspired by Buzzfeed’s 38 Signs You’re From North Carolina.

1. You think the Earth was made in six days.

2. Your grandfather was in the KKK.

3. You’ve been date raped at Duke, UNC, and NC State.

4. You’re diabetic.

5. You use the term “anchor baby.”

6. You would vote for Jesse Helms’s corpse.

7. You think global warming is a vegan conspiracy.

8. You really believe it’s heritage, not hate.

9. You have a We Still Pray bumper sticker on the back of your truck.

10. You think atheism is weird and snake handling is normal.

11. Your NPR tote bag is an NRA tote bag.

12. You’d go gay for Pat McCrory.

13. You took a school field trip to a tobacco plant.

14. You think the town paper mill smells like money.

15. You won’t shop at Ingles because you’re against immigration. 

16. Your school mascot was a Confederate general.

17. You buy weed from this guy.

18. You think gay marriage caused the Oklahoma tornado.

19. There are 14 microbreweries in your city but you still drink Bud Light.

20. You think South Carolina is ignorant.

21. You’ve never eaten a meal with someone of a different race.

22. You are terrified of Asheville…

23. … but more so of Durham.

24. Your first cousins are married. To each other. And it’s legal.

25. You think the General Assembly can stop sea levels from rising by ignoring it.

26. You’ve never heard of Thomas Wolfe but you love Petey Pablo.

27. You’ve slept with James Vanderbeek…

28. … and John Edwards.

29. You think Cheerwine comes from a vineyard.

30. Someone you are related to owns a lawn jockey

31. Art Pope co-signed your Governor’s home loan.

32. Your favorite artist is George W. Bush.

33. You were conceived at Bible camp.

34. You think Barack Obama is socialist/Muslim/Kenyan/the devil.

35. You have Run, Eric, Run t-shirt

36. Your State Representative’s name is Gerry Mander.

37. Your marriage isn’t legally recognized…

38. …but your fetus is.

Things are not going well in my state. While much of the country seems to be moving in a more rational direction (see, the Supreme Court’s likely overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, the legalization of marijuana in several states, and the general consensus by the citizens, if not the congress, that gun control is a positive thing), North Carolina has recently begun to look more like Mississippi 1966 than the Smart Carolina. It’s not that the people have changed–my home state, while undoubtedly Southern, has always been among the more liberal of the backwaters–but our current elected officials make Jesse Helms look like the grand marshall at San Francisco Pride. Let’s start with the most obviously crazy bill to get introduced by our elected officials: the Defense of Religion Act, which declared that North Carolina would no longer recognize the federal government’s prohibition of state religion. The bill, introduced by two Republican congressmen, was (thankfully) dismissed by the speaker of the House, but not before the rest of the country started to suspect that vinegar-based barbecue sauce pickles the brain.

Congress then moved onto more pressing matters, like mandating that future generations of school children learn cursive, as stipulated by the the Back to Basics bill, which passed unopposed because penmanship is really important. Next on their journey back in time, Republican leaders decided that what this state really needs is fewer of those pesky young voters and introduced Senate Bill 667 or the “act to provide that if a child registers to vote at an address other than that of a parent, that parent may not claim a personal exemption on account of such child.” In other words, you get taxed if your kid votes where he or she goes to college. SB 667 is just one part of the effort to disenfranchise all voters except white people who believe that the world was created in six days. Other proposed measures include requiring a picture ID, curtailing early voting and same-day registration, and hiring members of the Westboro Baptist Church to man the polls.

This is not the will of the people. My fellow North Carolinians are embarrassed about the actions of our elected officials, to say nothing of how just plain scared we are–in part because what if this is our punishment for not voting in the 2010 congressional elections? The boneheaded legislation proposed by our congressmen is certainly not applauded in Durham, the blue pocket where I have lived for the past three years. Just 20 miles down I-40 from the Statehouse, Durham is as progressive as a Michael Moore pool party, and has all the trappings of the most liberal of cities: a Democratic majority as well as a large number vegans, asymmetrical haircuts, and food trucks (including one raw food truck and one just for dogs).

Durham has changed a lot in the past few decades. Once known as the Black Wall Street, is has become a destination for beer aficionados, newly married couples looking for fixer-uppers, and folks who do CrossFit, and has lately become something of a media darling. This is in part because of our progressive politics and in part because of our much lauded and, I think, equally over-rated, food scene. A favorite quote from a recent transplant in a New York Times article about wine in Durham: “The horrible, paralyzing fear I had about leaving New York City was, ‘What am I going to drink?’ But it became apparent that we could find the wines we liked to drink. We realized we could live the life we wanted to live.” This new resident’s shock at realizing he can get more than Cheerwine and moonshine in these parts is indicative of the type of condescension Southerners often accuse Northerners of harboring towards us, but I found the Times article less annoying than Southern Living declaring Durham the best food city in the South. The editors arrived at this conclusion from an online poll, which indicates less that Durham has great food and more that Durham has a lot of people willing to click links. My evidence for this is that New Orleans didn’t even rank in the top ten and if the food is so great here, then why am I am always hungry? But Durhamites are a proud lot, despite our elected officials making us look like a state of fools, and we will vote in a poll.

While I am glad to live in this blue bubble in a state that seems about as red as George Wallace’s neck lately, I find the love many Durhamites have for the city almost as embarrassing as our legislature. I can’t leave home without seeing t-shirts with slogans like Durham: Not for Everyone and a number of businesses have named themselves after the local mascot in a fervor of civic pride that makes it look like everyone went the same branding agency. There is Bull City Salon, Bull City Yoga, Bull City Car Wash, Bull City Running, Bull City Records, Bull City Gymnastics, and more creative variations like Toreros, Pizzaria Toro and Cave Taureau. One restaurant, Bull City Burger and Brewery, has placards with historical facts about Durham–and some less historical ones, for instance: “2025: Raleigh-Durham International Airport changes name to Durham-Raleigh International Airport after area votes that Durham rules” (a vote, I am sure, that will happen via online poll). Durham’s love for itself is most embodied by an event held every spring called Marry Durham, in which hundreds of residents pull out their wedding dresses and tuxes and pledge allegiance to the city. This ceremony seems especially bizarre in a state where the constitution was recently amended to specify that the only marriages that count here are those between one man and one woman, and also strikes me the sort of thing you might see in Nazi Germany or at a Moonie convention, but people show up and recite their vows.

One question arises: If it’s so overrated here, why don’t I move to different town? And if I’m so pissed off about state politics, why don’t I leave North Carolina altogether? There are 49 other states I could easily move to, many of which aren’t run by lunatics. I do think about leaving, but where would I go? I am so cold-natured that I wear long johns and a mountaineering parka from October to May in the very moderate climate where I currently live, so anywhere north of here is out. I like the idea of San Francisco but I don’t like the idea of spending my entire paycheck to rent a shitty place in the Mission with 14 roommates and one working toilet, and that’s assuming I could find a job. LA sounds nice, but I watched a documentary about the water supply in the Southwest as an impressionable young environmentalist and decided it’s morally reprehensible to live anywhere where water is pumped in from thousands of miles away just to keep the lawns green. That leaves the Northwest, where I lived for a couple of years, and miserably so. I wasn’t just cold all the time, I was cold, wet, and drunk, which was my way of coping with the climate. Besides, Durham has one thing that I do love, and that’s my friends, the people who commiserate about what’s going on in the Statehouse with me, the people who listen to me bitch about our town even though they like the very things I bitch about. This place is my home because it’s affordable, it rarely snows, and I have a job here, but my friends have chosen Durham because they love it, and I love them. So I guess I’ll stay in this little blue bubble for a bit longer, not ready to marry Durham, but not ready to divorce it either.

My self-summary
My profile pictures are all several years old and were taken by professional photographers. Add ten pounds and a self-haircut for a closer approximation. I’m bitter, emotionally unavailable, and would drop you like pigeon shit from the sky if my ex wanted me back. (Luckily for you, she doesn’t.) My lungs hurt when I walk upstairs and I need a date for my sister’s wedding next week. There’s an open bar.

What I’m doing with my life
Gchatting while at a job that I hate but am too scared to quit because my parents would disapprove if I lost my health insurance; cleaning my house over and over because I have no hobbies and if I spent my weekends doing what I really want to do–watch Intervention in the dark–I’m afraid my legs might turn into sweatpants.

I’m really good at
Gossip.

The first thing people usually notice about me
I should have had braces.

Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food
Anything Grisham, Notting Hill, CSI: Miami, Coldplay, microwaved

The six things I could never do without
Facebook
Parents who still pay my phone bill
Subtitles for when I am eating chips too loud to hear the TV
Tampons
Batteries
Weed

I spend a lot of time thinking about
Ways to convince my ex that I’m dating.

On a typical Friday night I am
Stoned.

The most private thing I’m willing to admit
I think I’m too good for this.

I’m looking for
A mature, attractive rebound for uncomplicated sex and making people jealous.

You should message me if
You are over 5 feet tall and would like to go to my sister’s wedding. Did I mention there’s an open bar? Call me!

I didn’t think I would be alive to write this. As December 21, 2012, got closer and closer, a part of me really believed that the Mayans were onto something with their expiration date for the world. Maybe, like modern believers of the apocalypse, the Mayans pondered fiery pits of Hell or the left behind wandering among empty sets of clothing, but they gave with no visions of what would happen on 12/21/12, just that the 22nd would never come. But it did come, and here I am on Christmas night, half listening to a radio special on Santa and eating hummus that I think might have gone bad. This is my 30th Christmas, an age itself I never thought I’d live to see. When asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave the usual answers–a doctor, a lawyer, an artist on the streets of Montreal who drew tourists with giant buck teeth and tiny bodies–but really I had no plans to have a career because I had no plans to grow up. Many people think they will never live to the age of 30 or 50 or 80, maybe because it’s too hard to imagine ourselves with crow’s feet and gray hair, yet when I used to hear other people say this, I would think, That’s ridiculous. The average life expectancy in this country is 78 years old. Of course you grew up. Me, on the other hand, now that is a surprise. It’s not that I thought I would die young, just that I would never get old, a natural extension of believing, as I did, that I would never die. Everyone else would, of course, but I, Katie Herzog, nearly born in the parking lot of Pedro’s Porch Mexican Restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, with a low weight of eight pounds, 12 ounces, would not die.

Articulating thoughts like this are the reason the therapist I saw for a few years was always trying to get me to see that I was not, contrary to my own belief, special; that I would die just like every other human who has come before or will come hence. It was less those 50 minutes a week on a shrink’s couch that made me finally admit that I’m no more exceptional than anyone else you’ve never heard of and more that I just keep getting older. I hit 25, and that was unbelievable, and then, even more remarkably, I hit 29. Now 25 seems young, almost infantile. Still, though it is only days until the calendar flips to the year of my 30th birthday, I’m often surprised that I am not just old enough to be a lawyer or a doctor or a Canadian street artist, I’m on the verge of being too old to start doing those things. I’m equally as surprised when I hear of my friends and peers having children now, at the tender age of 30. When told the good news of a friend’s pregnancy, I smile and think, babies having babes. How could the people I went to kindergarten with be parents when I’m scarcely closer to knowing what I want to be when I grew up than I did when we were five? For this reason, I half wanted the Mayans to be right–if the world ended, I’d stop worrying about getting older.

It wasn’t just aging that I used to think I was immune from. It was everything. I could smoke a pack a day and not get addicted. I could drink every night and never get the shakes. I could be late for work, show up stoned or not show up at all, and I’d never get fired. And the person I ended up with would be no less than perfect. I would never settle for anyone less than my soul mate, a concept I don’t actually believe in but was sure applied to me anyway. For the most part, time proved me wrong: I have the lung capacity of a 9/11 cleanup worker; I had the shakes for weeks on end and finally had to quit drinking; and I got fired so many times that my resume isn’t worth the cost of a sheet of paper. But, surprisingly, I think I’ve found my person, and she really is perfect.

In my early and mid-20s I dated some and had plenty of mediocre sex with people I wished were gone when I woke up the next morning, but I never saw myself actually marrying anyone. The older we get the more some people worry about never finding a partner, but I never did because I’d rather be an old maid than with someone who was less than perfect. If I couldn’t find someone who was smart and funny and beautiful and interested in the world, I would be alone, and contentedly so. This had begun to seem more like a possibility in recent years. After my 29th birthday and still never having really loved someone enough to wed them, I started reading pop psychology articles about how being single can be a whole identity, like maybe some of us really are meant to be single for life, and I tried to embrace this. It’s not that I couldn’t find someone, it’s that I chose not to, I told myself. But then, a few months before the world was supposed to end, I met Lorillin, who is better than perfect because she is only perfect for me. Actually, there are both men and women who would disagree, who would argue that she is perfect for them as well, but this time I’m sure that I’m right. We are not the best people, she and I–we laugh at Holocaust jokes and see the value in getting big dogs because they have shorter life spans–but we are the best for each other. She is funny and smart and beautiful and interested in the world and when I’m with her, I stop thinking and worrying and jut am. After I met Lorillin, I started to imagine a life with another person–settling down, getting married, doing the things people do when they get older–and it sounded good.

Meeting Lorillin wasn’t the only thing thing happened in 2012. I also traveled around the country, staying alone in hotels and changing all the pre-set radio stations to NPR in quite a few rental cars. There was a lot I didn’t get done: I didn’t finish–or start–that book I hoped to have written by now, and I didn’t master the forearm stand or learn how to bake bread without the density of wet newspaper, but I did run a mile once last spring and I finally started paying my own car insurance. I created one moderately successful blog and another less successful but really fun one and finally put my portfolio online. But mostly when I look back on the past 12 months, it’s only fall and winter that are truly memorable, because that’s when Lorillin entered my life, and it changed everything. I’m now preparing to do something that I would consider crazy if anyone else did it: I’m going to move 3000 miles across the country to be with this girl. If an acquaintance told me she was going to do this, I would state my congratulations while thinking, She has lost her damn mind. If a friend told me the same, I would try to talk her out of it and if my sister said this was her plan, I might even call our mother. And yet, here I am on this holy night, looking for jobs in a new city and hoping that my next Christmas will be with Lorillin. This could be the biggest mistake of my life–giving up my house and my job and my life to move to a city and a girl I barely know–but I’m ready to grow up, and I want to do it with her. We’re all going to die, after all. Might as well start living.

My thanks to everyone who has kept up with this blog over the past year. Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year to you all.

While the six wedding invitations hanging on my fridge right now seemingly indicate that commitment is in the air, it feels like breakup season around here. Yes, I’m shopping for a half-dozen his & hers (and hers & hers) towel sets, but most of my conversations lately seem to be with people who are splitting up the dogs, closing the joint bank account, and asking if I have an Ok Cupid log-in they can borrow just to see who’s out there. We all know that breakups are the worst, and since my own messy inauguration into the world of the heartbroken, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to learn the best (and worst) ways to deal with the end of a relationship. The most important thing to keep in mind when you are going through a breakup is that it is a contest, so what follows are some tips on how to win your next breakup. These are generally written for the dumped rather than the dumper, who, while not immune from the sads, has a huge advantage.

1. Embrace the pain. For one week.
You can’t think about anything other than how totally fucking unfair it is she dumped you right after she got a book deal (like, right after, even though you went to all those coffee house open mic nights that really felt more like AA meetings), and your friends understand this, but we can only listen to so much bitching. Your pain is universal and understandable, but we told you to dump her months ago when you drank too much wine at dinner and told us how often you had sex (never). But still, you’re sad, so for the first week, go on that liquid diet, listen to Rod Stewart on repeat, and cry until your eyes are so swollen it looks like you stuck your face in a beehive. While in your week of tears, I recommend listening to the Magnetic Fields’ classic album, 69 Love Songs, specifically track six, “I Don’t Want to Get Over You,” which will both make you feel less alone and make your realize how self-indulgent you’re being. Pay attention to these lines in particular: “I guess I could take a sleeping pill and sleep at will and not have to go through what I go through. I guess I should take Prozac, right, and just smile all night at somebody new, somebody not too bright but sweet and kind, who would try to get you off my mind. I could leave this agony behind, which is just what I’d do if I wanted to but I don’t want to get over you.” Draw the shades and chain-smoke, but after seven days, you need to put on some pants and leave the house.

2. Rebound.
The idea of sleeping with anyone but your ex probably makes you feel nauseous, but take some Alka-Seltzer and find yourself a rebound. The purpose of a rebound is not to foster human connection or even to have good sex: it’s to remind yourself that you can still get laid. And you can! You probably haven’t been eating since he packed up his half of the Fiestaware, so chances are, you’re in tiptop shape for getting some strange. Thankfully, rebounds are most likely to be found at bars where the lighting is low and the drinks are strong, so slap some concealer on those eye bags and be glad you can’t eat when you’re depressed. Once you locate your rebound, do not, under any circumstances, think of him or her as a potential replacement for your ex. Falling into a new relationship right away is like treating a hangover with the-hair-of-the-dog: the shakes might go away for the moment, but you’re going to have to deal with the dehydration eventfully. Rebound and move on.

3. Beware of Facebook.
In the classic film A League of Their Own, drunk baseball coach Tom Hanks screams at an infielder who throws to third when she should have thrown home: Are you crying? Are you crying? There’s no crying in baseball! There is also no crying on Facebook. Facebook’s purpose is to break up your workday, normalize stalking, and inform you who is going to vegan brunch so you can avoid that awkward one-night stand from last summer who looks at you like you put tap water in her fish tank when really all you did was never call. Facebook is for laughs, not emotions, and getting all Conor Oberst on your status updates might feel good for a second—and let’s be real, you’re going through a breakup; feeling good is rare these days—but do you really want your coworkers, high school friends, and (even worse) your ex knowing that you turned his favorite t-shirt into a pillowcase just so you can smell his Old Spice while you sleep? A public platform for your heartache is tempting because it’s all you can think about, but if you want to win this breakup, you must resist high drama and emotional over-sharing. Fishing for sympathy is worse that fishing for compliments. No one likes that and certainly no one “likes” that. Change your relationship status if you have to and then continue as though nothing has changed.

Speaking of Facebook, until someone (me) invents the app that limits your ability to see your ex’s profile without defriending or blocking them,* it’s going to take an immense amount of willpower to avoid looking at their page. As someone without willpower, I recommend blocking your ex. While you might want him to see your life-affirming status update about the seven hours of yoga you did yesterday, do you really want to see him tagged at brunch with some girl you’ve never heard of? No, you don’t. When it comes to breakups, ignorance is bliss, so delete his number, block her gchats, and defriend the fucker who made you cry.

4. Do the things you want your ex to think you are doing.
You would probably rather spend your time with the ghost of Emily Dickinson than a bunch of upper middle class yuppies who give each other meaningful hugs, but get your ass to yoga. Yes, yogis can be notoriously self-righteous about their chakras and menstruating in sync with with the full moon, but no one has ever regretted finishing a yoga class. You might hate every second until the final resting pose, but afterwards, you’ll be glad you put down the box of wine and put on your stretch pants. If you really, really hate stretching, get stoned first. Everything’s more fun when you’re stoned. And maybe the next time you to run into your ex, it’ll be after one of these sessions downward-dogging your way to psychic balance and tight abs. When he sees how good you look, he’s going to feel bad, and that’s the goal, isn’t it?

5. Give it time.
The bad news about time is that it leads to hair loss, muscle degradation, the gradual waning of of your sex life, and ultimately death. The good news is that it makes the poignant hurt of breakups temporary. In the beginning, you’ll think about it before you even open your eyes in the morning. You may even wake up crying. But after the first week, you’ll be in the shower before you remember that you’re miserable. And after another week, you’ll be on your second cup of coffee before you think about it. Eventually, whole afternoons will pass when you aren’t wondering about your ex at all. And someday, maybe a few years down the road, you’ll have to look at pictures to remember just how one side of her smile was always a little bit higher than the other. You’ll forget her smell, her voice, the way she looked at you in the beginning, and even how very devastated you were when it all ended. You’ll start new relationships and those too will end, and you’ll have more breakups to win and lose. Eventually, hopefully, you’ll find the one that lasts, and everyone else, even the girl you are sobbing into your mug full of red wine about right now, will be just be a memory. In the meantime, try to keep a low profile—don’t perform confessional performance art, show up at his new girlfriend’s house, or be the guy who cries at parties. Just make some tea, breath deep, and be glad that every second that passes brings you one step closer to fine.

*I did a poor man’s patent on this, so don’t even try to Zuckerberg me. That said, I welcome free labor from any app developer who wants to make millions.

My feelings about Girls cannot be extricated from the circumstances under which I watched it, so it feels unfair not to disclose those circumstances: it was a Sunday afternoon, I was hungover, stoned, and couldn’t decide between ordering a pizza and going hungry because my phone was all the way across the room. The combination of headache, hunger, and the fact that I was attempting to watch the show via a website with the annoying problem of being both illegal and inconsistent, put me in a mood. Even worse, the only reason I was watching Girls at all was that I had finished the show I really wanted to watch, Planet Earth, which I love for the narrator’s very British hyperbole. Everything is the greatest migration ever. The greatest migration ever of alabaster seals, the great migration ever of Conway lemmings, the greatest migration ever of your self-worth as you spend another five hours in the couch stage of the couch-to-5K you planned on completing by thong season.

Girls is the product of Lena Dunham, who also stars in the show and, like her character, is mid-20s Oberlin grad who found herself under-employed and groundless after finishing college and moving to New York. Dunham is accompanied by three friends in her poor man’s Sex in the City. These are not ladies who lunch nor even ladies who eat lunch–after being cut off by her parents in the first episode, Hannah says that she can afford to live in New York for three-and-a-half more days, seven if she skips lunch–but the characters somewhat mirror the Sex in the City quatro. There is neurotic Marnie, sexy Jessa, prudish Shoshanna, and writer Hannah, as self-conscious on her MacBook as Carrie Bradshaw. Dunham would have been remiss not to acknowledge her fore-bearer in the single-woman-and-her-gal-pals-navigating-New-York sub-genre, and she does so most obviously through Shoshanna, whose studio apartment is decorated like a Suburban teens’ bedroom, complete with a Sex in the City poster above her trundle bed. Shoshanna tells her cousin Jessa that she’s a Carrie with a bit of Samantha, but we can tell she’s really a Charlotte.

Before we continue with this review, a confession: maybe it’s the circumstance under which the majority (read: all) of my television viewing takes place (read: stoned), but when I try to formulate on my own opinion about a show, I often find that I can scarcely determine what I’m watching, much less my own opinion of it. For this reason, I often supplement my opinions with other peoples’. While I sat on the couch yesterday, unsure if I enjoyed Girls enough to justify Project Free TV’s interminable loading times, I texted a friend.

Me: “Do you like Girls? TV, not extra rib.”
Her: “Yes. PASSIONATELY. And I don’t even care that they are all white.”

This friend (who really is a Carrie with a bit of Samantha) is an urbane former New Yorker with better taste than me, and so I figured she liked it enough to text in all caps, it was worth my time, which I was wasting anyway, and so I stayed on my couch for the rest of the afternoon and into the night as Lena Dunham and her girlfriends made New York life look not just not glamorous, but not even much fun. Today, with only a foggy memory of my breakfast five minutes ago, there are few things I clearly recall from my Girls marathon: 1.) Hannah’s clothes (remarkably bad. Her dress for a date with a Midwestern pharmacist is a maroon velvet thing with a bow, like a third grader’s Christmas outfit), 2.) the men, and 3.) sex.

There isn’t much worth saying about Number One other than it turns out all New Yorkers do not, in fact, dress well. As for Number Two, the most appealing man is Charlie, Marie’s smothering college boyfriend, who’s only butch quality is that he can weld a hammer and whose one moment of standing up for himself is when he reads from Hannah’s diary during his band’s performance. What is it like dating a man with a vagina, he reads, and you can see his panties get more and more knotted as he tries not to cry. While this may not seem especially appealing, Charlie is the only male character in the series who I would sit next to on public transit, and that’s because he’s cute. The prize for Least Likable Male Character is split between Charlie’s friend Ray, a barista with $50,000 in student loans who steals Hannah’s diary in the first place, and Hannah’s boyfriend Adam, who finds the company of his own penis more interesting than that of his girlfriend. Adam gets extra douche points for referring to Hannah as “kid,” like he is her reluctant older mentor. The only thing Adam seems to contribute to Hannah’s life is degrading sex, a lesson she brings into a sexual encounter with the Midwestern pharmacist, immediately defaulting into Adam’s brand of kink and asking her new partner, “Am I tight like a baby?” Slightly–very slightly–less hatable is Jessa’s boss, whose only job seems to be growing his ponytail and lusting over the babysitter while his career-woman wife is off doing something unexplained but definitely more important. His charm comes from his awareness that he is pathetic, but then he whines like his petulant daughter when the babysitter won’t bed him and even his fun little ponytail turns hatable.

On to number three. The sex in Girls is plentiful, graphic, and unpleasant. The only person who seems to be getting off consistently is Adam, but he scarcely needs a partner for it. Sex between Adam and Hannah is hard to watch–his dirty-talk incorporates incest and children–but harder to watch is Hannah’s reaction to his bad behavior both in and out of bed: she puts up with it. The couple reminds me of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Nottinghill: in both cases, you can’t understand why the woman is into her co-star at all, the difference being that you never get the feeling that Hugh Grant belongs on the sex offenders list. The only sex that looks emotional is during a painful break-up between Marnie and Charlie–ruined when Charlie turns into a vagina–and the only sex that looks pleasurable is between Marnie and Jessa–ruined by the presence of a Wall Street-type with the two most obvious signs of moral failure: a $10,000 rug and a goatee.

I didn’t come to Lena Dunham’s show prepared to like it–I was, after all, in a mood–but I do like it. Dunham is smart, and even if her character has bad taste in both clothing and men, she’s smart too. Hannah tells her parents that she just may be the voice of her generation (or at least a voice of a generation) and, sadly, she may be. Not sadly because her voice isn’t worthy, but because the men in her fictional life are the worst of man: selfish, infantile, and utterly dependent on the very women they treat like shit. There are no men in my life like this–but then, there aren’t really any men in my life at all. I turned to my former New Yorker friend–who, unlike me, is naturally attracted to men and actually knows some–to ask her if this is what men in New York are really like.

Me: Is that what it’s really like? The men are AWFUL. I can see why you moved.
Her: I have dated all of those men.

If my friend is right, if Dunham’s vision is what men really are like these days, I suspect it won’t be long until the greatest migration ever of New York women to lesbianism. And we’ll be here, us Mirandas, with open arms and plenty of room on the couch.

I’ve been in New York for a week, and with the exception of a few forays outside the hotel to eat, get lost, and then call anyone I know who might have access to Google Maps, I’ve spent most of my time waiting for the elevator at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. There are a dozen glass elevators in the center of the building and during hotel rush hour—which is all the time—I might wait 15 minutes to get back to my room, a room that lacks all the amenities of a Comfort Inn and yet costs $400 a night. I’m here because the owner of the publishing house where I freelance needed someone to work a convention at the hotel and I’m the only employee old enough to rent a car. I spend all day at a booth in the convention hall and spend evenings eating spanakopita and drinking hotel wine with authors and academics in receptions hosted by richer companies than mine. The authors and academics are impressed with my knowledge of contemporary literature and my willingness to argue with them. I don’t mention that my opinions are derived from a quick perusal of a New York Review of Books someone left in the hotel lobby and that I’m arguing mostly because they like it and I’m in sales. By the end of the night, they’re all hitting on me, and I say I’m going to use the bathroom before ducking into the elevator for the long ride up. The next day, they stop by the booth for small talk and no one mentions that I never came back.

New York is a place I came to fairly often as a kid. My dad’s parents lived 200 miles north of the city in Homer, a town named after an epic poet that didn’t have a bookstore or even a newspaper, and we’d stop in the city for a little sightseeing on the way to Grandma and Grandpa’s house every summer. Usually our parents would drop us off with the grandparents and drive straight back to the city for a week while my siblings and I slept behind the house in an ancient RV without power or a working toilet and helped Grandpa hunt the beavers that were turning his land to swamp. I preferred upstate to the city, which always struck me as inconvenient and rather filthy. I didn’t want to go to Statue of Liberty or Rockefeller Center or Central Park, all of which were likely harboring virulent species of flesh-eating pigeons or, at the very least, pickpockets. On one of our trips to the city, we were on the observation deck of the Empire State Building when it caught fire. My mom dragged me down 86 flights of stairs, and I went home with a sprained ankle and a story that I felt gave me the impression of being adventurous, although I would have preferred the trailer in Homer, watching Grandpa hunt beavers and reading chapter books about scrappy orphans who lived in boxcars, to any sort of adventure.

The fire in the Empire State Building and New York in general didn’t compare to the vacation we took in Atlanta one summer, when we somehow convinced our parents to take us to the World of Coca-Cola, a museum enticing to all kids, but especially those like us, the children of hippies, who were raised to think that Sprite was seltzer with a slice of lemon. When we asked to go to Disney World, our mom told us that we were not Disney people and gave us seconds of plain yogurt–which we thought was ice cream–and yet, they took us to a museum celebrating capitalism and high fructose syrup. The tour started with the origins of Coca-Cola, which was invented by an Atlanta pharmacist in 1886, and went through all the big moments in the brand’s history, from the first bottles and cans through the disastrous recipe change of 1985. The museum made Coke seem like a benevolent force spreading joy and bubbles across 200 countries, even ones in Africa where kids didn’t wear shoes but looked mighty happy holding bottles of Coke in high-resolution photographs blown up on the wall. Coca-Cola, it seemed, had a reach like the hand of God, and at the end of the tour, when we came to a room of fountains spewing every kind of soda imaginable, where you pushed a button and Coke or Sprite or Orange Crush would come streaming into your cup without having to beg your parents for two quarters for the vending machine, it really felt like heaven.

In Atlanta, we stayed at the Marriott Marquis downtown, a hotel much like this one in Times Square. This was also out of character for my family. Most of our vacations took place on a tiny island in the lowcountry of South Carolina, where the locals spoke Gullah and Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, and other civil right leaders had vacationed in the ‘60s. None of the houses had air conditioning and our primary source of entertainment was listening to the neighbors gossip on the party line and catching small green lizards that we’d flip on their backs and watch play dead while our dad told us about defense mechanisms. My bedroom at the beach house was always dirty, with dark paneled walls and a blood-red bunk bed. Its only source of light was a fluorescent lamp advertising Schlitz that belonged over a bar, and I wanted one for my room back home. The Marriott Marquis in Atlanta was different. That hotel also had glass elevators, and they scared the hell out of me. While my brother and sister would press their noses to the glass to get the best view of the lobby speeding away at three floors per second, I would cower in the corner for the ride 30 or 40 floors up. This was typical: fireworks, thunder, unleashed dogs—each sent me running for my dad, arms raised, begging him to pick me up. When I got too big to be held, I would wrap my arms around his legs and hide my face from whatever terrifying thing was out there, a defense mechanism better than playing dead.

Last night, feeling like I should experience New York outside of the Marriott Marquis for at least an hour or two, I decided to meet a friend at a bar on the roof of a La Quinta Inn in Koreatown. I Googled the directions and the asked the concierge to look them over for me and stopped a cop on horseback on the way there just to make sure, but I was still disoriented when I got to Koreatown and went into the wrong building. There was no elevator, so I started walking up the stairs to the roof, past a restaurant full of people speaking languages I didn’t understand. On the second floor there was a karaoke bar and on the third floor there was another restaurant with no white people in it and on the fourth floor there was a no trespassing sign. I was starting to sweat and it wasn’t because of the walk up. I should have stayed at the Marriott Marquis, I thought, a glass and gold hotel full of tourists with money, a place where the most terrifying thing is the line for the elevator and you always know just where you are. I turned around and went downstairs to ask directions. I got lucky: the La Quinta Inn was the next door over, and the elevator was working, and there my friend was, casually drinking beer in the shadow of the Empire State Building as though it’s perfectly normal to live in a city with 8.2 million people, a city with strangers and glass elevators and buildings that could catch fire at any moment. And for my friend, this is perfectly normal. Navigating to a bar on the roof of the La Quinta Inn in Koreatown is just a Thursday night for her, nothing to sweat about. Other things she’s done that I haven’t: live in Alaska, travel to Iceland and get married.

Soon, it was time to make my way back to the hotel. I had written down precise directions on how to get to the La Quinta Inn but no directions back. How hard could it be? I’d just go left where I went right before. But it was hard, and I was quickly lost. I wandered down blocks empty but for street cleaning crews that seemed to be following me, trusting my inner sense of direction, which is always wrong, before calling my sister in Colorado and trying not to cry. I’m lost, I said. Can you help me find my way? With Google’s help, she did, and I got back to the hotel and took the elevator to my room, which doesn’t even have a coffee maker or a mini-fridge, but at least I’m not lost among 8.2 million people anymore. And I won’t be again: the conference ends tomorrow, so I’ll hand out the last of my business cards, pack up the rental car and point it towards home, a place between the World of Coca-Cola and the Empire State Building, where there’s no hand of God, but there’s no fire either.

I’m not one prone to great passions. Rather, I try to live like Switzerland: neutral, isolationist, leggy. Like workaholics whose doctors tell them to slow down, to chill out, to reduce their blood pressure or risk heart disease and stroke, indifference is an attitude I’ve had to cultivate. I’m naturally more anxious than indifferent, but a concerted effort toward neutrality gives me a rather Zen attitude about life. At least, that’s how I look at it. Friends, family, and girlfriends have argued that I’m not Zen, I’m just too damn lazy to care about anything, but I consider my basic desire to stay out of it a personal strength.

I began my path toward neutrality at seven, a nervous age in which I often had panic attacks because one of my bike tires was white and one was black and spent most nights sleeping at the foot of my parents’ bed like a golden retriever. One day after school, I mentioned to my mother that is was a shame we lost the War. What war, she asked. This was in the midst of the first Gulf War and for weeks she had been listening to war correspondents on NPR while looking outside at the ubiquitous yellow ribbons tied around our neighbors’ trees–ribbons indicating a son or a cousin or a father in Kuwait. The War of Northern Aggression, I replied. Duh. My mom quickly explained that it was actually called the Civil War and we didn’t lose anything–our ancestors were still bootlegging potato liquor in Dublin until the 20th century. Thus began my introduction to slavery, which was not an aspect of the Civil War my second grade teacher emphasized. This wasn’t surprising–the mascot of my elementary school was a Confederate general with the same facial hair and politics as Robert E. Lee–and so my mom decided to take over my history education. After that evening’s lesson on the slave trade through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement (with a brief detour for suffrage and bra burning), my mom warned me about the dangers of looking at the world as North versus South, him versus her, us versus them. Nationalism, sectionalism, religion, ideology, alliances based on nothing more than the shape of your nose or your favorite sports team: this is why wars happen, she told me, pointing to yellow ribbon tied around a tree in the next door neighbor’s yard. We should try to be more like Switzerland, she said: secular, progressive, and not out to steal anyone else’s damn resources. I took her advice, and that’s how I’ve been for most of my life; like Switzerland, as calm and even-keeled as a Walt Disney in a cryogenic chamber. Currently, however, I live in a part of the world marked by a great and unavoidable passion that sparks waves of love and hate all around me. The cause is basketball.

Two years ago, I moved to Durham, North Carolina, a city of a quarter million people, 15 percent of whom (including me) live under the poverty line. Durham used to be known for tobacco and then it was known civil rights and now it’s known for food trucks and lesbians. Durham is home to Duke University, where the endowment is 5.8 billion dollars and the cost for one student to attend for one year is 56 thousand dollars, 23 thousand dollars more than the median income for those of us who live here year round. For this privilege, Duke pays no taxes. For the most part, life as a Durham resident has little to do with the university; this is even true when you live, as I do, in Walltown, an adjacent neighborhood that the University kept at bay by building a wall around itself. There isn’t a moat separating the two, but the lines are clearly demarcated. Yes, Duke students clog the aisles at the grocery store and throw their keg cups in the street, but Durham is not a college town. Duke, it seems, prefers it this way, ensconced within monied walls of academia. Summers in Durham, when all the students have gone back to Connecticut–those are best.

Part of my hatred for Duke is situational: before I moved to Durham, I lived eight miles down 15-501, in Carrboro, North Carolina, a town of 20 thousand people, 19 percent of whom live under the poverty line. Carrboro is literally across the tracks from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and while the two towns are culturally different–Carrboro passed a resolution opposing the PATRIOT Act, Chapel Hill made national news when police brandishing assault rifles stormed a vacant building taken over by protesters last fall–both townships have a common love for UNC basketball. When I first moved to Carrboro, this surprised me. My friends there were as politically radical as my friends elsewhere, and since when do radicals care about sports? How could these people who play in rock bands and make art and grow weed care about anything as inconsequential as basketball? It seemed so anti-intellectual, so non-thinking, so barbarian. My own alma mater, a liberal arts school most well-known for its high ratio of banjo players and white Rastas, may have had a basketball team, but who knows? The student body was too busy tripping on mushrooms in the botanical gardens to care about sports, although I do seem to remember a vibrant ultimate Frisbee scene.

I refused to care about basketball when I first moved to Carrboro. Sports, which exist solely to create winners and losers, are antithetical to my default neutrality. But UNC basketball is so universally loved there that it inspires passion even in those whose only nod to athleticism is hula-hooping on the co-op lawn. I tried to stay neutral, but the central winter pastime in Carrboro is watching basketball with your pals at the local bar, and so, in the midst of my first winter there, in the midst of insisting on my indifference, I found myself watching ESPN, working on my bracket, and really, really hating UNC’s biggest rival: Duke. As a friend–a woman who plays in bands, never wanted to be a cheerleader, and often says that Carrboro is where basketball and punk rock meet–predicted would happen, I became one of us. In March 2009, the year the Heels won the National Championship, I ran across the tracks to Chapel Hill with 30,000 other fans–30,000 other barbarians–to celebrate our victory.

But more than I love UNC, I hate Duke. All of my well-cultivated neutrality flies out the window when I think of Duke University. I can engage in conversation with people across the political spectrum and still maintain my equilibrium, but Duke, I cannot stand. I hate Duke students, I hate Duke fans, and, mostly, I hate Mike Krzyzewski, or as he is known to both fans and foes alike because his name is too damn hard to pronounce, Coach K. Coach K is the perfect foil. Nothing about him is neutral. His vocal support of religion and the military, along with his income, makes him the embodiment of all that I think is wrong with the world. My feelings for him are universal, as I found when researching Duke basketball for this article. This is illustrated by the following screenshot:

Coach K is the devil. Coach K is a rat. Coach K is a cheater. And, most offensive (to gay people), Coach K is gay. Let us contrast this to Roy Williams, beloved coach of the Tar Heels, a man with the sweet face of a plot hound who bought romance novels from the bookstore where I worked during the terrible season of 2010, when his team had the record of a third rate liberal arts school. Even then, Roy was friendly. He came in after depressing practices and embarrassing games, but still posed for pictures and signed autographs and graciously agreed things were not going well. That March, when the UNC men’s basketball team was as vibrant as a banana slug and Duke won the National Championship, I discovered the corollary to success. Every game that Carolina lost, every game that Duke won, found half my friends sobbing into their beers and the other half taking a Valium and going to bed early. And this, I realized, is why I am Switzerland: the disappointment isn’t worth the joy. My days as a fan were over, but my hatred of Duke only escalated when I moved the eight miles to Durham. For me, it’s not about basketball. It’s about privilege. I hate Duke because Coach K is worth millions and my neighbor lost her house; because Duke doesn’t pay taxes and Durham has no jobs; because this place for the rich is so close to the home I struggle to afford; because it’s right there, beyond the wall, a dark blue reminder that I’ll never be neutral. Maybe that’s what my mom wanted me to take from our afternoon history lessons: there’s a time to be Swiss and there’s a time to put on your school colors and scream.

Recently, a friend who was organizing a benefit party for Protect NC Families, an organization working to defeat North Carolina’s anti-gay Amendment One, called me. She said that she wanted to have a tipping booth at the party and asked if I would be willing to man it. Sure, I said. I wasn’t quite sure what a tipping booth was, but I pictured myself carrying around a gold jar full of cash donations. I was later informed that my hearing is awful and what I actually agreed to do was a kissing booth, not a tipping booth. This took more thought. Was I willing to risk mouth herpes for a good cause? Not really. And besides, what kind of people pay to kiss someone on Saturday night at a bar? Drunk people, and I’m almost 30. I’ve kissed enough drunk people. We decided instead to do a compliment and advice-dispensing booth, which would be more helpful and less contagious. My friend Camille joined me in the booth, which was partitioned off with a red velvet drape so it looked like we were telling fortunes or reading Tarot cards, and we made over $100 in tips, which put the total over $4000, all of it going to Protect NC Families.

In the midst of dispensing compliments and advice (What a beautiful neckline: you should always wear v-necks; it doesn’t matter if his girlfriend sucks: don’t make out with him until he dumps her; you found your dream job but it means a pay cut: get food stamps.), a queer woman entered the booth with a concern: a representative from Protect NC Families had just spoken and he didn’t mention gay people at all. Instead, he talked about how Amendment One would affect all unmarried couples. And this is true. Amendment One would, according to the ACLU, “take away the ability of committed couples to take care of one another when making medical, financial, and other important life decisions.” All unmarried couples, gay and straight alike, could potentially lose the right to adopt their partner’s kid, make end-of-life decisions, etc. It’s awful. But the woman who approached us was pissed because that’s all they talked about–how this is going to affect families–not the fact that this issue only exists because of homophobia.

Lots of organizations are using this tactic. ACLU mailers don’t show gay couples: they show pictures of heterosexual couples with babies and without wedding rings. A friend of mine is making promotional films for another national organization working to defeat the amendment, and after he interviewed a lesbian couple who has been together for 50 years, his boss told him to edit out all references to their sexuality. This is politics and I get it. These groups are appealing to the middle, to the people who might not advocate for gays but don’t want to see the rights of unmarried straight people curtailed. But it feels like our concerns are being neglected, and unnecessarily so. The people who are going to vote against this amendment are our allies. They would still be here, drinking and dancing and paying for compliments even if this amendment solely disenfranchised the gays.

The congressmen who introduced this bill and the people who vote for it may think that you, your mate, and your bastard child are going to spend eternity in Hell with the homosexuals and the Jews, but you are not the real target of their hatred or their legislation. I speak for all gays when I say that we sincerely appreciate the thought, work, and money that so many people have put into this, but the ACLU, Protect NC Families, and the other organizations fighting against this amendment need to acknowledge those of us who do not have the option to marry if the bigots on the right and in the government win. Straight people may be affected by this, but they will be able to work around it if they must. It’s not about you. It’s about us, and it’s time to start listening. That’s my advice. Tip jar to your right.

I haven’t been writing lately and there are reasons for this–the most significant being that writing is a pain in the ass. There are things I dislike more than writing–for instance, public laundromats and the self-flushing toilets that Whole Foods just installed like it’s an interstate rest stop–but writing is there with them on the list of my least favorite activities. And yet, even though I’d happily go months writing nothing longer than a grocery list, when I have to turn to the person beside me in yoga class and introduce myself, I always say that I’m a writer. I do this because I think it makes me sound like I have a rich inner life, when all I really have is a lot of TV to watch and some unfinished essays waiting for someone else to pick them up. The most literary thing about me these days is that I’m poor.

Some people say they must write; they feel incomplete without it. I hate those people. To me, writing is like walking very slowly on a treadmill. After a thousand steps, you smell bad, you’re tired, and you’re right where you started; as soon as you finish one sentence, you have to start the next. Even my motivation for writing is problematic: I do it for the attention. Everything I write beyond to-do lists and my own signature is meant for an audience of some sort. The one time I felt truly excited about writing was in graduate school. I was a terrible student–I never purchased any textbooks and I didn’t attend my own final presentation in one class–but every lecture that I went to was uninterrupted time to write. As long as I looked up every once in a while so my teachers thought I was listening, I could get 2000 words down in a single class. But now that graduate school is over and I spend all day working on other peoples’ terrible manuscripts, the last thing I want to do when I get home is pick up my own. So I watch TV instead.

These months of silence, however, have not been entirely without creative expression of a kind. Earlier this year, I started a Tumblr called Babes of NPR. The concept is simple: a picture of an NPR personality with a caption about who they are and how good they look. Example: Doualy Xaykaothao: Hard to spell, easy to look at. Coming up with captions is far easier than attending group therapy for recovering meth addicts in order to write a story that four people read including my sister, and only then because I told her she was in it. Even better than giving me an excuse not to write (I would finish that story about sleepwalking topless into my neighbor’s house but I have captions to do.), Babes of NPR has had a brief flirtation with Internet success. Granted, the amount of attention BONPR has received is small in the context of the Internet, where a Japanese cat named Maru has 100 million followers and is on the Emperor’s Christmas list, but it’s has gotten attention from exactly the audience I want: the babes of NPR themselves.

I launched the site in the beginning of February–and by “launched,” I posted a picture of Ari Shapiro with the caption: White House Correspondent/gay/Jewish/North Dakotan/babe, and then flooded Facebook with the news that I had just done something clever. It took more than a single picture of Mr. Shapiro (who is legitimately hot, not just public radio hot), but after a few more posts and Facebook blasts, NPR employees–the very people I was inviting the Internet to objectify–started noticing. A week in, I left my desk for a few minutes after my boss’s dog ate a box of frozen chicken nuggets and farted us all out of the office, and came back to an inbox full of emails. Hundreds of them. It turned out that a producer at Fresh Air had tweeted about BONPR, and all of a sudden my audience went from the few people I badgered into looking at to actual strangers, who, I hoped, would tell their friends, who would tell their friends, who would tell their friends. I saw my inbox and shouted that I was going viral, which both confused the hell out of my co-workers and turned out not be true.

My expectations from that very first spike in hits were huge, and continued to rise. I was interviewed by websites and newspapers, strangers found me on Facebook, and I got tons of submissions. It was exciting. When I got notifications that Audie Cornish, Peter Sagal, Ari Shapiro, or Mo Rocca mentioned BONPR on Twitter, I sent them to my parents. After Scott Simon re-tweeted me to 1.2 million people, Finally, I thought, I’m doing something my mom can tell her friends about. I started to get visions of turning BONPR into something culturally important. I would make a Babes of NPR calendar and donate the proceeds to public radio; no, a coffee table book! A heavy, expensive coffee table book with blurbs by Ira Glass and Alec Baldwin on the cover. Maybe after the coffee table book comes out I’d be on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Or, better yet, Fresh Air, discussing what it’s like to be Internet famous with Terry Gross. I stared planning the forward to the coffee table book: about how, thanks to my parents’ politics and their radio, I was a baby of NPR; about how this book was my way of giving back to public radio, my way of thanking the people whose voices are, literally, more familiar than my own.

But beyond a few special moments–getting a shout-out from Peter Sagal on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, reading a write-up in the New York Observer (“Oddly funny, moderately creepy”), hearing Ira Glass’s reaction (“Oh, this is just sad. Oh, look at this. Holy fuck.”), and receiving a t-shirt in the mail from NPR headquarters–nothing much has happened. This is the nature of the Internet: something is big for five minutes and then Snooky gets pregnant and we move on. My expectations rose too quickly, nothing really happened, and so my enthusiasm has dimmed. With each new follower, with each new submission, with each notification that someone I listen to on the radio knows about my blog, I’ve became a little less excited. When Fiona Ritchie, whose accent my sister imitated for an entire summer when we were nine, started following me on Twitter, I didn’t even bother to tell my parents. After six weeks, 111 posts, 2439 Tumblr followers, 276 tweets, a Facebook page, and some BONPR tote bags I drew in Microsoft Paint, I’m not just not famous, I’m losing momentum. Enough people have submitted names that I no longer have to scour the NPR.org for babes, but it’s hard to think of new ways to call people attractive. It just feels like work now. Like writing.

At this point, I have no indication that Babes of NPR is ever going to be more than a website that a few people look at when they’re supposed to be making PowerPoints or reviewing manuscripts, but here’s the thing about the Internet–the potential for success may be small, but it is real. We saw this with Stuff White People Like and Shit My Dad Says and every momentary cultural phenomenon that started out online. It’s hard to let go of the hope that even if I’ll never be Maru, maybe with a few more followers, a few more captions, a few more tweets from Scott Simon or Peter Sagal, that coffee table book will need a forward after all. And that is writing I look forward to.