Thought Catalog

These are the months that I’ve chosen to be asleep. These are the months when I stopped liking what I saw in front of me so I decided to change it. Alter the reality, contour it to my liking. I went to sleep because nothing can hurt you there, not even dreams or nightmares. You’re slowly dying and it feels like a warm blanket that’s wrapping itself around you. Do you know how good it feels to trick people into thinking you’re alive? Here I am buying groceries and licking envelopes. Here I am laughing at the appropriate times and asking the right questions but it’s all just an elaborate ruse. I look alive, like a real person, but I’m actually asleep. When are you going to notice it? Poke my skin and the flesh will feel real. Poke the insides though and you’ll see that it’s all dead.

Yes, Facebook totally sucks now. The timeline is the rudest thing to happen to our civilization since “having emotions.” Everything looks cluttered and you have trouble navigating a proper lurk experience, so you should just delete your FB and save yourself the technological headache! But wait, what’s that I hear? You can’t? You don’t know why but you just can’t bring yourself to do it? I feel you, sister. Facebook still has a tense grip on my balls too. One of the reasons why we can’t just say “good-bye to all that” is because we’d miss the smug satisfaction and joy we get from lurking people from our high school. Reading that one goth girl’s bad poetry (posted in the “Notes” section which no one EVER uses) brings you so much pleasure. Also hilariously sinful: watching your ex best friend slowly get fat on their photo timeline! Oh, what sinister fun it can all be! If you deleted your Facebook, how else are you going to feel superior? How about this? You’ll delete your FB when you want to become a better person but that won’t happen for, like, a really long time so…

The Monday Hangover occurs not when you’ve drank too much the night before. On the contrary, it happens when you’ve done too little on the past Sunday.

Sundays often operate on extremes. They hold a mirror up to your life. Sometimes the mirror is pristine and sometimes it’s cracked with coke residue. When it’s the former, Sundays have the ability to make you feel sublimely happy, like your life is full and complete. It reminds you that you’re surrounded by love and living in a wonderful city with solid friends. Everything slides down your throat like the creamy soft serve ice cream you’ll devour after you have your obligatory life-affirming brunch. (So much laughter! So many mimosas! People are definitely jealous of all the fun your table is having!) The whole day feels lazy, hazy, and dreamy. You walk idly from shop to shop, maybe even buying that book you’ve been meaning to read. (It will look really good on your bookshelf. Who cares if you actually read it.) Before you know it, it’s 5 PM so you go home to your apartment to listen to some soothing music, cook dinner, clean your room a bit, and read in bed. It’s the perfect amount of sloth. You never feel restless, you just feel rested. Then you sleep amazingly, like you’ve been drugged, and you wake up on Monday feeling lucid and bright. So blessed right now…

The conversation you have will feel like nails on a chalkboard. You’ll say the words “Good. Really Good. Jobs. Work. Weather,” and they won’t mean a thing to you. Is “I’m doing really good!” even English? It’s Greek, right? You don’t know Greek. When you’re having a conversation and both parties know it’s BS, a thickness develops with each and every single word. “How are you?” weighs approximately 5,000 pounds. “See you later!” is weightless.

Move into an apartment on the corner of Overpriced and Dangerous. Sleep on a bare mattress with an Ikea comforter. Your mother talks to you about buying a top sheet and a duvet cover but feel like you’re not mature enough to own something called “duvet.”

Read the New York Times piece, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” Feel exposed and humiliated. Share it on your Facebook with the caption: “Um….” Your friends will comment “Too real” and that will be the end of that.

Work at a coffee shop but feel hopeful about your career in advertising, writing, whatever. Remember that you’re young and that the world is your oyster. Everything is possible, you still have so much to see and hear. You went to a good school and did good things. Figure if you’re not going to be successful, who the hell is?

Date people who you know you’ll never be able to love. See someone for three months for no other reason than because it’s winter and you want to keep warm by holding another body. Date a Republican just so you can say you dated a Republican.

Eventually all these nobodies will make you crave a somebody. Have a real relationship with someone. Go on vacations together, exchange house keys, cry in their arms after a demoralizing day at work. Think about marrying them and maybe even get engaged. Regardless of the outcome, feel proud of yourself for being able to love someone in a healthy way.

I’ve never manscaped before. It’s not because I’m lazy. I just honestly didn’t know I was supposed to do it. However, the more and more I talked to my male peers and slept around, I noticed that everyone was in tip-top shape down there. While I wasn’t looking, men just decided to step up their penis game and get clean. They got trimmed and properly groomed, and became a true sight of modern penis perfection. My pubic hair, on the other hand, looked like an extra in The Lion King.

You want a job, a vacation, heath insurance, validation, a back rub, a scalp massage at the place where you get your haircut, people who are jealous of you, an ex who won’t stop texting you when they’re drunk, Twitter followers, happiness maybe sorta, someone to buy you lunch at a fancy restaurant, a mentor who can tell you what the hell to do with your life, a reliable internet connection, a reliable human connection, a gift card to the grocery store, dinner parties with friends where everyone will pretend to have their crap together for just one night, a nice flirty text message to wake up to every morning for the rest of your life, for everyone to like you even if you don’t like anyone, and one of those nights that doesn’t end till 9 AM and reminds you what it feels like to be young and alive.

Let’s do all of these things in one day: Eat a giant burrito, text your ex, have sex with your ex, get drunk, and go out. Because guess what? These “clean slates” brought on by the new year are 100% bogus and continually set us up for failure. There’s so much pressure riding on the beginning of a new year and all it does is create anxiety and push you to the brink. People fail to understand that doing “bad things” isn’t really bad at all if it’s done in moderation.

I understand why someone would lie about cheating. I understand why someone would lie about doing drugs. That makes sense to me. There’s something substantial to cover up. But there seems to be no valid reason to lie about something like the price of a coffee drink other than to do it for the sake of lying, which is terrifying.