1. Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be toxic, bitchy or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses—pretty but designed to SLOW women down.

1A. This is not to say women aren’t bitches or toxic or competitive sometimes but rather to say that these are not defining characteristics of female friendship, especially as you get older.

2. A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology. 

2A: The female friendship in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? is actually awesome and powerful. If you read it as otherwise, ask yourself why.

3. If you find that you are feeling competitive, toxic, or bitchy toward the women who are supposed to be your closest friends, look at why and figure out how to fix it and/or find someone who can help you fix it.

4. If you are the kind of woman who says, “I’m mostly friends with guys,” and act like you’re proud of that, like that makes you closer to being a man or something, and less of a woman as if a woman is a bad thing, see Item 3. It’s okay if most of your friends are guys but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, well, soul search a little.

4A. If you feel like it’s hard to be friends with women consider that maybe women aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s just you.

4B. I used to be this kind of woman. I’m sorry.

5. Sometimes, your friends will date people you cannot stand. You can either be honest about your feelings or you can lie. There are good reasons for both. Sometimes you will be the person dating someone your friends cannot stand. If your man or woman is a scrub, just own it so you and your friends can talk about more interesting things. My go to explanation is, “I am dating an asshole because I’m lazy.” You are welcome to borrow it.

6. Want nothing but the best for your friends because when your friends are happy and successful, it’s probably going to be easier for you to be happy.

6A. If you’re having a rough go of it and a friend is having the best year ever and you need to think some dark thoughts about that, do it alone, with your therapist, or in your diary so that when you actually see your friend, you can avoid the myth discussed in Item 1. 

6B. If you and your friend(s) are in the same field and you can collaborate or help each other, do this, without shame. It’s not your fault your friends are awesome. Men invented nepotism and practically live by it. It’s okay for women to do it too. 

6C: Don’t tear other women down because even if they’re not your friends, they are other women and well, this is just important. This is not to say you cannot criticize other women but understand the difference between criticizing constructively and tearing down cruelly. 

6D: Everybody gossips so if you are going to gossip about your friends, at least make it fun and interesting. As a corollary, never say, I never lie or I never gossip because you are lying.

6E: Love your friends’ kids even if you don’t want or like children. Just do it. 

7. Tell your friends the hard truths they need to hear. They might get pissed about it but it’s probably for their own good. The other day my best friend told me to get it together about my love life and demanded an action plan and well, it was irritating but also useful. 

7A: Don’t be totally rude about truth telling and consider how much truth is actually needed to get the job done. Finesse goes a long way.

7B: These conversations are more fun when preceded by an emphatic, “GIRL.”

8. Surround yourself with women you can get sloppy drunk with who won’t draw stupid things on your face if you pass out, and who will help you puke, if you over celebrate and who will also tell you if you get sloppy drunk too much or behave badly when you are sloppy drunk. 

9. Don’t flirt (too much), have sex, or engage in an emotional affair with your friends’ significant others. This shouldn’t need to be said but it needs to be said. That significant other is an asshole and you don’t want to be involved with an asshole that’s used goods. If you want to be with an asshole, get a fresh asshole of your very own. They are abundant.

10. Don’t let your friends buy ugly outfits or accessories you don’t want to look at when you hang out. This is just common sense.

11. When something is wrong and you need to talk to your friends and they ask you how you are, don’t say, “Fine.” They know you’re lying and it irritates them and a lot of time is wasted with the back and forth of “Are you sure?” and “Yes?” and “Really?” and “I AM FINE.” Tell your lady friends the truth so you can talk it out and either sulk companionably or move on to other topics.

12. If four people are dining, split the check evenly four ways. We are adults now. We don’t need to add up what each person had anymore. If you’re high rolling, just treat everyone and rotate who treats. If you’re still in the broke stage, do what you have to do.

13.If a friend sends a crazy e-mail needing reassurance about love, life, family, or work, respond accordingly and in a timely manner even if it is just to say, GIRL, I hear you. If a friend sends you like thirty crazy e-mails needing reassurance about the same damn shit, be patient because one day that’s going to be you tearing up GMAIL with your drama. 

14. My mother’s favorite saying is “qui se ressemble s’assemble.” Whenever she didn’t approve of who I was spending time with she’d say this ominously. It means, essentially, you are who you surround yourself with.

growing-up-indie:

1. Go to college.  Just go.  It’s where you’ll learn how to be, how not to be, and how to set booby traps in the shower so your roommate stops using your expensive shampoo.
2. Learn how to apologize sincerely.
3. Eye contact is major.  Get into it.
4. Talking crap about people sometimes feels good (just admit it), but tastes bad.  It’s the opposite of eating McDonald’s.
5. If it hurts, don’t wear it.  At some point the pain will show.
6. Learn how to wear lipstick and werk.
7. The day you look dumb in the grocery store at 7:19 in the morning is also the day you run into that duuude you don’t want to run into, and his stupid-hot-at-7:19-in-the-morning girlfriend.  Don’t worry.  You’re buying kale and olive oil.  At least you can cook.
8. Overdress, always.  Unless it’s heels in a park… that doesn’t work.
9. In every situation, consider the likelihood of skinny-dipping.  Act accordingly.
10. Check out your hair from behind… yea… you’ve got a whole situation going on back there.
11. Exfoliate:  your kitchen, your shower, your carpets, and your body.
12. Find out what color  dress/shirt/lipstick makes your eyes pop.  Buy a lot of it.
13. Never ever ever ever EVER ever ever take your shoes off in the club.
14. If you feel a deep need to take your shoes off in the club, walk your butt outside, get in a cab, and go home.  Game over.
15. No one keeps secrets.  Remember this when you’re telling you’re people all your business.
16. Life is not fair.  That fact is profoundly frustrating.  My Mom taught me this… dang was she right.
17. Don’t wait for some dumb boy to give you closure.  You give yourself closure.  That’s real.  Tie that mess right on up.  Buy ice cream if necessary.
18. Sometimes it’s not fate, or a sign… but just a coincidence.
19. You are not inherently patient.  It’s an exercise.
20. Learn how to do something exceptionally well.  Never apologize for that.  Step up.
21. Watch Inception as many times times as you need to.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt floats and Juno flips walls… It’s just a whole thing.
22. Learn how to make cookies.
23. Frozen peas, unfrozen, can be a meal.
24. Kittens grow up to be cats.  That’s when things get a little scary.
25. Don’t be that girl, in any and all situations.  Unless that girl is the awesome girl passing the boards… then you should totally be that girl.  I’m talking to you Andrea.
26. If a girls says she “just doesn’t really get along with other girls” that means that she’s probably not that nice to other girls… I’m just sayin’.
27. Ladies should be kinder to one another.  Teamwork, ladies!
28. Never be early for a party… unless you plan on helping.  By helping I mean, pouring tequila shots.
29. Being fourteen sucks and there’s absolutely no way around it.
30. Being thirty one does not suck unless you think it sucks for some reason.
31. Sometimes you go to restaurants and you just don’t get what you want.  It’s cool, just get ice cream on the way home.
32. Over-tip.
33. Just admit that you’re watching My Big American Gypsy Wedding because you’re completely obsessed and you really need to talk about it with someone.
34. God is good even when you doubt that God is god.

Yes to all of this.

#birthdaywishes

by Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

fyeahbangladesh:

It’s not Hawaii, and it’s not St.-Tropez. But Cox’s Bazar is an up-and-coming beach resort, with lush vegetation and soaring property prices to match.

I went to Cox’s Bazar this weekend — and stayed at the Mermaid Eco Resort — and it was lovely.  Pics soon!