The days of hiding your shopping purchases the way Ray Liotta hid guns throughout his house in Goodfellas are over.
Look, we can all pretend that we’re on point financially and never buy ish we don’t need, but our lives are 93.8 percent about buying unessential crap. Sometimes it’s because we’ve saved up money to treat ourselves with a little sumthin’-sumthin’ nice, and what do ya know, other times, marketing really fucking works. Case in point: I went to Sephora to get a cheap knockoff brush to apply blush with and ended up buying a seventy-dollar editorial eye shadow palette containing twenty-eight colors (read: this is for professional makeup artists) because the display looked dope as hell. Last I checked, I’m not an unpaid intern hired to assist Michelangelo as he painted the Sistine Chapel. I’m just a basic B with minimal makeup skills: Every time I go to apply eye shadow, I deliberate for a long time like I’m a jury member in 12 Angry Men, only to, yet again, use the one sparkling gold color in the palette, leaving the rest of the colors untouched. So why in the hell do I need a twenty-eight-color eye shadow palette when not only do I just use one color, but I also already have a bunch of mostly unused eye shadows at home? Exactly. I don’t need it. This was absolutely a waste of my money, but I did it, and guess wut? If I were boo’d up, I would’ve left Sephora, immediately stuffed the receipt in my mouth and swallowed it as if I were a drug mule, then gone to Walgreens and bought toilet paper and paper towels, hidden the small Sephora bag inside the Walgreens bag, and then, when I arrived home, I would have breezed past my boyfriend and hidden the eye shadow in the one room in the house bae is not allowed to go in like the Jenningses did to their kids on The Americans. But because I’m single, I rolled into my crib, put the receipt on the fridge like it was a hand turkey I made out of construction paper for my parents in elementary school, and I have the palette sitting out in plain sight like it’s a family crest at a country club. Y’all, I am living life out in the open and it feels damn good—expensive, but damn good.
Not having to wait for your significant other, who decided right as you’re about to walk out the door that he needed to take a dump, which undoubtedly will make the two of you late to the event you’re about to attend.
Y’all, I don’t wanna get into the specifics, but this has happened to me more times than I care to discuss, so I want to go on record and state that I don’t necessarily run on CPT aka Colored People’s Time; more often than not, my exes have had poor boo-boo time-management skills. Seriously, like, dude, if you know we’re about to go out to a party, maybe don’t eat seventy-two different kinds of lettuce and arugula because that mess is going to run right through you and now we’re going to miss our train because you needed to drop the kids off at the pool.
Glory be to the internet Gods aka social media and Wi-Fi because when you’re feeling hornier than all the bulls who participate in the Running of the Bulls, you can go on Twitter or Instagram and write a thirst post about a hot celebrity.
There are folks who channel their unused sensual energy into doing philanthropic work or picking up a hobby or binge-watching TV. That’s cool, but sometimes you want to be ignorant. In those moments, do what I do and hop onto Instagram and write an ode to a piece of A you have no chance in hell of fraternizing with. And be sure to make this ode so good that Walt Whitman will come back from the dead and be like, “I spent all my life drinking and writing poems about trees when I could’ve been sober and ignorantly writing bon mots about dreaming of macking on Ulysses S. Grant.”
Seriously, being single means I can devote time to researching hot peen with the vigor of a Politico.com fact-checker. I can get my scroll on by going through my social media feeds and take notice of cuties whose looks, for some reason, never really registered with me in the past (Hugh Jackman, Chadwick Boseman, and Riz Ahmed, just to name a few). Then there are some folks whom I recently discovered exist and their hotness has made me sign up for a lifetime subscription to Fap Magazine: peeps like The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun (never seen the show, but saw pics of him on sosh meeds) and country singer Luke Bryan (never listened to his music, but I watched the American Idol reboot because I’m a grandma at heart). And finally, there are the tried-and-true personal faves who have done something recently to remind me to bow down at the altar of their good looks. Take, for instance, legendary tennis player Rafael Nadal.
Tennis is one of my favorite sports to watch, and I’ve been #TeamRafa since he came on the professional tennis circuit back in 2002. He is, hands down, one of the best to ever play the game, and the fact that he is a person of color who has dominated a predominantly white sport is dope as hell. But let’s also be real: Homie is a hot and very in-shape Spaniard, who, in his spare time, does ads for Calvin Klein while glistening like your grandma’s finest polished silver, which is something that hot people tend to naturally do.
As I am every year, I was all about his journey to winning the US Open Grand Slam Championship in 2017, especially because he had been having some injury troubles in the latter part of his career. So when he won last year, I used my #ThrowbackThursday post on Instagram not to highlight a dorky picture of me from high school or a fun goal I achieved in my career. Instead, I honored Rafa by writing a #TBT to a video I found of him on Insta that was from one of his earlier matches during the 2017 US Open tourney where he was running back and forth, hitting the tennis ball and grunting loudly:
Somebody change “Seasons of Love” to “Seasons of Chub” because it’s gon take 525,600 mins to get over this (with a lisp) sessy ass vid. Today’s #TBT is @rafaelnadal being hella Zaddy-ish on the road to becoming this year’s @usopen champ. I mean, this mess right here about to be my ringtone, the outgoing message on mine and CeCe Winans’s voicemail (#Lol. #Wut. She has nothing to do with this), and will be the In Memoriam clip they play at The Oscars when I die because me watching this ish is straight up better than any film work I will ever do. If Helen of Troy’s face launched 1000 ships, then Rafa’s badonk made 1000 eggs military crawl their way to uteruses like they’re doing a Tough Mudder challenge. If Martin Luther got so mad that he nailed 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church, then Rafa’s angry tennis grunts made 95 peens stand at attention like the people in Billy Blanks’s Boot Camp DVDs. #DatingMyself. And if The Proclaimers would walk 500 miles to get to some vajeen in that song “I’m Gonna Be,” then I would use my JetBlue points and fly 500 miles to be the almond butter Rafa spreads on his rice cake. IDK what that means either. The point let’s give thanks to Rafa Nadal for being one of the greatest tennis champions of all time as well as one of the hottest dudes of all time. #YQY #YaaasKingYaaas #PeenHistory #IgButNecessary
#IgButNecessary indeed, but after I wrote this post and watched the clip a few more times, I moved on with my day of doing whatever the eff I wanna do because I’m single, which leads into . . .
Casual dating!
It’s a thing, or so I’ve heard. Look. I’ve never been able to casually date. I’m either so not into the person that I cannot envision wanting to meet up again to split a side of broccoli rabe, so I cut things off from the jump,* or I’m pretty much all in and have figured out what our portmanteau is (e.g., Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were known as Brangelina) and how we can use it as a hashtag on Instagram. Clearly, there is no in between for me, but please, go forth, put your feels on low-power battery mode so you can enjoy meeting and making out with new peeps, having fun, and just remember that I’m going to be all up in your grill like a TMZ cameraperson, trying to get all the scandalous deets, then segue ungracefully into asking your thoughts on Lindsay Lohan. IDK why, but the TMZ dudes always want to know how everyone feels about LiLo.
Sure, learning to love yourself can help you in the long run if and when you want a life partner, but more importantly, being your own biggest fan is only going to make you happier and have a better quality of life.
As the legendary RuPaul sta
tes at the end of every episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race: “If you can’t love yourself, then how in the hell are you going to love somebody else? Can I get an amen up in here?” Well, I’m only going to focus on the first part of Ru’s statement. Learn to love yourself, because if you can’t do it, life is going to be a bumpy-ass roller-coaster ride like the one I took where the safety bar went perfectly across the dude I was with, but because he was bigger than me, there was a decent-sized gap of space between myself and the bar, so I spent the two-and-a-half-minute-long ride writing, in my head, a spoken-word poem entitled “Ain’t This a Goofy-Ass Activity That White People Find a Way to Die From or at the Very Least Get Hit in the Face by a Flying Bird Like Fabio Did in 1999?”
* * *
Well, #TeamBeByYourself, that’s it! A quality starter/refresher pack for your journey with singledom. I hope it helps, but if you’re ever in a pinch and loneliness gets ya down and upset, just freakin’ go for it and cry. It’s good for your soul.
Addendum: I Have a Boyfriend Now . . . Well, I Had a BF at the Time I Turned This Book in to My Editor—J/K, We’re Still Together
[In Office Space Bill Lumbergh voice] Yeeeeeeeeeeah. A couple of things. One, I only learned that what I’m currently writing is called an addendum after I looked it up. In the past, I loosely referred to it as “When the reader is done with the book, but the author is like ‘Naw, dawg,’” but I knew that was too ridiculous, so I typed into Google, “What if the book you’re writing is over, but you still have some things that may be mildly amusing to 17 percent of the people who bothered to read it in the first place?” To which Googs responded with, “DaFuq.What?” Good point. In the end, I spent twenty minutes fumbling around on the internet until I found what I was looking for. Thanks, Googs, for having the patience of Stanley Tucci making over Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada and putting up with my nonsense.
Two, I recognize that it’s awkward that I’m like, “Btdubs, I gots me a man,” after I just wrote an entire essay about how being alone is not awful and can be as cool as the schadenfreude I feel when on Bar Rescue, Nightclub Hall of Fame inductee* and bar rehabilitator Jon Taffer trains an ill-equipped bar staff for seventeen minutes on how to undo every incorrect thing they’ve done for years and then throws a “stress test” aka floods the establishment with patrons, which, by the way, will be 1000 percent more people than will ever, ever, ever show up to this place in the future, so the staff fails miserably and cusses each other out like they’re on Jerry Springer. Y’all, I totes didn’t mean to get a bae after I had given up on dating and learned to (mostly) enjoy being on my own, nor did I plan on meeting someone after I started writing this book. But as we all know, life doesn’t give a damn about our plans and will throw in a surprise or two to keep us on our toes. Sometimes the surprise is a pregnancy. Or an unexpected, wild, and once-in-a-lifetime kind of night. Other times it’s new overdraft fees from Bank of America. Hey, I didn’t say they were going to all be good surprises, but in the case of my relationship status, it’s hella good. #NoDoubt. With that said, before I begin, I have one disclaimer: My boyfriend, due to his job as a tour manager, wants to retain his anonymity, so instead, we will use the nickname #BritishBaekoff because he’s British and loves The Great British Bake Off. Good? Good. Now lemme tell you the story of how we got boo’d up.
Bae and I met at a U2 concert. YES, I KNOW HOW ABSURD AND PERFECT THIS IS, AND THAT IF WE STAY TOGETHER, WE WILL GIFT THE BAND ONE AMAZON ECHO (TO SHARE) THAT WE BOUGHT DURING A CYBER MONDAY SALE BECAUSE WE DON’T HAVE MONEY LIKE THAT TO BUY FOUR, AND BECAUSE BONO & CO. ARE NOT ASSHOLES, THEY WILL PRETEND THAT THEY WILL USE IT. So, yes, I met #BB at a U2 concert, which is the universe’s way of saying, “If you can’t get physical with anyone in the band, the least I can do is send some other pasty and more age-appropriate foreigner with an accent your way.” A little blunt and judgy, but, hey, that doesn’t make it any less accurate.
So last year, as some of you may know, U2 toured in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of The Joshua Tree album, and one of the stops was a two-night stint at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. When the tour was announced, I made it my life goal to see them as much as possible, but even I knew that going back-to-back nights might be too stalkerish, so I purchased tickets for just the first night and then sat alone in my apartment wearing a U2 T-shirt and melodramatically staring at my laptop while muttering to myself, “Yeah . . . yeah. No, yeah, I made the right call. I made the right call. I mean . . . yeah.” Basically, I was like Miss Havisham at the end of Great Expectations. However, despite feeling early-onset FOMO, I knew that financially and sanity-wise, I had made a sound decision and carried on living my life until an angel in a maxi dress hit me up a couple of weeks before the NJ concerts.
Neyla, cellist and vocalist from the Lumineers, sent my manager an email stating that she loved 2 Dope Queens and wanted to invite me to a U2 concert because the Loom-Looms were opening for them. For the uninitiated, the Lumineers are an Americana folk music band featuring the occasional banjo minus the “lemme make a sharp left because ‘my kind’ is not welcome in this neighborhood” vibe. In short, they are white, but not “h-white.” Before I continue, I should probably explain what exactly the difference is between the two.
White and “h-white” both concern white people, but the former category is run-of-the-mill stuff that is silly and sometimes annoying but usually harmless, while the latter category is screwed-up trash that makes you wanna do a drive-by at 23andMe.com to make sure you’re not related to the white nonsense you’re witnessing. Some examples include:
White is Gwyneth Paltrow, in one of her Goop newsletters, intentionally referring to Billy Joel as William Joel for no gahtdamn reason; “h-white” is an AP reporter calling black child actress Quvenzhané Wallis by the name Annie because it’s “easier.”
White is when, in 2015, the New York Times decided that the traditional Mexican dish guacamole needed some zhooshing and published their recipe, which included green peas; “h-white” is racist white nationalists using tiki torches, which have Polynesian origins, to protest people of color being in America.
White is Mel Gibson when he had a feathered mullet, stonewashed jeans, and crazy eyes in Lethal Weapon; “h-white” is Mel Gibson just Mel Gibsoning it up in his day-to-day. Full stop. Period.
Thankfully, the Looms are white, not “h-white,” so I listen to them. In fact, I turn on “Ho Hey” when I wanna feel like a white girl who is artistically yet unnecessarily barefoot all the time (read: Joss Stone). Therefore, when I was presented with a two-for-one situation—meeting Neyla’s band as well as seeing U2 again for free—I obvs had to say yes, so she connected me with the band’s tour manager (soon to be known as #BritishBaekoff) and then I set about convincing one of my friends to come with me to the concert.
That friend is trusty ole Michelle. Even though she’s not a U2 fan, she’s always down for a good time. Plus, she’s black, so we def upped the “black people at a U2 concert who are not venue staff members” from zero to two. #ThisIsMyDiversityInitiative #SoNotWhatTheACLUIsReferringToWhenTheyTalk- AboutDiversityInitiatives.
On the day of the show, I met Mishy at her house at 5 P.M. so we could drive to Jersey and get there early to hang out in the VIP guest lounge until the show started at 8 P.M. Fast-forward to us being stuck in the worst traffic of our lives with every shortcut we tried to take being blocked off by the city. So there we were among the limos, convertibles, and other concertgoers as well as folks heading home from a long day at work. Ruh-roh! Michelle only agreed to go to this concert because of the promise of the VIP lounge aka free alcohol, and the arrival time on the GPS kept getting pushed later and later: 6 P.M., 6:15, 6:28, 6:45, and so on and so on. While I panicked internally, a welcome external distraction came.
Pointing to the window, I said to Michelle, “Look at these white people,” a comment that all black people (especially Maxine Waters and Danny G
lover) usually utter when they see standard-issue white nonsense like being barefoot in public spaces or playing a slowed-down acoustic version of a Migos or Cardi B rap song and getting 17,000,000 views on YouTube. Well, thankfully, what I was pointing at was charming ignorance, which is the foundation of my soul, so I was into it. There were two white people power walking/soft jogging across the damn highway towards the entrance of Lincoln Tunnel.
“I bet they’re trying to get to the U2 concert,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Michelle asked.
Was it presumptive to assume these strangers were going to see my favorite band, especially in a place like New York City/New Jersey, where there is a litany of options for nighttime entertainment? Maybe, but, y’all, I was confident that my hunch was correct based off the following exhibits: (A) These peeps are white, (B) they were walking across a freeway while dressed in clothing that implied they summer in Vermont, and (C) the last time I was at a concert, it was at a festival in Boston and I saw hundreds and hundreds of white people run as fast as they could at the faint sound of Mumford & Sons tang-a-langin’ on a banjo, which signaled the beginning of their performance. It was like a Black Friday sale at Net-a-Porter. It was like that scene in Braveheart with soldiers running up that hill if those soldiers were fighting not for their freedom but instead for the right to brag about not owning a TV and to continually host writers’ workshops. It was Tom Cruise running in every movie ever: perfectly upright posture and with a purpose. And even when some of them tripped and fell, it was like when I play Luigi on Mario Kart and his turtle-shell car drives over a banana peel, spins out for a few seconds, and self-corrects. The M&S fans were not deterred and got the heck back up and kept running. So, in closing, while my definition of running or moving at a swift clip is basically me skipping to my Lou, my darling, like I’m doing runway for dELiA*s Fashion Week (a thing I wish truly existed), these Mumford & Sons fans were risking personal injury to see their favorite band. So, seeing two white people walking across a freeway during rush hour traffic, which is a dangerous thing to do, seemed par for course.
Everything's Trash, But It's Okay Page 24
