An Ode To GIRLS

With the next season of Girls imminently upon us, it seems that the entire 20+ fixie ridin’-mason jarrin’-organic lovin’ while cigarette smokin’ female population is out reposting the second season trailer on a friend’s Facebook or having promiscuous sex in order to mirror scenes that will surely unfold within an episode.

As a 23-year-old lost somewhere between post-grad angst, youthful disregard and 9-5 business casual,  I find that I present a million different personalities, ideas and identities on the daily.  I wake up and read my people.com, my NY Post and regurgitate in bullet point detail the goings on of the Kardashians. Then I  read my New York Times, I swoon over Jon Stewart while watching The Daily Show, I argue about gun laws and women’s rights.  I also speak in hashtag, I chase my coffee with a kombucha and the radio dial stays drifting between NPR and NWA.

Watching Girls makes me realize that I’m not alone in my crazy dichotomous presentation of who I am, and who I am becoming.  The characters have the same first jobs that acutely remind them that they don’t know what they’re doing, they drift between being devoutly righteous and committed to their Yoga practice only to undue a lengthy detox during a late night of chain smoking and shameless grinding to an overwhelmingly synthesized Ke$ha song.

I can’t help but think as I watch, though, of the ladies who paved the way. Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, Miranda. While Sex and the City quizzes still remain a marker of personality assessment, people tend to now ask less if they are a Charlotte or Miranda and instead declare: “I am so Hannah… YOU are such a Marnie!”

I have to note – the Sex and the City ladies literally held me together through high school. I could, and still can, quote every single line of every single episode (not that cool of party trick, it turns out). Like many, I truly believed at sixteen that if I worked hard enough, my life would end up like theirs: full of shoes and romance. It wasn’t until I saw the second movie while studying abroad in Brazil that I truly got the global perception of these women and realized it was time to move on.

So maybe this is why on a Friday night, I now find myself standing in a dank cement room rather than at Neiman’s shopping for a Givenchy ensemble, sipping on mimosas.  I’m at Hoodslam, a monthly WWE SmackDown spoof wrestling absurdity deep in Oakland.  In this dark realm, my little five foot frame is surrounded by a sea of Dead Kennedy wannabes, loud men, cheering and characters like “Drugs Bunny” and “Baby Hoodslam”; the announcer can barely stand straight in his coattails, he’s swaying side to side as he riles up the crowd, so wasted he can barely count the 3..2..1 pin down.

The crowd is eager, loud and jeering. Despite forgetting to drink my ritual Redbull to prepare for the evening event, I am pumped – I’m about to watch some men WRESTLE.  It reeks of sweat and lost decency. Gnarly—men with flab from here to there, in tiny checkered costumes, tatted up, connected by collars are crawling around or being body slammed by girls in ill-fitting leather costumes and fishnet stockings. My generation Y fingers are Instagramming as I sip on one dark and stormy.

Yet it is here that I laugh. I hoot and holler. I forget the day’s work. Who needs fabulousness of haute couture and emotionally unavailable men when the alternative is so much more entertaining? Though I may not be in Bushwick, I am living the simulated realities the girls experience each week.

That is why at times I think Hannah knows me better than myself. She shows that nobody, not even yourself, really likes you when you’re 23 or 24, 25, 26…though it might not get better, you for sure will stop caring, shamelessly eat a Trunchebell-worthy chocolate cake and call it a night. Rinse, lather, repeat.  Oh, and your boyfriend will probably be crazy and then perversely attractive all at the same time.

Make sure you watch the Season 2 premiere of Girls on Sunday, January 13th at 9pm on HBO!