Television: Girls “The Return”

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Look at that nice, normal date at a pizza parlor. Way to go, Hannah!

The 6th episode of Girls is my favorite to date. Written by Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow, the story delves into Hannah’s character as she goes home to her parents house in Michigan for the weekend. There she reconnects with a really cute guy she went to high school with who is a pharmacist, learns that a classmate disappeared on vacation a la Natalee Holloway, and ends up going on a date with said pharmacist to a benefit to raise money for a PI for the missing girl.

The Date

Skipping over minor details, everything about the date with the pharmacist Eric was a refreshing reminder that not all guys are complete weirdo jerkfaces. I’m so happy for Hannah. It’s so nice to go on a date with a nice person, instead of the usual crazies that always end up stuck on you like a piece of city gum on your shoe.

The Parents
She had a “Party Girl” poster in her high school bedroom. A-MA-ZING.

The interactions with her parents resonates with me and presumably all of my friends. It’s so nice to go home, give your parents a good hug, sleep in your old bedroom and raid the fridge at night because you don’t have to ration your meals. They ask about jobs, wanna hang out with Hannah and are parent-y. There’s also some sex in the shower that goes awry (when isn’t there sex in the shower that doesn’t go awry?!), but I’ll leave that shocker for you if you haven’t seen it yet.

This show just keeps getting better and better. I love the focus on Hannah. It kind of felt like when your friend invites you home, and you get to see all of their childhood/ middle school/ high school things and get drunk with their parents. It’s so fun. It will be cool to see if they dive into the other characters. Jessa plz!!!!

Party Girl. Fuckin’ right.

You HAVE to watch Party Girl. HAVE TO.

Television: Girls “Hannah’s Diary”

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The latest episode of Girls was fucking AWESOME. Definitely the best one of the season so far, because so many “WHAT THE FUCK!” moments happened, and they were totally golden. Here’s what went down:

Shoshanna 

Girlfriend meets some dude she went to camp with, and makes plans to hang out later. A movie turns into a boner (obvi) and they wind up half naked on her bed. As this is her first sexual experience, I’m assuming, she felt very awkward when he went down on her, and just wanted to have sex. When she confessed that she’s a virgin, he stopped and was all “I don’t do that shit, because virgins get attached and they bleed.” #RUDE!!!!! What a dick. Get over yourself. Hopefully Shoshi gets what she wants from a nice dude not hung up on womanly stereotypes.

These are amazingly bad. I can never get penciled eyebrows to look right either.

 Hannah

The episode starts off with Hannah receiving a text of her kind of bf’s penis wrapped in some kind of fur. Then she gets a text that says “sry not for you” with “sry’ spelled exactly like that. Gross. Despite her roomies best judgements to not text him back, she texts him a picture of her boobs. Later on, after talking to her coworkers, they tell her some serious truths like ‘that shit is fucked up,’ ‘ew’ and ‘you need to leave him like right NOW’.

Also at work, Hannah’s new boss is suuuper touchy, but nice and buys people stuff for putting up with his touchy-feely fingaz. Conundrum! She confesses this to her new gal pals at work while they give her some disgusting new penciled in eyebrows that make her look silly. While she’s at her kinda-bfs house, she tells him everything she SHOULD be telling a fart stain like him. It’s amazing, until he thinks it’s hot and wants to make some luv. Screaming at the TV “DON’T DO IT HANNAH” doesn’t help, as she totally effed him. Sex is a tricky bitch.

Marnie

Fucking “Harriet the Spy” all over again.

Absolutely my least favorite character. She gets pissed at Hannah because Marnie’s boyfriend READS HANNAH’S JOURNAL (seriously, that’s your own painful fault. You don’t read other peoples’ inner thoughts, like AT ALL.) and writes a song for it at some empty, shitty show they’re playing. The words go something like “He has a vagina/ Marnie needs to get fucked by a real cock/ He’ll find someone who likes his smothering love.” Marnie THROWS HER DRINK at Hannah and calls her a bitch. WHAT THE FUCK! It’s not her fault she wrote down privately that your boyfriend is spineless and neither of you are strong enough to cut the dependable sex cord and breakup. #turdcouplealert

Jessa

She’s still a nanny. Her ass looks good in this episode because she has cool pants on. I really hope we get to see her out at a club and shit sometime, telling some guy what’s good, because this nanny shit is realistic but boring.

20 something: Freak outs and parents

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous
Yeah, nobody knows what the fuck is going on here. Image via Google

It’s not an uncommon realization that being in one’s 20s is kind of fucking hell. Looming student loan payments. We need to find jobs that probably have nothing to do with our majors, because jobs in our majors barely exist anymore (thanks a lot, technical revolution!). The job market is scarce. Applications go out, maybe 50, maybe a 100 of them without so much as a “fuck you” in return as a response. We want to go out and forget about our troubles with our friends (drinking), but we don’t really have money to do so because of rent and a pesky thing called eating.

We’re all going through this right now. It’s life, it’s our reality. We have high highs and low lows. As we think about ourselves and where our individual futures are going, we must also be sympathetic to the paths of our friends and their complex yet relatable feelings and freak outs.

I make this face at least once a week. Image via esquire.com

Crying and screaming irrationally about our futures is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s a really good release to get out all of your frustrations with jobs, relationships and social lives.

If it happens to you, hopefully there is a nice friend around or nearby a phone who can listen and help you talk things out. If it happens to a friend, remember to listen. Sometimes we can be so wrapped up in our own problems that we forget the complexities that our closest friends are living too. It’s so important to really listen to your friends. Sometimes all we need is to feel that someone is listening to us. Plus, maybe you’ll realize that your problems pale in comparison after hearing that a friend is pregnant/got fired/has AIDS/likes meth. Relativity bitches.

Parents

From talking to many of my friends, I’ve concluded that Will Smith was soooo right. Parents just don’t understand.

“Just get a job” is probably the most common thing said from parent to child during these rough economic and 20s-ish times. Even though mass layoffs after the crash in 2008 affecting many people of our parents age, and maybe even some of your parents, a disconnect os present in the dialogue concerning 20 something jobs and their futures.

Nobody is having a blast monetarily right now, except the 1 percenters (you jerkfaces!) and the people who think they’ll be the 1 percenters someday (idiots) but will instead be middle tier management 4 life (Ha!). Parents retirement funds that have been hit or dwindled, coupled with an unemployed child who is an educated adult is a heavy economic burden. It’s understandable that some parents, much like Hannah’s parents in HBO’s Girls, don’t want to fund their child’s 20s. They’ve worked hard and want to finally have some things to themselves. I mean, I want to travel the world when I hit retirement age, and maybe have a beach house or something dammit!

Being able to understand both our parents economic situation and their lives as individuals as well as our post-grad struggles in a country where job creation is a serious fucking problem is key to getting through this whole mess alive.

Television: Girls “Vagina Panic”

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Image via HBO.com

Instead of living disgustingly bleak lives ourselves, we get a beautiful chance to live vicariously through other 20 somethings going through similar/worse problems that us. These are the days of Girls. (And we get to wait to find the new episodes on the internet, or a friend living with parents who have HBO! Exciting!)

It is going to take a while to get it out of our heads that this show is not fabulous-fabulous like Sex and the City was. Sure, they both share uncomfortable looking shoes, sex and relationships warbles, but unlike SATC it is not glamorized in the least. Girls is less high baller fashionista and more like “holy shit, I need to make rent/I’m unemployed/I’m thinking about doing softcore porn to pay my cell phone bill/Who’s free to take me to my abortion appointment?”

SPOILERS!

Episode 2 of Girls is just as bleak as the pilot. Jessa needs to get an abortion, but flakes because it’s either scary, she doesn’t care, or she can feel the impending miscarriage happening. White russians + boys who call their mom are apparently the new coat hanger. The boy she’s making out with is directed to her underpants when the aforementioned miscarriage luckily appears.

And to those who haven’t vaginas, let me tell you that they can indeed be panicky. The episode has a panicked feel that is unsettling, but vagina worries are no laughing matter, especially when one of those matters could turn into a child.

While Jessa is buggin’ about abortion shit, her friends all wait at the abortion parlor (I’ve always wanted to call them that. They should serve ice cream there). Marnie is annoying because she hates her nice boyfriend and likes to be on time, while Hannah is having weird, plot-ty sex with her less-than-amazing sexual partner. Who, by the way, is the embodiment of the boyfriend or fuck-buddy of at least one of your girlfriends who could totally do better.

Lastly, Shoshanna, the chatty, perky one, reveals that she’s a virgin and shocks absolutely no one.

The episode, steeped with mediocre sex and abortion kerfuffles seemed like it ended an hour too soon. Maybe it’s a symptom of watching Tiny Furniture a couple of times, but I just expect to watch Lena Dunham for more than 30 minutes. I’m seriously considering not watching this show until I can watch all of them in one, amazing, Panera Bread-coma filled day.

You guys, stream episode 1 of HBO’s “Girls” on Youtube fo free!!

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So I guess HBO isn’t totally in the dark about the financial situation of every 20 something in the US. Here’s the first ep they’re streaming for free. I hope it’s as good as the hype!

UPDATE: I loved it!!! Pretty realistic, no matter what Jezebel says. I mean seriously, they can be sooooo annoyingly picky about details:

Girls opens with 24-year-old Hannah (played by Dunham) out for dinner at a fancy restaurant with her parents where she’s hunkering down on a plate of spaghetti like there’s no tomorrow. Later, she eats a cupcake in the bathtub. Maybe, you think, that Hannah was raised in the wild, like Nell, but no. Her parents are professors that just couldn’t be bothered to teach her how to eat at a table. 

Who gives a fuck! Has anyone ever met the child of a reverend or minister? They were the biggest party monsters of the high school crowd. Come on, what a weak argument. Maybe they’re trying to be cool in knocking a show down over picky details as “20 somethings are lazy, she’s ungrateful and needs a job” or “her parents are professors and she doesn’t know how to salsa dance? Totally unrealistic.” BLAH. Maybe if the show was unrealistically feminist and bitchy, someone at Jezebel might like it.

What did you think of Girls? I’m totally fangirling on Lena Dunham.

From Dick Montgomery on the Jezebel article: People love to hate millennials. We’re shifting the paradigm and it’s pissing old people off.

Girls: Its sex and New York city for new generation | Reuters

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“Some of it was versions of things that happened to me and things that happened to my friends. I did once drink a tea made of opium pods,” Dunham said, referencing a plot line in the first episode. “It was the most pathetic attempt at a drug experience that anyone in their early 20s has undertaken.” Lena Dunham rocks and this show is gonna be amazing.

Girls: Its sex and New York city for new generation | Reuters.

One HUGE flaw with HBO’s new series “Girls”

Posted on by 20poorandfabulous

As I already blogged, I am super excited for HBO’s new series “Girls” starring creative triple threat Lena Dunham. The new Sex and the City except I’m guessing way less fabulous and way more anxiety-ridden “where is my life going” and “why aren’t they paying me for work,” with the same amount of “why didn’t he call me back?”

Image via hbowatch.com

Except, what the fuck 20 something has HBO?! Unless HBO hasn’t caught on yet from the subject of their new show or straight hard facts, 20 somethings don’t have money. They barely have jobs and their own apartments. They especially don’t have money for cable and ESPECIALLY don’t have money for premium channels.

So when it comes to ratings and keeping this hopefully awesome new show afloat, I’m not sure if their 20 something demographic is going to be reached at all. Sure, people are super excited about the show, but they’ll be excitedly streaming it from some Eastern European website since HBO doesn’t stream their episodes either.

I almost feel like it’s going to be a one season wonder, or maybe two, like our fave Party Down. Sometimes it’s better to have a short series because then it doesn’t get drawn out like the shit hole that is The Office, Two and a Half Men, Family Guy, you name it. But still, this series looks awesome. Let’s hope there’s more than one season and that people with money and HBO watch the show!

UPDATE: Maybe all the kids/20 somethings forced to live at home with their HBO-subscribed parents are who HBO is banking on watching. Let’s hope so, because there’s a lot of ’em! Thanks, economy!