Don't Worry, It Gets Worse Read online

  Drinking: How else would talking to people be fun? How else would kissing be so enjoyable? I’m not saying that my life is filled with despair, I’m just saying that if I stay sober for too long I start looking at life as a long day’s journey into never getting out of debt and eventually being an old lady who thinks Frasier is funny. Gin is the way to my heart, or vodka, or wine after a long day, or shots to celebrate a great joke somebody just made about pop culture. Alcohol is everyone’s friend, and I am always willing to shower my friend with lots of money. I’ll include late-night cabs drunkenly navigating a cab driver who didn’t want to take me home anyway in this category. Cost: (Redacted for the sake of my mother’s blood pressure).

  Unforeseen expenses: According to my horoscope, sometimes the unexpected can happen. Sometimes I need to buy The Hurt Locker on DVD so I can see Jeremy Renner’s face. Sometimes I need to drop various technologies in the toilet. Or go to the movie theaters and give my liver a break. Buy a book to remind my brain there are other things out there besides computer screens. Finally get around to buying a garbage can for my room instead of scattering clothing tags around it like an Easter egg hunt. You only live once, says rappers and other people who don’t believe in reincarnation. Cost: more than you’d think! Like, almost a billion dollars!

  Total: A lot! I don’t know, I’m on glass of wine number three and this is depressing.

  Don’t fret, though, because I have come up with some foolproof tips that will certainly help me save money and/or my sanity, though realistically, probably neither!

  Tips for Saving

  Don’t get an air conditioner, just hang out your window and have the neighborhood children chuck ice cubes at your face.

  Go on dates and make somebody spend money on you, because that is a thing that happens never, you romantic fool.

  Never go to the doctor! Who wants to know if you’re sick? That’s such a buzzkill. Medicate with sleep and misery and fear, instead!

  Instead of getting HBO, which costs maybe a million dollars a month, try to find episodes online. Worry the cops will come and shoot you for trying to catch the last episode of Game of Thrones; cry hysterically to your roommate until he gives you his HBO GO password.

  Talk about Twitter enough so that everybody hates you and nobody invites you out anymore.

  Save some money on razors by…BAHAHA, I know you’ve had the same razor for eighty-four years.

  Instead of eating out at fancy restaurants, eat a tablespoon of hummus, a handful of potato chips, a squirt of mustard, and maybe forty-six gummy vitamins while standing in your kitchen. Ask your roommates to serve you glasses of water that have food crust on them for the full experience.

  Don’t get a manicure, bite your nails VERY CAREFULLY.

  Go home for a weekend and stare at your mother with wide eyes until she buys you something for dinner and, if you’re lucky, maybe a bra or some socks.

  Save money on bars by sitting alone in a dark living room, watching Food Network and dribbling wine on your chin. If you get wistful for the bar life, put on some heels, rub water (sweat!) all over yourself, play pop remixes very loudly, hold your pee in for an hour while “pretending to get home,” and then fall and hate yourself.

  Marry somebody rich like all those hot guys who worked at Enron (THROWBACK).

  Guilt your friends into buying you drinks by saying you’re depressed about a breakup you had thirty years ago.

  Go back in time before college, write the song “Call Me Maybe,” and dive into your piles of money.

  Make your smartphone a stupid phone by turning off the Internet.

  Shave off half of your electric bill by going to bed at a reasonable hour instead of staying up till 3 A.M. to stare at cats and people you hate on Facebook.

  Blow up all the Forever 21s to avoid temptation.

  Sue a large corporation for charging you for guacamole on your burrito and totally become victorious like Erin Brockovich.

  Stop drinking coffee; just use good old-fashioned fear of the unknown to keep yourself awake.

  Purposefully get gently hit by a vehicle and let the government thank you for your bravery.

  Money doesn’t buy you happiness! Do something for free, like going outside or sobbing or some other shit.

  Give up all your hobbies.

  The Countess says money doesn’t buy you class, so cross your legs and watch Bravo until you speak in a Klonopin-like trance of faux British accents and Pilates and baked tilapia.

  Stop doing laundry; wear the same jeans forever and ever and ever.

  Don’t go to the movies, just stare at Adam Sandler’s new movie poster and hate everything.

  Sex is free BUT so is not having sex.

  Accidentally spend money! I NEVER SAID I WAS HELPFUL.

  Savings: A reasonable amount, I’d say. At least a couple of dollars, if you’re lucky. Don’t go spending it on lottery tickets!

  * * *

  There you go, kids. I really feel like I have done my job here and been very helpful to you all. Look at what I did—I’ve taught you a hard truth about yourself and about the world. It will be years till you have significant money of any kind, and mere moments before you have to spend what little you do have. It’s not pretty, but at least it’s true. If you want to become truly free of monetary needs, do yourself a favor and free yourself of the chains of consumerism. Cancel your Facebook and go live in the woods for a while, run with the deer that care not what you wear or look like! That’ll show the world! Or you could try to become fiscally responsible, like a weirdo nobody wants to listen speak because of how annoying and uppity you are. At best, you could get another credit card.

  That’ll work…until next month.

  How to Romantically Destroy Yourself

  Even though we were raised in the same household, my brother and I have entirely different views on love and romance. It’s not a gender or age thing. It’s that he simmers and I boil over. I explode with the idea of somebody—the friend of the friend whose wild hand gesticulations fill me with poetic sensibilities, the guy who works at the bar I frequent who remembers my name. My brother, on the other hand, is a pragmatist. He can date a lady for months without even thinking if he even wants to “you know, actually” date her. He can discount somebody for practical reasons: distance, religion, crazy parents.

  I learned about the love line in the sand between the two of us when I was twenty-three, the year I binged on rom-coms and poems by e.e. cummings, the year after I binged on zombie films and didn’t think too much about matters of the heart. Twenty-three was the year I became a romantic. My brother, three years my elder, embraced twenty-six as the year he dated a lot and settled for anybody. I leaned toward guys who were better in my head than on paper. He leaned toward girls who were better-looking in person than in really great bikini pictures.

  These are the kinds of polarizing differences you find out about your sibling when it’s 3 P.M. on a Sunday and you’re drinking beer and playing “Pro, Con, Deal-breaker, Neutral.” The rules of the game are simple. You make up personality traits about a potential mate: “He talks to you in baby talk in public,” “Ray Romano is her father,” “He has a Roomba,” or “She only watches Rob Zombie movies,” and see how this affects your feelings about this imaginary person. It’s a game that makes you realize more people are attracted to lazy eyes than you had previously thought.

  My brother turned to me. “Okay, so what if the guy has sought out and murdered a guy who murdered his father? Would you date him then?”

  My eyes lit up. This was gold to me. The action hero, the John Connor badass of my dreams.

  “Are you kidding me??? That would be awesome! This is a superpro! This is a double triple pro! Sign me up for this dude if you know him.”

  My bro’s eyebrows furrowed all the way down to his cheeks. He took a long sip of beer and looked at me with the kind of stare that means I was about to get a lecture. His eyes held the same concern as a father finding vodka in h
is high school daughter’s desk in ABC family shows.

  “Alida. For Christ’s sake. Run away as fast as you can from that dude! He’s got rage issues! He took the law into his own hands! He probably has post-traumatic stress disorder, a warrant for his arrest, and a really bad temper! What the hell is wrong with you? When are you going to learn? Your life is not a MOVIE!”

  Of course my life is a movie, I wanted to tell him. I’ve been the heroine of my own personal action-movie-romantic-comedy hybrid for years! At the current time of filming, I just hadn’t reached the good parts yet. I was stuck in the first twenty minutes—where the lead heroine wears glasses and dates a bunch of wrong guys and her life is the job. I hadn’t bumped into the gruff man who I would hate, eventually fall for, discover he was a thief trying to steal my father’s jewels, hate again, get saved by, then forgive and marry.

  My brother continued on his rant, a rant he had been formulating, he said, since I brought home my second high school boyfriend, Calvin.

  “That was when I thought to myself, Oh boy. My baby sister has terrible taste in men. Do you think I carried a baseball bat in my trunk because I played baseball? I didn’t. I don’t. I had to keep you away from the kinds of guys who hang outside the deli, trying to buy beer. I bet you had a crush on every single one of them.”

  “No,” I corrected him. “The man of my dreams in high school was the kind of guy who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, the side that had bodegas that didn’t card. Besides, J, when I was seventeen, I was dating that twenty-two-year-old. He could buy beer on any track side!”

  He ignored my winning points and continued, ordering more beer for energy. I needed a guy who paid for dinner on the first date. I needed a guy who called me consistently, who was there for me and did thoughtful things for me and other people. I needed somebody nice, he said, because I was nice, even though I cursed a lot.

  “Most guys are assholes, Alida. You gotta find one of the few who isn’t.”

  For as long as I’ve been dating, I’ve been attracted to assholes, and my brother knows it. If there is one thing I blame, it is what I have termed the Shawn Hunter phenomenon. You guys watched Boy Meets World, right? Shawn is single-handedly responsible for why I consistently date terrible, unavailable guys. In case you haven’t seen the show, the lead character is a “nice” guy named Cory. An obnoxious trick birthday candle of a man, he has loved the same girl since he was six, has that work out for him, and never knows anything but comfort and a strong familial unit and stupid hair. Nice guys have it good, we all learned, and yet look how annoying they are! Cory was whiny and spoiled, and always making terrible jokes like some hack comedian in the Catskills. His best friend Shawn, on the other hand, provided the necessary balance to Cory.

  Shawn was a blazing forest fire, always combing his hands through his floppy hair, showing a slight disrespect for school authority, and, like any bad boy, wore gold chains. He spelled his name rebelliously, his foster father had a motorcycle and an earring, and he cut all the sleeves off everything he owned. It was love at first sight for girls of the ’90s everywhere, a collective girl sigh rippling through households whenever he showed up on screen with his trademark plaid and pout. Shawn was an adolescent god, our generation’s Judd Nelson, the ultimate bad boy. He was the star; Cory was the square, a guy who no doubt grew up to be an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal. Shawn was the first boy I truly lusted for, my adolescent hormones awakened like a baby cat opening its eyes for the first time. He created an ideal I held for seven years and into syndication.

  The Shawn Hunter phenomenon is how I’ve romantically destroyed myself over the years. Now, Shawn is replaced by every guy who smells woodsy, loves Tom Waits, and has a voice that sounds like whiskey and cigarettes. I want nothing more than to be the Angela to someone’s Shawn; to be the cool girl who makes the bad boy realize that love is possible and worth it. Looking back, I wish I had just watched The Brady Bunch as a kid and looked for guys with resilient attitudes toward divorce, but no-go. Boy Meets World set me on a warpath to falling for men who would never call me, and I could not assume it was because he was hanging out with his elderly principal.

  I tried to explain the Shawn Hunter phenomenon to my brother, that nice wasn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t exciting, and goddammit, I wanted adventures! He dismissed me with a wave of his hand.

  “Think of the guys you dated, Alida. They were awful to you. Jeez. It’s like you’ve gotten used to it.”

  It was true. In my college years, I had a talent for finding guys with emotional issues, with acoustic guitars, with anger, or with girlfriends they didn’t tell me about. They disappointed me one after the other, until I was so immune to terrible behavior that I expected it and sought it out. My heart was protected by a rib cage as anatomy deemed, a rib cage that participated in the occasional sex romp with the kind of men who didn’t want to talk about their day with me, let alone take me home to Mom. It had become routine for me to expect the least of the men I dated.

  And it didn’t get better after college. In fact, when I was meeting with my brother, I had just recently been dumped by a guy named Trevor, a complete asshole I met at a bar who was excellent at making jokes. He was my first after-college romance, a relationship that was defined mostly by his indifference, his inability to give me compliments, his scrutiny of my outfits, his attractive face, and our habit of texting each other more than seeing each other in person.

  Trevor’s awful behavior was no surprise to any of my friends, or to me, really. As much as I crave bad boys, I also crave some sort of predictable aspect to my life. I had this destruction down pat. Keeping around a guy I met at a bar (in this case, a guy who within hours of meeting told me he had never bought anything for a girl) was commonplace behavior. It allowed me to feel the old familiar feelings—attract them with my humor and my blasé attitude and my quick insults. Get immediately excited when he mentions he’s been to jail for fighting. Admire his leather jacket while making out with him. Watch him as he scoffs at human kindness, carries existential books around, and announces he doesn’t believe in labels. Assume that he will immediately fall head over heels regardless. Realize that his being sarcastic toward me has transformed him into being a jackass only to me. Tell my friends I am okay, I might see him this weekend, but who knows where he goes. Listen, oddly detached, as he talks about other girls. Never want him to meet my friends. Get nervous when he raises his voice. Still text him constantly. Convince myself that the challenge is worth it, have little victories when he texts me first or asks me to hang out first or lifts his finger in the slightest way. Feel myself getting annoyed but deciding to stick it out. Put up with some more bullshit. Realize he’s not a badass, he gets money from his parents. Realize his leather jacket is pleather. Decide not to text him first again, see what happens. Never see him again.

  Boom! I just did that off the top of my head.

  “Why exactly do you find yourself attracted to assholes?” my brother asks. The beers have turned him into a goddamn armchair psychiatrist, and I am the patient who has been committed against my will.

  I take a moment to reflect. In my defense, most breakups occur because they aren’t the right fit, not because the people are terrible, spirit-crushing humans. There are a million shades of wrong for a particular person, and not every shade is awful. But there are people who are more wrong for a person than others, and I seem to have found a surplus of men who are bold, capitalized, underlined wrong for me.

  Memories flashed before my eyes, a bunch of men who never asked anything of me because they never wanted to give anything in return. An old high school flame, a dropout who liked drugs more than he liked me, who was honest about seeing other girls because he knew he could be, and who made me laugh and so I put up with bad behavior. The first guy who broke my heart, a guy with gauges in his ears, who cheated and lied and hinted at it, but I still cried. A college boyfriend with whom things went awry because we stopped making fun of each other and
became polite and tired. Guys who faded out of the picture because they were mean or inconsiderate or bored or cornered.

  And then there’s me, terribly afraid to step out of the box and date someone different. Afraid to get hurt in a different, more complex way—by somebody who I actually trust and care about. My biggest fear. Nice guy was a bad word to me because I feared that lurching-stomach feeling of losing someone I love. Nice meant future, and the future was always uncertain.

  I don’t explain this fear to my brother, instead telling him that yes, I realize that, in all honesty, I am not even the kind of girl who should be dating bad boys. I don’t have a Russian-model body that is good for wearing catsuits and being in Bond movies, I don’t like how loud guns are, and I spill things on myself constantly. It’s just nice to think you know what you don’t want and do want in somebody. It’s just nice to know what to expect, even if it is bad.

  “You’re smart.” He concludes, “One day, you’ll be ready to find somebody better.”

  * * *

  Not every girl has a bad-boy problem. Some of my friends get into relationships constantly. Others cheat all the time, or run away. Some get jealous. Some think they are too undateable to even try. Our dating pool is a circus of fuckups, misfits, and past mistakes that we keep on making. The brand of baggage you’re carrying on your back is the issue. But most of all, I think we fear the same thing.

  I think that thing is love. Real love.

  Think of your first love. Think of how Bambi-like you were, prancing around all excited and in love with everything. Then think of how that happiness was beaten to death with a hatchet, spit on, shit on, leaving you cold. If you watch something you care about get destroyed, you’re not going to want to go back to that place, no matter how pleasant it ever was. I can tell you right now that I fuck up because the idea of that brief happiness, followed by the agony of the Band-Aid being ripped off? That’s scarier than anything. That’s scarier than missing texts from somebody you wouldn’t expect to send you one anyway.