The following is a too-personal account of Monday night’s premiere of GIRLS and the minutia leading up to it, as told by a real writer who lives in Brooklyn. All details are decidedly blurred in bias, self-absorption, and mild to intense neuroses.
these girls, are not this girl.
“Is it fancy?” I asked my friend last night, trying to figure out what a layperson wears to a premiere. After Googling “GIRLS premiere season 2” as a frame of reference, it had become clear that celebrities wear things like Valentino jumpsuits. Despite evidence of at least partial fanciness, my friend tells me it’s not. Which is good, because I don’t have any Valentino jumpsuits on account of my having to pay for things like groceries and health insurance.
There’s an hour to kill before the event. I’ve been working all day, staring at my reflection in a cheap mirror, my face coated in the florescent haze of a windowless convention center. It was here, next to this mirror earlier, where I had the realization that I have probably hated myself for the last ten years, and that my modeling career, even when it was going well, has been a bottomless pit of extreme self-loathing. Happy Monday!
The caffeine withdrawals have started to kick in and one of nine Starbucks’ on this block presents itself to me. I place myself next to a young couple having a conversation so intense they are incapable of saying anything. They sit there, not touching hands or feet or knees, staring dumbly at the plastic lids of their respective beverages and all I can think is how I wish I could make someone that miserable and they could make me that miserable and we, together, could be so miserable that we go to talk about that misery in a public place and come up silent and empty handed. That’s the type of misery I want. And so when they get up to leave, clearly having one of the worst evenings on personal record, I do not feel sorry for them; I feel sorry for me.
Hungry and riotously self-pitying, I walk to the Whole Foods in Time Warner Center, which is really just like Grand Central Station for uptown yuppies looking for a ticket to Kale Town. This is the New York I came here for but the New York I started to hate – fighting for bottles of unpasteurized coconut water with Japanese tourists screaming “kawaii!” and men wearing leopard sneakers. An angry mob of dog-eat-dog alpha, almost valedictorians with deep chips in their shoulders fighting for organic groceries and their place in this world.
I wander back and forth between the hot and cold food bars like a useless little vulture incapable of committing to green pasta or a popular grain causing problems in Peru. I decide on the bone-in roasted chicken but it doesn’t fit into my tiny container because normally I don’t get bone-in roasted chicken… because normally I’m a vegetarian.
Since I’ve already dirtied this box with chicken juice, I decide to continue as planned, without upgrading. My solution is the jam the tongs into the chicken breast, splitting it in twain, leaving a sad, half carcass in my wake. I recognize this as being bad buffet etiquette. With my wrongfully pilfered piece of chicken, I do laps, wondering why everything here sucks, how there is no happy medium between hot bar and cold bar. Against better judgment, I get some Indian slop and think, great, I’m going to smell like Mumbai at this premiere, in my tights with the old hole in the heel and the new hole in the thigh and f*%#, f*%#,,f*%#, , I am never going to make anything of my life.
