It has been a rough month or so for music lovers. It feels like every other day, my Twitter feed explodes with rumors or, more often than not, sad truths about another icon of American music passing away. As evidenced by my Music Monday posts, I develop very strong connections to the music in my life and each time another beloved singer is gone, it often hits me harder than I would expect.
As we’re about to embark on another weekend (though with being laid off, the weekdays and weekends seem to blend together), it’s hard not to think about Donna Summer. Her music was always the sound of summer weekends (no pun intended, for once) and being young and wild and free. And even though my weekend plans are less “bad girls hit the town” and more “taking advantage of the busy tourist season to make some extra dough“, I’ll be cranking Donna Summer all weekend long.
Hello friends! Thanks for sticking with the blog during our little hiatus. We are back up and running and looking forward to some great posts next week, including some thoughts on Revolver, attitude in the workplace, and postcollegiate summers. As always, I’m looking for more fearless post-collegiates to feature, so if you’re interested in being interviewed for the blog (or want to guest post), get in touch with me at postcollegiate [at] gmail [dot] com or tweet me.
I’ve been wanting to do a frivolous Friday post on some television characters I’ve noticed who really seem to embody the postcollegiate spirit and was thrilled to see this Vulture piece on the universally hated character on Smash, Ellis. What makes Ellis so awful? He’s a textbook millennial – he’s disloyal, he job hunts, he demands credit, he’s too eager to please, and he thinks he’s better than he is. Sounds like just about every middle-aged office worker I know talking about our generation in the workplace! The story really inspired me to think about other television characters, good or bad, who really seem to represent the millennial generation.
Nick Miller (The New Girl)
Oh, Nick Miller. Nick Miller, who dropped out of law school and lives off his meager bar-tending wages. Nick Miller, who doesn’t have health insurance. Nick Miller, who can’t get a cell phone because his credit score is so laughable. Nick Miller, who’s friends are convinced they could buy their own city with the money they’d save not covering his share of the rent. Nick Miller embodies just about every cliche (and hard truth) about millennial and money – most of us don’t have it and when we do have it, we’re not very responsible with it.
Penny Hartz (Happy Endings)
Penny’s misadventures in dating is essentially a documentary for anyone who didn’t get married by the time they were 24. She’s the girl who will adapt to whatever the guy she likes is into (see: that time she dated a hipster), she’s willing to go way out on a limb to find someone to settle down with (see: that time she dated the guy named you-know-what), and she’s even explored the possibility of settling down with her best friend (see: that time her sex dream about Dave was really a proposal dream). But what really makes Penny the embodiment of millennial dating is her perpetual optimism that it will all work out in the end, even though life tells us otherwise.
June Colburn (Don’t Trust the B—-in Apartment 23)
Poor Chloe. She gets her dream job, moves to the big city, and is so excited to settle down with her fiance. Except the job goes bust, she loses the perfect apartment, and her fiance is a lying cheat. So, she ends up trucking along at a dead-end coffee shop job while she tries to survive living with the show’s titular bitch, Chloe. If Chloe wasn’t so much frickin’ fun, it would almost be depressing to watch. It’s hard not to empathize with June’s blind belief that everything in her post-collegiate life is going to work out just fine.
Abed Nadir (Community)
Inability to communicate? Check. Constantly indulged by his peers? Check. Refusal to grow up and mature? Check. Pursuing a less-than-marketable humanities degree? Check. Obsession with pop culture which will unlikely serve him well in the future? Check. Although Annie’s relentless ambitious and need for approval and Troy’s insistence on being treated like an adult even when he isn’t really one yet are both strong candidates, Abed takes the millennial crown at Greendale.
By the time you read this, I will be close to landing in Texas for the wedding of one of my oldest and dearest friends. I’m thrilled to be a part of her special day and so excited to see many old friends this weekend, not to mention getting in a little family time as well. It promises to be a great, long weekend – which means no new posts until Wednesday.
Whenever I have to pack for wedding (and that’s becoming a more and more frequent occurrence with age), I always, always, always think about the wedding scene from The Muppets Take Manhattan. So, on this most frivolous of Fridays, enjoy a little muppetty goodness!
Hello friends! Short post today as I am gearing up for an insane couple of weeks. Kicking off the weekend with my first baseball game of the season – here’s hoping it stays warm out at Nationals Park tonight – and then continuing on from there with a boating, birthday parties, and the ballet, because I am a Fancylady sometimes.
With all this frivolity on my plate (and the wedding of my almost-big-sister in two weeks!) and the final touches on my grad school application, I haven’t had much time to scourge the Interwebs for clever bits of Friday fun for you. But fear not! Sit back, relax, and check out these top ten most popular past Friday Frivolity posts!
It’s Friiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! (Hey, sometimes I like to pretend I’m Oprah.) Very excited for the weekend to be here especially because the butter on our Easter table spread this Sunday will be in the shapes of little lambs and the moment someone cuts into it, I’m going to make jokes about sacrificial lambs for the rest of the day.
For a little bit of frivolity on this fine almost-holiday Friday, I was inspired by a great new website, The Billfold. Brought to you by the good people behind The Awl, Splitsider, and Hairpin (all worthy reads in their own right), Billfold is an irreverently fun and actually useful site about money and finance. They didn’t even pay me to say that! I actually think that thought on my own! One cool feature on The Billfold is the series “My Last $100” where the author details the last one hundred dollars they’ve spent. So, I thought I’d give you all a little peek into my finances – prepare to be…underwhelmed (spoiler alert: it’s mostly food and/or beer-related!)
Note: For the sake of ease and sparing you from reading about every $0.75 Diet Coke and $2.00 cup of oatmeal I bought this week, this only lists purchases over $5.00 and doesn’t include last night’s Girls Night, because that is off-limits for blog talk (as I foreswore on shoes and you cannot welch on that business).
$10 – DC Beer Week button – put your hands in the air for supporting local beer, what what!
$22 – Pitcher of beer, nachos, and french fries for a pre-21 Jump Street best friend movie matinee. Mom(s), please don’t judge us.
$18 – Grocery trip to Wegmans – all off the cold/hot bar to stock my lunches for the last few days. A conscious effort was made to include vegetables, to counter the effects of purchases made the day before this
$25 – H Street Country Club – Shrimp fajitas, a single margarita, and a couple of Dos Equis Ambers – weird DC-themed mini-golf on second floor of the bar was free with entree purchase!
$7 – Au Pon Bain – I attempted to order myself a “healthy” lunch sandwich (veggies! no cheese! no aioli! lots of veggies!) but *true story alert*, there were apparently two Rebeccas ordering lunch that day because when I returned to my desk, there was a turkey, brie, and cranberry chutney sandwich in the bag. I could have gone back and swapped out for my 400-calorie-veggie-delight but instead, I ate that brie-swaddled goodness and did not look back. It was a beautiful moment.
Have a great weekend and remember to spend responsibly!
Alternately titled: How I Spent Thursday Night Drunk With My Schoolteacher-To-Be Best Friend Watching Schoolhouse Rock YouTube Videos
I’m a simple creature. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. A roof over my head, clean clothes on my back, and warm food on my table. Throw in a case of Miller High Life and wireless Internet access and I will become downright gleeful. Last night started innocently enough – a few girls gathered together for dinner, catching up, and gossip. But then…everything changed.
Remember D.A.R.E.? Of course you do! D.A.R.E. is famous for keeping almost no middle class suburban white kids off of drugs but giving us all really cool retro shirts to wear ironically when we were smoking up behind the tennis courts during our off period (Mom, I swear, it was only the other kids, I was there to study!) Apparently, D.A.R.E. is still alive and kicking (because in all seriousness, they do good work, especially the drug dogs they bring to school when you graduate), so my STBBF was kind enough to share this jaunty tune that her students are currently learning to perform for their D.A.R.E. graduation. Warning: Listening will cause major earworm. NOT A JOKE.
Once we listened to this song like five times – and warned each other to “check our attitudes at the door” – it was a YouTube nostalgia fest. After brief detours with Rappin’ Rabbit and The Hippo Song (one of us grew up with a weirdly musical religious aunt), it was time to bring out the big guns – SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK! My passion for Schoolhouse Rock cannot be overstated. We own the VHS set at home and I still love to pull them out and watch them en masse when I’m visiting the PCParentals. I have very fond memories of catching the clips during Saturday morning cartoons, implementing them into my stash of babysitting tricks, and playing tracks off the dope cover album when I was a college DJ.
The genius of Schoolhouse Rock is that it exists perfectly at the intersection of sincerity and camp. The content is legitimately educational, unlike so many contemporary offerings, and there’s an earnest enthusiasm that never quite feels hokey, because each song’s story is sublimely silly in its own right. While I always had a personal preference for the grammar and history series, even the math and science songs had a way of making me want to laugh at it and with it, all at the same time.
So, in honor of this most frivolous Friday, please enjoy my top ten favorite Schoolhouse Rock videos (in no particular order).
Sufferin’ ’til Suffrage
I like to think that my feminism really grew out of watching this over and over again. Also, how fantastic is that girl’s ponytail? SUPER FANTASTIC.
Three Is A Magic Number
I am not ashamed to admit that I still use this to do multiplication in my head!
The Tale of Mr. Morton
Not only is this story incredibly sweet (Mr. Morton was lonely…Mr. Morton was), but another great feminist-inspiring song – spoiler alert, the woman proposes!
Interplanet Janet
“A solar system Ms. from a future world” is just the catchiest damned lyric. This has a 89% chance of being my Halloween costume this year.
Elbow Room
It was a toss-up between this and The Shot Heard Round the World, but is there a better song that illustrates Manifest Destiny? It’s also a PostCollegiate Family Favorite – we often sing it when we’re cramped in small spaces together.
Lolly, Lolly, Lolly (Get Your Adverbs Here)
Everyone is always raving about Conjunction Junction but honestly, this is the Grammar Song that just gets stuck in my head whenever I think about adverbs – which is probably more than any reasonable person should.
Electricity, Electricity!
A little dare – go switch your lights off and then on again. Did you just sing the chorus to yourself? Of course you did. Don’t be ashamed.
Dollars and Sense
Okay, so I clearly did not learn Becky Sue’s money lessons very well (as evidenced by my inability to stick to a budget) but this is like the most charming song about currency that has ever existed.
Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla
Thanks to STBBF for reminding me how awesome this song is – saying all those nouns over and over CAN wear you down!
Mother Necessity
This song comes in hand whenever I’m watching Jeopardy and there’s a category on inventors.
Okay and one more bonus video, because, come on, it’s the golden standard of Schoolhouse Rock videos:
I’m Just A Bill
It’s a classic for a reason, folks. And it’s adorably old-fashioned as it features a Congress that used to actually DO things like enact laws!
Musings on Life After College 