Stephanie Georgopulos

Or maybe it’s more of a bump than a lump; it could even be a hive, several of them, really. It could be a discoloration or an infected something or a personality disorder that had gone unnoticed until now. “Do I suddenly seem more anxious/ unable to pay attention/ depressed?” you wonder aloud.

My dad has tried his hand at many occupations – a florist, a SQL programmer, a cab driver – but much like being a father; “musician” is a role he couldn’t shed if he tried. For Father’s Day, I “interviewed” him. I wanted to show him that his passion for music is as worthy of celebration as his passion for our family.

Go to work, open your iTunes, and play this song continuously at the lowest volume possible. It’s been a few months, and you don’t feel any more fulfilled. In fact, your condition is worsening. You wake up every morning with a dull ache in your heart, the one you feel when you know something is over.

When taking a cab. Beyond trusting that your cab driver knows where he’s going and isn’t ripping you off, you have to actually trust that this person is indeed, a cab driver. I sound like a Paranoid Polly, but my mom was actually kidnapped by a fake cab driver when she was my age. All you need is a Crown Victoria and a smile – boom. Cab driver.

This isn’t some Zack Morris “time out” moment where you need to continuously break the fourth wall and bring us up to speed, ala “TIME OUT! Can you guys believe that someone like MOI is here, on a dating website? I mean, the internet! It’s CaAaRrRaAaZzZyY!” No. It’s not crazy. It’s 2011.

New York is like a fucking college campus, down to catching your friend on her bi-weekly walk of shame while you’re on your way to work. You can hit it off with someone who seemed like they moved to New York specifically for you; just to be charming and interesting with a side of mind-blowing sex, but when you finally look them up on Facebook the reality is much bleaker than that.

While my days as an angst-ridden, jobless youth are long gone, the emails I sent during that time are still alive and well in the depths of my outbox. There is nothing quite as painful as finding evidence of what a tool you were when applying for jobs as a recent college graduate. Here are ten examples of why it took me six months to get hired.

I don’t watch television all that much, but every so often I’ll sit down and commit to “vegging out.” And when that happens, I find myself consistently overwhelmed and disappointed – as our options have grown, the value to be derived from watching cable television has withered into nonexistence. Cable television has destroyed the sitcom. 

4. Getting booted from the Internet and having to start a download from scratch 5. Searching for my name, “Stephanie,” and downloading every search result (they were all pretty bad; save for “Hey Stephanie!” by Gob and “Stephanie Says” by Velvet Underground) 6. Downloading corrupted files that were half song and half screeching, scrambled white noise

If I were a teenager or young adult back then, I would’ve been like, “Oh, TLC? Yeah, they totally invented the condom eye patch. Rad girls.” But I was a kid, so I was more like, “WTF? What’s that neon green thing covering that one’s eye and where do I get one? What’s a condom?!”

Musicians aren’t all the same, but the guys I’d fall for weren’t content to just be musicians. They wanted to be Gods. They had the looks and the talent; and they wanted the world in return. They expected it. They wanted to be idolized, dreamt about, cried over. One girl could never be enough.

Crying Eyes belong to the person who has just finished crying, is just about to cry, or is somewhere between the two. You feel exposed in their presence; they’re releasing the kind of raw, naked pain that’s only fit to be released into the center of a pillow. You can look at them or you can look away, it won’t change anything.