5 Things That Always Make Me Feel Better

Lindsay Lohan

If I were the kind of awful person who befriended people solely because they make me feel great in comparison to their depressing lives, I would be friends with Lindsay Lohan so hard. Being that we are the same age, she makes me feel wildly reassured about the state of my face. I’m 26 and time (and booze and cigarettes) being the dick that it is, I’m starting to lose some of the enviable skin qualities I possessed just a few years ago. As a result, (and while I’m still firmly judgmental of any 20-something who faux complains about being sooooo old now) I have the occasional day where I feel like the crusty old bitch from Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead. But then I remember dear LiLo, who already looks like a 50-something single mom working the graveyard shift giving handies in a truck stop bathroom, and suddenly I feel like the freshest violet in the field. If that kind of superficial validation doesn’t make someone a true friend, I don’t know what does.

Other people’s engagement/pregnancy photo shoots

Okay, I have some questions about your engagement or pregnancy photo shoot: Why are you holding a tiny chalkboard? Do you really need it to display the date of your wedding? Is your iCal broken? It’s like, I see a chalkboard but there are no drink specials written on it, so I’m already feeling a little ragey about you wasting my time.

More questions: Why are you standing in a park with a pink bow around your belly? Why are all of you wearing cowboy boots with sundresses? Who decided that staged, overly saccharine shots of people gazing adoringly at each other (or worse, at someone’s pregnant belly) was a thing we needed to do to commemorate the landmark events of life?

But really, please never stop posting these. Nothing else stands a chance at getting me as high on smugness as looking through the 250 identical goddamn photos of you and your painfully basic fiancé on Facebook while sitting in the bathtub at 2pm on a Tuesday pulling clumps of last night’s mascara off my face. You’re the only people in the world who aren’t better than me right now, so thank you. I will send a baby gift promptly on the date I see spelled out on your belly in toy block letters. What’s the zip code for “black hole of mind-numbing, vapid sentimentality”?

Plucking my eyebrows

Sure, my rent is late, the zipper on my favorite boots is broken, there’s Fukushima and Kardashians and paralyzing socio-economic divisions in the world, and I’ll probably never be loved in a way that feels right, but goddamn, I’ve got that eyebrow situation HANDLED. Yes, the perfectly neat edges, pleasant arch, and newly balanced facial composition are enough to compensate for the disarray that exists in other parts of my life, thank you very much.

Reading old cover letters

There are very few kinds of writing I haven’t done, but of them all, by far the worst is the cover letter. In one page, you’re supposed to communicate the sum of your experience, demonstrate a grasp of the company and position you’re querying, be concise yet thorough; You’re supposed to somehow pull off making yourself sounds amazing without sounding like an arrogant, self-important asshole and exude a sense of excitement and enthusiasm for the company you’re applying to without sounding like a weird, needy suck-up. In other words, fuck cover letters forever. That said, the art of cover letter writing is honed over time, and I have gotten much better at it, so it makes me feel oddly self-satisfied to read the cringe-inducing cover letters of yesteryear and judge everyone who ever gave me a job. Like, I was the most pretentious little twat, what were they thinking?

Researching responsible things

Because “I’m looking into health insurance / retirement options / a plumber to fix my wonky sink” sounds better than “Ugh, I haven’t even had time to deal with that.” It’s not entirely better, but it’s a temporary patch on your overall sense of having your shit together. Besides, I’m still relatively young. I figure even having the term “IRA” taking up residence in some part of my brain buys me at least another 2 years before I have to actually do anything with it.