Eight: Puppies you can't have

They look up at you with their big eyes and their fluffy tails and their infectious energy. They nap or wrestle with each other in the fray of their paper scrap nests. It's just too adorable to handle and you're ready to take one home. 

Then you think about what that little furry ball of joy will do to your credit card bills, and now that you think of it, your furniture, and the very rhythm of your daily life. You remember that what is now pint-sized will grow into a decidedly less cute larger animal that will sag around a too small apartment.

Every day, I walk past at least one pet shop in the West Village, and pine away at my puppy-less existence and repeat this same tragic remembrance of reality.

Seven: Holidays are Blown Out of Proportion

At least a month before every major commercial holiday, it is in your face.

In every storefront, every display is screaming at you to celebrate it by buying lots of shit that's useful one or two days a year.

Some displays are pretty and make you feel like you're actually missing something. Others are impossibly ugly and pitiable.

Valentine's Day is arguably the worst of these holidays since the pressure's on whether you're feeling more single than usual or you want to make your honey happy.

There's nothing especially offensive about holidays so much as the way they are shoved down your throat. There's no escape and the sentiment of all the holiday buzz is pretty much profit driven. When else do flowers, chocolates and cards fly off the shelves? Tables are booked, booze is bought, jewelry showered on the significant others of the affluent.

People are gonna buy the shit anyway. Is an intensive holiday-themed marketing theme so necessary?

Six: Misery Loves Company

Today I crossed the street with a woman who was spinning around in a slow circle as we waited for the light to change, which I dismissed to an unnatural amount of peppiness. As we walked across the intersection however, she laughed to herself a little and then started to skip around the mounds of icy snow, leading me to the conclusion she was probably mental or on drugs.

Then again, there's a lingering doubt, and I wonder if maybe this woman was actually just really happy.

It's perfectly normal to go around looking dour and depressed here, but it makes us nervous to see visible happiness. Are we that miserable a people?

(Google)

Five: Guilt Over Staying In

There's so much goddamn stuff to do that it's impossible to figure out what's actually worth your while. Many times this results in the most relaxing option possible- staying in.

It feels pathetic not to be taking advantage of all the many opportunities that await if you'd just go out your front door. But the very idea of all those opportunities is often too much. Sometimes this makes me terribly afraid of becoming the next Little Edie, never leaving my apartment, spending hundreds a week on Delivery.com, having all my groceries delivered, and becoming immensely fat.

Then I leave the apartment, and I'm always exhausted by the time I get home, relieved to be entering a calm place I can call my own with mellow lighting and where my music floods out of actual speakers instead of being shoved into my ear canals with headphones.

In fact, it's fair to say that for all the time we spend out, we need to spend some equivalent amount in just to recover and unwind.

But that doesn't seem to make me feel any less guilty.


(Google)

Four: Entitlement Complexes

The disgusting sense of entitlement that people develop when everything is at their fingertips.

I was recently reading a yelp post in which its spoiled author complained about a bakery that wouldn't make her day-of cupcake order because they didn't have the proper ingredients.

She wrote, "UMM..are you FREAKING kidding me?! We live in NYC go have someone buy the damn ingredients."

 Jesus girl, we live in New York, go buy the damn ingredients and make the damn cupcakes yourself.


(Google)

Three: Looking Up

I've gotten so used to never seeing the sky that every time I see wide open sky, let alone a starry night, it takes my breath away. There is something genuinely soul-numbing about looking up only to see more buildings stretching upwards.


(Google)