I got E.B. White’s essay “Here is New York” out of the Brooklyn Central Library on Sunday by utter happenstance and read it in fifteen minutes while waiting in line for a falafel truck. I almost don’t want to quote it, because I dislike those people who just mine writers for fortune-cookie-slips to stick on their fridge doors or Tumblrs or whatever, and also because I’d end up typing out the whole thing verbatim because it’s so good.

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No on should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky.

I drove fourteen hours, twice, back-and-forth to Chicago in a Volvo sedan nearly as old as I am and with plenty more miles. The air conditioner makes this horrible screeching sound like the carburator is falling out and the brakes are failing all at once, but only one window rolls down so what can you do. My boyfriend and I took shifts, ate string cheese, listened to the Beastie Boys. One of our many en route fights that started with my wailing about the future and its lack of promise for me ended in sync with a rainstorm, and we saw an incredible sunset over Indiana that was all bulging and purple-pink like something weird and alive.

“See?”

I also did that thing where I get bored while driving and start singing snippets of whatever high-school girls’ choir songs stroll into my head–Bist du Bei Mir, the Vivaldi Gloria, Ascendit Deuses and Ave Marias and that stuff. At one point my boyfriend said, without looking up from his iPhone, “Oh, you really can sing. Usually you sound so goofy.”

Four and a half years and I’d never shown him that serious ability. But it didn’t suck when I did, so.

I spent all of last weekend in Prospect Park because I was tired of spending money and wanted to read. I bought some pears at the Farmers’ Market and finished two YA romances in a sitting. I brought my banjo but didn’t play it for three hours because I was shy and didn’t know what the protocol on being a Park Musician was but eventually I just tuned up and plowed through “Soldier’s Joy” and no one cared, even though that song is actually about morphine addiction. Pears, apparently, taste waxy and awful.

Then a bunch of Park Slope kids detached from their parenting pod and starting ripping up handfuls of grass to throw on me.

One of the stay-at-home-dads noticed and chided his spawn: “Sebastian, stay on this side of the tree.”

I’ve always wanted to name my Sims my son Sebastian and now the name is forever sullied by this little shit. Another argument for early banjo exposure in babies.

On the train home yesterday a boy got on with his grandmother at Canal Street holding a plastic bag with a goldfish in it. (Didn’t even know they were still giving those out for prowess in ring toss!) He was telling another little boy nearby about it (how he won it with fourteen tokens, how you have to take care of them, how they can die really easy but not as easy as turtles) but his voice was, I think, loud enough for my benefit, as I was reading Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions on my Kindle a few poles away and still got all the details. I could see he had the greatest eyelashes, the kind of thick line of black fringe that I’m always trying to coax out with sticky mascara and liner.

“You’ve got great eyelashes,” said the other little boy’s mom, like there’d been a train-wide brainwave about it.

“Yup. And I’m never gonna cut ’em!”

“I don’t think you can cut them,” his grandmother said.

“Well, I’m not gonna. Did you know they make fake things to make your eyelashes longer? Not fair!” he crowed.

And they do! It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I loved this kid. I’m never gonna cut my eyelashes either.

It was a warm night, a pleasant night. I’d just killed an hour slowly sipping a glass of wine in a cafe, looking at the fire escapes of the buildings across the street and listening to people talk as they zipped past on St. Mark’s Place. I half-read a book, I wrote a postcard. I thought about living here and being a real writer with a real fire escape.

We showed up at the restaurant at 9:36. Six minutes late, despite my best attempts at speedwalking in heels, because some sloppy drunk had tossed a cup of warm beer on (at?) my boyfriend in the penultimate blocks of the Second Avenue leg. I’d made a dumb joke about baptism imagery and starting over. I wanted to be chipper. We had gotten a same-day reservation at a tiny 30-person bistro that I’d become starry-eyed over after reading the memoirs of its chef/owner. I’d torn through the first chunk before I’d had it a full two hours from the library, entranced by this raw yet lyrical writing, a book suffused with a badass, salty, did-it-all-myselfedness. A writer and a cook, like I wanted to be. I craved her food before I even knew where to look for it.

But now I live in New York, where everything is, and so was this restaurant. My boyfriend was reluctant.

“It’s called Prune,” he said, making a face. “Will they have food I like?”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Prunes are just plums, after all.”

I wanted a Parmesan omelette, radishes with butter, pencil asparagus, and the kitchen’s speciality: bone marrow. We’d eaten it elsewhere before, and the promise of a warm and fatty delicacy spread over sourdough toasts was enough to sell him on the unappealingly chichi idea of a meal in a restaurant. I’d gone in person to get us a table that morning, and I was lucky.

But our table wasn’t ready yet. “Do you want anything to drink?” asked two separate bartenders, their t-shirts the well-fitted pink cotton of American Apparel. I said no, just water. No space for a ten-dollar cocktail in my budgeted meal. My boyfriend waved his hand, said nothing, his eyes on a two-top by our elbows that was unoccupied except by twin table settings.

Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. Then forty. I rebuffed more invitations to wine or spirits, sipping the water. My boyfriend was mute, still beer-damp, and in a sour mood not helped by crashing blood sugar. I clenched my jaw, stared at the mason jars of house-pickled onions and olives and told myself it was worth it. This place was founded by a former teenage cokehead, after all, a woman who once slept on a floor and ate cheap bodega eggs-on-a-roll like I did. It was scrappy and punky, like the female bartender with an asymmetrical buzzcut who frowned at the host for us and asked why we couldn’t take the open table.

“That’s…somebody else’s table,” he said, unsuccessfully craning out of our earshot. Oh, I thought. Well. My eyes went hot and shimmery. I felt a sharp stab of shame that I wasn’t worth the seemingly democratic practice of a timely reservation, and then embarrassment for my naïveté.

A large birthday party behind us ordered another round of drinks. I stared at the folds of my dress–Ralph Lauren, secondhand–and felt tears forming.

Eventually the group showed up. Whether they were famous or just rich I still don’t know; a four-person posse, well-heeled and gray-haired with Prada shopping bags and a round of martinis ready when they sat down. My boyfriend looked daggers at them as we were finally seated (10:27) at our table in the corner. An amiable waitress brought us a tiny plate of deviled eggs as an apology. I ate one, cool and creamy and a bit sharp with mustard, and it stuck in my throat.

I scanned the menu, looking for what I’d been waiting for. Roasted marrow bones were supposed to be their signature. I must just be missing it. I asked the waitress.

“Oh, we no longer serve it.”

She was friendly, but I felt gawky and inept for even having asked. Normally I can shrug off snobbishness in the name of a good meal, but now, six weeks into living in a city that made me overstimulated or overtaxed by turns, that muscle in me was spent. I felt foolish and unwelcome. I didn’t belong even in a place that was–or so I thought, anyway–more about craft than clique.

But my discomfort went beyond the shabbiness of my Salvation Army attire and my student Visa card with the comparably paltry credit limit. I suddenly felt sick at the thought of spending thirty dollars–almost half a days’ salary–on spatchcocked poussin. Like a tongue bit mid-chew, it jolted me awake.

Even though I’d tried to shirk destiny and teach myself taste, there was no way to avoid that I am what I’ve eaten. I felt like every bite I’d ever taken of microwaved lasagna had left me with something of its mediocrity even as it gave me halfhearted nourishment, that the cells Stouffers powered were endowed with a nucleus of intractable blandness. There was something in my essence that made me fundamentally, universally unsuited to do what I wanted. Who was I to move here, to eat these things, to try and write? I am possessed of a body as mushy and white as the boxes of instant potatoes that built it, and whatever had once lit the fire in my belly felt soggy and stagnant. I had the vague notion that someone, somewhere, had fed me a lie, and now I was choking.

For the first time in recent memory, I had no appetite.

I managed to get a full two blocks away before I began heaving sobs. In New York, when you’re nobody, since you’re nobody, nobody will notice you wobble and weave as you gasp down the street. My boyfriend threw an arm over my shoulders, and we got to Cooper Square and a strange little park of blocky seats and tables where I bawled, hard, knowing in the mealy center of my bones that I was not going to make it here. People love to say that this city will eat you alive, but that assumes it’ll bother to bite.

“You need to eat something,” he said. So we walked more, stopped twice, forking over four dollars for a pint of ice cream and a buck fifty for shitty pizza. I ate and felt nauseous, but calm, at least, angst dulled by a flood of insulin. If I can’t make art here, I thought, belly up on his dorm-room bed, I can’t make it anywhere.

I awoke the next morning feeling alive but none too vital. I washed my face, dressed, got a cup of coffee. I felt no hunger, but a combination of a maternal sense of duty and a toddler-like ache for something true and sweet saw me to the greenmarket in Union Square. Vegetables and fruits arrayed not for artistry or cleverness but pure advertising appeal. Orange-fingered carrot clusters, three-fifty. A dozen eggs, five dollars. Three boxes of blueberries for ten. All products, all priced.

I picked out some food by color and feel, filling a bag with fruit for a few crumply bills. I sat on the bench and bit into a breakfast, just some raw material to fill and fuel me. Nothing chopped or sliced or peeled or dried but still whole and swollen with juice. After all, just a plum.

New York City is not like any other place on Earth. Everybody knows this. What everybody doesn’t know, or at least what I didn’t know when I came here the first time to live, are the exact things that make it so different. You can, of course, learn this stuff just by coming here, living for a while, and just figuring it out (I guess that’s something it’s got in common with every city or place ever). But maybe it’s nice to have these things pointed out to you first.

This is not a travel guide or an essay where I lord my urban, dyed-in-the-black-wool-turtleneck savvy over anyone. These are the things that freaked me out, that took me a while, that made no sense, that betray me as the emigrée and hopeless insophisticate that I am. So let’s go!

• Uptown/downtown. It’s what it sounds like. Don’t go, say, or ask for directions north or south. That’s not a thing here.
• Corollary: streets go up- and downtown, avenues go laterally.  I got this backwards, and I am dumb. Just goes to show you. Blocks between avenues are super long and blocks between streets whip by. If you desperately need to navigate, put away your iPhone. I swear you can puzzle this one out. Just remember the sun rises in the east and sets in the west (but I’ll give you a break for GPS if it’s cloudy).
• If you swipe into a subway station and you stumble to the turnstile without actually going through properly, you can’t just swipe in again unless you have an unlimited-trip card. At least I’m pretty sure. So get it right the first time.
• “Well drinks”: Maybe this is a term elsewhere? But I never had seen it prior to coming here. Anywho, this means drinks mixed from the bottles from the well underneath the bar, i.e., the cheap stuff. But that is why they cost less. Bonus: they invite all kinds of “might as well/all’s well that ends well” type plays on words that are really only funny after you’ve had a few.
• On line, not in it. The cashier does not mean that you are connected to the internet, but that you are queueing up. I don’t know. It’s just what people say.
• Bodega. It’s a corner store. Like a dépanneur? And most of them have not just coffee and cigarettes but also Amy’s burritos and Greek yogurt (but at a steep, steep markup. Naïve, drunk, and hungry: ye be warned)
• Food carts. The halal ones, I’m told, are pretty good, and cheap for how much food they give you. The coffee and bagel ones have terrible coffee and bagels that are just untoasted, bloated bread enveloping a too-small, unspread square of cream cheese product. Go to a bodega or deli lunch place instead (lots of them have scallion cream cheese, even!) The smoothie ones are probably okay, though.
• The line at the Union Square Trader Joe’s actually moves fairly quickly considering how many people are in it. And if you just get on line right when you get there, you can pretty much do your shopping without losing your place as it winds around the store.

• There is a Farmers’ Market near your home or place of business. I practically can guarantee it. Here’s a map. Saturday at Union Square you can get a giant cheddar-scallion scone and a drinkable strawberry yogurt for like four bucks and it is way better than brunch out. Also, buy some goddamned peaches while they’re in season.
• Brunch. Fucking everywhere has brunch, and they will totally charge you twelve bucks for eggs and toast, which, ew. If you must, at least find a place that has a prix fixe deal with drinks included.
• Brooklyn. Do not assume, as I did, that if you and someone else both live in Brooklyn that you will be neighbors or easily visitable by subway. Bushwick is not that close to Boerum Hill which is not that close to Crown Heights. It is a geographically large place and you will probably end up going back to Manhattan to transfer lines to get anywhere, so you might as well meet your friends in the East Village and get brunch there (though, see above).
• You don’t get cell service on the subway. This might be the most “um, doy,” item on this list, but I didn’t know. And I still see people trying to send text messages while whipping from Canal St. to Delancey/Essex! And, also, on that note:
• Delancey St. and Essex St. are the same subway stop. Again, I don’t know, it just is that way.
• Times Square really does suck. Really, it does. Don’t go even for the experience. Have you ever gotten punched in the face while watching TRL on a big-screen TV inside a garbage dump? Congrats, you’re experienced.
• A lot of people will come onto your subway car and ask you for money. Creative variants I have witnessed included a guy with a duffel bag full of free snacks, a singing group who started their act by feigning a request for the time and correcting the tourist who proffered his wrist watch by harmonizing “it’s doo wop time!“, a blind kid in a Sixers jersey with a rippling, pink scar up his arm and a guide dog, a bunch of kids, including one who must have been only seven or eight, doing elaborate backflips and hip-hop moves on a moving A express train, and your garden-variety winos, hobos, and Vietnam vets. Toss them change if they entertain you or move you to do so; it’s good for humanity.
• Restaurant grades are bullshit. The things you can get away with and still get an ‘A’ are, to my mind, horrifying. But you probably won’t die from eating anywhere.
• Do not ever pay full price for a hairstylist or yoga class. These things are on Groupon and Livingsocial (or just offering regular ol’ discounts) more often than anything else. You can get such stupidly low discounts on them that more than $4/class or $25 for a shampoo and trim is highway robbery.
• Get a library card if you can. Because otherwise you will fall prey to the siren song of used bookstores and drain away your savings account three, four, six, and two-for-ten dollars at a time.
• Despairing. You might. I did. I do. The city is huge and scary; it smells bad and is not always safe. But it’s incredible, too. It’s the only place where you can get the best of anything or the worst of anything twenty-four hours a day. So breathe. You’ll get through it, one shitty cup of bodega coffee and well drink at a time, and you might love it, too.

Bonus addendum: The Skint and r/nyc are good places to find cheap, free, cool, or all of the above type things to do. I have gone to many an outdoor movie and gotten free Colbert Report tix from total strangers just by cruising the internets. You don’t ever have to be without plans! That said, it’s okay to be bored here, too. We all need breaks.

Sometimes, even when you feel full of vim and vigor, even when you move to a new city and start a new job and feel really gung-ho about Doing Journalism and Living In New York, and even when you live on couches for a week with basically nothing more than a hobo bindle and a banjo and really did intend to write a blog post here about it, you get sick. Life just decides you need a good ol’ elbow to your Grown-Up stomach. Or throat, as the case may be.

I don’t get sick much, because I’m a jerk like that. But the last time I did get sick was a mysterious, RENT-themed and antibiotic-resistant chest cold acquired at the tail end of my previous New York tenure as an intern. Something about that city makes my antibodies get nervous and hide, like they’re Midwestern tourists in town for a youth group trip. But I figured now that I was really a Real Person, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen, like a college diploma is some kind of mystical inoculation against infectious diseases.

Tuesday night, I went to bed convincing myself that the weird swollen lymph node and headache I was nursing were the result of too much couch-sleep and not enough water. Whatever! I am a Grown-Up now! These things happen! Wednesday morning, I woke with chills, a sweaty forehead, and a teeth-gritted determination to get into the office for an 11 AM interview I had scheduled. Because grown-ups with jobs don’t get sick! And definitely not in the summer!

I thrashed about for a good ten minutes attempting to extricate myself from a sweaty tangle of XL-dorm-sheets before cooler heads (literally) prevailed. My boyfriend pointed out that if I my throat hurt too much to insist I could go to the office, I probably wouldn’t give a very good interview. Fair point, I conceded woozily. Unable to talk past the golf ball in my throat, I emailed in sick, accepted two of his roommate’s Liqui-Gel ibuprofen, and mumbled an apology for infecting suite 902 of the NYU Palladium dorm before losing consciousness in a fevered delirium of almost-sleep.

Upon re-waking, I realized the acute problem of being sick as a Real Person: I had no idea what to do. As a kid, your parents can take you to the pediatrician or hospital or holistic-shaman healer. You don’t have to worry about who pays for it. As a college student, you just have to pull on some crusty sweatpants and drag ass to the student health center, where you might have to wait forever in a room with CNN Health Highlights on loop but, eventually, you will get treated by a distracted nurse-practitioner with triple her usual caseload. And thanks to the Student Life Fee, or whatever, you don’t have to worry about who pays for it. But Real People? There’s no familiar doctor. There’s no student health center. There’s just you and your inflamed throat lining and what suddenly feels like the largest goddamned city in the world.

But I’m lucky. I’m a Real Person, but also a Modern Young Adult, which means I have two good things at my disposal: Yelp and Obamacare. My smartphone located a walk-in clinic with good reviews literally around the corner, in the middle of a drug store. This being New York, the place also sells aisle after aisle of store-brand snacks, a frightening variety of frozen food, and beer, on tap, for take-out, 24 hours a day. My parents’ insurance, which otherwise would have been unavailable to me as of a few weeks ago, covered me for a doctor’s visit, a strep test (positive), and a round of amoxicillin capsules half the size of my thumb. And I could go home, just over two hours away on NJ transit, to lie on a familiar couch and watch cable, to let my parents buy me ice cream, to take my temperature and to take care of me.

The point is, Real People, you don’t have to be sick in a vacuum. You don’t have to do any part of Real Life in a vacuum. You can let the people who love you talk you out of going in to work and buy you probiotic kombucha and you can let your interviewees and coworkers and banjo teachers know you’re too busy burning up to come in and infect them and you can let the government give you a break on co-pays so that you can afford not to die. Get some rest. Watch some Netflix. Chug some Nyquil.

But then you’d better as hell get well, because you are way behind on your blog posts.

I realized two days ago that last weekend, in the flurry of diploma-getting and picture-taking and packing-up-everything-I-own, I missed saying goodbye to one of my best friends. This being The Future, I quickly typed distressed messages of apology for my oversight at her on Facebook. But, as it turns out, she said she had actually slipped out on purpose, because it was hard for her to watch so many people leave and seeing them was too much.

“I’m not good with goodbyes,” she said.

scene from my moving-to-college roadtrip four long years ago

I’m not either, I told her. Nobody is! And so we said a kind of fakey-Facebook goodbye, punctuated with emoticons instead of the sobbing through tears that would likely have accompanied the physical act. I didn’t have much time to dwell, because in the short span of three days that I was home I had many glamourous tasks to attend to: unpacking, doing laundry, getting my teeth cleaned, going to the doctor, having blood drawn (ugh), trying not to barf on the nice phlebotomist, going back to the dentist to have my sexy tooth-grinding mouthguard refitted, and putting something in the family fridge that wasn’t pre-shredded cheese or moldy Indian takeout.

And! In my infinite wisdom, I had signed up for banjo classes in Brooklyn that I was Very Excited to take without noticing that the first class was on June 14, also known as Three Full Days Before I Intended To Move to New York. So I took the Boltbus up, for just the night, to learn the very beginnings of the clawhammer style and doodle around in that wonderful city for a bit. (Pro-tip: if you ever want to be regarded with suspicion at your favorite vegan bakery, go there in a stained-button down with a banjo strapped to your back. Hayseed-chic!)

The class, though, was great, and started the usual way any class does, with a go-around-and-say-your-name kind of deal. The teacher was friendly and did his best, but three people in he did a sheepish little palms-up.

“I’m not good with names,” he admitted.

Which made me think. As we were practicing forming our hands into claws and awkwardly strumming out our first attempts at the bum-ditty, I realized that no one ever says they’re good with names. And yet people still point it out, invariably, in situations where there’s a whole roster of new folks to get acquainted with. Same with goodbyes. I’d bet you two vegan donuts that no one relishes the act of parting with their friends any more than they profess their utter confidence at learning what people are called.

So what compels us, as a people, as a species, to qualify something that’s so universal? Why can’t we just come out and admit it? Change is hard. The best part of spending time with people is when you’ve mastered their name but don’t have to say it for the last time. If introductions aren’t queasy and nerve-wracking, then they’re at least a bit of tricky memorization. And goodbyes are just awful. No one wants to wrap their arms around someone knowing they’ll have to release them, and so soon, too soon.

I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it, either, other than try to ride it out. Not to get all “Closing Time” on you, but it is true that beginnings follow endings. There was once a time when you didn’t know your best friend’s name. The people you’ve bid farewell circle back in the strangest ways. So maybe it’s a good exercise to relish these precipitous moments we’re “not good with” and give people healthy dose of consideration–not judgment, just taking-in–when we see them first and last. Who are they, and where will they go with or without us?

And if you really can’t remember names, or can’t handle the burden of keeping in touch, worry not. There’s always Facebook.

Hello! Since last we met and talked about talking in front of people, I’ve had a bit of a stage upgrade.

Yes, I spoke on a stage so large and far away from everyone that they threw me up on a JUMBOTRON. Life goal: achieved.

But in all seriousness: I was selected as one of three student speakers to give a brief Convocation address to the University of Chicago College Class of 2012 (also known as my friends). It was a huge, huge honor and not nearly as terrifying as it sounds.

I wanted to make a list here of all the people I have to thank for getting me here, starting with Cecilia who threw my name into the hat and winding all the way back to my first-grade teacher who said I was the best writer she’d ever had, but there are so many of you that I’d inevitably leave someone out. But please know that each and every bit of time with you, my teachers and family and friends, are the cornerstones of my own wonky mosaic.

I’m also not going to talk about the other events of the weekend, the packing and saying goodbyes and feeling so many feelings, because the emotional gears are still turning. Processing is in progress. Hell, I haven’t even unpacked my car yet.

Here’s what I learned, however, about standing up and talking to lots of people. Maybe this is so stupidly obvious as to be unremarkable, but that’s just how the truth works sometimes: you gotta believe in yourself. In writing this speech, in revising and smoothing its manifold metaphors, in practicing its slow-calm-breathe-pause delivery, the advice I got was always the same: be confident. They picked you because you have something to say, so say it.

For someone who once bunched the covers over her head the morning of her turn to deliver the Old Testament reading on Youth Sunday, I felt preternaturally calm clutching my printed-out speech and lining up in my assigned spot for the bagpipes procession. I believed my own hype. I had emerged from the shadows of always wear sunscreen and this is water to craft 3 minutes, one-and-a-half 14-point pages of something I really meant. I looked around at the sweaty faces of all these people around me, all these kids in their cheapo robes and variously-angled mortarboards and knew that I wanted to tell them what I was going to tell them. I had a message and by God I was going to sell it.

At my school, we call our graduation exercises Convocation instead of Commencement because we as an institution believe not in firm beginnings and endings of learning experience, but of a constant ebb and flow, gatherings and dispersals, continuity. I hadn’t even considered this beforehand, but that was all I wanted to say in my speech. You tell people that you love your friends and you remind them that theirs are great, too; that there’s really nothing else to life. You get on a stage, you speak slowly, you don’t throw up on your shoes. And voilà. Three minutes fly by.

Also, in terms of Good Graduation Advice: the sunscreen guy was definitely on it. Especially when your ceremony involves sitting without shade for three-plus hours.

You can listen to my speech, recorded by my loyal father on his Zoom H2, right here. I hope you like it.

On Sunday night, I got up on a tiny stage in the back of a pancake house and told some jokes into a microphone. It was not as awful as it sounds! For the past five weeks I’ve been a student of the awesome Feminine Comique, an all-girl, totally-badass comedy class where I learned the basics of the stand-up genre with some really awesome other ladies and taught by the indefatigably hilarious Kelsie Huff.

Why? Well, for one thing, I wanted some practice in case I was going to speak at Convocation (and that is totally happening, so, check mark!) But also, I wanted a chance to see what writing and performing in a genre that I liked but had never tried was like. Also, I was desperate to get out and meet some non-UChicago people. And, well, Mission Accomplished all around! I told jokes! People laughed! And I also took away some good insights from Kelsie and the other gals that I think extend to plenty of parts of my (creative) life. Behold!

1. The power of the exercise

Some of the first things Kelsie had us do were just simple joke-writing practice. For instance: she’d give us two nouns to fill in the sentence “I like my [blank] like I like my [blank]…” and then complete it. Not the most groundbreaking of joke forms, but it got the wheels a-turnin’. And it wasn’t easy. Having to come up with a logical conclusion to the pair of “lawnmower” and “dental floss” put my brain in knots, but I found a punchline eventually: “I like my lawnmower like I like my dental floss: for begrudging, occasional maintenance.” Not that funny, but! The muscles are now stronger. I have lifted a comedic weight.

2. You can’t go wrong with feelings

Another of the exercises we did was to compare two events or things and tell the best and worst parts of each. “Finding a job is like going to the prom: I’m overdressed and hoping to get lucky.” When stuck for a way to finish this particular prompt, Kelsie would have us fall back on how things made us feel. Not to be fuzzy or sentimental, but to dig at what’s really going on in these situations that can make them funny. Peel everything away and the raw nerve can make you laugh. Or cry.

3. Tighten, tighten, tighten

Once we had our bits in place, we would perform them for the class and get notes. Invariably, there was some version of this advice: cut it down. Stand-up comedy is not reading essays. It’s not even really telling stories. It’s being conversational while still hitting all your funny marks. And that is hard! But it’s a good skill. For those of us who love being verbose (guilty) or obtuse (guilty) or using lots of adjectives that end in -se (see previous two items), it’s a challenge to reduce your artful prose to something talkable. Pro-tip: write it out, perform it with your notes, then put your notes down. Perform it sans reading, preferably into a recording device, listen, and evaluate. The stuff you remember to say is the stuff that you keep.

4. Pace yourself and Let It Land

Probably the second-most common critique was about pacing. The girls and I would just cruuuuuuise on through our routines without pausing for laughs or letting things sink in. But remember, stand-up is a conversation. It’s a dialogue. The audience wants to respond and trust me, you want that energy coming back at you. Example: my joke that I was “tall, or as I like to say: vertically fat” didn’t go well when I flew on to my next bit about the mortal danger of wearing high heels because no one understood what the hell I had said. Let them process. Let them think. Let it land.

5. Find Your Truth

This could pretty much be a cardinal rule all kinds of storytelling, or even all kinds of creative work period. Tell the truth. Tell the funny truth, the uncomfortable truth, the adorable truth, the repulsive truth. It’s not that easy, but it’s also not that hard. You can be yourself in a campy, stage-whisper-y, jab-and-wink kind of way and still be telling your truth. Case in point: despite my bit about being from Pennsylvania, I do not actually hate the Amish. Much. Being honest just means being a little vulnerable.

And what didn’t I learn?

1. How to be funny

This is not a teachable thing. People are funny because they’re funny. But! You can become funny-er if you think through these rules, deconstruct a little, and then take your comedy building blocks and assemble them into a veritable Tower of Mirth (and avoid stupid metaphors such as these). It’s about taking leaps of faith onto that tiny stage, fumbling with that microphone, and trusting that you will not die if you try to tell people about your Junior Prom.

Memorial Day barbecue, one of many free-ish hot-dog-themed dinners this week

$2.89–Shipping my old copy of Mastronarde’s An Introduction to Ancient Greek to someone in Tempe, AZ and netting me a cool $7.89 on half.com. So maybe this doesn’t count?
$43.50–Cap and gown at campus bookstore, which is neither returnable nor rentable, so basically my education has cost me $200,043.50 at this point
$5 plus $1 tip–Double IPA at campus pub, which I bought to kill time and ended up making me semi-drunk for a 10 PM showing of Dazed and Confused
$4.50–Saltines and ginger ale at CVS, for my best friend who mysteriously contracted a stomach bug at a minor-league baseball game and wouldn’t let me into his room because there was puke on the floor so I had to just leave it by his door like he was the Phantom of the Opera or something
$10–Tickets to see Chelsea Peretti do standup at the Lincoln Lodge, which cost $15 but my friend bought them and gave me a discount for the aforementioned CVS purchase. Technically I could try to get in free with the card they gave me as an Official Stand-Up Comedy Trainee but I figured I should pay up.
$20.25–Enough gas to last me the rest of the week. My parents are just going to fill up the tank when we drive back to the East Coast from Chicago, so I’m trying to get juuuuust enough to use up exactly.
$7.75–Laundry. Tried to cram 3 weeks of clothes into the $2.75 machine and had to bail halfway, suck it up, and pay a dollar more. Like usual.
$18.79–Groceries: 4 Jonagold apples and 1 Pink Lady, 1 lb. carrots, parsley, dozen eggs, butter, ¼ pound of kalamata olives with pits (because you save $3 a pound that way!), 2 avocados. Shopping light due to impending moveout and need to eat through pantry reserves. I also had picked up two containers of hummus (2 for $5! A STEAL) but then it turned out I had the wrong size and had to ask the checkout guy to put them back.

The love of your life is a person. Don’t take this for granted. Because here’s the thing: the love of your life doesn’t think of him- or herself as the love of your life. They don’t actually think about themselves in relation to you at all. Like everyone else, they’re the protagonists of their own story. They are a whole subject, stripped of the genitive modifier that defines them in your mind, another disparite ego out there in the world. When you imagine them as the love of your life, you’re bounding them. You’re saddling them with a duty and reducing them to one segment of the experience of being alive: loving you. And that’s unfair.

Wanting an abstract, faceless person to show up and ooze into all the cracks in your psyche sells both of you short. There will never be a woman in a red dress or a tall dark stranger who appears from the corner of the room to charm you unbidden. What there will be are these: your friends. Your acquaintances. Your unexpected introductions at a party. Someone who will co-generate a spark with you. And there will be a push-and-pull, a back-and-forth, a banter. There will be a meeting of minds before the heart even gets introduced. There will be gradual increases from either side, tenacious, then audacious, until that leap of faith where the gap closes.

Look. If you try to divvy up the world’s population into Romantic Possibilites and Everyone Else, you’re compartmentalizing in a way that chokes off some of the fluid, wonderful pleasure that defines being a social creature. The real things in life don’t fall into neat, check-list-able categories of go to school, eat a meal, make friends, fall in love. Think of dinner parties where you laugh more than eat or classes where you learn just as much about your fellow students as you do about Marxist economic theory or differential equations. The desire to stick a romantic relationship onto an already-constructed life like it’s another Lego block is akin to driving to the gym to run on the treadmill. It’s joyless. It’s idiotic. It’s refusing the incredible alchemy of ebb and flow that is letting your life be a harmonious entirety of a project.  You don’t need solving. You don’t need saving. You are not a puzzle piece. You just need to get your life out of the oblique case and put it first and foremost. The secret truth is that the love of your life is just your life.

So many of the friends I have are Romantics. I see it in the male and female and straight and/or gay: all this waiting, hoping, planning, dreaming, despairing. Don’t, please. Or at least don’t waste away doing it. Because if you do find human partnership that satisfies you, it is not going to be a transcendent paradigm shift, but rather a resonance, a deepening of something you’ve already found to be true in yourself.

But then, I am no expert. I am just a person.