____Featured Essay | yr an adult

How to fucking own your 30th birthday party

by Henry Goldman • November 6, 2012

I woke up Sunday morning feeling like my stomach was throwing up into itself, over and over again. Maybe I should have gone into the bathroom of our straight-out-of-Portlandia vacation rental and induced vomiting. But instead, I just lay in the cozy master bedroom of our temporary Northeast Portland cottage, staring at the wall of art books the owner had left, telling myself, “You’re fucking 30. You don’t throw up from drinking anymore.” I was in the final throes of a long weekend of eating, Portlanding, and blackout drinking, and instead of calling taking it easy, spending the day in bed, I officially started my day with a breakfast of fried-pastrami-and-eggs poutine washed down with a shot Bulleitt Rye and pickle back.[1] Even though I didn’t officially hit 30 until this morning, that shot was the cherry on top of a serious rite of passage.

Last weekend, I invited a bunch of my closest friends to join me to celebrate my 30^th in Portland, Oregon, a city that feels like home, even though I grew up 2 hours south. Most of them didn’t come. But then again, many did and they helped me turn my birthday party into the kind of indulgent, excessive celebration of my time on this planet that you don’t usually get as an adult. A big problem with writing autobiographical blog posts is it leads to self-mythologizing. I realize sometimes YR AN ADULT features posts that occasionally come off as arrogant and pompous and I take responsibility for that. But at the same time, if I successfully do something which I think is actually of value to other fellow new adults, then I want to recount it, for the benefit of you dear reader. That’s why I humbly present to you a few lessons on how to have the 30^th birthday party you deserve, based on how I did it. Also, it’s my birthday today, so I can blog about what I fucking want.

… KEEP READING!

Things I Don't Want To Grow Out Of

An elegy for the weekend getaway bender

by Henry Goldman • October 22, 2012

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a café in near my friend Cory Poolman’s house in Philadelphia. I’ve been hung over for days, I haven’t showered in approximately that same amount of time and having left my toothbrush at the hotel in DC, my breath is zombie rotten. This current trip I’m on is similar to a lot of short, wild drinking trips I’ve taken in the last decade, where I spend a few short days in a city with at least one old friend, drinking, eating, not sleeping, carousing, wearing the same “one cool” outfit I brought in my daypack for days on end, chasing the dirty hipster bars, the classy cocktail joints, the button-down-broseph brewpubs for (mostly) ironic purposes, the grimey weeknight dance parties, the latenight drunkfood hotspots, laughing, exploring the various neighborhoods of whatever city it is and pretending that if I actually lived there, it would be like this all the time.

Sometimes, the trip has been coupled with a work trip (usually to New York), meaning in between the roistering and bopping, there were times when I had to pitch a client or supervise a shoot or perform some other imposition of maturity. Other times, it’s been driven by an impulsive urge to skip town for few days, maybe by the chance to reunite with a larger group of friends or just a cheap last-minute airfare. These quick getaway benders could also be tacked on to other trips, an extended ticket after a wedding or an elongated stopover between an intercontinental trip. The current trip that I’m on is driven by the fact that I got a free flight to Washington, DC. I’ll come back to this trip, because it’s been exhilarating enough to recount the details, but one persistent thought that has continually come up during the trip, beyond, ‘where are we going next’ and ‘whiskey or beer’ and ‘god I feel like dogshit this morning’, has been, ‘how much longer do I get to do this’? I began writing for this blog because I was interested in the juxtaposition between how I both wanted to grow up at the same time that I didn’t want to grow up at all. But when I think about how much fun I’ve had on these little excursions, how hopeful I’ve felt about life, I realize this is a tradition I don’t want to grow out of.

… KEEP READING!

I'm living my life wrong

7 possible reasons why I just spent $35 on a weekday lunch

by Henry Goldman • October 17, 2012

Me and my friend/absent collaborator Andrew Brown often meet up on weekdays to get lunch. Usually, we go to a pleasant Chinese café on Church St, where the lunch special is a whopping $5.75. The lunches are often impromptu, based of text messages sent at 11 amto see if we’d each like to break out of the monotony of our given workdays and take an hour to gripe about all things everywhere always. Today, however, with San Francisco’s Indian summer[1] in full effect and the temperature hovering in the low seventies minus wind-chill, we decided that in this sweltering heat wave[2], a meal that a a little colder/less heavy was in order. So, we met up at the sushi place in the Metreon, with the charming patio overlooking Yerba Buena Park. It was such delightful setting that somehow we chocked up a bill of 70$ in 45 minutes without even thinking about it. Like idiots.

The meal was fine, but it wasn’t anything special. At no point was I either tempted to take a picture of an immaculately plated, superbly original dish nor did I shove a piece of sushi in Andrew’s face, like, YOU HAVE TO TRY THIS IT’S SO FUCKING GOOD OH MY GOD. So, in a moment of after-the-fact self-reflection, I thought I’d take a moment to consider a few possible reasons why I spent what is an empirically unreasonable amount on an unremarkable lunch.

… KEEP READING!

cultural studies

The reality TV shows YOU could be in (you know, if they existed)

by Henry Goldman • September 6, 2012

I recently got a short-term gig at a reality show production company. It’s been a fun little trip, because, while I’d worked in TV before, I’d never done pure reality production and wanted to see what it was like. Truth is, it’s probably not for me, but for the short term, it’s been super interesting. And despite having my first full-time, need-to-go-into-the-office-every-day gig in 9 months, I still spent most of my free time thinking about my generation and how growing up is weird. So, putting both of them together, I came up with a few ideas for reality shows about new adults/non-adults that I might like to watch, but no network might like to make. These aren’t shows about weird families who run a dark, dirty business, or formulaic looks at terrible wives or ex-wives or cretinous rural children. This is the real shit, the shit that you and me are living in, which is why they probably won’t be on TV anytime soon.

My Super Sweet 30^th Birthday Party

The holy grail of reality development is finding an easy-to-recreate format, that will drive a narrative and keep viewers watching for the whole show. This show, apes the format from another reality show (another common practice in reality development), My Super Sweet Sixteen, but instead of showing obnoxious, rich teens’ birthdays, would depict young adults as they reached a different milestone.

The first act would introduce us to a character, upset about hitting an arbitrary aging milestone, depressed about where they are in their lives and just feeling generally old. Then, we follow them or one of their friends, as they plan to get all their soon-to-be-30-year-old’s friends together from around the country for a blowout party weekend in some exotic party locale. It could be anywhere from New Orleans to Vegas to Dubai to Aspen to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, as long as there’s booze, women and scenic landscapes for interstitial shots.

There’s a transition act, where the friends all meet up to travel to wherever they’re going to party, drinking in airport bars, eating at roadside diners, reminiscing about their twenties. And the payoff would be the party, which would ideally include drunken shenanigans, interactions with random strangers, gratuitous hook ups, food fights, fist fights, dancing injuries, D-list celebrity cameos and all kinds of puking. It would be the best kind of exploitative TV.

… KEEP READING!

modern adults

The 7 types of new adults you know

by Henry Goldman • August 10, 2012

Writing about adults and adulthood, I’ve been especially interested in the general archetypes of young people that keep coming up. While every person is a unique snowflake and all that, I mostly find that as our generation comes of age, there are only a few different categories that people fit into. That’s probably how it is for most eras, and there’s no reason for millennials to think that they’re special (except for the fact that everyone has told us that we’re special our entire lives). For a generation supposedly marked by self-reliance and individualism (if you read the papers), pretty much everyone I meet can be placed into a small handful of categories. And, since I’m assuming you’re as judgmental as I am, I thought it would be helpful if I broke down the various types of people you know (if you live in a major city), so that when you meet a new person, you can quickly and easily put them into a category, and befriend or dismiss them appropriately.

The “Bobo”

This is a new term for me, but it’s very well-established (according to my mom and @aziziz). It’s short for “bourgeois bohemian” and translates perfectly to North America. How it hasn’t caught on in with people our age, I have no idea, because it describes like, half the young people in most cities. They wear bespoke artisan chambray shirts and vintage sunglasses, craft aftershave, read Monocle; when they travel, they have a retro-style duffel bag that was handmade by some guy they met at a party for a startup; when they go out drinking, it’s mixology bars that serve artisan cocktails, using small batch alcohols, where they’ll pronounce to their friends salvos like, “Bulleit has a great name, but it’s really just a pedestrian whiskey.”

You probably know a lot of people like this, and for lack of a better term, you might have referred to them as some qualified kind of hipsters, like, “I mean, he dresses like a hipster, but he’s not the grungy kind, crashing on the couch of some warehouse. He has, like, a really nice loft.” I’m talking about the guy who works in advertising with a fedora. He’s a bobo. Same with the girl taking Instagrams for her Tumblr about pop-up restaurants. She’s a bobo. And that dude with 50$ Benny Gold sweatshirt, the $200 Huf Limited sneakers, the sleeve tattoo and and the throwback Jansport backpack? He’s a bobo. Can we all start using this term, please? Derisively, like the way people used to use the term “yuppie” in the 80s? Because even if these bobos are your friends, or you’re actually one or I’m actually one (I mean, I know I probably am), we can all agree that they’re worth our surface level scorn, right?… KEEP READING!

modern adults

How old is too old for the ultimate bro pad?

by Henry Goldman • August 7, 2012

There was this article this weekend in the paper about these four dudes in New York. All close enough to 40 that we might as well just call them 40. They live together in a giant 2-story apartment in Astoria, Queens, and have lived together in various apartments since graduating college. In 1994. The house itself sounds like a coo place for four bachelors, with rooms that don’t share walls, 3 bathrooms, a garden and bunch of nerd gear (dvd collections, collectible toys, role playing games). And the guys don’t seem like weirdos. They all have jobs, artistic pursuits and their time as roommates has turned them into an extended family. And I can’t imagine I’m the only guy who would read that article and think, “Well, that sounds pretty good.”

… KEEP READING!

Things I Don't Want To Grow Out Of

On growing out of dive bars

by Henry Goldman • July 31, 2012

We still like to call them just “dive bars”, but that isn’t the correct term. “Dive bar” is supposed to mean rough, working class, gritty. The neighborhood should be down-and-out, not up-and-coming. The clientele should be a mix of derelicts and drunks and the bartender should be indistinguishable from their patrons. A true dive has no attractive, young people anywhere in the vicinity. When people our age describe a bar as a “dive,” they’re probably using the word incorrectly. For our generation “dive” is used as an umbrella term to describe a bar that’s neither sports bar, brew pub or danceclub, where there is some sort of cheap American beer on tap (PBR, High Life, Olympia, Rainier, etc…) and where a good portion of the patrons/bartenders dress and act and are tattooed like hipsters. I don’t like the term “hipster” and I don’t like misusing the term “dive,” but I know that when I describe the bars that have always been my favorite bars as “hipster dives,” you probably know what I mean.

I mean the bars with veteran bartenders, whose only life accomplishment is figuring out how to only work 18 hours a week for the past fifteen years. Where sharpie-graffiti has been scrawled on every visible surface. Where the bathrooms are so disgusting it’s almost admirable. And where the cheapest beer is always the most popular. For my last 13 years of drinking, I’ve preferred drinking at these types of bars, romanticizing their applied shittiness, knowing that I had a better shot with the girls who would drink here as opposed to more bourgeois watering holes in whatever city I was living in. But now, as I grow older and wiser in my drinking, more susceptible to hangovers, more picky and prickly about where I drink, I’ve fallen out of love with my old favorite watering holes. I wanted to take a look at why I liked these bars then, and why, as I become an adult, they become less of the place for me to be.

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personal journals

Here’s what happens when I go to friends weddings

by Henry Goldman • July 25, 2012

If you’re like me, in your late-20s, your summers are probably tent-poled by the celebrations of your friends love-contracts, their fiestas of legally bound love, if you will. I had four last summer, three this summer, and god knows how many I’ll have next year. Just this week, I returned from the nuptials of one young Ben Winkleblack, an old high school drinking-and-smoking-and-talking-about-hip-hop friend. Wink, as we still call him, is far more grown up than I am, these days. He has a job doing something Jewish, he owns his own house and, obviously, he just legally committed himself to the love of his life. Hell, even after ceremony, there’s was much talk of how the couple plan to have kids in the very near future, which to me, sounds like a threat, but to them, well, I guess they’re excited about it. Needless, say Wink is a grown man.

I’ve now been to enough weddings to know what to expect, more or less. Sure the menus and venues might be different, but the experience is generally the same; fun, festive, and slightly weird. Well, maybe it’s just weird for me. I’ve started to notice a pattern in my own behavior and wanted to provide an inventory of what happens when I got to weddings, you know, just in case you’re thinking of inviting me to yours.

… KEEP READING!

cultural studies

On going to rap shows by yourself

by Henry Goldman • June 14, 2012

Last night, I wandered down to see Action Bronson at the Independent in San Francisco by myself. It’s maybe the third or fourth time in the last year I’ve gone to see a hip-hop show by myself, and I’ve found that as long I show up at the right time, 5-10 minutes before the headliner starts, and don’t feel let myself self-conscious about flying solo, I can really enjoy myself. In my teens/twenties, going to see music wasn’t about seeing music, it was about having a night out on the town with friends, drinking, carousing, trying to sneak backstage to meet the artist, getting all kinds of high and trying/failing to hit on girls.

Nowadays, however, I drink plenty enough as it is. And most of my friends, aren’t into the same music as I am, so I’d be dragging people who weren’t interested, thinking that one live show could convert them into rap (or experimental electro or vintage soul or Belle & Sebastian) fans. I remember once, in college, taking my friend Tom, to a rap show across the border in Burlington, Vermont, two hours away. As we drove home, after four hours of various 2001-era underground rappers yelling at the audience to put their hands up and demanding to know who was getting high, Tom said, “Well, that should do it. I have seen all the live hip-hop I will need to for my whole life.” To be fair, at this age, I wouldn’t sit through four hours of that kind of show, either. I don’t care how high you are. It’s fucking boring. Especially, I assume, by yourself.

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how to live your life

8 reasons why you shouldn’t bother buying a home

by Henry Goldman • June 8, 2012

Earlier this week, NPR had another bleak, the-world-is-sooooooo-fucked-up-for-young-people article about how millennials aren’t buying houses like previous generations (forwarded by Andrew Brown, yr an adult’s moral conscience). They explain this trend by rehashing all the other bad news millennials are faced with; there aren’t any jobs, credit is impossible, real estate is either prohibitively expensive or in regions with no economic prospects. Also, since millennials are sooooooo entitled and want the freedom to pick up and move whenever they feel like, they’re not even thinking about owning their own home. It’s depressing news, which is why I felt compelled to look on the bright side, to help you, dear reader, to consider it a blessing that you’ll probably never be able to afford you’re own home. Below is a list of reasons why you shouldn’t bother owning a home, because it mostly sucks. Don’t say I never made you feel better. .

1.) Owning a house is, like, a job in itself. Every Sunday is another trip to Loews for new fixtures or appliances. If you live in an apartment and you have a shitty kitchen, you just have a shitty kitchen. And your life is pretty much the same as it would be after you could have spent $50,0000 and 700 hours making your kitchen awesome. Think about it. What do you want to do this weekend? Watch Prometheus, go get drunk in the park, watch Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Final and play ‘Cards Against Humanity’? Or do you want to get in an argument with your girlfriend/boyfriend in the drapery section of Home Depot?

… KEEP READING!

Where should you live?

11 hyperbolic things you could say about Detroit’s twenty-something boom

by Henry Goldman • May 29, 2012

“Young people moving to Detroit in droves” is one of my favorite media-created memes. If you read any national media outlet that covers the movements of new adults, you’ve probably read about the quote-unquote “trend”; Hip, motivated, young people have been re-populating the desolate post-industrial wasteland of Detroit an unlikely pace, buying abandoned homes for nothing, building urban farms, living in art-warehouse co-ops, starting social enterprises or food trucks or boutique ad agenecy. Basically, all the “interesting” things twenty-somethings purportedly do in other cities, they’re doing in Detroit. But the narrative crafted around this meta-story is more meaningful, because Detroit is symbolic of America’s previous century, and now, in it’s deteriorated state, it’s symbolic of America’s post-millennial soul-searching/the death of the blue-collar middle class. And the fact that apparently hip people are moving there to revitalize it makes a great story. But it’s just a story.

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modern adults

On growing up apathetic

by Henry Goldman • May 24, 2012

Two things happened on screens that I was looking at in the past few days:

First, I saw the documentary “Inside Job,” which is about how the financial crisis/great recession was caused by the greed of decision-makers at the top of America’s financial institutions, which was enabled by the lax regulatory oversight of our government. The film makes a compelling argument that system has been rigged so that the rich get richer and the political leadership maintains the status quo, because they’re inextricably linked with the banks. It’s a really good film if you want to understand why you should be furious that NO ONE HAS GONE TO PRISON over this shit. This American Life/Planet Money’s episodes on the financial crisis had already given me a good understanding of how the collateralized debt obligations and the loose credit in the early ‘00s caused the housing market to go. This film put in larger perspective how deregulation and institutional greed created the market ecosystem where this kind of thing could happen. Also, Matt Damon’s narration is great. It sounds like he was getting his first look at the copy as he was in the vocal booth, and as the movie goes on, he gets more and more furious with the case the filmmakers built. Watch it.

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Interviews

What’s it like to live in the Yukon? A Q&A with bushman/adult Tom Witte

by Henry Goldman • May 14, 2012

Tom Witte is an old Montreal friend, a Canadian, a savvy drinker and talented raconteur. When I knew Tom, he was a city guy, who knew the best Montreal microbreweries, the fastest bike routes across the city and which weird experimental electronic music shows to go to. Nowadays, Tom is a bushman, having spent the last five odd years in Dawson city (population 2000), deep in the Yukon territory. Dawson is next door to Alaska, at about 64º latitude, and a five-hour drive from the next biggest “city” (Whitehorse, pop. 20,000). I wanted to know what it’s like, spending your twenties in a town of 2000, how twentysomethings there compare to us city-folk, and just what the fuck he’s doing there.

First off, why don’t you describe Dawson City.
I think more Americans are getting to know Dawson City thanks to that TV show “Gold Rush Alaska”, though they might not realize it’s in Canada, since the show is pretty vague on that little detail. Historically, Dawson City used to be a thriving hub of gold-seekers at the close of the 19th century, booming to around 30,000 people at the height of the Klondike rush. Since then, it’s dwindled in size, frozen and thawed countless times, rotted and rebuilt and survived thanks to the continued efforts of small-time gold miners, tourism, and an active first nations community.… KEEP READING!

personal journals

9 things I wish I could tell my college self

by Henry Goldman • April 24, 2012

Most of the people who read this blog are post-college, or at least the age of post-college folks, but I know a few of you “new adults” are still actually matriculating, so this post is primarily directed at you. I had an awesome time in college, I learned a fair amount in school, I made a handful of friends who I will keep forever and I grew up (some). I also got to spend 4 years, summers included, in Montreal, which is one of the best cities the world. For that, I am forever grateful.

That being said, looking back at the experience, I can’t help but feel there are some things I wish I’d done differently, which would have affected my immediate post-college life and possibly my life as it is, now. Like the song goes, I wish I knew what I know now when I was younger. So, after considering how hard it is for kids fresh out of school these days, I thought I’d share a little bit of real talk that that I would tell my younger self, if that was possible and hope it will give you kids a leg up on your peers once you get out.… KEEP READING!

free ideas

Free idea: how-to-be-a-man classes

by Henry Goldman • April 20, 2012

After checking out the various offerings in yesterday’s post’s about skills-classes, it got me thinking about what kind of classes I’d take if I had the time/motivation. And while making robots or screen-printing all seem like great uses of my time and creative energy, I realized there’s a more basic knowledge deficiency which I’d love to rectify. I don’t know how to be a man.

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