Tag: henry goldman | yr an adult

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.

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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.

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I'm living my life wrong

I am outraged (for, like, 10 minutes, before going back to dicking around on the internet)

by Henry Goldman • August 16, 2012

Earlier, this week, like many of those hooked to the reflective glare of the internet, I was riveted by a Tumblr post by NYC-based comedy writer Matt Fisher entitled, “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court”. In a straightforward way, Mr. Fisher outlined how his sister’s greedy, shitty insurance company did everything in its power to avoid paying a claim, essentially acting the way greedy insurance companies always do, all the time. Not only was the story equal parts heartbreaking and infuriating, it also inspired me to take action.

What kind of action, you ask? Did I research advocacy groups that are fighting for insurance reform, to which I could donate my time? Well, um, no. Did I get a group of my friends together to take up arms, come up with our cleverest anti-vampire-capitalism slogans (i.e. ,“Quit playing CLAIMS with my heart”), sharpie them onto cardboard signs and then go march on the nearest Progressive management office? Again, I did not. That would be a lot of work. So what did I do?

I retweeted Eugene Mirman’s tweet about it, and then went on with my day.

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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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In the News

Email from my mom of the day

by Henry Goldman • July 26, 2012

This is what my Mom had to say upon reading my most recent post about weddings.

“when did you wake up blotto in a hospital?
I really like your blog, but I better not read it anymore. The laughs are not worth the angst.
Love,
mom”

cultural studies

Am I too old to be excited about stupid summer movies?

by Henry Goldman • May 4, 2012

So, I’m going to go ahead and apologize, in advance, in the public eye of yr an adult, to my girlfriend, for dragging her to the see The Avengers this weekend. I should also apologize for making her watch Iron Man 2 on TV, last night. I mean, I admit that that movie was excessively dumb. Also, I’ll admit that Thor, from last summer, might have made us both stupider. And that there is no reason to watch the reboot of Spiderman coming out fourth of July weekend, but that I will be going to see it regardless (probably not opening weekend). At this point, it should be obvious that I am one of those 29-year-olds, who still get excited about 200-million dollar summer popcorn movies. Which begs the question, is it even OK for (new) adults to be (overly) excited about entertainment that has been produced to entertain 15 year olds?

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modern adults

On being held hostage by the highest rent in the country

by Henry Goldman • April 3, 2012

A couple weeks ago, news stories started to come out around a report that announced that San Francisco, the fair city where I’ve live for the past four years, has the highest rent in the country. No one I know was shocked or even surprised. First of all, San Francisco is (arguably) one of the most livable cities in North America. Our fair burg boasts beautiful architecture/streets/landscapes, dense neighborhoods with great restaurants/bars/things to do, public transport good enough that you don’t need a car and weather that, while it isn’t as great as LA, is never oppressively bad. Secondly, while the rest of the country has been trying to get out from under the not-so-Great-Recession, San Francisco’s economy has been booming. Seriously. Every tech company here has been hiring constantly since ’09, often offering people who do tech things HUGE salaries (not to mention other perks, like free shuttles to work and free lunches). This means there’s a ton of people in the city will to pay exorbitant rent to live in the city.

All in all, this means, I’m terrified to ever give up my (relatively) decently priced apartment in an awesome part of town, because I’m scared I’ll never get anything like it again.

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I'm living my life wrong

How to be an asshole at a mixology bar

by Henry Goldman • March 9, 2012

Last weekend, a group of friends and I were encouraged to check out a craft cocktail spot in Lower Manhattan (that will remain unnamed) by a friend who is into mixology and had read that the spot had good cocktails. There were a couple warning signs that this maybe wasn’t the place to bring 7 people who were already drunk, hungry and ready for Brooklyn – the bouncer who asked if we had a reservation, the white table cloths, the model hot waitresses. However, I remained optimistic, right up until the point when the spot in question turned me into a perfect asshole, and not in the way it’s supposed to.

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I'm living my life wrong

My earthquake/emergency kit needs an overhaul

by Henry Goldman • March 6, 2012

A few months after I moved into my latest apartment, I decided to succumb to the pressures of San Francisco’s department of emergency management and set aside a little space in the house for an earthquake kit. Well, the other night, after being awakened by a 4.0 on the Hayward fault line (it felt a little bit like a car had crashed into the floor below my bedroom), I decided it was time to re-assess what kinds of emergency provisions I had at my disposal, should I be in the apartment when the Big One (predicted to happen before 2030) hits. I opened up the cabinet where my girlfriend brews kombucha to see what we have in stock.

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cultural studies

Why it’s ok that my favorite new rapper is, like, half my age

by Henry Goldman • February 24, 2012

If you’re not familiar with the saga of Earl Sweatshirt, I’ll sum it up quickly. The best rapper in this massively hyped, angry young rap crew called Odd Future got sent to reform school in Samoa, cut off from the rest of the world, right as his friends we’re hitting youth culture hard as a sidewalk face-plant. There’s been too much breathless reporting on Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All’s significance to rap/music/hipster/punk culture. So, if you don’t know about them and are actually interested, I suggest you read their coverage in either the NY Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or one of those other countercultural media outlets the kids are so fond of.

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I'm living my life wrong

The “Getting My Shit Together” Clock Is Winding Down

by Henry Goldman • February 6, 2012

Now that I’m 29, I’ve been coming back to the old (Hindu?) saying, “You spend your first 30 years making your habits. For the last 30 years, your habits make you.” Unhappily, I find this concept disturbing as I’ve spent the whole of my life embracing habits that were, at best, entirely unproductive and at worst, completely unsavory. If this random quote from the internet is to be believed, that means I have less than a year to come up with a completely new set of habits that will define the rest of my life.

Of course, you could say that what I do in my last 12 months before turning 30 wouldn’t be enough to counteract the other 29 years of less-than-successful living. And to that, I say, bullshit. This is America, not France. We gambled on a dream, stole a whole, very well-appointed continent from its native population and built the best damn country in the world on it. We’re doers. If I say I can turn my shortcomings, bad habits and compulsions around in the space of year, then god help me, I can do it.

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