WHY 22 IS THE END: IF ONLY COMPLEMENTS WERE CURRENCY

As we've been droning away at work, Kristen and I have been noticing that complements have been pouring in from different directions this week. Here's a sample of a few:

- "Thanks so much! You're a STAR!"

- "Don't you look spiffy--have a date tonight?"

- "THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU"

- "I like that you always keep me guessing. Keep it up."

- "You explain this best."

- "Keep up the good work."

- "Thanks for coming in late last night and fixing something I forgot to do because I am incompetent and use you as a means by which to cover my ass so I can look great and you can look bad."

Now, as you can see, many of these are directed at work ethic. Others are aimed at appearance. Yet, none of them refer to anything beyond "I see what you did there--and it was good. I'm going to tell you and no one else of your excellence." This is totally fine...if we didn't crave raises more than the expired "as is" food we eat from our respective low-level super markets (because we can't afford anything else).

We're not saying to ban complements--we're just saying that if we had a bruise for every time we got a pat on the back, we'd practically be paraplegics. And, that is reallllllly annoying (as we've been working our jobs for well over half a year and we are still regarded as farts in the wind).

I don't know about Kristen, but I'm opening up a savings account at the American Bank of Complements, so I can save up, accumulate interest, and--eventually--be able to afford a hug (which is worth at least fifty complement dollars).

WHAT 22 IS THE END: YOU ARE FATIGUED FROM THE RESULTING TIME CHANGE DAYLIGHT SAVING BRINGS

This past Saturday night I attempted to watch a new horror movie I had purchased. It was the perfect cleanse to a crazy two weeks of non-stop, ridiculous, mind-numbing work and I was very excited to see it, as I had heard great things. As the clock approached midnight, the sounds of screaming and murder and highly-evolved-plant-life-massacring-humans sang me to a deep sleep. I woke up on my couch at 4AM, dazed and startled: I wasn't asleep for that long. I sidled my way across the living room floor into my bedroom and continued on sleeping.

I woke up the next morning at 9AM and knew something felt funny. I had a busy Sunday and only realized at "2:30PM" that my clock was wrong: I was a victim of Daylight Saving Time. That night, I got home, ate dinner, and hung out with my family, but could not muster the will power to stay awake beyond--I don't know--10PM.

For the past three days, I've just been an absolute wreck from Daylight Saving Time. Recently, the slightest of changes in my sleeping patters eff me up. I can't stay awake for more than three hours without getting groggy. I frequently zone out and forget what work needs to be done: I am an absolute waste on many different levels from fucked up sleep.

At 22 years old, this is a problem. Every time I decide to watch the Colbert Report--I'm a mess. Whenever I go out and have some drinks with friends, costing me a midnight hour, I'll be a vegetable the next day. If I am at work beyond 9PM (which happens a lot)--I have to go home and lay my head on a pillow and sleep for many, many hours. 

Daylight Saving Time's beginning has disrupted my internal clock. And, like many adults, I have been introduced to a despicable culture of "tired adults," who find a bond in common misfortunes. Daylight Saving Time hits this nail on the head, reinforcing that--after a certain age--there is an unstated agreement that "Oh, something sucks in life: let us find a means to express our malcontent!" And, let me be the first to say: this malcontent is expressed in the most mature and progressive of ways.

Daylights Saving Time has helped usher in post-college life and has made me proud to be 22. Who wants to be lively, anyway?

WHY 22 IS THE END: ZITS ARE FOREVER

I have been fortunate enough in my lifetime to have clear skin. I've never had to use acne washes or go see a dermatologist or even have to pop a zit or follow in the footsteps of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jessica Simpson. I've always had clear skin and have always been followed by the envious eyes of pizza faces everywhere. My frequently pimple free face has helped me pass as a high schooler even at 22. It's pretty cool to get carded every time you try to buy cigarettes, alcohol, lighters, or even spray paint. It's never inconvenient. Never.

Kristen, like me, has also enjoyed the blessing of zitless skin and clear complexion. However, like me, she has suffered the same affliction: when you do get pimples, you get them bad. This was always the problem in high school: the occasional crater you didn't know how to deal with. A zit would come, attack for a week, and leave us on our merry way. We never had time to learn how to understand them or even befriend them enough to make it work for us (if that's even possible).

At 22, pimples are becoming more and more problematic because you aren't in high school and everyone notices and feels the need to make clever euphemisms about it ("Oh, looks like something bit you on your lip!"; "Where'd you get that fancy new beauty mark?"; "What? Run out of Pro-Active?"). And, every time I get a pimple, I'm like "EMERGENCY EMERGENCY HOW DO YOU FIX THIS WTF MATE" It makes me wish I had had terrible acne in my youth because then I would know how to deal with pimples. Now, when I get the occasional, unsightly face (well, eye)sore, I just scratch it and try to pop it, aggravating it to an extreme point where people look at you and only have "LOOK AT THAT ZIT" on their mind.

Maybe, at some point in the future, zits will stop trying to conquer my face once a month, a prospect that seems impossible. Until that point, I need to figure out how I'm going to deal with this when I am 32. Or, I'll just preoccupy my thoughts with trying to learn how to accept other things I don't like about my body, so zits will seem inconsequential.

WHY 22 IS THE END: NO ONE "GETS" YOU ANYMORE

Kristen and I met while we interned at a cable television channel while in college. We were in New York City for the summer, none of our friends were really in the city, and we had a lot of free time while at work. So, we spent most of our hours making LOL creatures to maximize LULZ instead of committing suicide in a cubicle.

Beyond that, one thing we realized that summer (and what brought us to be ~*~bEsTiEs~*~) is that no one we worked with understood us or got our humor. We were lone rangers, cruising through a desert on the fastest wild stallions in the West. People in our office couldn't keep up (At. All.). Most of the other interns couldn't even keep up. It got to a point where our bosses were like "We don't give you real work, so make us a Powerpoint presentation of current trends because you introduced us to LOL and Facebook, so you guys must be hip."

So, we blew their minds with YouSendIt and Amy Winehouse--before either were trainwrecks.

And, even though we made a fancy Powerpoint, no one understood what we were saying. No one "got it." Kristen and I discuss to this day if we presented drunk and spoke French. Really, we don't get it.

As foxy 22 year olds, Kristen and I have realized the same thing as we forge into the real world: no on gets us. We both make jokes, try to win people over with our killer fashion sense, and are hard fucking workers--but no one respects or takes our worth beyond face value. No one says "Oh, she's a spectacular, comedic, ironic writer" or "Oh, he is a greaaaat actor and entertainer."

No: all we get are jobs that have nothing to do with what we studied in college. Or, they have nothing to do with what we actually want to be "when we grow up." Either way: we feel like we're doomed.

Beyond predicting "David at the Dentist" or "Kittens Inspired by Kittens," no one has taken our cool hunting predictions beyond being strange, weird, and off-kilter. We have close-to-mainstream-taste, but no one takes us seriously (which is why we started a blog).

But, you know what: we've reached a point where we don't fucking care anymore. We'll watch "Bart is the General" and laugh at "Riding On the Bus with my Sister" and still love/hate Rosie O'Donnell and not care that no one "gets us."

Whatever. Excuse our beauty.

WHY 22 IS THE END: YOU HAVE EVEN LESS MONEY THAN YOU DID IN COLLEGE

I work as a personal assistant and am pretty content with my just-outta-college wage. However, like every working man, working woman, and--if you are in Asia--working child, mo' money brings mo' problems. And, once you are in the real world, these problems all hit at the same time.

I've learned that with car payments, rent, student loans, phone bills, credit card, and the "cost of living" combined, you barely make ends meet. I am not understanding how people can be upwardly mobile if this is how "adulthood" begins. I mean, I don't even have that high of bills but I can't imagine them going up even in the slightest. Do adults secretly win the lottery? Do adults just quietly stew in their debt? Do adults all eventually become Willy Lohman? Please, adult readers who we do not have, answer these questions.

I cant figure out what I'm doing wrong (besides not listening to my weekly Buxfer.com report) but I cannot foresee and end to this madness. You would think I am just bank-bank-banking that dough but, honestly, I have no idea where it is going because I am banking nothing. Like, zero point zero zero dollars. Like, I think I'm actually paying my boss to work for him. Like, FML.

If I can get someone to pay for my alcohol addiction and my housing and my clothes and my car, then I think I will be able to bank some money and actually move on with life. Then, maybe, 22 won't be the end.

WHY 22 IS THE END: BEING ON THE INTERNET AT 2:45 AM IS NO LONGER "WHAT YOU DO"

It's weird to say "back in college" but I haven't been to my Alma mater in over a year. So anyway back in college, it was perfectly normal to be up doing absolutely nothing at 3 AM, and then call your BFF who only lives 5 doors down to go to the C-store and get some snacks. Being up at all hours used to be just "what you do" but now it's "what you do when you are lame." Normally I don't ever make it to 3 AM unless I am out, about, and wasted. Otherwise I am in bed by midnight because I am too exhausted from my big girl job to even bother.

So what happens late night after Conan finishes (FOREVER as of tonight, but that's another blog post) in the life of a 22 year old? Well I did some regular weirdo "I live alone so I can" stuff like change my clothes in the kitchen and hold an impromptu yoga session in my living room. Now I'm online at a time where EVERYONE used to be online, but right now I only have one person on my buddy list, the same BFF who used to live 5 doors down on the 7th floor (that's another blog post on an entirely different blog). OH WAIT HE JUST SIGNED OFF.

AM I OLD? Brb planning my funeral. Or obsessing over how I am not married yet while acknowledging the fact that I don't want to be married yet. I think that's the next stage of life anyway.

WHY 22 IS THE END: NO ONE FACEBOOKS US ANYMORE

For the adult, checking Facebook once a week is a new sport you participate in once a week. For the high schooler, checking Facebook is something you do when you're not on MySpace or YouTube or LiveJournal or Xanga or AIM. But, for the college student, checking Facebook less than once an hour is a faux pas, social suicide, inexcusable: if you do not check your Facebook profile more times a day than there are hours you are awake--you're in trouble.

Speaking for two recent college graduates, we at 22IsTheEnd are still running on a schedule that requires our being on Facebook more minutes a day than we spend actually working at work. This isn't actually our fault, though: it is the product of having spent the past four years in college slaving over the art of Facebook stalking and replying tactfully to Facebook messages whilst drunk. But, the only difference in our Facebooking as "adults" versus our Facebooking while in college, is that people do not give a damn about our profiles anymore.

Recently, checking Facebook and going to our profiles is like taking an optimistic walk through a ghost town: you hope you're going to see something new but, inevitably, you won't. Your friends from school are either still at school or you don't talk to them because they are in a different city. Your "new" friends (if you are so ~*~bLeSsEd~*~ to have them) don't know you as a Facebooker but rather as an adult. Thus, the only people who Facebook you are you're best friends who always Facebook you. This is not a bad thing; however, when you log in twenty times a day and you've only received one message from your fellow blogger/business partner, you feel incomplete and like you want to take your profile behind the work dumpster and put it out of its misery (believe me--I've come real close).

Moreover, in our year removed from school, living the high life of the 2-2, Facebook has devolved into a wasteland where you:

1. Receive friend requests from people you don't care about;

2. Get frequent postings from relatives who should not be on Facebook

3. Or, are persistently sent resumes from people you knew in elementary school who know you work in the biz and really would like to get into the entertainment industry but have only worked as a waiter but know that entertainment is "where they belong."

Facebook for the 22 year old + crowd is a sad, hollow sham. It reminds me of those elderly people you see at tennis courts shuffling around the green pavement chasing tennis balls: the sport will never be the same for them, even though they try to force it to be. 

And, in 2009, maybe our Facebook profile's shifting toward obsoleteness is a good thing: who wants to be obsessing over an unnoticed profile when you have a shiny new blog? 

(And, Facebook gives you cancer, so fuck that boolshite--I'm gon keep blogging.)

WHY 22 IS THE END: WE OBSESS OVER OUR HOROSCOPES

My neighborhood has an unusually high amount of storefronts for psychics. The only thing that prevents me from going in is the fact that it would seem "sad" if I went alone. Not the fact that I want to see a psychic. Then you could tell people you went at as a joke if they find out. Sort of like seeing "Bride Wars" with your gay BFF instead of seeing it alone with one of those tiny packs of tissues your grandma always carries in her purse.

Anypathetic, kf and I follow our horoscope (we are both Taureans) religiously even though we know that the EXACT SAME THINGS never happen to the both of us during the same day, week, or month. We sit at work insisting that we will both find true love AND be promoted this week, all the while not dating anyone and not doing anything about how disgruntled we are between 10 AM and 7 PM. When the horoscope has nothing to do with what is going on in our lives whatsoever, we insist the sun signs have shifted and are in fact Gemini, because the week was totally shitty for Geminis.

PREDICTION: Soon enough, on a Sunday afternoon when once of us is catching The Craft on TBS for the 38th time, we will end up checking out spell books from the library. Hopefully we will at that point become totally embarrassed, explain to the librarian that we were really just trying to research Salem, Massachusetts, and delete ourselves from the ivillage.com daily horoscope email list. Hopefully. Unless those spells totally work.

WHY 22 IS THE END: WE WANT TO SEE "HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU"

LISTEN UP PEOPLE:

FINALLY: the movie He's Just Not That Into You--a once revolutionary book for twentysomething women and obnoxious gay men--is out in theaters! 

Let me tell you this: I'm absolutely, over the moon, va-jay-jay-is-all-giddy excited for this movie. It'll be the best thing that's happened to me in 2009.

The first reason is that I will gladly watch anything with Jennifer Connelly. She could be remaking Nell--and I would still love her forever. She's beautiful, she's talented, and she gets better with age. Love that J. Con.

I also love Drew Barrymore (despite some despicable life choices she's made). Even though I'm a 11 years younger than her, I feel that I've watched her grow from child actress to screen gem. I salute you Drew. 

But, most importantly, I'm a big fan of this, and this, and this--but not this. Let's make it clear: not. this. (And not this, either) And, as you can tell, He's Just Not That Into You places all of the aforementioned at the heart of the film, thus making it well worth that $15 ticket.

At any other point in my life, I would greatly abhor the thought of wanting to see this film or any other like film; but, because I am now 22 and realizing that my life peaked years ago, I really want to see this (and hope I have a date to see it with).

 (which is impossible because nobody is that into me)