Karen Kilgariff Quotes

Politeness doesn’t require actual humanity. It’s just cultural ritual... Politeness is fancy curtains in your front window. Kindness is the home-cooked meal on your dinner table.

Fuck politeness.” Fuck the way we were socialized. Fuck the expectation that we always put other people’s needs first. And while we’re at it, fuck the patriarchy!

We barely get any time on this planet. Do not spend it pleasing other people. Fuck politeness. Live life exactly how you want to live it so you can love the life you make for yourself.

I think its good to just say what you're thinking out loud. Some guy comes up to you on the street and starts asking a bunch of personal questions, you can say 'Whoa, this is weird behavior, I don't know you. You seem like a predator.' If he gets mad and calls you a "bitch", it doesn't mean you're a bitch, it just means you were right." -Karen Kilgariff

There’s really nothing like the self-righteousness of the partially informed.

Find the one thing you love and shut up about it.

But for women, it’s so much more than that. The politeness that we’re raised to prioritize, first and foremost, against our better judgment and whether we feel like being polite or not, is the perfect systematically ingrained personality trait for manipulative, controlling people to exploit.

I’m not a shitty person, which really is the point of life in my eyes: “Don’t be a dick and do good things.” That’s my other motto. It has the word dick in it.

Friendship leads to human connection, which feeds your soul. More than kale or spinning or fifteen-minute naps under your desk, conscious communication with your clutch friends is the best form of self-care.

The epitome of fucking politeness is learning how to act in the moment, instead of wishing you had later.

Why does everyone think whistling indicates relaxation? It’s literally one of the weirdest things you can do in public without breaking the law.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. —RAY BRADBURY

Motivation isn’t necessary,” she said. “You just have to do it.

Don’t get into a fight with one more friend over the umbrella they borrowed and never gave back or the time they didn’t save you a seat at the group dinner or whatever the fuck. Stop finding fault and making a fuss and crying in weird apartment building hallways expecting people to come out and wrap you up in a warm blanket of giving a shit. They’re not going to. Yes, it would be really nice, but it’s unrealistic to the point of self-abuse. Everyone has their own problems. Some of them are awful and tragic, and if you knew what they were, you’d be grateful for the ones you have.

When people sit down to have a conversation, all they're looking for is something they can agree on or participate in with you.

don’t throw your shit all over town. If you have a problem, don’t just confide in whoever wanders into your office. Save it for a person who cares about your well-being.

Politeness doesn't require actual humanity. It's just cultural ritual. Kindness means you actually care and have good intentions toward a person. It means you think about them as much as you think about yourself. Politeness is fancy curtains in your front window. Kindness is the home-cooked meal on your dinner table.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down. —RAY BRADBURY

She taught us that the sad truth is, you can't stay out of the forest because the world is a forest. And it's filled with predators. If someone is assaulted, it wasn't because they were careless, irresponsible, or dressed wrong.

you’re responsible for your own quality of life. Accepting that fact is the first step in the journey to that distant oasis that is watered by the ancient spring of self-care.

feminism wasn't a bad word; it was a vital pursuit and would be until girls were raised to believe in themselves and the importance of their contribution to the world the same way boys were

KAREN: “Get a job” was the first step in the three-part process I once blurted out while we were ranting about the importance of personal safety. Self-sufficiency is your first form of self-defense. The sooner you accept that you must work for a living, the sooner you can roll your sleeves up, find your true calling, stack that paper,

People who don't care "yes and" you. They'll help you stir that soup of sadness you're making because it somehow feeds them, too.

And society was fucking brutal to her because not only did she DARE to have a body with curves, but she was … (looks left, looks right, lowers voice) … a single mother. The nerve! And her socially unacceptable single mother–ness resulted in isolated loneliness that she was told, like all women, to blame on her body.

The following quote is from a Ted talk my sister sent to me that blew my mind.... We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many MEN raped women... We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many BOYS harassed girls... We talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant in the state of VA last year, rather than how many men and teenage boys got girls pregnant... So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political affect. It shifts the focus (and blame) off men and boys, and onto girls and women.

I’m a hustler and I work hard, but being a lazy person is my default. It’s what I do best. I’m a champion napper—I’ve even taken a nap in the Louvre among other weird places. I love chilling and day drinking and taking it fucking easy. But as it turns out, I’m not retired just yet, so I try my best to go against the lazy grain, which is why I always have multiple to-do lists going. Otherwise, I’ll to-don’t with everything and take a nap instead.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. —RAY FUCKING BRADBURY, Zen in the Art of Writing

Politeness is fancy curtains in your front window. Kindness is the home-cooked meal on your dinner table.

Even the term violence against women is problematic. It's a passive construction, there's no active agent (of violence) in the sentence. It's a bad thing that happens to women. It's a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term 'violence against women' nobody is doing it (acts of violence) to them, it just happens, men aren't even a part of it." Jackson Katz, PHD from his Ted talk 'violence against women it's a mens issue

you’re currently living, I’ll say, just remember that as long as you’re attempting to not be a dick and doing your best to do good things, you’re worthy of a good life, one that you’re proud of and that when you wake up every morning makes you stoked to be yourself. And if you don’t wake up stoked to be you, figure out the first step you can take toward that life you want. Once you’ve taken that first step, then figure out the next step, and so on. It might feel like a long journey (it is), but for me, that was the most important part, because once I got to where I wanted to be, I was confident in my ability to grab that opportunity by the balls and make it my bitch.

Don't treat your friends like they're the audience of your one-woman show. These are people who are good to you. Offer to them something high-vibrational. Think to yourself, What's the most exciting thing I can say to this person?

Thinking back, I don’t know how anyone else who grew up when I did didn’t become obsessed with true crime. The ’80s practically forced it down our throats in the name of TV ratings. There isn’t one person my age who doesn’t still get the chills when they hear the gravelly, soothing voice of Robert Stack or hear the creepy theme song from Unsolved Mysteries.

It was a dark time. Most of my decisions came from a place of believing the garbage that found its way into my head that, despite ample evidence otherwise, insisted I was ugly, stupid, and worthless. And that narrative told me I didn’t have the right to take things slow, or insist we use a condom, or even to just say, “Stop.” That self-advocacy stuff wasn’t for girls like me, girls who were taught that their worthiness was determined by who was in love with them.

And besides having supreme, sometimes unfounded confidence, everything Kids These Days need to know can be accessed online in a five-step YouTube video or some think piece on Vice.com. Younger generations already know not to mix oxy and Seroquel. Many of them own small businesses. God, honestly, fuck off, teens!

It’s much easier for me, for all of us, to complain and gossip because it holds the listener’s interest, but it does have a negative residual effect. I thought I was making fun dinner conversation, but it was actually just a release for me. My friend had no choice but to open up those “low vibrational” topics because that’s what I’d been talking about the most. Things people have done or said that are fucked up, ways people have let me down, failures, bad behavior, rudeness, lies. The shortcut to human connection is meeting on the common ground of hating a third person. But that shit is low vibrational and leaves a fart fog of shittiness in the air. And sometimes, people already have so much shittiness going on in their lives, they just can’t take another moment of it. Remember that.

All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore. —RAY BRADBURY, Farewell Summer

The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool. —RAY BRADBURY, Dandelion Wine

For girls, junior high is a daily dystopian nightmare of apocalyptic emotional warfare. Kill or be killed. Gossip or be gossiped about.

Love is supposed to make you a little bonkers and batshit, but there's bad crazy and good crazy, and you realize which is which when you love someone who doesn't love you back.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then rebellion is her cool aunt.

I was watching the beauty boat slowly pull out of port as I stood alone on the dock of permanent invisibility.

And as goes Ohio, so goes the nation.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then rebellion is her cool aunt.

I’d become a drooling, pathetic lunatic for a guy who clearly had no interest, but was probably bored and liked being adored, so he’d come sniffing around every four to eight months.

Being a 13 year old girl is simply the worst experience you can have in life, including all cancers and bear attacks. It is a daily series of betrayal and base humiliations that you must figure out a way to look cute during

So you pack up your dreams and move here like a hip, arty Dorothy heading to a sexy version of Oz. But then you arrive to find it’s a five-hundred-square-mile parking lot filled with plastic surgery and parties you’re not invited to.

Have you always felt unseen, ignored, or unloved? Congratulations! You're the perfect prey for narcissists who feed off of blind worship and internal sadness. You'll never convince the target of your obsession that your love is what Sade was singing about on that one album. But oh, you will try. And in doing so, you will damage your self esteem. And then, once you will wake up from the stupid spell you put on yourself, you can rail against those narcissists, but it won't affect them. So it's better just to skip ahead to the part where you admit that you're the one who bought the ticket to their show. Choose to want to figure out why you do these things and how to stop. In the end, it's all you can do.

When running late, "it's OK." When I have a million things to do and not enough time to do it, "it's OK." When I get stuck in a fantasy about plane crashes or normal girls, "it's OK." It's my mantra when I need to override the voice that tells me nothing I do is OK.

The following quote is from a Ted talk my sister sent to me that blew my mind.... We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many MEN raped women... We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many BOYS harassed girls... We talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant in the state of VA last year, rather than how many men and teenage boys got girls pregnant... So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political affect. It shifts the focus off men and boys, and onto girls and women.

The shortcut to human connection is meeting on the common ground of hating a third person. But that shit is low vibrational and leaves a fart fog of shittiness in the air. And sometimes, people already have so much shittiness going on in their lives, they just can’t take another moment of it. Remember that.

My mother was (still is) a timeless beauty—she’s also smart and funny—but when she was dating someone, I’d watch her turn werewolf-style from a competent, determined authority figure into this entirely not-her version of herself: a desperate, overly flirtatious, subservient ding-dong for shitty men who’d inevitably dump her and leave her in tears. And yes, this is harsh, but this type of personality-corrupting toxic masculinity bullshit didn’t spring up from within her out of nowhere. She was taught to do this, taught that acting sweet, deferential, and noncombative was her best chance at securing a man, aka happiness.

It was the point in my life when I realized that dudes who talk about their “crazy ex-girlfriend” are full of shit. What they’re really talking about is someone they hurt and didn’t leave the way they found. These guys put their ex-girlfriends in a position that makes them do things so extreme and out of character that they seem crazy.

Breakups will make the best of us go fucking batshit, but if you learn through it that you can rely on yourself to mend, you’ll go a little less crazy each time they happen. By the time I met Vince, I was a confident person who, while wanting a relationship, didn’t stake my personality, my dignity, and my life on it. It became a nice addition to an already lovely life

I don’t know, if I have to give some sort of advice here to all you sweet baby angels who want more than how you’re currently living, I’ll say, just remember that as long as you’re attempting to not be a dick and doing your best to do good things, you’re worthy of a good life, one that you’re proud of and that when you wake up every morning makes you stoked to be yourself. And if you don’t wake up stoked to be you, figure out the first step you can take toward that life you want. Once you’ve taken that first step, then figure out the next step, and so on. It might feel like a long journey (it is), but for me, that was the most important part, because once I got to where I wanted to be, I was confident in my ability to grab that opportunity by the balls and make it my bitch.

After what seemed like eons of heartache, the pain slowly dissipated. I was able to make sense of it and see myself as the protagonist in the story, not as the stupid, foolish love interest. I stopped looking for him in crowds, stopped dreaming of running into him, stopped imagining some magic bolt of electricity hitting his brain, causing him to realize the error of his ways and beg for me to take him back.

Basically, instead of labeling myself as someone who suffers from depression or anxiety or whatever, I have to remind myself that I’m actually trying to thrive with depression or anxiety or whatever. I can’t use my diagnosis as an excuse to throw a protective barrier over myself or an invisibility cloak to hide from life. It’s time to throw that coat, and this coat metaphor, away and use more productive tools to cope.

I was going to work there forever. And that certainty filled me with a dark fear. It scared me so badly I became compelled to try to get stand-up sets around town. You need to have an engine to get anywhere. The fear of stagnation can be a very powerful one. So I started to really try. I called in and signed up and did everything I could to be like a “real” comedian. The ones who didn’t have shitty day jobs. The ones who sat around writing in coffee shops in The Sunset for hours

Essentially, straightforward, honest, and clean is the only way to break up with someone and have you both leave with your dignity intact. {...} This takes a TON of vulnerability because this process is awkward as fuck and feels shitty to both parties involved, but I swear if you buck the fuck up and break up like a civilized person, in the long run, unless they're a psychopath or total dick, you'll keep your soul somewhat unscathed and their ego and heart not broken beyond repair.

This bold choice had been borne out of my mother’s desperate desire to break free from her ’70s design aesthetic: chickens. She’d let it slip sometime around 1975 that she liked chickens, so from then on, that was all she got. We had paintings of chickens and chicken calendars, chicken corn-on-the-cob holders and chicken serving dishes. I remember watching her opening a gift one Christmas morning and announcing, “If whatever this is has a fucking chicken on it, I’m gonna go insane.

I just downloaded the audiobook of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and all I want to do is listen to it while I paint my nails, but deadlines are a thing, so I’m writing down the top ten biggest therapy epiphanies of my life like a boss instead. I’m not motivated, but these words! They just keep showing up on my screen! Point being, you don’t have to bound into every situation ready to kick ass, you just have to show up, and once you’re there, you might as well do your best.

This is when I learned a valuable lesson: anyone trying to give you career advice is full of shit, especially if it’s a family member. People hear about you trying to do something they were never brave enough or lucky enough to try. You making a go of trying to make your dreams come true makes them feel bad. Maybe because they had the same dream. Maybe because they had a mean dad who made them become a stock analyst. Now they see those small decisions dictated the shape of their lives, and it makes them feel disappointed somehow. Whatever the details are, they’re projecting all their old shit on you. Step away from these people gingerly. Do not engage.

Have you always felt unseen, ignored, or unloved? Congratulations! You're the perfect prey for narcissists who feed off of blind worship and internal sadness. You'll never convince the target of your obsession that your love is what Sade was singing about on that one album. But oh, you will try. And in doing so, you will damage your self esteem. And then, once you wake up from the stupid spell you put on yourself, you can rail against those narcissists, but it won't affect them. So it's better just to skip ahead to the part where you admit that you're the one who bought the ticket to their show. Choose to want to figure out why you do these things and how to stop. In the end, it's all you can do.

We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It’s a passive construction. There’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it! —JACKSON KATZ, PH.D., FROM HIS TED TALK “VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: IT’S A MEN’S ISSUE

It was the point in my life when I realized that dudes who talk about their “crazy ex-girlfriend” are full of shit. What they’re really talking about is someone they hurt and didn’t leave the way they found. These guys put their ex-girlfriends in a position that makes them do things so extreme and out of character that they seem crazy. The night Aiden called me, after months of “I love yous” and making plans for our future, and told me he had a girlfriend and couldn’t see me anymore, and then hung up? By dawn, I was parked outside his work, I hadn’t slept the entire night, and I waited for him to show up because I needed an explanation in person. I didn’t get an explanation. I just seemed crazy. And in that moment, I was a little crazy. Love is supposed to make you feel a little bonkers and batshit, but there’s bad crazy and good crazy, and you realize which is which when you love someone who doesn’t love you back.

The shortcut to human connection is meeting on the common ground of hating a third person. But that shit is low vibrational and leaves a fart fog of shittiness in the air. And sometimes, people already have so much shittiness going on in their lives, they just can’t take another moment of it. Remember that.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. —RAY BRADBURY, Fahrenheit 451

Time looks like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. —RAY BRADBURY, The Martian Chronicles

Kids were free to go off on their own into places like the fucking forest. Yes, small child. Go take a walk. Kids were expected to go figure their shit out and compose themselves. When they were ready to stop being an asshole, they could join the family again.

It was the point in my life when I realized that dudes who talk about their "crazy ex-girlfriend" are full of shit. What they're really talking about is someone they hurt and didn't leave the way they found.

Save the shitstorm for every fifth visit. Practice bringing something else to the table. If people ask you about a problem, try out the phrase, "It's so crazy, I don't want to get into it. What's good with you?" Then if they have to know something, they'll insist you tell them, but usually people are just relieved.

I know now that no matter how far into something you are, how many times you’ve agreed and moved forward, you can always decide to turn back.

But when you get older, you learn the shittiest, most ironic life lesson: “perfection” is not a guarantee for happiness. This was never clearer to me than back when I read the shocking news that Sandra Bullock’s husband cheated on her. What?! How? Sandy is America’s sweetheart. She’s gorgeous, down to earth, legitimately funny, and genuinely talented. Her husband looked like some guy you’d see at the hot dog stand outside of Costco. And yet HE cheated on HER??

Not many eighteen-year-olds have that balance yet, so back then, I fell quick, I fell blindly, and most of all, I fell hard. I fell in a way that I later worried I’d never be able to fall again, but at the same time hoped I wouldn’t, so I could spare myself the pain.

Although a toned body was important in the 1980s, the nation was again distracted by even more ridiculous hair and clothing. I was at my thinnest at this point in time. Also, I’d gained four inches in bangs height. And yet, I squandered my small, perky ass on oversized khaki Bermuda shorts, loafers with argyle socks that I pulled up to my knees, and crewneck wool sweaters with tie-on lace collars. Comedian Karen Kilgariff, of My Favorite Murder, described the 1980s aptly as a time when young girls dressed like they were doing middle-aged secretary cosplay. Barbara had become my style icon.

If someone holds their cards close to their chest, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their cards are worth fighting to see. The people that are open with their cards who wear their cards on their sleeve and offer them to you in a take it or leave it manner. Those are the people worth playing cards with. I don’t know why this metaphor has become a card game….. Hey if you are shy and hold your cards close to your chest. I get it. It’s hard to open up to people especially when you’ve been hurt before. And you were raised in a house where your caretakers were emotionally unreliable or used your emotions against you because of their own untreated phycological issues. Wait, what? Mom?

You refine your choices to avoid causing your own pain. But good. The pain comes anyway. You start to see that it's supposed to. Adversity forces you to grow past reactive fear and self-preservation and into a worthwhile human being. Tragedy paradoxically begins to strengthen your heart. It breaks it but then it reforms it as a better, stronger machine. And then you start to instinctually care about others. And you start to see how to be. Friendship leads to human connection which feeds your soul. More than kale. Or spinning. or 15 minute naps under your desk.

Don’t mistake someone’s quietness, lack of participation in a conversation, or -worse-air of disinterest as intriguing. If someone holds their cards close to their chest, it doesn’t necessarily mean their cards are worth fighting to see. The people who are open with their cards, who wear their cards on their sleeves and offer them to you in a take-it-or-leave-it manner, those are the people worth playing cards with

Now that they’re gone, the real people can get real. I’m talking about the fuckups and the drama queens, the ones who get told they’re too much: too big, too loud, too smart, too mean. I’m talking to the people who have been severely scraped up by life and by the mistakes they’ve made in it. You guys are my favorite because you are me and I am you

whether we feel like being polite or not, is the perfect systematically ingrained personality trait for manipulative, controlling people to exploit.

The fear of stagnation can be a very powerful one.

Fuck politeness.” Fuck the way we were socialized. Fuck the expectation that we always put other people’s needs first. And while we’re at it, fuck the patriarchy! Yeah, I said it.

You’re familiar with the Feeling. It’s the regretful, upset, disappointed feeling you get after someone says or does something particularly shitty and you’re so taken off guard that your politeness instincts take over so you just ignore it or go with it or kind of shut down. And then later you imagine all the awesome things you could have said or done—all the perfect angles1 that you could have kicked that person in the shin—and then you’re awake at 3:00 A.M. totally mad at yourself for not having said/done/kicked them. The epitome of fucking politeness is learning how to act in the moment, instead of wishing you had later.

That’s the thing about fuck politeness—it’s not about being rude.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

We all have our core beliefs that protect us from that which we’re too scared to admit we want, like love or money or happiness, as if we’ll somehow jinx our lives by thinking it. It’s fine to not want to scream it to the sky, but make sure you aren’t cursing your own happiness by believing more in something never manifesting, by worshipping at the altar of doubt, or negativity or obliviousness, than actually trying to attain that thing.

The woods are a good place to scream in frustration. They've heard the frustrated screams of enraged family members since humans first existed, and they don't judge or tell you that you were the one being a dick; they accept and envelop your screams and use the excess carbon dioxide you emit to grow. Everyone needs a little scream in the woods sometimes.

When I was a little kid, I thought it would be so cool to find a dead body. Once again, I blame Stephen King for this, along with my overactive imagination, as watching Stand by Me as a six-year-old gave me some crazy ideas about what an adventure finding a body would be. And also I associated River Phoenix and his all-encompassing gorgeousness with finding a body, so that didn’t help.

I’m a hustler and I work hard, but being a lazy person is my default. It’s what I do best. I’m a champion napper—I’ve even taken a nap in the Louvre among other weird places. I love chilling and day drinking and taking it fucking easy. But as it turns out, I’m not retired just yet, so I try my best to go against the lazy grain, which is why I always have multiple to-do lists going. Otherwise, I’ll to-don’t with everything and take a nap instead

calling myself my standard “stupid fucking idiot” and generally admonishing myself in a way I would punch someone in the face if they said the same to me.

when I was twenty, instead of applying for an internship program at my college, I flunked out. My loving parents had no choice but to cut me off, so for about six months, I lived in a white-hot, flat-broke panic. And then it came to me: I had to do something big to prove I wasn’t the flunky loser that reality was making me out to be. So I decided to become a stand-up comic. This really seemed like a solution to me at the time. I’d always wanted to do comedy

Your “career” is just another word to help you categorize the journey you will take through life. Why not start brave and bold and believing in yourself? And if you fail in the thing you want to do, that’s fine. You can start your career-having life in one career, and then if you need to, you can switch to another. I did.

had begun to deal with all the heartache and social stress of high school by eating. And eating. And eating. I wish I’d known at the time that this was pretty much standard fare for teenage girls. But I didn’t, so I burned with shame, angry that I didn’t get the food issue that makes you skinny and light-headed and just as ashamed. I

Quitting my desk job in 2009 (at almost thirty years old) to try to make it in the entertainment industry (specifically, hosting food shows). I’d lived my entire life paycheck to paycheck, so not having a regular salary or any guaranteed work was really scary, but I saw a chance and took it. My only goal was not to have to go back to a dreaded soul-sucking desk job, and so far, it’s working! Giving myself the chance to try was pretty much the best, kindest decision I’ve ever made for myself.

in my late twenties. I was a receptionist at a multibillion-dollar corporation staffed by the same boring WASPs I had so happily escaped post–high school. I hid my large tattoo on my calf under pants I bought at a thrift store in high school for four dollars that I’d hemmed with duct tape and whose zipper was held in place with a safety pin because I REFUSED to spend any of the little money they paid me on business-casual work clothes. I was depressed as fuck and thought that this was my future. I truly thought that for the rest of my life, I’d be a low- to mid-level employee at some nameless company, never making enough to save for retirement and eating breakroom granola bars for lunch till I died. I’d get drunk with equally miserable friends every night because I was so unhappy with my day. I’d take hangover naps under my desk during my lunch break or

Blogging got me out of my rut and made me feel like I had a purpose but was also a great way to put a positive spin on my life. When my car got broken into one morning and my stereo stolen, my first thought wasn’t about how much it would cost to fix it, it was, I can’t wait to blog about this! I joined the first and only dating site I used knowing that even if I didn’t meet the love of my life (spoiler: I didn’t), at least it’d be great blog fodder. And instead of sleeping during my lunch breaks, I’d go outside and take cool pics of my cheap, homemade lunch and the book I was currently reading

we were shocked to see the view count explode when we posted it on YouTube. When we got a message on Facebook from a dude at Cooking Channel who asked if we wanted to make more tongue-in-cheek cocktail videos online, I quit my job to give myself a chance at doing something real. Something for me.

Every new neighborhood I’d find in my wanderings made me feel like an explorer uncovering uncharted territory that I’d mentally mark on my map, always expanding upon the geography of my adopted hometown. Beverly turns into Silver Lake. Rowena turns into Hyperion. Hollywood turns into Sunset.

If I’d known that I was going to have to have a shitty, entry-level job for the next fifteen-plus years until I stumbled into internet success, maybe I would have waited a couple of years before entering the workforce.