We go to parties because we hope to be changed. At least, I do.
This time around, it’s New Year’s Eve. It is five degrees above freezing and the ground is covered in slush. I am walking through the city streets drinking a water bottle full of vodka and crushed pills. I am completely flying.
Someone mentions there’s a party happening at 6000 Parc. Obviously, we go.
The party is spilling from the third floor, down the inside stairwell, onto the street. Whoever is hosting has a massive flat-screen TV that takes up most of the living room wall. They’re playing Frances Ha, muted. The coffee table has been pushed against the wall so everyone’s dancing while the movie plays silently in the background.
It’s a bit too on the nose: the black and white Greta Gerwig movie about feeling like an undateable loser in your twenties playing at a house party hosted and attended by a bunch of twenty-somethings with fine arts degrees and bad tattoos. The choice feels too pointed, too manufactured. I live for it.
I first watched Frances Ha as a precocious tween who wanted to feel some sort of proximity to adult life. “Real” life. I wanted to be quirky, basically. Buzzfeed was big and so were Brooklyn hipsters. To a child in suburban Ontario, this highly publicized and highly inaccessible version of life held vaguely appealing promises. I remember that the jokes in the movie about anal and getting cum on your face really scandalized me. Those were the only things I remembered about the movie for years. Not the famous and frequently quoted “Looking across the room at your person” monologue, but the scene where Frances and Sophie loaf around their apartment talking about sex. In a sense, I was doing the same thing I’m doing now at the party: I’m trying to create a version of myself, a version of my life.
It’s a natural impulse. After all, in order to make life interesting, sometimes you create situations for yourself. That’s basically all the movie is: Frances, too, deliberately inserts herself into places in order to achieve some sort of emotional effect. When she gets kicked out of her third apartment, she tries to instigate a moment of faux spontaneity by “play” fighting her new roommate—who hates it. She tries to be one of the boys to prove she can have other meaningful friendships besides Sophie and fails. She goes to Paris on a weekend whim and reads Proust while she’s there because it’s what she thinks she should do, only to sleep through half of her trip.
It’s hard watching Frances flop through dinner parties and awkward conversations with guys who are constantly negging her. It’s unbearable at points. There seems to be no purpose or point to all this awkwardness. Such is life, and such are parties in your twenties.
"The choice feels too pointed, too manufactured. I live for it."
I am spending my time at the party trying too hard to make a moment, trying too hard to be chill and unaffected by the people around me, trying too hard to make this year worth something. I fall back into the couch with my best friend and the world sinks. We keep sinking down, further and further, dragging everyone else down with us.
We are manufacturing life in this party. We are falling stupidly against each other as we try to find the door to the balcony. Maybe we aren’t changed—not yet—there is something in motion. No one thumbtacks a ziplock bag of weed onto the wall for no reason. No one plays a black-and-white movie during a party without ulterior motives. We stitch these gestures together to create something alive, something tender. Then, to look upon our friends as they watch the dancers moving through the dark, their faces lit up ever so softly, trying to catch the slightest variations in their expressions.
We go to parties because we hope to be changed. At least, I do.
This time around, it’s New Year’s Eve. It is five degrees above freezing and the ground is covered in slush. I am walking through the city streets drinking a water bottle full of vodka and crushed pills. I am completely flying.
Someone mentions there’s a party happening at 6000 Parc. Obviously, we go.
The party is spilling from the third floor, down the inside stairwell, onto the street. Whoever is hosting has a massive flat-screen TV that takes up most of the living room wall. They’re playing Frances Ha, muted. The coffee table has been pushed against the wall so everyone’s dancing while the movie plays silently in the background.
It’s a bit too on the nose: the black and white Greta Gerwig movie about feeling like an undateable loser in your twenties playing at a house party hosted and attended by a bunch of twenty-somethings with fine arts degrees and bad tattoos. The choice feels too pointed, too manufactured. I live for it.
I first watched Frances Ha as a precocious tween who wanted to feel some sort of proximity to adult life. “Real” life. I wanted to be quirky, basically. Buzzfeed was big and so were Brooklyn hipsters. To a child in suburban Ontario, this highly publicized and highly inaccessible version of life held vaguely appealing promises. I remember that the jokes in the movie about anal and getting cum on your face really scandalized me. Those were the only things I remembered about the movie for years. Not the famous and frequently quoted “Looking across the room at your person” monologue, but the scene where Frances and Sophie loaf around their apartment talking about sex. In a sense, I was doing the same thing I’m doing now at the party: I’m trying to create a version of myself, a version of my life.
It’s a natural impulse. After all, in order to make life interesting, sometimes you create situations for yourself. That’s basically all the movie is: Frances, too, deliberately inserts herself into places in order to achieve some sort of emotional effect. When she gets kicked out of her third apartment, she tries to instigate a moment of faux spontaneity by “play” fighting her new roommate—who hates it. She tries to be one of the boys to prove she can have other meaningful friendships besides Sophie and fails. She goes to Paris on a weekend whim and reads Proust while she’s there because it’s what she thinks she should do, only to sleep through half of her trip.
It’s hard watching Frances flop through dinner parties and awkward conversations with guys who are constantly negging her. It’s unbearable at points. There seems to be no purpose or point to all this awkwardness. Such is life, and such are parties in your twenties.
"The choice feels too pointed, too manufactured. I live for it."
I am spending my time at the party trying too hard to make a moment, trying too hard to be chill and unaffected by the people around me, trying too hard to make this year worth something. I fall back into the couch with my best friend and the world sinks. We keep sinking down, further and further, dragging everyone else down with us.
We are manufacturing life in this party. We are falling stupidly against each other as we try to find the door to the balcony. Maybe we aren’t changed—not yet—there is something in motion. No one thumbtacks a ziplock bag of weed onto the wall for no reason. No one plays a black-and-white movie during a party without ulterior motives. We stitch these gestures together to create something alive, something tender. Then, to look upon our friends as they watch the dancers moving through the dark, their faces lit up ever so softly, trying to catch the slightest variations in their expressions.