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    Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now
    Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now
    Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now
    Ebook294 pages4 hours

    Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now

    By Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler

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    About this ebook

    From Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler, the acclaimed authors of The Hookup Handbook and Friend of Frenemy?, comes Your So-Called Life—a must-have, hilarious, and absolutely unique bible for any woman in her late 20s and 30s who’s making the big move into real adulthood. With invaluable ideas and advice from a host of experts—from former Top Chef host and celebrity chef Katie Lee to dating expert Rachel Greenwald to Bank of Mom and Dad host Farnoosh Torabi—Your So-Called Life is ideal for every young woman at a crossroads, looking for a career, a soulmate, a home.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 14, 2010
    ISBN9780062010858
    Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now
    Author

    Andrea Lavinthal

    Andrea Lavinthal is a beauty editor. Jessica Rozler works in book publishing. They are the co-authors of Friend or Frenemy? and The Hookup Handbook. Both live in New York City.

    Read more from Andrea Lavinthal

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      Book preview

      Your So-Called Life - Andrea Lavinthal

      Part I

      GPS for Your So-Called Life: How Did You Get Here and Where Are You Going?

      In order to know where we’re going, we have to know where we came from—or some shit like that. Anyway, think of this part of the book as our version of The History Channel, minus the programming on World War II, signs of the apocalypse, and the truth behind The Da Vinci Code. Here, we take a look at the changing face of adulthood, from Before the Common Era to the present TMI Era, a time when our life choices are endless and we feel the need to write about it all over Facebook and Twitter. (@everyone-in-the-freaking-universe: should I choose the honey mustard, Grey Poupon, spicy mustard, chipotle mayo, or horseradish?)

      One

      Looking Back: The Former Face of Adulthood (You Know, Before There Was Botox and Restylane)

      What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents, they ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

      —???

      Pop quiz: Who is quoted as saying the above? Was it:

      a. Andy Rooney

      b. Your crotchety eighth-grade English teacher

      c. Yoda

      d. Plato

      ACTUALLY, THIS is kind of a trick question. The O.G. deep thinker himself, Plato, is widely believed to have uttered these words in the fourth century BCE. However, that was waaaay before we had iPhones, Facebook, or Google, so there’s really no way to verify that it happened.

      Arguments about attribution aside, we use a quip about kids in a book that details the growing pains of real adulthood to make a point: Intergenerational squabbling is an age-old tradition, kind of like prostitution. Although the lyrics might change with the times, the song remains the same. The elders think the young’uns are selfish and amoral slutbags, hell-bent on polluting society, while the young’uns think the elders are stodgy old squares, hell-bent on sucking the fun out of life. This battle is probably because, as the years go by, adults tend to forget the agony and ecstasy of growing up, and younger peeps often lack the life experience and self-awareness to recognize their moments of foolishness. Remember when you were too immature to realize that spandex bicycle shorts plus a skirt did not equal a cute look? Oh, the follies of youth! OK, to be fair, there are plenty of older selfish and amoral slutbags (see GOSSELIN, JON; or pretty much anyone else on a reality television show, with the WOODS, TIGER; and JAMES, JESSE), and there are certainly younger squares (see PHILLIPS, JENNY, that tattletale who cried to her mother that you dipped her fingers in warm water to make her pee when she fell asleep early during a slumber party in seventh grade), but that’s a whole other book.

      As you move into your redo-berty years, you’ll find yourself trapped between two worlds—the elders and the young’uns. On one hand, you’ll be the recipient of condescending advice from certain members of the older generation who accidentally-on-purpose forgot what life was like during the transition period to adulthood. Sure, growing up happened a lot earlier in decades past because options were limited compared to the multitude of choices we have today. These elders will insist that they seamlessly and stoically made the jump to big-kid status and all of its big-kid responsibilities, and they’ll offer up variations on the old line When I was your age, I had to walk ten miles in the snow to get to school. (When I was your age, I had three kids and a house, and I didn’t think twice about it.) That might be partially true, but they still experienced self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and the excitement of growing up for real, and if you don’t believe us, you obviously never watched Mad Men. It’s just that this anxiety and fear wasn’t as public as it is now, and often, it manifested itself later on in the form of midlife crisis. (For more information on digital communication and its effects on your so-called life, check out Chapter 3.)

      Some old’uns might go so far as to insist that you’re not actually a grown-up unless you’re married with children, and they’ll prod you to get on with it or settle down to match expectations of adulthood that are left over from their generation.

      On the other hand, you might catch yourself slipping into the role of an elder. You’ll shake your head at that girl in the mall who must have been raised by wolves—and very slutty wolves, at that—because no mother in her right mind would let her young daughter leave the house rocking microscopic jean shorts a la Daisy Duke and a full face of makeup a la What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? You’ll fear for our future when Time magazine runs yet another alarmist story about whatever awful thing kids are supposedly doing these days. (What’s with all of these middle schoolers sexting and, um, sexing? When we were that age, we either steered clear of the boys because we didn’t want to get cooties, or we were preoccupied with more pressing matters like teasing our bangs and singing Madonna songs into a hairbrush while we danced around our bedrooms.) You’ll feel moments of panic as a younger generation comes up and does things differently than you did. All of this is only natural—just like our favorite word, puberty.

      We guess what we’re trying to say is that even though the face of adulthood is morphing thanks to our wider variety of options in life, some things never change. There will always be the angst about growing up, the Peter Pans (and the Wendys who love them), the Holden Caulfields, the rock ’n’ rollers, and the late bloomers.

      Now, let’s look at some events throughout history that affected the how, when, and why we grow up.

      THE EVOLUTION OF ADULTHOOD: A SEMIRECENT HISTORY OF GROWN-UP MILESTONES (YEAH, WE’RE FOCUSING ON WOMEN)

      THE THIRD AND FOURTH CENTURIES BCE: While classical Greece hardly constitutes semirecent history, we wanted to throw this one in here for our man Plato. For obvious reasons (duh, the absence of Google), learning the average life expectancy in the days of Zeus proves to be a difficult task, but it is believed that most people didn’t make it past forty years of age. (Plato must have taken good care of himself because lived to about eighty years young.) Knowing the short life expectancy of the ancient Greeks, we imagine the wild younger generation that was admonished in the opening quote of this chapter as a bunch of unruly eight-to ten-year-olds, drunk off wine and defacing Doric columns as they roamed the streets in depraved mobs—kind of like A Clockwork Orange, only with toga-clad grade schoolers.

      To put things in perspective, a girl who lived during this time period married off around age fourteen or fifteen, and wasn’t considered a true woman, or—stifle your giggles—a true gyne, until she had her first child. (Girls and women were classified by sexual maturity and marital status. "Kore" referred to prepubescents; a parthenos was an unmarried virgin who had already gotten her period; a married woman who hadn’t had a kid yet got labeled as a nymphe; and married moms took the gyne label. Yet for some reason, You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Gyne doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

      OTHER DAYS OF YORE: We know, we know. This still isn’t considered semirecent history, but we wanted to show you that you don’t have things so bad if you, say, have a crappy job or a nonexistent love life. For example, according to the book Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World, by Dorothy A. Mays, in the seventeenth century, the average life expectancy for women was slightly less than forty-two years, with maternal death during childbirth playing a big role in shortening the life. Also according to the book, the average age of marriage for the ladies in colonial America was twenty-two (later than we would have guessed), with a woman expecting to go through her first bout of labor about sixteen months after saying I do or Yea. Forget the honeymoon, because, typically, she would give birth every fifteen to twenty months during her next twenty years of life. Which sounds absolutely exhausting to

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