54. The Week in Me
Most importantly, as we trudge our way to the local European Wax Center to rip off the remaining figurative stubble of 2023, I need to know:
I don’t know if I have a majestic list of resolutions to offer you. I have wants. I want my work to be published and I’d like to get paid for a piece. I want to hit at least 2,000 subscribers here. I would like to finish the first draft of my novel: about 100 more pages of traumatic recall. I want to figure out my career, because I think I really need to pivot to events full time even if it means taking a 50,000 dollar pay cut. I want to be on more podcasts. I want to publish a chapbook I have been working on. I want to conduct my first journalistic interview. I want a montage of the nights people assume I have: big hair and big flirtations and big Uber bills to get home at 4am. I want to go on more walks and find shoes that make walking easier for my military-discharge flat feet but do not compromise my Tom of Finland drip. I want to receive compliments and praise and devotions as good as those I give, even as good as the ones I just give to girls on the street. I want to use the word “just” less frequently. I want people to take pictures of me, on their phones. I want to see Brian Wilson live. I want to not lose a friend this year, to death, to life. I want to dance inside four sweating walls to Robyn songs. I want to love myself. I want a fucking grilled cheese.
I want to be happy.
Phew. So. Instead of another winding road or ten sitting in your inbox around the same topic of “new year, new beginnings” and motivational mantras and achievements of the year…here’s why I don’t drink.
15 was a hard year. The friends my mother had arranged for me had mutinied against me in an AOL chatroom. I had been told how weird I was. A freak. My brother, my 8-year-old brother, was called “deranged.” One of their boyfriends, an oil slick named Dave Palmieri, had logged on to tell me that I was a loser. I sat there for two hours watching my only friends, to make this clear for the younger folks reading, flood me with snake emojis and leak audio saying that I totally approved Kanye West calling me a “bitch” he made famous in his new single. My parents had to physically turn off the computer and pull me away. I spent that summer, after freshman year at a private school where I didn’t bother to make friends because my real friends would be waiting for me in front of Spindler’s Bakery on the Boulevard every Friday night - catatonic. Not leaving my room. Watching dark movies I shouldn’t have watched yet. I don’t remember the details but I know that summer is there. I didn’t speak.
And yes. My mom arranged my middle school friends for me. My childhood best friend, who I had met in my Lilliputian 4-year-old frame, who had shown me Back to the Future for the first time, who my dad called Shellsea, whose house I left kicking and screaming in a Minnie Mouse ballet costume at five as my mom huffed “bitch” at me, and I had burst apart. I won’t litigate that now - seeing this (she is reading; she always reads) is likely as hard for her to swallow as it is for me to write. (I love you very much, Chelsea.) I had experienced my first suicidal considerations in the wake of losing my sister, calmly telling my parents at 13 that I didn’t want to live anymore.1There were therapists who sat at the foot of my twin bed who might as well have prescribed aspartame - sweet like Orbit and leaving me hungry. My mom asked her friend if her daughter wouldn’t mind asking me to sit with her at lunch. I did. Those girls, the Bitch Clique, as their black and HTML gradient Internet profiles named them, a roster of initials that rarely matched mine, did become my friends, in that my house was the one where Angela and Aundrea and Ashlyn and the boys who bullied me in grammar school now made out behind me in the dark, while I watched the Blockbuster copy of The Mist we had decided to rent in my woodwalled basement, my dad’s collection of Hess trucks in glass behind the bar. In that my mom was caddy, to take us to see John Tucker Must Die, to the Meadowlands flea market to buy cherry blossom Louis Vuitton knockoffs. In that my mom was Val the Impaler, insisting I get my second holes pierced because these skinny white bitches “cool” girls were all doing it. (I had mine done by my childhood pediatrician and honorary grandfather, Dr. Vanore, and they grow infected to this day. A hard ball of pus and shampoo and slept-on hair as a biannual reminder to reject performity conformity.) In that I, the one to lose her virginity at least a half-decade after their cherry blossoms were popped, was the one who taught the girls what “Rubbers, Jimmy hats, CONDOMS? Ringing a bell? GIRLS.” were when they started sleeping with their greasy boyfriends at 13. I had learned what condoms were from a Golden Girls episode. I thought that lamb skin condoms had fur on them, and I was too embarrassed to use the family computer to ask if the fur lined the outside or the inside.
I was used. For my finished basement. For my mom’s ache for me to be normal, and for her gas money. And after Beth Bruno stole my Timberlands from my bedroom and wore them to school the next day, my hierarchy in the group flipped. She stole my shoes, and my precarious spot. I was weird, they knew: I liked the Beatles, and I wore Converses until I was told those were loser shoes. I turned down the Easter parade of rainbow Dooney and Burke bags my mom would bring home from Nordstrom. I didn’t shop at Abercrombie: they didn’t sell black tank tops, and they only made clothes for skinny people - I felt guilt buying a pair of cooltone rainbow fingerless gloves for 4.95 on clearance. I read for pleasure. I used big words. I didn’t cheer. I would only get a base tan at the tanning booth, not bake myself into their blackfish shades.2
My weirdness had been permitted, even beyond the mom mall drives and the Coach wristlets for every birthday - I was loyal. I was a scent they had not sprayed yet. Dragonfruit or oud amidst all of the Cucumber Melon and Love Spell. I could give them a $2 word for an essay; I could be the person who wouldn’t tell the others when they wanted to play Nancy Drew computer games in their attic, an activity we were violently wrested from by social arbitration before the age it should have been traded in for more mature fare.3
But with Beth stealing my shoes, the turntables had…you know. I got called “vaca” - a cow - in vague MySpace posts, the summer I finally mustered the courage to buy a brown and turquoise Donna Karan bikini from Macys. I have never worn a bikini again. I don’t think I’ve worn brown or turquoise as an adult, either.
So I spent New Year’s that year alone. No parentless parties, no parties where the parents sat watching a movie pretending there weren’t loose gangly toddlers quoting Family Guy and trying to drunkenly finger girls whose mothers they knew, upstairs. No small pack of bespectacled friends having a Lord of the Rings marathon and playing Clue, their braces a nest of popcorn leavings. I was alone. My parents were at the Olivos’ house. I sat at the base of their dining room curio and felt the most alone I had ever felt.
Just like Nick Miller in the New Girl episode “Virgins,” I came to a truth: alcohol makes you happy when you’re sad. I had seen dark movies. I had read issues of STAR Magazine with Paris Hilton drunkenly dancing like a woman donning a tree with its Christmas angel. I had not fallen asleep during the school assemblies about drunk driving. I knew the transformative powers of that liquid. I decided my sadness would go away.
I rooted through the curio until I found an electric blue bottle of SKYY vodka. It had surely been given to my parents at a wedding. My parents are not drinkers: my mom has barely drunk since she got married. My dad has an occasional dinner beer and an occasional cranberry-vok when everyone is asleep. I saw him stumble over a step coming home from a coworker’s wedding at 25 or so and my brother and I gasped and cheered. It was our first sighting of our dad drunk. (He denies this happened.) They wouldn’t miss the bottle. The contents were clear. Water could top it.
I opened the little bottle and put it to my little mouth and tipped. Tipped, then tipped away. I, in all of my wisdom gleaned from Norman Lear shows and James Patterson books and Marilyn Monroe movies, at 15 did not know that you chase a shot. I had coated every cell of my mouth with the taste of nail polish remover.
I spit. I ate half a tub of Duncan Hines vanilla cake frosting from a kitchen cabinet. I never drank again.
I have been asked, 1500 times, why I don’t drink. “Is it okay to ask” rarely. “Was your father an alcoholic” often. “Did you get violated or something” more than you could fathom in polite company. My answer now is my answer then: I can not hold my liquor. I am not emotionally primed to drink in moderation: I barely live in moderation, and I certainly don’t feel in it. I am an alcoholic without ever swallowing a shot. I consider drinking only in my darkest moments. When I lost my best friend last year, I screamed in Matt’s arms to let me get the aged Dewar’s (a work gift I kept in sentiment) from the pantry. Only a way to numb pain. Forget. Not be in my labyrinthine daggered mind. Rarely a curiosity as to the taste of a chocolate stout or an Earl Grey gin. Never a salted-rim path to dance on the bar, or the table. I’ve done all that: lampshade on my head, red lipstick all over a boy’s Kohl’s flannel shirt, underwear in my back pocket, torn rotator cuff from moshing at a basement show, falling down the damn stairs4…Stone Cold” Steve Sober. I should never have a favorite drink. I should never have too much to drink. I should never drink. And I haven’t, and I will continue not to. My friends have evolved from kids who called me a narc to friends who are grateful I will run out for a nostalgic bottle of Boone’s Farm at 10pm, have room to drive the pool noodles out to our friend’s Fourth of July party, will drive them home, will roll the window down with zestful speed - I learned my lesson after Kaitlyn Mills vomited in my passenger pocket.
I don’t drink. I can’t. It remains the only good decision I have ever made, I joke.5 And the most loving I have made for myself.
I still have those Converses they harangued me into stashing away in a small closet. They carried my flat feet through high school and have the Bright Eyes lyrics on the toe to prove it. I will never get rid of them, no matter how little they serve me while wearing them to concerts these days.
They are my Spite-Tops. They’re not going anywhere.
And now, your recs…
To read:
I wrote a bonus post for you this week. Starting in January, this movies post will be PAID, so please consider paying. I’ve set my subscription to the cheapest it can go. Also, if you Venmo me even like five dollars @taragiancaspro and type “gossip” in the note, I will add you as a paid subscriber. I really don’t care WHAT you pay at this point. It would just tickle me to make money from this newsletter.
53. What I Watched in December
The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011, dir. Ari Aster) This is Ari Aster’s 2011 thesis that I left off the list by mistake. Probably because I watched it at Chris and Ali’s house and almost immediately fell down the dark stairs after. It was the scariest injury I’ve experienced (I hit my head - HARD - and apparently kept bringing up Natasha Richard…
I also loved
’s review of Saltburn, as I covet and pine after everything she writes.
My childhood best friend Chelsea, mentioned above, is a professional book cover designer and her work was profiled in the New York Times! Like the Golden Globes, the New York Times isn’t worth wiping your ass with unless your friend is mentioned. And my friend was mentioned! The New York freaking Times!! Read about book cover design here.
Mothers of Irish step dancers (Step moms?) are freaking out about trans kids in Irish step-dancing. Much like the rivers the dancing is named for, gender is fluid! Sign this petition to protect trans dancers.
Very confidently,
is my favorite essayist, and not just because I housesit for her sometimes. It’s not just because she is a fellow Cancer and also very very hot and a fellow Housewives stan or that I saw Point Break for the first time in her living room. She is just a deeply truthful writer. She is the Adrian Monk of writing, connecting seemingly unrelated themes with a “here’s what happened” and ludicrous ease. I didn’t WANT to find myself in her latest essay. But! I! Did! You should subscribe toGrief Beachhere and read her latest post about whales.Thank you to
for including this Twitter thread on Sammy Davis, Jr. in a recent newsletter. Tap dance is an art form that reminds me that it is a very, very good thing to be alive.In somewhat less uplifting news, Sammy Davis, Jr. was a freak. This Rialto Report long read about him is…you know what? People are getting fired for advocating against genocide. Fuck it. This world is too stupid to be a prude.
Please read the
Dudes Rock recap of 2023. Each sentence is a pile of emeralds:
My writing goal for next year is to impress
enough with my work that I am asked to contribute to the 2024 roundup. End of goals.To watch:
read last week’s post and asked (through ) if this was the Leif Erickson song to which I had been referring. It’s NOT, but it is INSANE, and it is ENCOURAGED viewing.This is literally just Simone when I threaten to put her in a little wHig:
This is literally just Lugosi:
Actually my babies:
Various and sundry:
Cha cha real smooth:
me:
As an even numbers OCD lifer, I hope this decidedly even year brings you good health, laughter, happiness, good kissers, great breath for you and all around you, dreams, miracles, snow, lemonade, Spice World finally streaming or at least you gaining the wisdom to buy a cheap DVD player, and limited diarrhea.
Until then, this will be me on Sunday night closing out 2023:
Love you bitches,
TG
It would not be the last time I have come close to ending it all over the loss of a best friend.
If you know me in real life, you are agog in shock right now. Yes. I used to pop on those little steampunk vampire-ass goggles and stand in a tanning booth, with headphones feeding out to my turquoise iPod mini, blaring Jack’s Mannequin or Cartel.
(That age is maybe 86. If any of you want to play a Nancy Drew PC game like next week, please call me.)
53. What I Watched in December
The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011, dir. Ari Aster) This is Ari Aster’s 2011 thesis that I left off the list by mistake. Probably because I watched it at Chris and Ali’s house and almost immediately fell down the dark stairs after. It was the scariest injury I’ve experienced (I hit my head - HARD - and apparently kept bringing up Natasha Richard…
But not really. It’s SO not a joke.
This is beautiful personal writing Tara! Thank you so much for the mention 💕
Re the photo, Are you 4th from left in the red dress?