Read Online I'm Only Here for the WiFi by Chelsea Fagan - Free Book Online Page B

simultaneously mean so much and so little as these? If you’re in your twenties, it’s pretty much a guarantee that your friends, potential dates, or significant others are going to be hounding you to “go out” and ostensibly make the most of your evening every single night. Monday, your best friend got an office job, so you have to hit a club. Tuesday, someone got fired, so you have to commiserate over happy hour. Wednesday, everyone is hitting dollar draft nights at that bar that won’t stop playing “These Boots Were Made for Walking” as though that were ever a good song. Thursday has been Thirsty Thursday since you were sixteen goddamn years old. Friday is date night. Saturday night has open bar at that pretentious lounge until eleven. Sunday is for the Bloody Mary brunch that somehow bleeds into early Monday morning. It’s inescapable.
    Of course, you can’t say yes to all of these; you would die either of alcohol poisoning or starvation from no longer being able to afford to feed yourself. It’s simply not an option, and even if you’re getting taken out on a date one or two nights a week, it’s not going to offset the cost of dancing in a circle with your friends the nights before and after. It’s simply not an option to do it all at once. And, let’s be honest, we can’t quite go out the way we used to. It’s tough but necessary to admit for a twentysomething that we’re “young” but we’re not “that young,” and constant binge drinking with friends is among the first things to get hacked off that list.
    It’s fairly easy to get stuck in the social quicksand of going out every night to drink; it’s an obvious, universally accessible way to get everyone together and hanging out. It also enables everyone to be well-lubricated and capable of engaging in the various shenanigans and hijinks they won’t permit themselves in the unforgiving light of day. And despite the insistence of many bars on charging upwards of $12 per cocktail, it can often be fairly affordable. But even if you’re drinking at someone’s house and therefore spending less on your night out than you would seeing a single movie, it is clearly unhealthy to find yourself constantly drinking every time the clock strikes five.
    On the other hand, nights alone with take-out Thai, a rerun of your favorite TV show, and browsing Tumblr for vegan recipes to laugh at aren’t going to be cute seven nights a week, either. Clearly, you need to strike a balance, but no one’s there to tell us where to set the limits. If we listened to our parents, we would never leave the house except to go to work, on bike rides, or to check out a new museum exhibit that doesn’t interest us. If we listened to our “party friends,” we would probably be addicted to crystal meth by now. If we accepted all the invites in our OKCupid inbox, we would become a less appealing version of a Katherine Heigl movie, perpetually rolling our eyes at lame first dates. (And/or we would become those heinous semihumans who literally only accept dates in order to exploit an unsuspecting suitor to get a free dinner, but those people are monsters, andyou’re all cool and perfect.) There are many things we could be doing with our social calendar, and even with such pressing options on all sides, the balance can be struck.
    As I mentioned before, we face a palpable divide in our twenties between those of us who have “real, big kid” jobs, and those of us who are left bowing at the altars of tips and retail. And though it is pretty clear that the “cool” ones—at least the ones able to look at friends with a subtle mix of pity and disdain at brunches—are the ones with professional jobs, this is one category in which they undoubtedly lose. Though having a professional job may provide you with the kind of disposable income that allows you to frequent