The User's Guide to Keeping a 24 year old lover

To be perfectly frank with you, not every one will understand your new fascination with your love object. But, as Woody Allen once famously said, "The heart wants what it wants." In their deepest yearnings, they all either wish that they could be you and are secretly jealous. Oftentimes, this jealousy may manifest itself as snide comments, eyerolls and all manner of knowing eyebrows raised. Stay the course and remember that few have the sort of mettle necessary for such pursuits. Nor the stamina. More on that later.

Initially, the most difficult aspect of dating a 24 year old once you are past the age of 35 is breaking the news to those closest to you. As might be predicted, the initial reaction that you will probably receive will be that of incredulity and scorn, particularly amongst your closest loved ones (see: family and ex-girlfriends).

No, she's incredibly mature. No, that's not code for big tits. Yes, I'm really seeing her and it's not just about sex.

Inevitably, you might be tempted to get into discussion about the finer points of a taut 24 year old body. This is not without merit, but please be advised that should you want to be viewed as a grown up conducting a Relationship instead of a "Hook-up" (in the parlance of the subject in question), it is advised to exercise some restraint. After all, discretion is the better part of valor.

You might also find yourself on the unpleasant receiving end of a great deal of ire from ex-girlfriends, particularly if they themselves are over the age of 30. Reactions may range from suppressed disdain to bitter rage to mocking laughter. Your response to any variation of the question: "Are you fucking kidding me?" should be polite restraint. You are, after all, a gentleman. A gentleman who is currently enjoying the nubile charms of a young, impressionable lady. There is no need to rub salt in the wound, even in the cases of the most bitter shrews who have been cast aside for greener pastures. A curt "Thank you." will suffice for any variation on the comment, "Good luck with that."

Verbal Cues:

As an individual over the age of 35, you might find it informative that the generational divide used to be considered as intervals of a decade. Thanks to the acceleration of the internet age, the cultural reference points that people once used to identify each other are now considered within five year brackets. Thus, in your case, you are considered three generations older than your paramour. Not to worry that your squeeze was being born as you were in college. Below is a handy guide to what to talk about with your 24 year old lover. Bearing in mind that your lover was born in the late 80's and was hardly cognizant of pop culture trends until well into the late-90s, here are some cultural reference points for your edification:

The Thong Song will have figured into the score of her early life. Marky Mark will be more famous for dropping his Calvin Kleins than for his fledgling rap career. Ditto for his Scorsese film career. Britney Spears will have been a major role model before she lost her shit. She probably danced to Who Let the Dogs Out at her middle school dance. By the way, it's called Middle School--not junior high school. She wasn't really aware when Clinton was president because she was four when he was elected.

Also, be aware that the average 24 year old's speech is peppered with two verbal tics that most 20-somethings echo unconsciously. Call it something akin to speech patterning that self-identifies--not unlike cats purring at each other. The first, and most obvious, is the complete inability to express oneself verbally without the frequent use of the word, "like." "Like" rarely refers to an actual emotion or affection. Instead, it is used as an emphasizer or verbal pause. For example, "He had, like, the biggest penis I've ever seen." or "I don't, like, understand what you're talking about."

The second verbal peculiarity that you may come across is their propensity to inflect each sentence as if it were a question. This is not an indication that your 24-year-old is asking questions. No, in fact, this generation has been raised to be incredibly self-important having been told that They Are So Special from their first beginnings. The inflection is a method for them to make themselves more agreeable to others of their age and employed as a tool to deflect gravitas and perhaps, in some cases, to divert attention away from the content of their statements. "So, like, Rachel is such a bitch? You know?"

Activities:

Eating Habits: In most cases, your 24 year old's eating habits will veer between the shockingly disgusting and the most spartan. She will in all likelihood eat her feelings and ricochet between self-loathing and childlike abandon in regards to food. If she is like most 20-somethings, she will have struggled with her love/hate relationship with food. Luckily for her, her metabolism will still stand up to the revolting amounts of Hostess cupcakes she stuffs into her gob while nobody is looking. In the interim, she will insist that she eats healthy and will mask her food issues under the guise of "food allergies." The most popular of these will be "vegan," or "gluten-free" which will allow her to acceptably indulge her twisted relationship with food in public. The short answer here is to stock your fridge with green juice, diet Coke, Red Bull and Haagen Dazs. This should satisfy most needs.

Going Out: If you are over 35 and not a douchebag, we will safely assume that you are past the age where you think it's fun to go out to loud bars with overpriced drinks and people running to the bathroom to do coke every five minutes. This is not the case with your 24 year old. This is, in fact, the playground for 24 year olds. If you are making plans to pursue a relationship with a 24 year old, be prepared to spend a good amount of time in these social settings. These sort of venues are populated by girls who drink too much and like to employ the word "Whoooo!" as mating call and man-boys who spend a good deal of their free time at the gym, their disposal income on tight-fitting shirts and their social time staring at their iphones pretending to ignore the women in their general area. Stiff upper lip, soldier. Nobody said this would be easy.

Sex: Let's face it. This is probably the major activity and source of interest in pursuing a relationship with a 24 year old. Unless your 24 year old was a major slut, she will probably be less confident and practiced in this area than your more seasoned lovers. Though you will likely have to endure your share of toothy head and fumblings, they can be more teachable than other lovers who will have had more experience upon which to draw. Remember: teaching is a noble art and your lover's young, pert body will probably make up for a certain artlessness. All that we can say to you is that we wish you luck: hydrate and prepare yourself for vigorous sessions. 24 year olds are full of energy.

Exit Strategies:

Assuming that at a certain point, you will tire of being in a relationship with your 24 year old and will finally come to terms that it has run its course, you will have to devise a foolproof exit strategy in order to gracefully extricate yourself without gnawing your foot off to escape.

The average 24 year old becomes extremely attached and it is the rare one who will let you end the relationship without a great deal of recrimination and tears. This is to be expected. Here are some keys to ending things with a minimum of drama:

-Break up with her at her house so that you can leave. There is nothing worse than having a sobbing lover in your apartment who won't leave.
-Have plenty of tissue handy. -Bring chocolate and a season of Gilmore Girls on DVD for her to watch when you leave. The hijinks of fast-talking Lorelei will take her mind off of you for a while. -Be prepared for many teary phone calls and meetings afterward. Alternatively, be prepared for a series of cringe-inducing break-up scenarios enacted on your doorstep. -Be cruel to be kind. You are doing nobody any favors by dragging this on.

Please be ever mindful of Dan Savage's Campsite rules for dating the younger kind: As with campers at campsites, the older partners of younger people should always leave 'em in better shape than they found 'em.

Happily Ever After:

So, let's assume that you find yourself feeling "something real" for your 24 year old. Let's say in the best case scenario, she returns your feelings (and it's not about being opportunistic and taking advantage of your career and income) and you decide to Live Happily Ever After. You'll have many happy years of marriage and child-rearing before she dumps you in her late 30's after realizing that you have taken the best years of her life and subsumed her needs to Find Out Who She Is to your domestic needs. Luckily, you'll have a good decade before she cottons on to the fact that perhaps she needed more time to figure herself out before you cast her into the role of Young Wife and Mother. With luck and some practice, you can start the cycle again and remind your ex-wife-to-be that she was, once upon a time, that 24 year old. Carpe diem.

Best of luck to you.

Remember: age ain't nothing but a number unless it's statutory!

Yoga Hate

Hello hate fans,

Yes, it's your local resident hater. It's been an extraordinary long time since my last post, but I've found myself inexplicably unable to summon up appropriate amounts of hate ever since last November. I've just been feeling, well, so damn hopeful that it was hard to dig up the hate. Fortunately for you, dear reader, I've not lost that hating feeling.

I wish I were one of those irrepressibly happy, sunny, optimistic people whose heart was big enough to accommodate all manner of people and annoyances. Indeed, Miss Cranky Pants grew up among the peace-loving hippies of NorCal. Despite what one might expect, it actually created a marked aversion to happy, shiny people. I embraced the dark cloud of crankiness around me like a warm blanket on a cold night and all those mellow hippie types be damned.

Alas, MCP is still a Californian and therefore enjoys her fair share of yoga. It keeps bitterness and crankiness at bay for a little while. Yet, irony of all ironies...MCP finds herself annoyed with her fellow yoga students. This, my friends, is the ultimate test of hateration. At a time when once is supposed to find peace and love for all sentient beings, I'm busy spewing mental venom and aggression from my sticky mat. It's not like Ashtanga yoga...it's more like Bitch Yoga.

My ire knows no bounds. I reserve a special kind of hate for people who are killing the yoga flow. I don't fault beginners as such, but I hold a real place of disdain for people who practice lazy yoga. You know what I mean: those slackers who don't hold the poses for as long as other people and who are clearly half-assing all of the poses. They are, in fact, riding off the energy coattails of their fellow yogis and I won't stand for it, dammit. It's just annoying that they get all the pay-off of good yoga energy without the work.

The second type of yogi that I find myself hating (perhaps even more passionately than our Lazy Yogi) is the Yogi Who Is Effortlessly Better Than Me. They say yoga is not a competition. That is utter bullshit. Everyone, I mean, everyone in class is trying to suss out the best student. Most of the time, I can assure you that it's not me which leads me to why I find yoga to be ultimately a practice in futility towards enlightenment and peace. I particularly hate those smug students who happen to be super-bendy and super-strong and are pretending like it's SO easy and that everyone isn't looking at them in envy. It's sort of like the guy driving the cherry-red Jaguar...What? Who, little old me? Yes. Go suck a curry egg.

So, in sum total, here's to Bitch Yoga and the ultimate competition towards enlightenment. Let the best yogi win.

SARAH PALIN

It's been a while.  But, there are a million and one reasons to truly hate on Sarah Palin--Alaska contribution to worldwide fascism.

Let's examine the issues, shall we?

Sarah Palin believes in abstinence education.  Let us not even begin to discuss the irony of her knocked-up, unmarried teenaged daughter.

Sarah Palin does not believe that human beings are responsible for global warming.  Obviously.  It is God's will that we live in a desert.  No worries, though, because the rich people will have built themselves water pods and colonized the moon by then.  Fuck everyone else, you poor, penniless bastards!

Sarah Palin believes in good-old fashioned family values.  Weeeeell, what about your Downs syndrome baby?  Doesn't staying home to raise one's family align with that stance?

Sarah Palin is under investigation for abuse of her power.  Frankly, this is page out of the Republican playbook.  

Sarah Palin left her little-ass Alaskan town with a huge debt for a money-sinking stadium.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't fiscal conservatism about not blowing your wad on stupid shit?

Sarah Palin likes to shoot things including wolves, caribou and believes that beluga whales should not be considered an endangered species.  She supports gun ownership, including handguns.  To her credit, if all of the young men growing up in the inner city manage to kill each other, we won't have to worry about that pesky prison-building/public school reform problem!

Sarah Palin opposes pro-choice.  I mean, she was able to pop five children out of that militant, barracuda vagina so WHY NOT YOU?!

Sarah Palin believes in oil-drilling in Alaska.  To curb our dependence on foreign oil, let's rape God-given American soil and stop giving money to those TERRORISTS and INFIDELS.  Oh, but exploring alternative forms of energy isn't that important...

Sarah Palin is swaying the women's vote.  Because that vagina of hers with teeth apparently is worth a couple of thousands of votes and American women have stopped thinking altogether.

This most recent post is for you, Sarah, you awful, fascist, corrupt, Republican whore.  Smooches.

Oh wait

So, I randomly ended up reading The Advocate in my doctor's waiting room...what The Advocate was doing in a stodgy midtown GP's office, I don't know...but here's a hilarious piece by Margaret Cho. Gay men and the women who love 'em. Dick o' clock, indeed.

Dick O'Clock

When out at the bars, Margaret Cho is every gay man’s best friend—that is, until last call.

By Margaret Cho

I am a big fan of going to gay bars. After a long, hard night walking all over a big stage in my new show, Beautiful, I need to be able to watch a good drag queen lip-synch perfectly to “Piece of Me” and have a very large and very strong drink, so my favorite place to go is the local gay bar with my most special gays.

Most fag hags agree that the best times they’ve ever had were at gay bars, sharing precious moments with their fags, drinking lovely pink cocktails and dancing and laughing the night away.

Until it becomes “dick o’clock.” You know what time that is, don’t you? It is when all the gay men in the club simultaneously start looking for dick. It happens all at once, usually around midnight or 1 a.m., generally earlier on the West Coast.

I am not sure how it starts. It may be that sudden realization that you are out on a weeknight, which a lot of gay men and fag hags like to do, because—let’s face it—weekends are for straight people. Since it is a weeknight, you probably need to get home and get in bed at some decent hour if you even want to pretend to try to keep your job.

So that means you need to get some dick, and get some dick fast, because procuring dick isn’t necessarily easy or quick—and we all know if we don’t pick carefully, we will wind up with dick we don’t want. Which isn’t always that bad, because dick is like pizza—even when it’s bad, it is still kind of good, unless it’s soggy.

But anyway, finding dick, good or bad, is no simple affair; it is a process, a lengthy one (Hee-hee, get it? I said “lengthy”), which may take up to an hour if you are picky and aren’t overly aggressive about it. Then you have to take that dick home—which can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on where you live in relation to the bar and if you are driving or taking public transportation. I think we should all be finding ways to get dick on public transportation because not only will you be saving time, you’ll be leaving behind a smaller carbon footprint.

If you do end up driving, you would still have to get that dick into your home, offer it a drink or a joint or a bump or a line or a pill, which you should be careful about because this can take a long time and be an unwelcome distraction from the next step, which is when you work that dick. Which could take between two minutes and 90 minutes, depending on how good it is and whether or not you gave them a drink or a joint or a bump or a line or a pill, if you need to do it more than once, etc. Then get rid of that dick, which should be quick, because after all you are both gay men and probably both need to work the next day.

Even if you are fairly speedy about all these steps, you still may not be able to go to bed right away because if the dick is especially good or bad, you will need to call your fag hag -- remember us? The ones you left at the bar to get some dick? And we’ll be there to dish with you about everything that happened. And then after all that come down off your “dick high,” which will mean you may not even close your eyes until 6 a.m.

I think this is all too much for you. We fag hags care about you. We don’t want to see you burn your dick candle at both ends. We think you should stay at the gay bar and just hang out with us. But we are fag hags, and we will love you even if you have big, dark dick circles under your eyes because you left us to get dick the night before and didn’t get any sleep, because we are awesome like that.

Comb Overs

Last weekend, Miss Cranky Pants found herself at her friendly neighborhood salon getting her little piggies all sexed up for summer. Sparkly and pink? Yes, please. Among the trashy magazines, the throat gripping smell of polisher remover and the low-grade roar of hairdryers, MCP spied an older man in a salon chair. He was as bald as an egg save for a muff of brown around the perimeter of his shining pate. Oh, and a handful of stringy strands just above his left ear. I couldn't help it. I tried not to stare. But, I failed.

He was regaling his poor stylist with the evils of artificial sweetener. He had sort of a honking, pedantic voice. He droned on like an autistic child and talked about how it's just deadly to eat fake sugar. No ma'am, you wouldn't ever catch him eating fake sugar. In fact, for him, it's just organic brown cane sugar, thank you very much. Anything else and you'd just about be asking for problems.

Apparently, his highly questionable style decision was not one of his current problems.

His poor stylist, choking on her giggles and making agreement-type sounds, was tasked with blowing out his fringe and carefully arranging his combover artfully over his pointy scalp. Oh, the humanity!

But, she soldiered on. She wielded her natural bristle round brush with all due gravity and curled under. Presumably to give his 'do some volume. She finished off with a smear of wax, firmly anchoring his combover down. No typhoon nor hurricane could disturb this baby. No ma'am, not at all. The only thing that was gonna get his goose in a gander was artificial sugar.

God, people are so weird.

PS: in the course of trying to find a suitable picture for this post, I ran into this little gem.

Wait--lemme quote the best line, "..the comb-over could, in a weird and not-altogether-serious sort of way, be seen as a sign of the kingdom of God. In the comb-over, we see a refusal to admit defeat, and the defiance of an evil world where men like us lose our hair. Rather than viewing it as a pathetic and unsightly act of desperation, perhaps the comb-over could be seen as one small act of protest - a proleptic signpost to that glorious eschatological day when there is enough hair to go around…"

Riiiiight...God loves you and therefore makes combovers possible. Nevermind about those poor children dying in Iraq...surely the grace of god is evident in combovers. Of course, I might argue that combovers might in fact be the work of satan, but...I'm not the one losing my hair, baldies.

Breeders

This post is not intended to be an indictment of all and sundried who decide to procreate. In fact, Miss Cranky Pants is even known to engage in cooing and baby-bouncing when the mood strikes. This post, however, is dedicated to parents of MCP's generation whose world has shrunken down to the size of a milk-splattered onesie.

Miss Cranky Pants used to know some very interesting, worldly folks. She ran with a sophisticated pack of multi-cultural, multi-lingual people who talked of culture, politics, movies and books. Over time, Miss Cranky Pants noticed that the people in her world started pairing off and disappearing. This is not unlike the scene in Never Ending Story where the world started to crumble from lack of imagination.

Her beloved friends began marrying, nesting etc. She has now noticed that her friends have started to produce issue, offspring, spawn...

What used to be discussions about European and American geo-politics has now devolved into discussions about baby's poopy schedules. They no longer go out, try new restaurants, travel to exotic foreign lands. The extent of their movie watching now involves animated figures. Their emails and blogs feature their drooling children and their latest exploits (Baby's first bong hit!) The expensive strollers, the bulky accoutrements, the baby voices...it's sort of like becoming Baby Mama Barbie with all the accessories.

Why must having children dictate The End of Everything Interesting? And to all the parents out there who are boring the rest of us with pictures of your children and their incredibly boring activities (Yeah, so your kid can walk. Guess what? So can most of us. Get over it.), know that nobody else finds your child as adorable/brilliant/fascinating/precious as you do, so please restrain yourself. Just like every generation thinks it invented sex, it seems that every parent thinks s/he created The Most Perfect Child. Well, there are 6 billion people on this planet so I guess parents of 5,999,999,999 are wrong.

So--kudos to my parents for hitting the jackpot!

Fake boobs

Miss Cranky Pants has been AWOL for a while now due to the demands of her job and busy social life (who am I kidding, here? My job is running my life.) BUT, in an effort to counteract the grievous muscular tension caused by her work, Miss Cranky Pants rallied her pals together for a day out at Inspa World (possibly the greatest place on the planet). A day of floating, naked time, kimchee eating and strategically placed high-powered jets...fabulous.

So, in the midst of my bliss in the giant hot tub, I witnessed to a woman in a very little bikini and very big fake boobs. Let it be noted that Miss Cranky Pants is not against plastic surgery. Actually, quite the contrary--she firmly believes in better living through chemistry and the scalpel...but, there was something about these boobs that were just not quite...right.

I mean, surely, this woman had every right to insert immovable faux-mammaries in her chest, if she wanted? Well, sure, but note that the name of this blog is hateration not live-and-let-live-aration...so, i gotta say that her boobs were like two halves of a grapefruit stuck on her chest...I found them repulsive and yet strangely fascinating. They didn't move at all when she moved. They didn't bounce when she bounced. They were, in essence, her anchor. I wanted to poke them to see if they were as hard as they looked. They looked concrete and utterly unbiodegradeable. How very ungreen.

It led me back to a time when a good friend of mine, C, decided to get fake boobs because she had been self-conscious about her chest her whole life. In fact, in the course of our friendship, I'd never seen her without her shirt on. What could make this otherwise out-going, smart and seemingly confident woman so neurotic about her boobs or lack thereof? Her response? "I just want to stop thinking about it."

So, she scraped her pennies together and got her boobs enhanced. Days after the surgery, I delivered arnica gel and chocolate to her door. Her boobs were high, huge and unmoving. Kind of like Kilimanjaro. She made me touch them. They felt like rocks inserted under her pectoral muscles.

But, in the end, I guess she made the best of it because she moonlighted as a stripper and made a fortune. So, the moral of the story is you reserve the right to get big fake boobs if you want and the rest of us reserve the right to gossip about how big and fake they are. Chacun a son gout, I suppose. And thank you to my genetic pool that has given me boobs that are beyond reproach.