girls

Kiss My Grits, 2017

Penni Jones2 Comments

We can admit that 2017 was a shit show, right? We were all so eager for 2016 to get packing that we didn’t even consider that 2017 might be even worse. And it was much worse.

But I’ve decided to search for silver linings.  For one thing, my book On the Bricks came out in the beginning of the year. Here are some of the other best things about 2017:

Most stalk-worthy baby: Mindy Kaling gave birth to Katherine Swati on December 15. In true boss form, she refuses to tell us who the father is. This leaves us all free to believe that the father is BJ Novak. And if it’s not him, I don’t want to know.

kaling

Best movie ruined by a sexual predator: For at least a month I was obsessed with Baby Driver.  The last time I fell this hard in love with a soundtrack was when Natural Born Killers came out. And the car chases had the fourteen-year-old boy in me boning out BIG TIME! But then the Kevin Spacey scandal broke and I haven’t been able to watch Baby Driver ever since. It’s a good thing I saw it five times before we heard the news.

babydriver

Best TV show I started watching in 2017 even though it came out in 2016: The Good Place- holy shirtballs, you guys. I watched it because my cousin Chris told me to and for some reason I treat him like my life coach. What could have been cheesy is clever and full of existential questions, made easy to digest with a huge dose of quirky humor.

thegoodplace

Girliest habit that I picked up at the beginning of the year and dropped before December: Fingernail shellac- it looks great but you have to sit there for an hour once very couple of weeks to keep them from looking  gross. And since I’m not great at keeping things up, mine ended up looking great for two weeks and then trashtastic for about three.

shellac

Something I had at the beginning of 2017 but don’t have at the end: my uterus.

99problems

This year’s Kanye: Tyrese Gibson totally out-Kanyed Kanye this year. He repeatedly posted videos of himself on social media crying about his divorce and custody battle as well as complaining about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.  In his douchiest move, he hired an airplane to fly a banner over his ten-year-old daughter’s school. The banner read “NO MATTER WHAT, DADDY LOVES YOU SHAYLA”. The subtext being that if she wasn’t embarrassed enough already by his social media rants, she would certainly be mortified by the banner at school.

Tyrese Gibson

Show that ended with us saying “WTF?”: Girls. Hannah somehow had a black baby. I guess since they never actually mentioned the baby daddy’s race (South Asian), we weren’t supposed to notice that he wasn’t African-American. And then she and Marnie went somewhere (I think it was upstate New York but I’ve already kind of forgotten) to live together and raise the baby even though Marnie was always terrible.

girlsbaby

Best reboot:  Will & Grace– the first episode was a little awkward, but by the third episode they were back in their rhythm like they’d never been gone. And let’s be honest. We need Karen Walker in our lives now more than ever.

willandgrace

My favorite food of the year: this freaking taco cake made by Liz at the Dexter Bakery.

tacocake

Most potentially exciting thing about 2018: Amanda Bynes is planning a comeback and if that doesn’t happen I’m done with EVERYTHING.

bynes

 

 

Marnie is the worst

Penni Jones1 Comment

I have a love/hate relationship with the show Girls. The first season was a breath of fresh air. It felt honest and funny while not shying away from the gritty turmoil that is the 20’s. It evolved over the next few seasons into an annoying bitch fest. The four main characters were constantly bickering and neglecting one another as their narcissism increased in intensity. Season 5 brought it all back around for me, except for Marnie. She sucks so hard.

marnie
Your problems mean nothing to me, peasant.

The character arcs in Girls have been both frustrating and interesting in varying degrees, depending on the character. Though Hannah is a spoiled, self-centered brat, she is talented and unashamed of her flaws. We’ve seen her go from aimless writer to a teacher pretending to be a grown-up, and hopefully back to following her passion because she’s realized that’s her only path.  Shoshanna and Jessa have also been on paths of self-discovery that have set them up to mature and grow. Even the under-utilized Elijah is growing up. Then there’s freaking Marnie.

shoshanna
The sheltered Jewish virgin is now a worldly Japanese girl.

The series began with Marnie as an uptight art curator. A rich girl with excellent taste, and a preference for perfection that bordered on OCD. Then she decided to wanted to be a singer. By season 5 she’s in a band with her ridiculously annoying ex-husband. And they’re already successful, because this is Marnie we’re talking about. The problem is that following her bliss caused her no suffering. Quitting her job to pursue a dream never put her in a position to live off of bread and peanut butter for a week. Her teeth are just as white and her hair is just as shiny as it ever was. Even going through a divorce hasn’t seemed to have a maturing effect on her. She’s gone back to using Ray for her errand boy, just like in season 3. She still gives zero shits about anyone’s problems but her own. And she’s super annoyed by how her ex-husband is handling the divorce, because it’s about her after all.

adam
Started as the worst character and now he’s the only reason to watch the show. 

The writing on Girls has been equal parts brilliant and frustrating throughout the series. But character development like Adam’s from season 1 to 2 have kept it interesting. I don’t know if Marnie is the result of a dropped ball in the writers’ room, or if she’s meant to be an example of how much some people are just truly awful. We all know jerks who never learn lessons, or who never learn to think beyond their own needs even when their friends are sinking. So maybe Marnie is just an asshole.

What’s up?

Penni Jones4 Comments

I recently discovered that we have Vevo. My time is being sucked down a rabbit hole full of Alice in Chains videos. I’ve crawled out to catch up with my Goats (I’m trying out nicknames for my readers. I figured Goats is preferable to Cows. Thoughts?).

I learned two days ago that Gloria Vanderbilt is Anderson Cooper’s mom. The fact that I didn’t know this completely strips me of my pop culture professor title. And as a dear friend pointed out last night, I’ve also lost points from the gays. I promise to work even harder to regain your trust.

We’re still playing ‘is he or isn’t he a he’ with Bruce Jenner’s rumored sex change. The Daily Mail has reported that Bruce has selected the name ‘Bridgitte’ as his lady name. Anyone who reads the Daily Mail knows that it’s slightly more accurate than interpreting your dog’s poo for news. So maybe he’s a Bruce and maybe he’s a Bridgitte. Either way, he or she stopped being relevant in or around 1986.

The third season of ‘Girls’ just finished, and I’m not feeling too optimistic about the future. At least half of the season was spent on the friends infighting. I know that young women can be catty and mean, but these chicks are horrible to each other. None of them wants any of the others to enjoy a shred of happiness. It’s a collective of miserable people, and the parts that made it funny have disappeared. My vote for funniest grungy chick friends show has been shifted to ‘Broad City’.  I hope ‘Girls’ can recapture the honesty and humor that made it a great show in the first season. But I’m not sure if I can stick around long enough to find out. Who am I kidding? I’ll give it another season.

The Lindsay Lohan documentary series (or as I like to call it, ‘The Show About That Girl We Stopped Caring About Five Years Ago’) on the OWN Network has experienced a ratings drop. It’s been beat out by ‘SpongeBob Square Pants’ (that’s not a joke). I haven’t watched the Lindsay show, but my friend Melodie has. Here’s what she had to say: ‘From now on I’m going to pretend it’s called LINDSAY! and not boring old LINDSAY like it really is. If anything needs the added pizzazz of an exclamation point it’s a show where you just watch a Troubled Starlet sift through her storage containers and pretend to be inspired by meditation cards.’

Thanks for catching up with me. I have to go now. Vevo has a selection of Hole videos that are calling my name.

xo

SGSC