You’d think by the age of 30, I would have gotten used to the rudeness of others. I would have just accepted that people, left to their own devices, are selfish, inconsiderate, and unreliable. But no, I’m still always surprised by bad behavior. Like, didn’t they have parents? Didn’t those parents drill the same things into their head that my parents drilled into mine? Absent parental dictates, aren’t these things just obvious? Don’t you know that when staying in somebody else’s house, you take your shoes off and keep your pants on? 

Apparently not. 

My roommate sent me a text (a text!) a week or so ago, asking me if her friend, Gabe, who was going to be in Boston, could “crash” with us this past weekend. I immediately wanted to say no, and resented that she had done it over text, which makes saying no harder. (Or at least saying no to people you will definitely see again.)  But I thought her use of the word “crash” suggested Gabe had some kind of business in Boston, and that he was only looking for a place to sleep. 

How wrong I was! I stayed out late on Friday, hoping Gabe and my roommate would both be asleep by the time I got home, and thus I’d avoid any awkward intros or small talk. We have a pull-out couch in our tiny living room, but the living room is so tiny that the sofa bed, once pulled out, takes up almost 80 percent of the space. So I knew I’d need to be quiet and careful to slip past the sleeping Gabe into my room, which opens directly onto our living room. 

When I opened our (unlocked) door at 2am, I did not find a sleeping Gabe in a dark room. Nope, instead I found a roly poly man in nothing but his underwear (and it appeared to be women’s underwear, which is neither here nor there, but which I would not have known had he just put on some FLIPPIN’ PANTS) on his laptop sitting in my favorite chair. I immediately recoiled at the thin layer of fabric that separated my beloved reading chair from this complete stranger’s scrotum. (Sorry for the image, everybody.) His shit was also everywhere, and his suitcase blocked the path to the kitchen. 

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I just skimmed the Lorrie Moore piece in the New Yorker, and I really don’t feel one way or another about Dunham, or Girls, or Tiny Furniture. 

There was a piece in N+1 a few weeks back that suggested that hatred of Dunham sprung from class envy, from the detractors’ distaste for Dunham’s relative ease, in terms of both money (her parents are successful New York artists) and personality (she doesn’t seem to have a lot of hangups re: her body or her career ambitions, etc). This may be true, and, honestly, I can’t blame anyone who dislikes Dunham for her remarkable advantages in life. Life’s unfair, and it sucks, and no one should be expected to pretend otherwise. 

But for me I don’t think I’m envious of Dunham. I really just don’t care, and I must admit to being frustrated that, once again, the person who gets the attention, and the resources, is some wealthy white girl from New York City. It’s perhaps how I feel about Sloane Crosley, or Nell Freudenberger. (The latter is admittedly from LA.)

I’m sure they’re all lovely, talented people (though I really, really hated Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls), but why are their voices the ones that get heard? Why are their experiences worthy of such a prominent platform? Why is their perspective considered representative of their generation? How many movies or books or television series do we need about aspiring straight white artists of upper-middle-class backgrounds living in New York or LA? Or a collection of essays, some of them wry, about the life of a beautiful girl from Westchester trying to make it in the big city? I understand that most people who make movies or publish books live in one of those cities, and most of them come from an upper middle class background, but are they incapable of looking outside their own immediate experience? There are lots of other people (of the non-white, non-straight, non-upper-middle-class variety) who aspire to be artists, or who have thoughts, many of them wry, about life in this country, or in this world, and yet they never get the same amount of attention. (And any attention they do get is often instantly attributed to their status as a minority of some kind.)  

It’s an old debate, and an old problem, and I’m not hopeful it will change any time soon. I don’t have HBO, and, even if I did, I probably wouldn’t watch Girls. But I don’t begrudge Denham her success. I just find it more of the same, and thus very boring.