(In honor of both wedding and graduation season, here’s a piece I wrote some years back when I myself was a younger person that I came across a few days ago. It is not, exactly, non-fiction)

1. The high heels will fuck up your feet. I’m won’t tell you to never wear them. I am saying be reasonable and only wear them when can afford to pay for a car.

1. The cheap flip-flops you’ll basically live in if you happen to go to college or graduate school in a warm place where people aren’t freaked out by flip-flops? They will also fuck up your feet. And should you have occasion to learn this in major metropolitan area, you will undoubtedly also that cities are disgusting and your feet will turn black, like coal black, and you will have to spend several hours on the side of your disgusted friend’s bathtub trying to essentially scrape off what will feel like a truly pre-modern level of filth from your horrifying feet while he tries to call around and find someone who can lend you a pair of closed toe shoes so you can go somewhere and buy a pair of close toed shoes because what kind of animal wears sandals on a rainy July in New York.

1. When you’re desperately broke, try to avoid putting groceries on your credit card.

1. Pay off the smallest credit card first. Don’t make such large payments that you’re forced to go back into debt on the same credit card.

1. You’re thinking: why even get a credit card? I mean, wouldn’t living debt free be the smart thing? Yeah, sure I guess. But odds are good that you’re already in or about to be in a lifetime of debt from college alone and unless you’re a criminal or a techie (or both) you’re probably not making good enough money to float through life in cash and at the very least you’ll need the credit card to pay for your friends’ stupid weddings.

1. Your friends’ stupid weddings are probably going to set you back about $200-300 per. Unless they have a destination wedding, at which point the sky is the fucking limit, but (at least theoretically) you’re under zero obligation to go. If you’re in the wedding party you’re looking at around $800 minimum and that’s only if she’s not a complete dick and picks inexpensive bridesmaids dresses and affordable hair/makeup and/or doesn’t demand a destination bachelorette party. You’re not rich enough to have friends that demand destination bachelorette parties. Note: this will not stop your friends from demanding destination bachelorette parties.

1. Seriously, how did your friend become the sort of person to demand a destination bachelorette party? Remember how she spent all of college bumming your cigarettes and studying Marxism and playing up her whole gritty working-class roots persona? Like every time she talked about her hometown or her family, it was like a Springsteen song come to life. Or it would have been if she’d ever learned how to drive a car instead of bumming rides off of you all the time. I mean, until she was almost thirty years old she was a glorified intern at this anarchist artspace in Brooklyn. She made ramen in a coffeepot. So, like, what the hell is up with this I expect all of you to go in on three days in Ibiza at an overpriced hotel full of airbrushed Eastern European models and their questionable DJ boyfriends? What happened to Solidarity, comrade, because I’ve never paid that much for a hotel in my entire goddamn life.

1. Counterpoint: your friend that studies Marxism and works at an anarchist art gallery still manages to pay rent in Brooklyn on an occasional barista job is absolutely the sort of person who will demand a destination bachelorette party. Because someone else is paying her rent and it’s probably her rich parents and you should have known that freshman year of college when you described the bathroom at that seedy punk rock club as literally shitty and she rolled her eyes and said, fear of feces is, like, so bourgeoise. The revolution will not be sanitized.

1. She will name her first child Djuna or Flannery. You will spend a lot of time on Facebook looking at impeccably art-directed photos of her family vacation to some otherwise un-touristed island paradise. You will be both envious and disgusted at how much she spent on those shoes. And you know exactly how much that was because you saw them last week at Nordstrom and when you weren’t chortling at the price you were halfway wishing you had the sort of life, to say nothing of budget, that would accommodate that kind of superfluous luxury. I mean that leather is so soft. It would feel like a dream.  

1. You are so bourgeoise. Or rather, you’re aspirational bourgeoise, Champagne tastes, $15 dollars in savings. Even though, you’re solidly north of thirty-five and your mother still reminds you that you don’t have a trust fund like that isn’t clear. If you’d had a trust fund, you would have moved to New York with your friend and paid rent on an apartment in Brooklyn despite having no job save a magazine internship and the occasional barista shift. Maybe you’d be sunning on some secret Thai beach now with a doctor/poet husband and your adorable moppet with the twee name.  Eugenie?  Wilberforce? What sort of asshole names their kid Wilberforce?

1. Nobody’s forcing you to have kids and I wouldn’t if I were you, but if you must, you should give your kid a boring, normal name like Jim or Cathy. Because either Jim or Cathy could probably beat the pants off of Wilberforce at mini-golf or the kind of amiable, slightly fatalistic underachievement that has doomed people like us to debt, worry, and barely concealed, red-hot burning class resentment when it dawns on you that Wilberforce is four and already knows more languages than you. He’s studying Mandarin and French. We’re going to start him on Russian soon because his father and I think he needs a Slavic language. Your friend mentions this when you meet her for dinner. She’s come to town because her husband is at a Epidemiology conference and she thought she might just pop down for a spa day and some patronizing flattery at local restaurants, so authentic, your Southern culture, even though she’s originally from Macon, Georgia. You bring a picture book for her kid, a book you loved when you were four. She scoffs at it. That’s so sweet, but honestly Wilberforce has just started Proust. I’m sure we could find a local charity to donate this to. That’s when she mentions the Russian and how they’re teaching him to play mandolin. Then you order. “You’re so lucky you can still eat gluten,” she says, “and lactose. It must be so liberating to not be worried about your health” and orders an entrée composed entirely of lettuce foam and condescension.

1. Your friend will complain about the bottle of white wine she chose. “It’s just not good. I can’t believe a supposedly decent restaurant would serve something like this. Maybe I’ve been in New York too long. I mean I hate to be that kind of person, but I guess I am that kind of person.” She gives a cutesy #sorrynotsorry grin and shrugs so you can see how toned her arms are under her perfectly rumpled linen blouse. “But please, if you can stomach it, help yourself. I’m certainly not going to drink it.”

1. Seriously? Help yourself. You’ll need fortification while she drones on about her household renovation, the problems their having with the contractor, the difficult of finding environmentally friendly subway tile with the right sort of creamy luster to the finish for their kitchen expansion. Creamy Luster. Heh. That would make a good band name. She used to make that sort of joke all the time. Remember when the two of you made loads of fake band merch out of men’s undershirts and sharpies and iron-on letters. Sometimes if the name was a really good name, you might pull out a guitar and play barre chords badly and die laughing at your own dumb lyrics. That was fun. Remember? She half-way smiles, “I don’t think so. And I am serious about the luster. If I’m going to pay that much for tile, it really needs to be perfect. I expect to be happy.

1. You won’t know if anyone is happy. You won’t even know if you’re happy most of the time. You’ll read somewhere that happiness is a thing you remember and that sounds about right. You remember happiness at the oddest moments, in the oddest ways. When you and your friend and your other friends were all twenty-three and broke and living in a house without air-conditioning and drinking too much cheap vodka and cheap wine and cheap beer and sitting up talking until 4am until your tongue was exhausted and your throat sore and your voice a crackling rasp from too much smoke and argument. You will think you were happy then, in a sort of tingly, nervous, brink of anything, edge of everything kind of way. You will tell your friend this and she will tuck a long strand of shiny honey blonde hair Her natural color? She did used to dye it all the time. How is it possible you knew everything about each other and you maybe never knew her natural hair color? behind her ear. “I was miserable then,” she says. “That whole time. College. The time after. When we were friends then? I was miserable. It was literally the worst part of my life.”

1. You will realize you don’t know when people are miserable.

1. “No offense,” your friend will say

1. You will not take offense.

1. “No offense. But I realized one day that I deserved to be happy. And I could never be happy living like you do. Are you happy here? Don’t you know that you deserve to be happy?”

1. You’ve seen it mentioned on the cover of magazines in doctors offices and paperback self-help books. You’ve heard it said by lots of men and women with and nice hair and athleisure. You’re cool, in theory, with happy being just desserts, but you have questions like, does everybody deserve happiness? Just you and me and maybe Wilberforce and his pals from Russian Mandolin Proust class? That’s the kind of conversation you used to have with your friend, back in the days when she swore she’d been miserable. But she was funny then. God, she was funny. And you were funny too, maybe. You’re maybe still funny. You’re also not that unhappy. Certainly not as unhappy as she assumes you are. Things could be better, but they’re not so bad that you can’t enjoy the wine and find creamy luster funny. The waiter comes by and asks if the two of you want dessert. Your friend screws up her face, as if offended to be asked.

1. Never apologize for ordering dessert. Two spoons, optional. But you know, even after everything, she’ll probably have a bite. She’ll tell you she’s missed you. You’ll tell her you’ve missed her too.

1. You’ll mean it.