From: [Redacted]

To: John Vieira

Subject: Bridesmaids

Have you seen the movie Bridesmaids? (It’s okay to admit you’ve seen it… it’s a funny one).

From: John Vieira

To: [Redacted]

Subject: Bridesmaids

Not only have I seen Bridesmaids, but I saw it on opening night. There was a group of girls dressed up as bridesmaids and they had me take a picture of them with their tiny pocket camera. It felt minuscule in my stupidly large hands; I felt bad enough about seeing a movie alone, worse that it was ostensibly a movie for women, but this was just surreal. I should have felt shittier, but at that point I just kind of enjoyed the situation and hoped that someday I could tell this story after several drinks in a bar that served free popcorn, long after Bridesmaids had justly lost the perception that it was a movie only for women (and hardly a movie only about women) and in a manner that my shame in that story would be the shame of seeing a movie alone.

Insights and observations from a first visit to Las Vegas:

1. What is with the countless opportunities to ‘shoot a real machine gun’? I understand that Vegas is supposed to be the land of iniquity, but it just seemed sort of weird that shooting a machine gun was perhaps the main thing I saw advertised.

2. There were some extravagant things we did that I really enjoyed (hello neon dance club), but after paying multiple hundreds of dollars to travel a few thousand miles in a seat with just a little bit too little leg room for a man of my sticks, the the thing I loved the most was going to a shitty dive bar off the strip and buying cheap drinks and singing karaoke with my friends. You know, the same thing I do every other weekend at home.

3. Does an approximated sky help a mall become more pleasing to walk around in? Apparently yes. On some level, I felt like it was perpetually a pleasant dusk in the ‘Miracle Mile’ mall attached to our hotel.

4. Going for a run to shake a hangover was a very controversial move. People gave me a hard time (and I started to act all smug about it because everyone was giving me a hard time), and even my sister, upon picking me up from the airport after flying home told me this was a really weird thing for me to do. Was it weird? I sincerely find exercising to be the best way to shake a hangover.

5. I only ate sandwiches except for half a pizza at like 2 AM one night that I dropped on the ground on the way up the elevator.

6. My friends are much better than your friends.

I’m about two weeks in to my four month homeowner experiment and this doesn’t have much to do with owning a home, and more about proximity, but I’m finding that one of the things I miss the most about my apartment is my walks to and home from work. I’m (probably much like you) quite good at walking without thinking about it, so I could just let my mind get all ‘first year after college’ and go wander off in any direction it felt like. There were no RSS feeds and no menswear blogs to bother me.

It was just me and my unfocused mind, and unless it is summer time and I’m running outside a lot, it was the only time during the day where I had that sense of mental freedom. It felt good, and I miss it.

And then the Uncharted theme song comes on and everything feels like it’s going to be ok. You’ll play video games in your apartment and eat secret turkey sandwiches that nobody knows about because you tell the world you are a vegetarian. You’ll download Horrible Bosses from a torrent site and watch it as an excuse to eat candy even though you can barely hear the dialogue. You’ll lie on the floor and do twenty pushups in an effort to balance the king sized bag of candy you just ate.

And then you fire up your Playstation and press the button with the Playstation logo on your silver Playstation controller and then the Uncharted theme song comes on and everything feels like it’s going to be ok.

At some point we will all drop our iPhones and shatter the glass on the back. For some people it will be during the first week of ownership. Those people will be upset and feel that they’ve been ripped off by Apple. In a twist of irony, they’ll curse the ghost of Steve Jobs.

For other’s they won’t break their glass until the precise midpoint between when the current iPhone was released and when the new iPhone will be released. They will be literally paralyzed with indecision about whether they should wait for the next model or buy another of the previous model.

For a select few, they’ll drop their phone several times, often on very hard and rough surfaces, without incident. They’ll begin to feel invincible, they’ll start to remember how their bones felt when they were fifteen years old. Finally, one drop will prove to be too much and the glass back will break. Disillusioned by their newfound and very sobering sense of vulnerability, they will dig too deep into their own psyche and have an existential breakdown. The last coherent thought they will have is about how they wished they had not upgraded from the iPhone 3GS.

I often wonder how often people think about my shoes. Probably never, but maybe once in awhile when the rest of my appearance is so put together that a person’s gaze makes it all the way past my lazy eye and crooked nose, over my rumpled shirt and unbuttoned fly, by my bulging stomach and the mustard stain on my bulge-free crotch to make it down to my shoes which are either glorious or kind of worn out depending on how you feel about about men with all of the other attributes in this sentence.

He worried about his career and his future and if he would ever fall in love with a woman enough to want to marry her. He worried about his mother when she was sick and his brother when he got fired. He worried about who would be the next president of the United States and how it would change the economy.

But most of all he worried: what if that last tweet was the best thing he would ever write? Nobody retweeted it. Nobody even favstarred it.

How to be 26 years old:

1. Act responsibly sometimes.

2. Act irresponsibly sometimes.

3. Feel very anxious about things you did when you were acting irresponsibly.

4. Notice your eyesight getting worse and your achilles tendons aching.

5. Keep playing video games.