6 Tips for Hosting Overnight Guests
August 3, 2012 § 19 Comments
Isn’t it fun having a friend come visit and stay overnight? What a great way to catch up without having to hurry. You can have dinner, hang out, sneak each other’s phones and hack one another’s Facebook accounts, stay up late, then get up and have a breakfast party in the morning. Good times.
Some people find it stressful preparing for spend-the-night company. No, no, no. Having a job interview on a roller coaster is stressful. Being bitten by a spider that’s stuck in your pants at the exact moment you meet your new mother-in-law is stressful. Being stopped by a cop for a broken tail light when you’re a convict on the lam is stressful. Having friends over is easy. Here are a few trusty tips, as practiced at my house this week when a friend stopped through town:
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1. For friends coming in from afar, send easy-to-follow directions, including landmarks. For example, I include these details to help friends get to my neighborhood:
“…Exit to the left. Pass ‘ANY CLUB’. Note: it is not just any club. It’s Tiffany’s Club, but half the neon is burned out. Also, everyone inside is naked; so just know that if you decide to stop and go in. Next, pass the motel with the people trading money in the parking lot. Don’t slow down, that’s not a book swap. Turn left again.”
Excerpt from actual text. Details make it easier for a visitor to recognize your home.
* * *
2. Get the house ready. Consider putting out some flowers.
As you can see, I considered putting out some flowers.
* * *
3. Arrange a customized stack of reading material at each guest’s bedside. I like to assemble a mix of fiction and nonfiction, including some poems or essays, based on the person’s interests or what I think their interests should be. If you think they have an addiction, a self-help book is a great way to let them know. Everyone loves this kind of helpfulness.
In this case, it was a challenge, because my friend reads as much (if not more)
than I do, and we have a lot of the same favorites. So these are kind of
random choices. Btw, if you don’t have Sloane Crosley’s humor essays,
pick them up. Funny.
* * *
4. Place a welcome card on the guest’s pillow.
Sometimes, the card is so good, I can’t even stand to write in it.
I’m dying to have a pregnant houseguest ever since finding a congrats card
that reads, “Way to go, you little slut.”
* * *
5. Find out what your guests drink, and stock up on it.
Post-party recycling. Why all the club soda, you ask?
Because we were throwing down white wine spritzers like
a couple of 75-year-old BALLERS.
* * *
6. Go all out and cook a fancy breakfast. Don’t be the host with the toast. Although I’m not much of a baker, having morning guests calls for extraordinary measures. I picked this Martha Stewart recipe, because apparently, these muffins aren’t restricted to certain days of the week like other muffins. Versatile!
I may have disregarded that part about “jumbo” muffin pans.
But how much difference could it really make?
A good bit of difference, actually.
So basically, a trip to my house is like a luxury vacation. As long as you’re cool with our ancient plumbing (“old world charm”) and curious little kids who may or may not dig through your suitcase while you’re asleep. Come visit!
Hooked on Like
June 20, 2012 § 9 Comments
Mark, we gotta talk.
(No, not you, Wahlberg. I told you we’d FaceTime later. GEEZ, a little space. C’mon.)
Zuckerberg. Yes, you. Put down the… no… Fine, update your status. I’ll wait. Ready?
OK. I heard you’re brainstorming ways to get kids younger than 13 onto Facebook. WTF, man?
You don’t have kids, but you were one pretty recently, so let’s play a game: Imagine you’re 10 years old.
Let’s say you’re a kid who doesn’t make friends so easily — maybe you’re a little nerdy. (I know, HUGE stretch. Just go with it.) You manage to accumulate 14 “friends” on Facebook. Yay, you! You have friends! Then you see that Mikey, the douchey kid who’s always yanking your backpack when you’re walking up the stairs at school, has 75 “friends”? What goes through your mind? What about when you start posting little quips and updates and maybe a drawing of a dragon wearing rain boots, and your posts get zero “likes”?
Zuckie, my friend, when you’re little, you’re still learning what friendship is. And life, at that age, is all about counting. Whoever gets the most marshmallows in his s’more is the king of the cookout, you know? You can’t tell me kids wouldn’t draw the conclusion that more “likes” equals more like, and more “friends” means more friends, and that friendship is… quantifiable.
Hell, adults are old enough to know better, and look how much we crave likes. You know what I’m talking about, Z. You’ve seen it.
Who hasn’t had that feeling – when you wake up and see that whatever you posted the night before has 100 likes, and before your feet even hit the floor, you’re designing your new business cards: Pithy Internet Genius. Yes!
You skip off down the street to start your day, and you stop five times to chat with neighbors, because surely everyone wants to tell you how brilliant and hilarious you are. You’re hugging and high-fiving left and right. You’re Drew Barrymore on ecstasy – but smarter. You bust out a tango with some random guy at the bus stop and then promise him you’ll knit him a hat for his new baby. You laugh uproariously at your boss’s chauvinist jokes, because hey, everybody deserves a chance. You end your day with a cold, crisp glass of rosé on the front porch as you gaze into the sunset, where the clouds spell out, “HEY, SPARKY, YOU’RE MAGICAL!” in pink fire. The universe loves you.
And everyone knows the opposite feeling, too – when you wake up and see that whatever you posted the night before has zero likes, and you sit there wondering how long the internet has been broken and why all your friends have been offline for 12 hours.
Then you see that your friends haven’t been offline. They all turned their digital thumbs up to the video of the squirrel wearing a beret on a merry-go-round – but not to your post. Was it bad? It was the thing you said about cats being Nazis, wasn’t it? Everyone thinks you’re stupid. Or anti-Semitic. Or anti-cats. Or ugly. Are you ugly? Probably. This is everyone’s way of telling you.
And just like that, there goes your day. You’re hungry, but breakfast is for people who are liked, so you just shuffle into the bathroom, slump down on the floor, and suck Crest Extra-Whitening directly from the tube until you create a suction seal and realize you can’t pull it off your tongue no matter how hard you try, which just FIGURES. And then a little ant goes crawling up the side of the bathtub, and you mash him with your bare thumb, because it’s better he knows now that THERE’S NO POINT. And then you cry because dammit, that’s not like you, squashing little ants like that.
Eight hours later, that’s where the gutter cleaners will find you when they lean their ladder up against your window: On the bathroom floor, with a tube of toothpaste hanging from your swollen tongue, making a teeny-weeny shroud out of toilet paper and whispering, “I’m sorry,” to an ant corpse.
And those are grownup like-addicts we’re talking about. Oh, not you, of course. Or me. Obviously. But… people.
So. You know what I’m talking about, Z-berg.
Kids deserve to learn what “like” means in the real world first. That it’s not something you count. That it’s not something that comes and goes based on who clicked what, and that it comes from being a good friend. A friend, not a “friend.” That’s all I’m saying.
(W-berg, stop ringing my phone, man. I’ll call you later.)
Mark just sent me a text. He wants me to show you his new apron AND tell you that Facebook isn’t for little kids.
“Like this”
April 23, 2012 § 2 Comments
I told my mom that I was running out of age-appropriate books for my 9-year-old, a voracious reader, and she said, “Just let him read anything he can get his hands on. That’s what I did with you.”
Me: But I ended up reading Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon when I was 9.
Mom: [nods]
Me: [looking on bright side] Then again, I turned out like this.
Mom: You would have turned out like this anyway. There was nothing we could have done.
And that is how “like this” can mean two different things.
Also, that’s the awkward segue into expressing my gratitude to those who have liked this column and shared it with friends. (I swear I’m not going to make a habit out of blogging about blogging. Because if there’s one thing that’s a waste of internet space,* it’s this: “Today I blogged. Here’s how I feel about blogging this blog. It’s like, I’m blogging, and here’s the blog, and now I’m going to step away and not blog, but then I’m back! Blogging again! Blog! Blogging like a mofo!” )
Whether you’re one of my 7 friends in real life or you stumbled upon it when we had that brief moment with the porn or the earrings a couple weeks back or you’re one of those Irish people who somehow found it at the very beginning, thank you for all the times you’ve taken a moment to “like” this.
It gives me a rash to come out and ask for anyone to share the Blink or follow it on Facebook or Twitter. If anyone “likes” a post, I want it to be because you actually like it. So it tickles me to pieces that so many folks are re-posting and sharing this stuff voluntarily. You’re all hired as promotional agents. (But it’s an internship, so it doesn’t pay.)
As the Blink’s agents, you should know that you’re doing a great job. I keep getting emails forwarded from friends-of-friends with stories about how someone had a horrible day or week or year, but then they read something here and it perked them up. I’m not going to quote them verbatim, because some of them are really specific – and some of these people, I’m telling you, if I was going through the shit they’re going through, I don’t think I could laugh at all. So, there. You’re making people happy when you share this stuff. I hope you’re proud of yourselves, young ladies and gentlemen.
Anyway. Just wanted to say thanks. Carry on.
(* PS: If there’s something that’s not a waste of internet space, it’s when Marcel says she desperately wants a nickname but can’t ask for it, about 1:35 into this. I really get that.)
