Not Watching Girls: Recap, Volume 1

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | January 12, 2015 | 11:05pm

Entertainment

Not Watching Girls is where we detail the real-life foibles, exploits, and hot and hilarious haps of what we were doing in our exciting, glamorous, and emotional lives in our Brooklyn apartments during the half-hour the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls airs.

Apparently Sunday evening was the premiere of Season 4 of HBO’s award-winning, critically acclaimed Girls, in which we pick up after Lena Dunham’s Hannah has been “accepted to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, giving her a much-needed professional boost after she loses her book deal following the suicide of her editor,” according to Time Magazine. “Wait—for real?” I thought, as I shoved a handful of fries into my face and watched the Golden Globes in my glamorous apartment near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in beautiful South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That seems like a crazy-ass plot point for reality-focused programming such as Girls. Sidebar, I love to douse French fries with ketchup, but my friend from high school always said it is gauche and the absolute last thing the French would ever do; ketchup is a bastard’s moutarde and apparently the kind of condiment preferred by people who still call pommes frites “Freedom fries,” even though it’s been, like, 12 years. Also, I ate some of a kale salad from a plastic take-out container with my fingers, because I didn’t feel like washing a fork. It’s cool, dudes, nobody was around. It was sexy as hell, because it was flawed, and real.

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So apparently there was some kind of butt thing on that show Girls, which is created by Lena Dunham, the first It Girl in history who is known to live in Brooklyn Heights. While that was happening I was sitting on my own butt, which kind of hurt but did not buzz, and watching Tina Fey and Amy Poehler host the Golden Globes with a computer to blog from perched on my lap, sitting on a folding chair in my sexy and hot apartment in Brooklyn. Do you guys ever think about your love lives as, like, a Tumblr, where you’re just endlessly reblogging/reSNOGGING other peoples’ exes? I just want the thrill of something new, you know, something I’ve never done before, like MAKING something yourself, like a selfie, and then posting it, having it to yourself for that thrilling split-second just before everyone else posts it to their sites? What if Love could be the feeling of having put something on the internet that nobody has ever seen? One day I hope to experience this. Or I liken it to the feeling of the first time you ever heard “Call Me Maybe.” The world seemed so crisp with possibility then, Carly Rae Jepsen was our beautiful conduit, young and free, like a Noxema commercial.

Some movie named Boyhood won over Selma and it was unconscionable. I finished my fries and decided to eat some chocolate next because playing Candy Crush: Soda Saga during the commercials ignited my sweet teeth. I have multiple of them, it’s a genetic predisposition, like my Mexistache and the metabolism of a rock. Do you ever feel lonely? I don’t actually, I am an only child and I know that being alone means getting everything all to yourself. The potential of having to share anything gives me great anxiety, which is also a bad element when paired with my metabolism. But I have heard that most people feel lonely when they are alone, and that is why most people are afraid to be alone, and I find that incredibly sad but not sad enough to do anything about it, other than hang out with them sometimes. I wonder if Lena Dunham gets lonely, my dude. Prolly. I put my feet up on my side table and flipped the channels around a little bit. That one Grimes song I like is now in that Expedia commercial and is now ruined for me forever because of Tumblr, and love, and money, but mostly television. “I think Lena Dunham wrote the premiere of season four of her HBO dramedy Girls just for me,” wrote The Guardian. I dunno what you heard, but that seems p. nice of Lena Dunham tho, b? Seems like she gets a bad rap or whatever. She definitely gets lonely, also, so in that sense she’s just like us, even though she’s on the cover of, like, Elle or whatever.

Smoke break.

Ten minutes left, I walked into my backyard to feed the two stray cats that live there. I don’t know how I have a backyard in beautiful South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, next to the BQE, it seems bananas luxurious, but please note that I share it with like 14 other people in the building. The cats do not have names but the flavor of dry Friskies in a box I bought for them is called “Surfin’ Turfin’ Favorites” and the box features a super-chill cat with one paw up, looking at clouds in the shape of the cows, chickens, and fishes that it will consume in the form of byproduct highly compacted by bits of grain. That cat on the box is chill as heaaayyyyl.

The tiny black cat runs up to the bowl and starts eating before I can finish filling it. The gunshy white cat with brown spots eats that shit off the floor. They sleep in a wooden window box on a with an electric blanket. It’s brick as fuck, but everything’s all good. I imagine that right now, back on Girls, Hannah Horvath is having a hot career boost from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop like everyone else in history, no? Let’s go to the research: “Sending Hannah to Iowa is no small matter,” writes The AV Club. The gunshy white cat with brown spots, who I really should name, won’t approach any people but she reaps the benefits of our mechanations. It’s funny how cats are just giant users in the end, so much like humanity. You know?

One half hour isn’t very long, to be honest, even for a situation comedy on a cable television network. It is not as long as the following sentence: “The farewell scenes between Hannah and Adam, and Hannah and Marnie, were emotionally effective—every now and then, it’s useful to be see that for all their fighting and period estrangement, Hannah and Marnie are best friends—and the final shot of Hannah in the back of the car, wondering if she’s made the right choice even as her parents engage in road trip small talk, was an effective reminder that, as entertaining as many members of the ensemble can be, “Girls” tends to be at its most potent when it focuses on Hannah,” writes HitFix dot com. That sounds aight, but that sentence needs to fall back, mang. Binary fission that sentence, HitFix dot com! I latched the backdoor so the outdoor cats wouldn’t come in and fuck with my indoor cats, and so that I could keep up the illusion that I am not an OD cat lady in waiting who is tasked with the care and maintenance of four of them.

“[Girls] displays a new maturity in the premiere, an effortlessly confident episode that’s not bent on being controversial,” writes Metacritic user j1train. That is sick, bro. Uzo got robbed.

HBO’s Girls airs Sundays 9 PM EST.