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Girls and Fucking Off

Fucking off is an important and complicated part of life. Don't fuck it up.

You guys say “fucking off,” right? Or “fucking around”? Could be a regional schism, like whether you “smoke up” (country kids), “smoke down” (city kids) or “smoke out” (a lezzie high-school basketball player I remain in active if long-distance love with). So for our purposes, fucking off is, like, screwing around (except, “screw” is so gross except in finite circumstances, like Screw the porno magazine—this is the same kind of rationale I apply to being just-fine with any and all excrement used in the context of a performance, but having 5,000 divorces in my future because if someone does or even thinks about any Bathroom Words while I’m around I’m fucking gone).

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HANGING OUT

Why are all the little sticky labels we have for fucking off (the best one) so bad? We’ve covered screwing around, but there's also “screwing the pooch” (I can’t), “fucking the dog” (no), “hanging out” (cornier than the Fort Gibson Sweet Corn Festival, which begins on Sunday in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, which I found out about in an article that begins “Hang on to your niblets”). So bad! We’re supposed to be meme-ing all over ourselves with Tumblr linguistics and there’s no common way to explain doing nothing much at all together that doesn’t invoke “bro”? When my guy friends go on their all-guy guy trips in a camper that they rent so that they don’t have to be away from each other for too long (zaaawww) they call it a “Manwich.” None of this is for girls, except the always-noxious “Girls Night.” Fuck all of you forever. F minus.

So the secret thing about hanging out—my secret, in my secret My Little Pony diary, with the heart-shaped lock—is that I can’t do it. An actual agenda item with my therapist is How Do People Watch TV Together? Because unstructured activity time of the “Come over and hang out” variety remains semi-foreign to me (I grew up in a big house all alone and not lonely with my Little Women and Secret Garden and The Little Princess and and and and), even after a high-school era where my house was the party house with the makeout couch, you know? Even after five, six years of not having anywhere to be at any real time and having to reshape time in my own image, I just… I dunno. I’ll do anything at all for eight hours, anything. I’ll go anywhere. But showing up at someone’s house in the mid-afternoon feels like fire ants infecting my ambition and purposefulness, like, especially if your friend is a slow and wants you to watch them roll first, then wants to talk about your other friends in advance strategizing about what to do. Like, let’s just choose a fucking beach and falafel place and then talk on the fuck the way there. “Let’s see where the day takes us” is totally fine too if you immediately get on your bike and push off into a mad, adventuring vortex right after you say it. Otherwise, like, CHOOSE A THING.

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Structure like the kind I want might violate our mandate of untethered friend time, and its real, inherent value, but I don’t so much care. Even on a Sunday. Especially on a Sunday.

PURPOSE

Is hanging out (have just been informed by my friend Paul that “fucking around” usually denotes sex. Pervs.) something that is idle and dumb and distinct somehow from regulated fun? The semiotics of partying are expansive. What I do know is that none of it is without meaning, that the pursuit, and it is a pursuit, of blowing jokes and blowing lines should still be a Coney Island of the Mind-worthy risking of “absurdity and death,” just like what a poet is supposed to do. Hanging out can be poetry, is maybe what I'm saying here.

On a weird plane ride from Houston to Guatemala City I read a copy of In Style with an interview with Pharrell where he said that “there’s no creativity in partying,” which I like as a reason not to just drink 100 beers as a thing to do, even when the open bar is where you get your dinner. Still I'm not sure. Shouldn’t there be creativity in everything? Shouldn’t little birds dress you in the morning, or shouldn’t you be pre-fight Rocky, just because? Shouldn’t that feeling when you and your friends are in flow—actual “flow,” like Mihaly Csikszentmihaly flow—be understood as real? I think so. I think there is creativity in partying.

CARS

The best place to fuck off is in a car, for sure, which with pals is like a pet-store cage filled up with antsy, caffeinated puppies who need to pee and can only hold it in through a coordinated system of screaming and moving the windows up and down in time with the beats on the stereo. Also a good place to put your bare feet on someone’s neck and face very carefully and they can’t do anything about it.

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FIREWORKS

I am a world-expert on three things: the Assateague horses in Virginia, Rumspringa, and fireworks. Before Katy Perry ruined everything, but after I found myself at my friend’s birthday party and definitely the fuck afraid of fireworks, I figured out how they worked and watched some weird industrial films about them, and now I understand and relate to fireworks and sparklers as the ultimate hang-out tool. See above, re: having an activity—even/especially if that activity is really fucking stupid, and only pursued for weirdness and beauty—and imbuing fuck-off time with active rather than passive ideas. I mean, building a Jenga village and then setting it on fire is fine, too. Just what is it that you can do with your friends that you can’t do alone or for that much longer?

TUMBLR

You have to be careful about including the internet in your fuck-arounds. I think if you’re REALLY good friends who can be bored together, can sync up your boredom patterns so that a YouTube that looks fun but turns out to be toooo long is not a fun-ender, or if you’re brand-new to each other and need something to focus on, clicking fast through Tumblrs and drinking and doing the assessing and sorting work of Tumblr IRL is like an extremely purposeful way to hang.

WET NAILS

This is going to be a fake-out because I don’t remember how to do my own nails anymore. I can do, like, Essie Ballet Slippers or whatever, but the epic, primary, primal-girl hangout thing of summertime bodies daisy-chaining each other’s nails with some piñata haul of gnarly fun nail polish colors feels like a simulacrum, because now me and my girls hang out by paying women who are older than us to do our nails for us.

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Choosing colors together is still a bonding moment on par with college sports. And it’s super-fun and giggly to chat it up while you and her are in the vibrating chairs, or do boy talk at side-by-side nail tables. One time the nails lady told me and my BFF to knock it off, which made me miss my mom. Anyway, that move of a few girls holding their hands up chest-level and blowing on them, all unison rose-bud whooooosh, and fanning them at each other, at the sky, that is some womyn-togetherness shit right there.

PRINCE

Remember that story about Tracy Morgan playing basketball late at night at Prince’s house, and then Prince and his wife came in in their jammies and Prince was like (say it like Fred Armisen says it) “You have to go.” What would that be LIKE! Also did I imagine this story, or read it in the book Tracy wrote that I spent a half-day reading at my desk before leaving to smoke and suntan, or did I daydream it? I just like that story. I like any story about Prince, basketball, and jammies, so make some up for me?

WOULD YOU RATHER

The best game on the block, to be played in utter secrecy because as much as it is fine and good to be a total fucking cunt you have to aim it in the right direction. And the direction of your sweetie-peach-pie pals when you pit them against each other on Facebook for old-fashioned “Would You Rather” isn’t the right one. (The game “Fuck Marry Kill” is the cerebral, adult version of this game; “Would You Rather” puts you closer to the action of mercilessly deciding whether Bro or Bro II has a more effective wigglebuddy.) (TM my friend Justin for “wigglebuddy.”) (heheheheheheheh.)

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POPCORN

If you eat popcorn very fast, one kernel at a time (Hang on to your niblets!), with a serious, inscrutable face, it is hilarious.

GET BLOCKED

See how many of your tertiary friends will delete or block you on Twitter in, say, a given hour. It’s effective to call a straight and earnest man a “fag” (lower-case important); he’ll either want to engage on the language politics or be unable to respond to a girl asserting the thing he so wants and fears (probably). Anyway, the challenge is to identify and execute the ways in which you can best offend people you know without specifically hurting their feelings.

GENDERED HANGS

Boys have a definite advantage in the hang-out. Think it through: hanging out, fucking off, whatever, is about sliding out from under any and all supposed-tos and is also a defining way-of-being. And, thwarting supposed-tos is more easily and more readily a boy pursuit, because the judgments and penalties and physical behaviors that go into “hanging out” are more boy-oriented, from beginning to end. It’s really sucky and the only way to respond is to not be a sulky pussy about it. There are a lot of really good times and places for your primo concern to be your outfit and hair and not saying anything that wounds but a genuine hangout demands, demands, that you lose the Way of Being that is thrust upon you the rest of the time, at work or whatever, and unfold into the Way of Being that employs your most guttural instincts. Those are important.

KIDS

Related: An hour ago, because I am an A+ baby sister, I put three kids to bed who have been Mickey Mouse-and-airplane-and-sugar-retarded for the past week. Their hotel had a giraffe in it, I think, is what they said as they melted into their sheets. I don’t want to be Fort Gibson Sweet Corn Festival about this, but small children are definitely a model of fucking off. Not teenagers, occupied as they are with impressing each other with half-truths and being motivated by hickey-desires and vodka procurements and huffing. Kids do literally whatever they want all the time only because they want to until they fall asleep in the middle of the floor. I’d rather fuck off with that kind of girl than the one who thinks her carefully selected party anecdotes—“this will make me appear sexy, mysterious and adowable!”—are worth anyone else’s time.

Previously - Girls and Fucking Up

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway