So Long, #SummerOfZo

The summer of Zo as we all (ok, as I) know and love it has officially come to a close. Today was my first day of school, and from here on out I will be a serious professional student and will no longer spend my days sleeping until noon, doing Pilates, drinking tequila and writing about it — thus confirming that grad school is going to be very different than college.

My cute first day of school outfit, very appropriate for August

As sad as I am for my summer to be over, I will say that I am very, very excited to be going back to school. This is an incredible opportunity, and I am looking forward to "becoming a stronger
interviewer and writer, and finding out what I am passionate about so that I can apply it to my work and my career" (that is, word for word, what I wrote on my introductory index card this morning. NERD ALERT!!!!);.

Having been out of the game (read: school) for two years, I forgot how horribly, horribly boring orientation is. Sitting in a room for 9 hours straight, surrounded by complete strangers, learning about how to use the library and how to log into the printers? I mean, it's brutal.

After day one of my two day mandatory orientation (which, one of my friends advised me to "100% skip if you want to make any friends at all. Orientation is for losers.") my only takeaway was that I really needed a drink (and that I still had no idea where the library was). Luckily, it was Thursday, and a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend was having a birthday party at Village Tavern (a dive bar in the West Village where I met two of my last three boyfriends), so convincing people to go out was relatively effortless.

The bar ended up being great—so good, in fact, that I ordered several rounds of Fireball shots for everyone there. After all, since I was all of a sudden back in school, it felt appropriate to behave like I was 19 again.

47 rounds later, it was time to go home.

I recently started seeing a guy who happened to be out that night and begged him to order pizza to his roof after the third bar of the night (the first two of which I remember clearly, the third— not so much) and by the time we got home and the pizza got there it was so late I decided it would be easier to just spend the night and go home before school in the morning to change and pull myself together. Drunk logic, as it turns out, doesn't always make sense.

Cut to 8:30 the next morning when I shot awake, still wearing my white jeans from the night before, in his apartment. The orientation program started at 9, and was at least a 45 minute subway ride uptown. After we had been lectured for an hour the previous day about the importance of being on time ("If you are even ONE minute late, you will be locked outside the classroom and considered absent"), my hope for going home (all the way from the West side to the East side) before going to school was totally out the window.

So, I Walk of Shamed to Day 2 of Grad School.

In white jeans, black tank top and (thank God) a pair of flat sandals, it definitely could have been worse, but that combined with the fact that my hair was matted to one side of my head and I reeked of a dive bar, it definitely wasn't great.

To make matters worse, I fell asleep halfway through the lecture on How To Make The Most of Our Extracurricular Activities, and the lovely British girl next to me had to tap me awake and offer me a 5 Hour Energy.

It was an apt close to the #summerofzo — now I just need to finish my summer reading. 

My Night at the Fat Black Pussycat

I once went to the comedy cellar with the most boring guy I ever dated, and still had a blast, so figured it was a good activity to do with an out of town guest on a rainy Monday night when there was seemingly nothing else to do.

We met up with a friend of my friend's (who also happens to benamed "Zoe W.) and tried to get into the 9:30 show without tickets, and had no luck. We basically got laughed off the block. Apparently, even on a rainy Monday night in June, The Comedy Cellar is a hot spot. We found a bar called "The Fat Black Pussycat"* that was conveniently serving $1 Margaritas (and also, oddly, advertising "Live Nudes!" in the basement) and decided to get drunk and wait it out until we could try again for the 11:30 show. 

Three Babes At The Fat Black Pussycat
(Have I ever looked worse?)

Again, No Dice.

Just as we were about to give up, a creepy guy popped his head out of the bar next door and asked if we had any interest in attending a free comedy show that was starting in 5 minutes.

Considering this was the same day as our bizarre experience the Hologram Museum, and we were already a little bit tequila-tipsy, we were pretty much up for anything. And, let's be honest, he had us at "Free!" 

The creepy guy, who was quite clearly very high, ushered us behind a black curtain (this was becoming the theme of the day– I swear it wasn't as unsafe as it sounds) into the back room of the bar otherwise known as the "performance space" 

"You three, sit here" he told us, and gestured to a table directly in front of the stage. 

There were 7 people total in the room: the three of us, two girls we later learned were from Turkey and didn't speak a word of English, and two men, one of whom was wearing a fedora and the other whom was enormous, decked out in layers and layers of gold chains and bragging loudly about the fact that he was "Akon's record producer" (or somerthing). 

The first comedian came on, and immediately got into reckless verbal argument with Fedora guy and Akon's producer when they started heckling him, so they left.

And then there were 5. 

The comedians were terrible. One of them actually YELLED at me for laughing at his jokes, because even he knew they weren't funny. They all kept asking me what race I was, and got really mad when I told them I was a boring, white, Jewish girl from the East Coast. One kept calling Zoe, Alix and I the "Varsity Squad," and referring to the other foreign girls as "JV," which I think may have been a compliment to us but honestly the jokes kept falling so flat it was really hard to tell. 

One of the comedians, named Raj Mahal (who genuinely believed he was the first guy in the world to come up with that name for himself, and was horribly disappointed when Alix told him she went to high school and college with two different guys who had the same name) was actually mildly funny and sort of hot, but kept talking about his "very serious girlfriend" which was a huge disappointment to us, who as the only audience members were trying to flirt with him out of boredom. 

Luckily, as we discovered after the show when we were taking fireball shots with the talent (we'll get to that in a second), a lot of what comedians say "happened" to them isn't actually true (I'm sorry, but did anyone else know that? Like was Louis CK ever even actually married?) and Raj Mahal was single. Unluckily, though, he had zero interest in any of the three of us — probably because we were funnier than he was. 


After the show was over, in an attempt to hit on Raj Mahal, the three of us and all of the male comedians went to the front of the bar to get drinks. Yes, to confirm your suspicions, we were the only patrons in the bar. Somewhere along the way, we managed to lose the Turkish girls — probably after they used Google Translate to figure out what "JV" means. Somehow, most likely because comedians make less than three unemployed girls (there goes my dream future career) we ended up treating them to drinks for hours. One of them got so drunk he repeatedly asked me if I would consider making a threesome tape with him, at which point we decided it was time to excuse ourselves to Artichoke Pizza.


I'm going back to the Comedy Cellar on Thursday....