How To Have A Fabulously Basic Fall Weekend

Last Saturday, thousands of white, preppy East Coast kids stuffed the pockets of their Barbour jackets with nips of Fireball and  flocked to suburban New Jersey for The Hunt. The Daily Mail calls the annual horse race the best day of the year for the "attractive and inebriated elite," and anyone I know over the age of 22 calls it, simply, "hell."

Couldn't have said it better myself. So I didn't 

Back in the day (read: every year until now) The Hunt was my favorite weekend of the fall. My girlfriends and I would road-trip out to Summit, NJ — first from college in DC, then from the city once we became real, working adults — and spend Friday night drinking wine and eating pizza by the fire. It was EXACTLY what we would have been doing at home, but somehow felt more special when it was done without the threat of the rats that lived in our house/apartments running around trying to steal our pizza (seriously; we knew it was a thing long before "pizza rat" got famous.)

The next morning, we would wake up at the crack of dawn to straighten our hair. Getting ready was actually a surprisingly fast process, considering our outfits were always heavily curated (as in, bought brand new the week before) by the time we actually got to New Jersey.

You can't tell, but EVERY person in this picture is wearing aviators. 

We'd drink mimosas and pick at a tray of bagels until it was time to get on the train (we always missed the first two — luckily they ran every 20 minutes) where we drank more champagne and complimented each other's aviators and Hunter boots.

The rest of the day was, pretty much, exactly how the Daily Mail described it. We would drink beer/champagne/whatever we could find, flirt with the boys who had the best looking sandwiches at their tailgate (we never actually bought a plot, so were literally forced to scrounge for food and alcohol) and run into pretty much everyone we'd ever met.

For the first three years, it was HEAVEN on earth. Did I mention how cute the boys were?

Last year, though, something had changed. Saying I was suddenly "over it" is the understatement of 2015, and I exaggerate a lot. I got there, stayed for 20 minutes and decided  it wasn't for me. Considering I'd paid $175 ticket, it ended up costing me $8.75 a minute to wait in line for the port-a-potty and drink a warm Natty Light.

After that, I retired.

So, this past Saturday, when a few of my brave 24 and 25-year-old friends went out to Far Hills for one last hurrah, I donned my white-girl fall uniform (jeans, boots, sweater, vest, aviators) and decided to treat myself to an equally basic, but far less alcohol fueled, fall weekend.


The weekend went as follows (listed in order of chronology, as well as basic-ness):

Nothing says "basic" like a selfie of a girl in a vest and
Ray Bans at an apple orchard

1. Took the train out to the suburbs (New York, not New Jersey, but otherwise the exact same as usual) with two of my besties, where we cooked ourselves a huge dinner. A guy in the grocery store stopped us in the snacks aisle to ask if we were throwing a party because our cart had so much stuff in it; I couldn't decide if it was rude or flattering
2. Watched a Diane Keaton movie, which I slept through, and was in bed and asleep by 11:30 
3. Woke up at 9:03am, put on a hot pink Nike running outfit with matching sneakers, and went on a run. Listened to Taylor Swift's 1989 the entire time, and at one point paused to jump in a pile of leaves.
4. Put on aviators, drove an hour to an apple orchard, picked apples, ate apples (like, 45 of them each), drove home. The Taylor Swift CD wouldn't play in the car, which was a real buzzkill, but we soldiered on
5. Got home, put on leggings, made pumpkin bread. 
6. Watched Season 2 of The OC (the second best season in history, next to Season 1 of The OC) while eating pumpkin bread and drinking apple cider that we bought at CVS. 
7. Debated skipping Saturday night in the city and continuing our weekend on its current trajectory until my friend's mom told us we were being losers and needed to go out.
8. Trained back in to Manhattan and went to a girls'  dinner where we drank vodka sodas and talked about boys, then to a birthday party for a friend of a friend where we continued to drink vodka sodas and tried to meet boys.

Sunday went similarly, except we came back to the city and ate Sweet Green Salads instead of pumpkin bread (#skinny) and watched The Intern and Nashville instead of Because I Said So and The OC. I wore the same leggings and sweatshirt  all weekend. Judge me.

Worth noting? I saw equally as many horses at the apple orchard as I did in all three years at the hunt combined: None.

The pumpkin in our pumpkin bread came from a can,
not from these.

Going Back To College is EXHAUSTING.

When my friends and I were seniors in college, we affectionately referred to ourselves as "SWUGS," or, "Senior Washed Up Girls."

To put it nicely, it was NOT cute. We wore weird outfits to class and to the bar (workout clothes on a good day, full blown sweatpants on a hungover one), ate fried food nonstop, and only talked to the boys we'd made out with as freshman and had, in the course of four years, had basically become like brothers to us. I don't think I brushed my hair or kissed a boy once the entirety of senior spring (with the exception of Spring Break. Obviously.).

#SWUGlife

When my mom came down to DC for graduation, she and I went dress shopping and I came out of the dressing room in a hot pink bandage dress. 

I thought I looked AMAZING, despite the fact that it was senior week and I had been drinking for 8 days (and four years) straight. Looking back, though, I was 15 pounds heavier than normal (due to the beer and fried food consumption that had become the #SWUG way of life) and definitely looked like a neon-colored sausage. 

“She doesn’t normally look like this!” My mom told the lovely young couple next to us. “She’s a senior girl. She’s normally much thinner.” They nodded in agreement, seemingly understanding of the fact that my lifestyle pretty much required me to consume 10,000 calories a day, and the rampant hangovers inevitably prevented me from exercising. 

Regardless of the fact that I spent the whole semester looking like a chubby, unkempt gorilla, it was the best time of my life (probably because I was eating ice cream 3 times a day and going through 9 bottles of wine a week). I lived in a house with my best friends, and we did pretty much WHATEVER we wanted. To this day I’m still too afraid of the Georgetown housing office to put the true details of our debauchery on the internet, but just know that we came very, very close to not being able to walk at graduation. 

This weekend, I went back down to DC for homecoming to find out what its like to be a SWUG who’s three years OLDER than an actual SWUG.

I sent this to a boy on Saturday because I
thought I looked sooo cute. I don't. 

On Friday night, four of my closest friends and I piled into a car with 6 bags of popcorn and some Big Macs (really getting back to our Senior Spring eating habits) and made the trek from New York down to Georgetown. It took us 5 and a half hours, one pit stop to pee in a parking lot and one pretttttyyyy scary accidental detour in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but we made it. We did almost kill each other a few times (mostly over the fact that SOMEONE wasn’t fulfilling her duties as the front seat passenger) but by the time we got to the hotel at 2am we were, as usual, deliriously obsessed with each other and for some reason all speaking in weird accents. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, breeds more inside jokes than a long, tense car ride. 

It was, admittedly, really weird to get to the hotel and only have to share a bed with one other person (considering when we were in Montauk this Summer we slept 19 to a room and I slept on the floor) and to have my own towel that no one else had dried their body with or thrown up on. We did, however, wake up with a 12 hour old Big Mac on the desk, so we haven’t totally changed since college. 

After addressing the rotting Big Mac situation, we went to brunch at a lovely restaurant on M Street with our group of friends like the civilized 24 and 25 year olds that we are. I only had one Bloody Mary. My suggestion to pickup beers at the deli and find a sophomore party to go to before the tailgate got laughed at — apparently, we were too old for that. 

When we got to the tailgate (at 11:35am — more on time than EVER, because we had literally nothing else to do) we promptly realized that we no longer knew anyone who went to college at Georgetown. I recognized two people who were freshman when I was a senior, and even they looked like ancient grownups compared to the 18-year-olds walking around in jean shorts and crop tops. 

One girl walked by in a GO HOYAS bandeau (read: bra pretending to be a shirt), and I pretty much wanted to kill myself. Did I mention I was wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers? 

Waking up and finding out this was
my Snap story was... tough. 

I spent a large part of the tailgate trying to find beer that wasn’t flat (when did I start caring about that??) and catching up with people who told me they loved my blog, which was AWESOME (seriously, thanks guys — you made my weekend). I also made it a point to apologize to a boy who I thought thought I robbed him senior year, only to find out that my friends made the whole thing up and he had no idea what he was talking about. At one point, I ran into a boy who I briefly dated, and neither one of us recognized or acknowledged each other.  

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the waterfront drinking Dirty Shirley’s (if you don’t know what they are, look it up) and catching up with people who, thank God, graduated around the same time we did. It was around this time that we figured out that 3 years after graduation is really the last time it’s still appropriate to go to homecoming — we were the oldest people there. 

That night, we went to a bar that I could never get into in college because you had to be on a “list,” and I knew 19-year-old me would still be really proud of old, boring, cares-about-the-carbonation-of-her-beer 24-year-old me. I almost ended the night going home with  a guy I had a crush on in college, but jumped out of the moving cab on the way to his apartment and went back to the hotel to order pizza with my friends, instead.

Unfortunately, we fell asleep before the pizza got there. 

The next day, we squeezed all four of us into the back seat of the sedan we’d driven down in — somehow we’d agreed to let our two guy friends come with us, and generously gave them the front seat (you’re welcome, guys) and embarked on the darkest, longest, coziest 6-hour car ride of our life.

I didn't change my outfit all weekend. SWUG me would have been proud. 

Just a girl and her house. We tried to rent it for the weekend, but
considering we almost got evicted on four separate occasions when
we lived there, the landlord turned us down. Rude.

The Late, Great Tyler Weiner

My house is a zoo. I actually rarely know how many pets we actually have living there, because my mom is constantly giving away cats and adopting new puppies (well, buying them from designer pet stores). My freshman year of college, she called me three times to tell me about new dogs she'd purchased  — one of whom was a male pomeranian that she'd named "Baby Zoe" because she missed me so much — and my younger brother threatened to move out of the house.

#Squad (Tyler's Not Pictured)

Through the revolving door of Weiner animals, one remained constant: Tyler.

He kept on kickin right up until he turned 18 (which in my opinion is a very long and very happy life) and my parents sadly had to put him down earlier this year. My mom nonchalantly called to tell me this as I was walking into a 2nd date, which I subsequently walked into sobbing. We went on to date for five more months, probably because he was afraid he would have to see me cry like that again if he ever broke up with me (which eventually, he did).

Jewish Dogs Are the best dogs.

Tyler was a legend. When I was in first grade (my most adorable age), I convinced my parents to buy me a puppy from the pet store that opened up next to the supermarket. Like any 6 year old, I did zero to actually take care of the puppy, which is probably why he was never potty trained.

When we were little, my mom brought Tyler everywhere. Once, when I was in 6th Grade, she brought him to visit me at school and then got distracted and forgot him. I was sitting in English class when all of a sudden, Tyler came barreling down the hallway and somehow found me at my desk. He came to math and science with me, too, before my mom even realized he was gone.


As much as my mom loved Tyler (until she got newer, smaller dogs that she liked better — not dissimilar to how she feels about my little brother and I) my dad was his BEST friend. The two of them went everywhere together. My dad in his signature red, white and blue Adidas track suit, Tyler on his lap with his head out the window, blaring Motown. I don't think my dad has ever liked any of his kids as much as he liked Tyler. Actually, I know he didn't, because he tells all of us so all the time.

Ty-Ty loved vanilla ice cream, manaschevitz wine and humping stuffed animals. He will forever be remembered as the most beloved, and longest lasting, pet in the Weiner household. To this effect, he will forever be commemorated in this painting at the top of our stairs:

The real star of this painting is Tyler, to the left.