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.

My Journalistic Skills Have Turned Me Into a Full Blown Stalker

If I've learned ONE thing so far in journalism school, it's how to investigate. It has made me curious as hell (I'm a huge pain in the ass to have a conversation with — I Google everything) and when there is a question, I absolutely need to have the right answer. I've become an expert researcher, and can get to the bottom of pretty much anything.

This skill has come in handy in my schoolwork, but until today I didn't recognize its importance in real life — that is, until I needed to use it to get a date.

Let me explain.

This morning on the 1 Train, I was seated across from the absolute hottest guy I have ever seen. I can't even describe him in a way that would do his hotness justice.

Of course, I was coming straight from the gym with sopping wet hair, and in my 6am sprint out of the house forgot to bring a bra, so I  wasn't exactly looking my best. I was too nervous to sit near him, so I sat three seats down, then got even more nervous so got up and tripped my way into the seat directly across from him. It was super graceful, don't worry.

For the next 15 minutes, I stared him down while he quietly read his book. I even went so far as to take off my headphones in the least subtle way possible (they're HUGE and make me look like the Napster guy form 2002) just in case he noticed me looking at him hungrily and decided he wanted to chat.

Weirdly, he didn't.

To make things as creepy as possible (except not, because it gets worse. Just wait.) I took a discrete picture of him, figuring I could submit it to HotDudesReading or use it on my "Missed Connections" post on Craigslist.

After exchanging zero words and one moment of uncomfortable eye contact, he got off the train at Times Square. I chased him for a little, but lost him before I could say hello (which was probably for the best, considering I had no plan of what I would say to him if I ever caught up to him, panting like a madwoman).

Saddened by the fact that he'd gotten away, I went onto @hotdudesreading (which, if you're not familiar with, is the best Instagram account on the planet) to figure out how I could submit my creepy stalker pic to their site in the hopes that he would see it and track me down and marry me. Realistic, don't you think?

I got distracted by the hotdudesreading and started scrolling the feed, and lo and behold THERE WAS MY NEW SUBWAY CRUSH.

Like any good investigator, I decided I had to find him and this was my chance.

This is where the real A+ detective work comes into play:

I spent 20 minutes scrolling through the comments (yes, there were a lot) trying to see if someone had tagged him. As luck would have it, someone did!

This brought me to his Instagram page, which gave me his real name which allowed me to find him on LinkedIn within seconds (he didn't have a Facebook, which made him even more desirable).

I enlisted the help of my friends, and by 9:06am (exactly 26 minutes after getting off the train) I had his work email and phone number — 2015 is a scary time to be alive.

At this point, I was kind of stuck. I couldn't exactly e-mail him out of the blue, considering we were strangers and I had spent a large portion of my morning stalking him to the ends of the earth, so I picked arguably the creepiest means of communication in existence (normally reserved for girls with handles like @bigb00tybitch and @sweetluvin69) and Direct Messaged him on Instagram:

I mean,  LOOK at this guy. He's without a doubt the hottest person I've ever seen— in real life or on TV.  This picture doesn't even do him justice. I also think my message was really well crafted: as un-creepy as possible, given the circumstances, and for the first time in a long time I didn't have to lie about having read a book I was talking about.

HE ACTUALLY RESPONDED TO ME!!!!

As if his hotness wasn't enough to make me swoon, he literally turned out to be the nicest guy on the planet. I did some recon, though (because I'm a journalist and that's what I do) and his girlfriend looks like she's pretty cool, but I can't decide if that makes me feel better or worse about him being the one that got away, especially after all that hard work.

The good news is, if things don't workout between them, he knows where to find me. You say psycho, I say resourceful.