How did it all go so horribly wrong?
Twenty years ago, when I graduated college I had my whole life ahead of me and it was going to be an adventure. I had a professional fulltime job at an office in downtown Washington, DC, working for a presitigious non-profit, with a bunch of other young, single, hip professionals (can we still say hip?). Yeah, it was entry-level and the pay was just okay, but it was enough.
In addition to all my new, young, single coworkers and professional colleagues, there were also all my old friends from college, many who hadn't graduated yet and still were in 7-day-a-week party mode.
Despite living at home with my parents (which was standard for Generation X in the 90s, and only temporary in my case) my life was a non-stop succession of lavish business trips (well, lavish for a non-profit), drunken bar crawls, cultural events and happy hours.
I still remember fondly Tuesdays at Sfuzzi with the Capital Hill crowd, drinking the eponymous peach bellini-inspired drinks that came with a free italian buffet. And who could forget the warehouse party scene of the 1990s, desperately searching nightclubs every Friday and Saturday night for that one person who was in the know and could score you the phone number you needed to call the next afternoon to get the location and password to attend that underground party with the coconut-scented chill room and over-amped house music off some back alley under the Whitehurst freeway?
And then there was that beer tasting we all attended for the City Paper personals section. In order to qualify for the door prize (a mixed case of microbrews) we actually had to submit an ad. Everyone in our group, guys and girls alike, wrote eloquent ISOs and submitted them and then, like the adventurous literary crowd that we were, kept everyone up to date on all the disasterous dates using that new technology......what was it? Oh, yes, E-mail! We kept each other laughing for weeks. I still have all the e-mails archived somewhere and go back and read them for a laugh. Who needed Facebook? Who even imagined Facebook?
That was my life. A new entertaining adventure every week, brought to you by a single group of friends living just outside the city. In the age of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" it really was just like being in your own sitcom.
Fastforward----->2009.
What happened?
Twenty years (and a string of failed relationships) later I find myself single and living by myself in a two bedroom condo that I own 20 miles outside Washington, DC. Five days a week I drag my ass out of bed at the crack of dawn to sit on my oversized sofa eating my Cheerios while watching Matt, Meredith, Al and Ann all trade inane banter between interviews with guests who are ostensibly there to discuss the news of the day but in reality are pushing their latest book/reality TV project. Then its a soul-sucking 60 minute drive/park/walk/subway/walk some more combo commute to the office where I spend the next eight hours forcing myself to get something done so my boss at the prestigious non-profit doesn't think I'm a complete layabout. Afterwards, a little exercise at the gym before enduring another marathon combo commute home, just in time to drown my sorrows in a bottle of wine over "I'm a Celebrity....Get Me Out of Here" before passing out and repeating it all again the next day.
My fabulous collection of single friends that supplied my weekends with a neverending carousel of wine festivals, concerts, hiking trips and Gold Cups, one-by-one exited the single life, trading condos for townhouses and townhouses for single family homes, with all the lawn mowing and other Saturday upkeep they require. My social life on a Saturday night has been reduced to conversations with a three-year-old about Thomas the Train at a suburban California Pizza Kitchen so populated by young families it is nearly indistinguishable from a Chuck E. Cheese (except maybe better food and no games or animatronic characters).
Not only are none of my friends single anymore, they no longer have any single friends to set me up with. There are no singles living in my building. The bars in the mall across the street where all the single folk hang out have closed (probably due to lack of business, I'm sensing a mini-trend here).
My sitcom, in short, has turned into an American tragedy at worst or a prime-time dramedy at best. I'm not quite sure.
What I am sure of is that this is no longer working. I don't want a suburban dramedy. I want an urban sitcom.
Where's my sitcom?
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