I say this with absolute confidence.
If you’re thinking, “But! But!” then you’re one of the offenders and nobody has had the heart to tell you.
So here it is: Put the phone down and back away slowly.
I was recently minding my own business (for a change), walking down the hall while mentally humming “Staying Alive” (because that’s the only way to strut and make it look natural), when I was accosted by someone who said those words everybody dreads:
“Oh my god, you have to see this video. It’s so crazy!”
Then they made me watch a five minute long video of their cousin’s wedding reception where nothing – and I mean absolutely nothing – of interest happened. I could feel my ankles swelling, that’s how long I was standing there.
Let’s be 100% crystal clear here. I can only fake my way through so many utterances of, “Oh, wow! That’s crazy!” before I start to feel cheap and and ashamed and lose respect for myself.
I say this as a person who didn’t even start to lose respect for herself all those years in the 90s when I would get free CDs from bands by sticking their CD to my bare midriff and then undulating like a belly dancer without the CD falling off, so the bar is already pretty low.
I say this as a person who didn’t feel cheap when she used to wear a thrift store polyester orange hot pants romper to festival concerts and tell young men to refer to me as “Tangerine Dreamy”.
I say this as someone whose best friend kicked someone out of the way so that I could grab Kip Winger’s bass pick off the floor at a Winger concert and then I waved it around like it was Simba in the Lion King. No shame felt. Not an ounce.
I somehow – somehow – made it to the end of the wedding reception video while, sadly, unsuccessfully trying to dive into a nearby potted plant.

Not wanting to tempt fate, the moment it was over I started to lightly jog away from this person. I figured it would be worth the asthma attack if I could actually get away from them. If they couldn’t tell how desperate I was to get away during the first video, who knew what else they had in store for me?
Which is why this person then said:
“Hang on, before you go, let me see if I can pull the video up from the bachelorette party!”
Oh god, no. NOOOOOOOOOOOO. If I wanted to watch a video of a bunch of skanks I’ve never met, and will never meet, standing on top of a banquette at some nightclub that can best be described as “Axe Body Spray in The Form of a Building” wearing iridescent fake wieners as unicorn horns, satin sashes that says “Slut Number One” and “Slut Number Two” and badly twerking to “Blurred Lines”, I would go to the nearest swingers club next to a Trump rally that just let out.
Now, if you happen to have that YouTube video on your phone of that super fat cat who busts out the side of that shoe box with his big body, I’m game for that. Anytime. That video is literally two seconds long AND it also features a cat with a fat body, which will never, ever get old for me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, their health, blah blah, pets shouldn’t be overweight LEMME SQUOZE THAT FAT CAT BODY.
Sometimes I stare off into space, thinking about all the fat cat bodies out there, and trying to figure out how I can arrange my life in such a way that I can make a living out of squozing them. This is America, in the year of 2019. Anything is supposed to be possible.
If I were a millennial, I would ask you to donate money to me for to reach this goal, but I’m a Gen-Xer, so I prefer to just complain about it and take little to no action.