Twentysomethings Like Beer, Sex

Every once in a while a writer comes along whose talent is so, erhm, different you just can’t ignore them.

Last year we had such a person in Stephen Morse, who now has his own production company. See? O, the places you’ll go when you’re named one of Philadelphia Will Do’s People of the Year.

And, recently, I learned of another young writer who is sure to shake the foundation of the literary movement. (Or something. Have you seen how nice it is outside today? I’m not spending too much time on stupid jokes right now.) The writer’s name is Ainsley Maloney. The Stephen Morse comparison isn’t really all that apt, as he wrote about how black people didn’t care enough about black people and she wrote about how sometimes guys and girls fuck each other without really caring about each other.

Her two recent articles are headlined “The Buddy System” and “Long, green trip.” The cover stories are, respectively, about fuckbuddies and binge drinking in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Let’s analyze them in a charticle after the jump.

Oh, of course I took a photo from Facebook. We cover all the bases here.

“The Buddy System,” Feb. 13, 2007. As explained before, “The Buddy System” is about fuckbuddies, or, as the article calls them, “sex buddies.” Fuckbuddies, if you didn’t know, are friends who have sex with each other without being in a relationship. (Sometimes it can be called “friends with benefits,” which may or may not include actual intercourse. These things are complicated!)

• The article begins with the tale of Alex, a 23-year-old in a band, who has three fuckbuddies. (I need to teach myself a musical instrument.) They, of course, don’t know about each other, but Alex complains that “[i]t takes a lot of work; I’m not gonna front. I usually like to have at least three girls I can call whenever I feel like it. Ya know, you don’t always want to play the same video game, but you got a favorite video game… That’s kind of how it is.”
• Alex also doesn’t kiss any of his harem, so basically his effbuddies aren’t even a girlfriend-experience prostitute.
• Amy, a “petite 23-year-old college grad from Philadelphia,” says she has become fuckbuddies with 5 to 6 of her 10 high school guy friends. If I still had any female friends from high school, they’d totally be getting yelled at right now.
• And the money quote from Ms. Amy: “We’ve all been drunk together, played strip poker; we’ll watch porn and turn off the sound and make our own dialogue. To (be able to) sit there with a girl and be able to joke about it, I think it makes them feel like they can be themselves more.” Watch a porn without the sound? What are they, communists?
• Jen, who wants to be a family and sex therapist, on how she started hooking up with a friend she was talking with online: “Some of our conversations were like porn. We realized we both had this sexual energy and it needed to go somewhere.” I am happy that at least somebody getting ass from writing online a lot. (Rimshot.)

“Long, green trip,” today: This is about the “Northeast Erin Express,” a day to celebrate Irish heritage in which 99 percent of the participants are people you try to stay away from in bars. The Northeast Erin Express naturally takes place in Center City.

• The true Irish song being played when the crew gets to Blarney Stone? “American Girl,” by Tom Petty.
• Katelyn Sheldon, who’s from South Jersey, said she had to be mentally prepared for the day. “[S]he didn’t drink the night before, was in bed by midnight, and up by 6 a.m. to make the hour drive to Philly.”
• One man, Kevin Dougherty, takes Erin Express with the seriousness you might expect for the Olympic 100m finals: “I was told when I started this three years ago it would be the best day of my life. I look forward to this day months in advance. I had trouble sleeping last night.”
• These paragraphs:
  

  As he spills his ice water all over the table, Kenny Robins, a 27-year-old from Belmar, NJ, says he was “trying to go to Boozetown, but made a left and went to Sexville.”

  I ask him where he’s really going next; he looks at me confused.

  “Sexville,” he says.

• And, of course, the saddest part of the article: “Rick Kearney, who lives in Havertown – “2,876 miles from Dublin” – and gives his age as ‘the 27th anniversary of my 39th birthday’ – said he comes to Erin Express to see all the lads and lasses – especially the lasses. ‘I’m looking for a young lass, since my wife died,’ he said. ‘Just don’t tell her I said that.’”

I can’t wait until Maloney’s extensive article on the concept of the hatefuck.

Long, green trip [Philly EDGE]
The Buddy System [Philly EDGE]