Unpopular Opinion: Girls' Trips Suck
PLUS: Jane wants to hire you, please! All the details below.
Hello, good people!
I was thrilled, THRILLED, by how many of you are interested in helping me out with writing and editing here at AJPT. I think there are about 2350 of you so far who could do an outrageously stellar job. Thank you!
I pretty much broke down what it is I need in the comments of the last story. The one key criteria I did not mention yet is trustworthiness. Working with me, you will have access to everything on this site and also my personal stuff. (Since starting Sassy magazine all those years ago, I’ve had little delineation between what’s work and what’s personal - I am sure some of you “creatives” whose own lives are your material can relate.)
I get that it is unwise to announce this in public (though I have less to lose than Kim K. when she posted images of her $4M diamond ring on Instagram that time), but: I am the worst with security and confidentiality and passwords and doorlocks, etc. I keep other people's secrets forever, but I myself have always been a haphazardly open book. (Okay, not completely open yet, as you will see when you read my truly open and actual book, officially announced today via this link you won’t be able to access unless you subscribe but it is a pretty basic announcement and says that the book will be published by Random House(!!!) and titled, duh, It Happened To Me. That’s the book I am working on writing now and thus my need for your help with AJPT.)
I figure staying open and honest and forthcoming - and handing out my phone numbers and credit cards routinely - will all work out in the end. Who wants to spend valuable energy worrying about what might happen if information were to get leaked or even waste time memorizing a new password after decades of the same one. A lot of you may feel differently, but for me it’s called freedom and living life! (Note that there is another iteration of this free-living doctrine that I find self-serving and calculated and do not support: people I know who always park their cars without even taking a moment to pay attention to signs and reason that the amount they pay a year in tickets is a fair cost for the privilege of parking whenever and wherever they please. That’s more rude and entitled. As a therapist once told me in an upbeat tone, at least my quirky behaviors only hurt myself.)
In terms of being so open with all my personal stuff, it is however a slight bummer that I have modeled for a minimum of three completely nude photo shoots over the course of my adult life and not one of them has ever surfaced. I get the hint.
So anyway, the next step for all of you who have expressed interest in the job or who want to now: Ask me any more questions in the comments and then if you still want to apply, send an email to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com with the subject line: I’m A Good Person. (You have to really mean it when you type or dictate it or the email won’t go through.) I will then write you each back with the details I need from you, as well as hours and pay. The plan is to wrap this up quickly because I could use the help yesterday. Like right now when I am in the CMS building posts instead of working on The Book!
I love you and I always love most what you have to say in the comments, so I will look for you there!
Jane
Super Superficial PS: A podcast was just released for which the interviewer - the one-of-a-kind Sam Pocker - had done the most incredible research. He was bringing up people and places and experiences my own mom and I had forgotten about. The problem is that I think I look really shitty in it. I taped another podcast with Rachel Kramer Bussel that same night and I look fine there, so I think the problem was me trying to following specific lighting directions rather than winging it as I normally do. A dab of makeup might not have hurt either, but like with updating passwords, I generally can’t be bothered. So be forewarned and watch it here if you want to know more about my past than anyone ever. And you will have to wait until the summer for Rachel’s to see how much more pleasant I can look. I know, exciting!
PPS: Today's Unpopular Opinion, like many of the best ones, has ideas in it that I completely disagree with (starting with the first sentence in the large-font quote that’s pulled out before paragraph two, for example). So you should feel free in the comments to disagree as vehemently as you want to with any or all of it. I would love to hear your best, worst and most mediocre girls’ trip stories too. The one I regret the most was leaving Michael in Sao Paulo on an extremely fun tour with REM to meet up with a bunch of moms of Charlotte’s kindergarten friends for a girls’ trip in the Bahamas at an all-inclusive where the floors were so greasy slippery from the sole cleaning amounting to buckets of some bright blue formula dumped onto them every night and the drinks were the same bright blue and tasted probably the same. I felt it was important to go make those connections for little Charlotte’s sake and I still get that (and am close with at least one of those moms still). But come on, Jane! And that’s the end of that whiny, bougie, privileged girls’ trip story. Tell yours too please!
By Rosie K.
I’m coming off the heels of a weekend getaway with ten girls. We laughed, we danced, we partied—we had a good time. Why then, did I leave feeling just as doom and gloom as I did when I got there?
“Women are cliquey by nature. But I now know how terrible it feels to be on the other end.”
We went to the middle of nowhere, Washington state, for a “Girls’ Getaway” over a three-day weekend. We are an eclectic mix of moms, powerhouse business owners, and savvy community leaders who had only known each other six months prior to planning the trip, bonded by a ‘friends of friends’ type of situation. We were very much looking forward to time away from our kids and husbands to relax, reset, and day drink without judgement.
We stayed in a beautiful glass cabin surrounded by mountains with a sauna, hot tub, winery down the street and day spa at our disposal. We hired a chef the second night we were there, who prepared a gorgeous and delicious four-course meal: Classic Caesar Salad, Fusion Chicken Cakes with ginger aioli, Prime Filet Mignon with chimichurri sauce, and a Tahitian Vanilla Créme Brulee with fresh berries for dessert. The meal, while overpriced, could have been the highlight of the trip for me.
“There’s usually a ring leader or ‘mom of the group’ in these situations, and I don’t click with ours.”
The disappointment lay in an entire day wasted walking around an art museum that one of the women (the ring leader) was dying to go to. Not my kind of a Saturday activity on any Saturday, and especially not one on a girls’ trip. It was boring, arduous and depressing, and completely killed my buzz.
Walking around the art gallery felt similar to being in the lunch line behind the popular girls. Everyone had paired off with their respective friend, giggling together like idiots, leaving me to pretend to enjoy myself as they oohed and ahhed over sub-par paintings. I couldn’t have been more annoyed. It made me miss my real friends terribly.
“I got picked on for NOT eating a cinnamon bun. I felt like I was in middle school getting singled out by the Regina George of the group.”
When we got back to the house, the entire vibe was off and it felt like it took forever to get back to vacation mode baseline. When you’re dealing with a group of women with strong personalities, making a suggestion like going hiking (we were in the woods, and the weather was perfection) instead of going to see art felt like it was met with daggers and crickets.
One of the moments that hurt me the most was when they were still up drinking night one and at 11 pm, I said I was heading to bed because I was going to wake up early to do Pilates. That simple statement was met with judgmental stares and eye-rolls, and then one of the women - the ring leader’s bestie and roommate - turned to her and loudly said the nastiest thing so that everyone could hear: “This skinny bitch would wake up to workout. How annoying! Go home!”
