The Skirt: Perpetuating My Own Myth

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"The Skirt" is an ongoing series in which Four Pins' resident lady friend, Rachel Seville, becomes the most important woman in your life.

This summer I’ve written a cutesy column about love and advice for guys and things guys might want to know from girls. But the verdict is in—this is not how ladies write columns on the Internet. Look, I can’t spend the rest of my summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on my couch looking at photos of dogs in clothing on the internet and eating Cape Cod chips while listening to John Cage's 4'33" on repeat and writing a column perpetuating my own mythological status as the Coolest Girl Writer on the Internet, which is what I’m doing now.

If you live in the United States, you’ve definitely seen me. If you read Four-Pins or follow John Jannuzzi on Twitter, you’ve at least heard of me. I’m the girl who writes that weird fashion blog that makes fun of a lot of things, called Pizza Rulez. “But you don’t blog about pizza!” everyone always says. Apple Jacks don’t taste like apple. Fuck you.

I am at Viand—if you have to ask which one, you’ll never be like me—and I’ve ordered a club sandwich I’ll never touch and coffee I’ll drink like it’s water from a Fountain of Youth in a Jean Michel Basquiat painting. I am wearing a puffy taffeta Carven dress and a trucker hat with a plastic cow head on it and Nike Dunks the color of Champagne I poured last night on someone who’s famous below Delancey between Essex and Allen. I reach into my pig-shaped purse and dig out my Burt’s Bees chapstick. I apply three coats. My lips are buzzing with electric energy as I make sultry eyes with an old man until I realize I’m staring at an unoccupied, wrinkled vinyl booth. I smell like water and sugar mixed together with a very expensive spoon from Barneys and everyone in this empty restaurant is looking at me. I am writing in the present tense.

I have taken six Flintstone vitamins and three of those gummy bear pills, and I’ve just lined up four Sour Patch kids in front of me and named them all Harmony Korine.

“Let no trash bin go unhumped,” I hiss at them aloud, although I am alone. And then I eat them. They’re the only thing I’ve eaten in hours.

A few hours later, I am standing in New Jersey at a barbecue you read about on Twitter, but weren’t invited to. There are Christmas lights hanging outside in a way you could only ever hope to hang Christmas lights. I have had three O’Doul’s, but because I’m so out of it on Flintstones and gummy bears and Sour Patch Kids I’m three 450-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets to the wind and have staged an impromptu reading of a blog some guy wrote about me on the Internet in high school:

“She was the first girl I ever explained my life philosophy to. I revealed to her that I don’t think there is a meaning in life and we should just experience it. If we walk around trying to figure out what this instance means or what this event means, we take away from the actual experience of life.”

I have the polite attention of my friend Jessie who cuts up beautiful things for a living and the rapt attention of a dog who, I’m made to understand, is not to eat any table scraps.

After I finish reading, I lean down to the dog and pull a Sour Patch Kid from my pocket. “This is Harmony Kor--” I begin, but the dog snatches the candy from my fingers with its horrible beast mouth and consumes it.

I think bitterly of something Bob Dylan once said to Jonah Lehrer: “Dogs are a man’s best friend.’”

Suddenly, I feel ill, and I know I can’t be here anymore. I reach into my HSN x Target for Balenciaga tortoiseshell fur-trimmed bag I got from my friend who works in PR in Paris and dig out the vial of blood I use as lipstick. I apply sixteen coats and smear my mouth and I realize I have never wanted more in my life to just go back to being Ashley from Florida and I stand up and whine, “I want to go to an art gallery where I can blow bubbles” and I don’t tell anyone, but I just leave.

I nap on the way back to New York and fall asleep as soon as I get back to my apartment and when I wake up the next morning I have texts from all my friends asking:

“Where are you???”

"Are you ok?????"

"This dog is throwing up purple do u know why????"

All my friends think I’m dead.

And maybe I am.

Like in “The Sixth Sense.”

Rachel Seville is a writer living in Brooklyn who believes in miracles. Read her blog, Pizza Rulez, here and follow her on Twitter here.

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