“My sort of dream is the John Cassavetes model. Go out, and try to make some money, preferably doing acting, but whatever! And hopefully you can make that money in these short injections, so it’s not a full-time job. You go away for two months, get a little bit of money, and then pour that money back into your film. And that’s just what Cassavetes did. He’d go and act in stuff, then go back and make his movies, which he knew would not make any money. But that’s what he loved to do! It’s a great model, I think, and it has always been my fantasy. It’s a pretty difficult thing to do.”

—Alex Karpovsky to Blackbook’s Francesca McCaffery, describing his dream career, which is also his actual career. He is an indie filmmaker (for <3), an endeavor he is currently funding by playing Ray (and Shosh’s life partner and soulmate) on HBO’s Girls (for <3 + $$).

A few people have asked me if I’ve been keeping up with Girls, and what I think about it, or what kind of money conversations I would have with each of the characters. I had only seen the first episode, because HBO made it available on YouTube, and I don’t have cable service, nor a television. I did not like the first episode.

But you can’t always judge a show by its pilot, and I went searching on iTunes and Amazon to download episodes of the show. They weren’t available. How was everyone watching it?

They were doing what Hannah Horvath would probably do, which was watching pirated episodes, or sharing HBO GO accounts with their friends. Why was HBO making it so difficult to watch one of their programs? Were they considering offering a streaming service to non-HBO cable subscribers?

Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer at Netflix, said that HBO was going to become like Netflix, so Netflix had to come up with some great original programming to stay competitive with HBO.

Sarandos might be wrong. HBO probably doesn’t want to offer a Netflix-like streaming service, and Derek Thompson explains why at The Atlantic, which is basically: HBO isn’t going to make a lot of money offering a streaming service unless you are willing to pay a ton of money, so they’re not going to do it.

So, if I’m going to catch up on Girls, I’ll have to go to a friend’s house to watch DVR’d episodes, or borrow someone’s HBO GO account. Who’s sharing? [via]

“When I graduated [from] college, my parents said, ‘You can live with us,’ but they made it really clear they were not going to support any of my endeavors. They were like, ‘You can live with us and that’s a great gift we can give you, but you have to have a job, you have to figure out, like we did, how to have a creative life, and we’re giving you a great step ahead by already living in the city you want to be in, but we’re not going to serve that function for you. Our parents didn’t do it for us, and we don’t think it’s healthy.’”

—Lena Dunham talked to Terry Gross about some things, including Heavy Things, but also more light things, like living with her parents. She also said this: “I feel like I’m constantly asking them to please stay out of my work life, but also to please bring me soup.” (I mean: I think this is all any of us want, from anyone). I know a lot of people don’t like her, but I really like her. She makes me feel okay about being a hot mess. But I am three years older than her, so maybe she shouldn’t.

Hey, fellow young ladies of a certain ilk. Is it just me, or are we all kind of a mess? Are we all rambling around our lives, spending too much and making bad dating decisions and working at jobs we hate, because we’re honestly struggling to get somewhere? Or are we doing this because we think it’s romantic?

I think I had an epiphany of sorts last year, while squoozing blackheads out of my face in front of a mirror (I know you do it too, don’t even). I was doing this even though I knew for a fact that I would regret doing so, just as I always do. Suddenly, the following thought zoomed through my mind: “Being a mess doesn’t make you cute. It just makes you a mess.” And I looked at myself in the mirror in shock, struck by the realization that I was not only picking at my face against my better judgment, but I had been doing just about everything else against my better judgment too. Every circumstantial excuse I’d built up to explain myself out of responsibility for the last few seemingly unlucky years of my life melted away like they were nothing. There I stood, in my jammies, my face red with irritation, newly aware that my unhappiness and disorder was actually of my own choosing.

Between manic pixie dream girls and slacker dude culture, I think our generation somehow got the idea that it’s charming to be a hot mess. HBO’s Girls seems to be the culmination of this. I’m not knocking the show. I think it’s a well-written, well-acted show, and I’m glad to have it on television (ladies making art represent, what what!). However, I do worry that as the viewer, we’re idealizing this kind of life, rather than looking into it as a mirror and recognizing our parallel mistakes. Are we romanticizing our twenties as being the time when we should all be complete disasters as people? If the Beat Generation had the wandering artist ideal and the Me Generation had the power greed ideal, is our generational ideal to be broke and having terrible sex and hating ourselves?

Mike’s piece about having a great, fulfilling year, while saving too, is the perfect counterbalance to this. Mike isn’t different from us, he’s just aware. Spending smarter and saving is a choice—one every single person can make. Are we not doing it because we are genuinely incapable, or are we not doing it so that we have relatable, charmingly self-deprecating tweets for people to star? I think once I was truly over the hump of being broke and unable to pay rent, I continued to live most of my twenties as if I was in some kind of movie montage. Here’s me drinking too much at a bar with my friends and rolling around in the street at 4 a.m.! Here’s me eating dinner in my underwear on my mattress on the floor of my otherwise empty studio apartment! Here’s me sleeping with a 40-something-year old dude who doesn’t treat me well! Here’s me overdrawing my bank account because I want to go rollerskating! Whee! I’m such an adorable 26-year-old mess!

However, after the zippy montage is edited together, there remains all the real life stuff on the cutting room floor. Here’s me choosing to go out drinking, instead of writing and getting better at what I really want to do. Here’s the part where I have to wake up at 6 a.m. to go to the job I hate, hungover from drinking the night before. Here’s me never wanting to have friends over because my studio apartment doesn’t have any furniture, so I sit in isolation, my neurotic inner monologue eating away at my confidence. Here’s me getting home after unfulfilling sex, wondering why I keep actively participating in something that makes me unhappy. Here’s me without the option to quit my job and pursue my goals, because I have no money saved.

There will undoubtedly be those who read this and just think I’m an asshole. And I probably am. I am an asshole for having known what I should have been doing and embracing the fuck-up instead. But maybe it is relatable. Maybe it is generational. Maybe it was growing up on slacker movies like Clerks, Reality Bites,  or even Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming. Maybe it was the dozens of rom-coms with meet-cutes and grand gestures and manic pixie dream girls and sexual mistakes. Or maybe it was something more organic, something within our culture and politics and changing world at large. Perhaps it was watching some of our parents, who thought they had amassed everything they wanted in the ’80s and ’90s, suddenly get to the ’00s and ’10s and feel they’d been robbed of something essential, like the game changed on them. Or perhaps we feel like the game changed on us, and if the goal posts are that much farther back than they were before, we don’t want to play. I don’t know. All I know is I can feel it around me, this sense that we all want to be young and dumb forever. I have a suspicion that we think being a mess equals being young equals being vital.

And I’m done with it.

Here’s to working like a boss, saving like a champ, and getting to the next level. I’m gonna Beyonce this shit from now on. Who run the world? Girls. But probably not until we start thinking of ourselves as women.

Lindsay Katai is a writer/performer/debtor living in Los Angeles, CA. She sometimes remembers to use Twitter. Photo: Flickr/bingham_becky