Ten Ways to Get Rid of Your Vanessa Effing Abrams

Everyone encounters at least one Vanessa Fucking Abrams in her life. These are awful, annoying people who are enthralled by their own hipster-ish lifestyle, act as though anyone who chooses a different lifestyle is crazy/stupid, fuck up the lives of most of the people around them, and manage to offend you merely by existing.

So, I've decided to make your life easier by giving you ten ways to solve the VFA problem*:

1. Shove her into the path of an oncoming F train. ("When you're a Humphrey, you're always on the F train.")

2. Asphyxiation via her own stupid American Apparel "hooded scarf".

3. Get the Chuck Bass in your life to seduce her and give her an especially virulent (and fatal) form of syphilis.

4. Pull a Kevin Spacey in Se7en and chain her to a table while force-feeding her Annie's organic frozen turkey dinners until her stomach explodes.

5. Horrific "accident" involving the espresso machine at the coffee bar she (of course) works at.

6. Run her Vespa down on the Manhattan Bridge.

7. Forced marathon viewings of The City. Inevitably, she will claw her eyes out from boredom.

8. Call up the Blair Waldorf in your life and sit back and watch the carnage, pineapple mojito in hand.

9. Lure her to an impromptu "Save this building!" protest that takes place in a building about to be demolished.

10. Arrange for her to meet Michael Moore, then tip him over so that he crushes her.

Boom. You are welcome.

*These are not things you should actually do to anyone in real life. I am not advocating murder, because, as previously mentioned, I am not a serial killer.

On Beastiality

(How's that for an SEO title?)

Beauty and the Beast came out when I was about four years old. I don't remember seeing the movie for the first time, but my parents tell me I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

I do remember begging my parents--in that entitled, naggy way four-year-olds have--to buy in on VHS. (Side note: Remember VHS? Good times. Then again, you can't have commentary or extras on VHS, so really, I'm glad we've moved on to DVDs.) Though I didn't watch the tape to the point of destruction, it's fair to say my mom (and dad) soon came to hate "Be Our Guest," and looked forward to the start of the school year. They did, however, indulge me and buy me a really awesome Belle costume for Halloween. I looked pretty adorable:



My attraction to Beauty stemmed primarily from my love for its heroine--a love that only grew as my childhood years passed. Belle wasn't like previous Disney princesses. She loved her kooky inventor father and, most of all, books.

(Also, I totally loved the Beast. To the point where I preferred him in his Beast-ly form and lovingly treasured the plastic model of him I got at Pizza Hut. Even at that early age, I was weird. Though I think it was mostly that I didn't like Human Beast's long hair. And his fur looked soft.)

But here we have a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Did I become a bibliophile because my natural inclination toward reading was reinforced by a positive role model, or did I just pick her to model my life after?

If the latter is the case, I'd like to take this opportunity to give the entire Disney operation the finger, because I've suffered quite a bit of disillusionment and heartbreak because of them and, more specifically, this movie. Don't get me wrong: It is my second-favorite 2-D movie (Lion King represent). Hell, it got nominated for Best Picture that year. But Belle's ostracization from her peers was romantic, even a little glamorous. She didn't seem to suffer all that much from being smarter than most of the people in her town. Yeah, some old hens sang about how odd she was, but she seemed to get along pretty well in life. And--spoiler alert!--she's rewarded with an awesome life in a huge castle with a dream library and a pretty cool (if a little hirsute) dude for a husband.

Granted, this sort of thing happens in every other Disney "princess" movie. With Beauty and the Beast, though, it feels like more of a betrayal, because I'm Just Like Her. So, if we follow Five-Year-Old-Girl Logic, all those things she gets should also be mine, right?

But in the real world, the Beast is never a Prince in disguise; he's only a Beast, and no amount of wishing or loving will change that. Castles are pretty expensive, not to mention damp and drafty even in the summer. And if you read Lord of the Rings every year and love Battlestar Galactica and read books about superstring theory, people will only ever see you as a Nerd.