Life has its trade-offs. As you age, you lose things like teeth and the ability to play in the ball pit at fast-food restaurants, and you gain things like experience and employer-based health insurance.
— Alexandra Petri
Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.
Wilde is an invaluable acquaintance. Often, in situations where I am required to appear witty, I simply steal large chunks from his works and attempt to pass them off as my own with minor modifications.
Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
If you want to be famous because you do something well or badly, be it singing while fat or hitting balls of various shapes and hues, you have to be prepared to divulge. We live in the age of the chronic overshare.
The worst thing that happens to you at college if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you will miss two hours of someone reading scintillating anecdotes about Medieval Ireland. The worst thing that happens to you in life if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you might lose your job as a first responder.
There is something about a mortarboard that gives otherwise sane and normal people the overwhelming urge to burden you with advice. Some of them cannot help themselves. They were asked to do it by a committee. But one can only take so many pieces of wisdom before they all start to blur together.
No matter how successful you are, no matter how good you are at what you do, even if a golden path rolls out in front of your feet your whole life, there will come one particularly bleak Tuesday when you glance over at Facebook and notice that Jen From Down The Hall has just won an Oscar.
All the weird inconveniences of adult life that you thought they made up to lend excitement and color to episodes of 'Sex and the City' are, in fact, real.
It is possible to assemble a narrative for yourself, brokenly, on social media, only seeing what you want to look at.
Good laughs melt out of memory pretty quickly.
I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.
Snow is like a manic pixie dream girl: fun and whimsical when you encounter it only through the barrier of a movie screen - but absolute misery to have to put up with in real life.
It's not that Millennials don't believe some things are serious. We'll make 'It Gets Better' videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest.
Worst case scenario, nothing I do has any value or purpose, but if I can make someone laugh, I'm at least as useful as a piece of quiche would be.
My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far, no one has.
Standup comedy was my weird hobby. I would drag my poor parents out to the only open mics that were in coffee shops instead of bars. I'd get up and go, 'Hi, I'm 17, and I have jokes about matriculation!' At the time I was like, 'Why is no one laughing?'
The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.
Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.
Bad things happen, and you can only be so prepared.
Every so often, when I am feeling plucky, I try to write a screenplay that combines all 10 of Americans' top phobias and market it as a sleeper hit.
Almost nothing anyone told me about Harvard has been accurate.
At Harvard, people like to impart the idea that you are a mover and shaker.
You do not get gold stars for cleaning your toilet. In actual life, there is a depressing lack of stickers.
Success is like food caught in your teeth: much more noticeable when it happens to other people. If it happens to you, other people have to take you aside and say something.
President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.
A picture can hide as much as it reveals.
Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.
Anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it.
Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.
Millennials don't go to rallies.
I tend to process stuff by making jokes about it. It's something that makes me annoying to be around in times of real crisis.
I majored in extracurriculars, honestly. I joined the Harvard Stand Up Comedy Society, which is a ragtag band of misfits. I wrote for 'On Harvard Time,' which was a student TV show trying to be 'The Daily Show.' And I wrote a humor column for 'The Crimson' starting my sophomore year.
No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.
I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.
Once you start worrying, it's hard to stop.
The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.
At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.
I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
If you're doing what you do because you love it, you have room to be happy for others. And that's a lot of fun, when you get down to it.
In high school, you at least have to get up at a reasonable hour and show up at places on time. College, on the other hand, gave me the sense that I could complete major assignments at 2 A.M. without suffering any repercussions, along with the erroneous idea that in real life, things started after one in the afternoon.
When police are shutting down cameras, it is a sign that they know the truth is not going to be kind to them.
Ferguson shows the power of social media. This could have not been a story. Or it could have just been a local story. Or it could have been something that we saw only from a distance, through the usual filters. Instead, it gathered steam.
I swear like a sailor, assuming the sailor in question died in 1800 and was really square.
How many stories do you know about people cooped up in places because of deep snowfall? How many stories where something good happens to those people?
Millennials give comics the kind of adulation past generations reserved for musicians. We respect Lady Gaga. But we'll travel hundreds of miles to touch the hem of Jon Stewart's robe.
One of the things I try to do - and I always regret when I'm not doing it - is I try to read as much as possible as I'm consuming news.
People feel compelled to continue reading and hearing the news. Sometimes, you just want somebody to be yelling at it with you as you're reading it. I think of that as my function.
My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before, and needless to say, I quickly lost control of the class.
