Long Time Caller, First Time Listener #7

On marriage, music, and majors.

Welcome to Long Time Caller, First Time Listener, a column where we, Trixie and Katya, give you, the reader, advice. Our answers may not be valuable, but they will definitely be irrelevant. 

Today’s topics include love, marriage, serenades, lesbians, and college.

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Want your question answered by us? Email goopedsubstack@gmail.com. Please include a name/pseudonym and your pronouns!

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Question 1: Hi! My name is Isabella and my pronouns are she/her. Next year I am getting married to my girlfriend who lives in another country, but I haven’t told anyone in my family yet except for my mother. How do I tell them the big news? (PS: some of them don’t even know I’m gay so that will be interesting) 

-Isabella 

Trixie: Isabella, I am always confounded by the desire to be married. But I am never confused about the desire to receive gifts. I am a shameless gift lover. I love my birthday because I love receiving flowers, cards, gifts, and cash. I love having a Jewish boyfriend because Hanukkah is like the Groundhog’s Day of gifts. (You get a gift every single day! There’s even a candle ceremony and I look best in extremely low lighting) I especially love Christmas because I love gift shopping and I always allow myself to spend whatever amount I want on my friends and family. It’s my way of showing “I may have ignored you all year but here’s a gift receipt so you can quantify how many dollars worth I love you.” Make sure whatever you do, you collect gifts.

I have the uncommon POV that you don’t need to tell your family the details of your romantic life. In addition, no one usually expects queer people to partake in heteronormative rituals such as marriage and parenthood so even if you told them they’d likely be indifferent. When straight people get married, it’s a cookie cutter nuptial song and dance where the wackiest thing that happens is someone lifts you up on a chair during the reception. As a queer person with a passionate international love story, you get to build your love life from scratch and make it whatever you want. My dream wedding is to get married at a gay bar on Halloween and encourage everyone to wear $10 or less costumes. Someone in a shitty Frankenstein mask from CVS crying during my vows would make me so happy- because it’s what I want. Have your dream wedding at the Nordstrom Cafe and then in a year or two you can tell your family when you feel it’s appropriate. The wedding will also mean more to them when your wife has spent more time in the states and establishes a familial bond.

Katya: Hi Isabella, and congratulations! It doesn’t sound like you’re planning a lavish wedding, since those are generally bankrolled by the family. So, I think you’re doing everyone a favor by not telling them. Nobody likes weddings; they’re stressful, expensive and more than half of them end up in costly divorces. So I say, wait a year, and if you and your girlfriend are still together then you can celebrate your anniversary with a giant but affordable wedding reception-style blowout bonanza party. You can even include a link to an Amazon wish list or registry on the party invitation, so you don’t miss out on the only good part of a wedding–the gifts. This way, you can let the whole family know that not only are you queer, you are serious about it! Mazel.

Question 2: Sup, fuckers? I have two questions- 

1. I am a musician and wrote a song about someone and sent it to them and they never responded. I know it’s not because the song sucked, I’m great. Have you ever flopped artistically or had someone you were really excited to show your art to just not care about it, and how did you recover from your bruised ego? Do I just die now?

2. Katya, when you smoke in drag, how do you keep your lipstick from getting on your thumbs and therefore on everything else you touch? Whenever I flick my cigarette it smudges on my thumbs and shit gets real gnarly real quick! Trixie, you’re the makeup guru so maybe you know some smudgy lipstick life hacks

-Beach Bunny

Katya: Hi Bunny, thanks for your questions! I have no doubt that you are a brilliant musician and that the song you created was fly, sexy, hot and beautiful. It’s possible that the person with whom you shared it was an old maiden type of person who doesn’t possess the vernacular to appreciate it. This doesn’t make you a bad musician per se, it merely indicates that you suck at marketing. There are two very different skillsets involved in creating a song, and then trying to get people to listen to it. Great art flops all the time, due to poor marketing strategies hindered by scandals, competition, hurricanes, mudslides, murders, and other unpredictable acts of God, etc. Madonna planned to release a disco ballad called Tunnel Vision the day after Princess Diana died. The single, easily one of her best–a masterpiece really, was never released, but do you think she went home with a bruised ego that night? Of course not! Also, your second mistake is sharing this with the person it’s about. Vague and mysterious are the watchwords here–just like Taylor Swift. Let people wonder, and don’t ever spell it out for them. When it comes to directly referencing a past lover in a song or film, wait til they’ve died and then change the name! Good luck, flop!

2. Great question! For the smoking, girlboss, the enemy is gloss. The easiest fix for this is a matte lipstick. There are a few that come to mind: Red Scare Matte Lipstick from Trixie Cosmetics. I also love Don’t Stop by Nars (this is my favorite– don’t tell Trixie) which is a liquid lipstick that turns very matte and is extremely long lasting. Or you could go full on clay pigeon mouth with Mac’s Ruby Woo which literally is the driest fucking lipstick in the world. Think mouth made of sand, it is so fucking matte. Good luck and happy red-lipped smoking.

Trixie: Beach Bunny! There is a band called Beach Bunny and I love them so much. Anyway–I routinely flop in the musical realm. I would say my artistic instincts are typically sound, but vocally I am very limited. My voice works in comedy settings but I have found that I can’t really “sing” in the traditional sense. I wrote the entire album “Two Birds” about a breakup I had with a guy I dated from Kentucky for only five months. I remember the last time I saw him we went to Dollywood. We were click-clicking up this roller coaster and I felt no better time than the present to say “I love you!” Instead of saying “I love you too,” which is customary, he screamed all the way until the end of the ride and broke up with me two weeks later. It was devastating. I think I partly wrote that album thinking if he heard it he would take me back and wow as I type that I am so secondhand embarrassed for myself. Basically the point is people rarely have the reaction you want to a song about them. Most of my current music is about my boyfriend of five years and I don’t think he could care less. Even my song “Jesse, Jesse” which is a love song about the Hollywood actor Jesse Eisenberg didn’t phase him and he knows how much I love rich Jewish men.

Question 3: So I’m a psychology major and I just came to the conclusion that I don’t really like people. The idea of becoming a therapist and talking/listening to people for a living for the next 70+ years of my life exhausts me. What do I do now? Switch majors? Become an IT engineer instead? 

-a girlboss trying to vibe

Katya: The fact that I immediately misunderstood “IT engineer” to mean building and operating a giant version of the evil clown from Stephen King’s IT should be much more concerning than funny to me, but the important thing for you here is that you need to just calm down. Very few people go to work in their majors, and fewer still go on to work in that field. The mere prospect of doing anything for more than 70 years is exhausting. It hasn’t even been 7 minutes since I’ve been writing this paragraph and I’m ready for a nap. So switch majors, switch bodies with your mother, get a Nintendo Switch, and then switch that out with a Playstation, I don’t know! It’s gonna be fine, and don’t worry, in 70 years the planet will be on fire! 

Trixie: Girl boss, why do you believe you are going to live another 70+ years? What kind of yogi tea-drinking prayer circle sober life are you living? Also cut yourself some slack- no one likes people. And no one hates people more than those who work with people. The last “people person” I knew killed herself in 2014. I didn’t even attend the funeral because you guessed it, I didn’t want to see people. Anyway you never know what’s coming. I worked at makeup counters for years to get myself through college for performing arts. Of course I ended up being a performer but I also ended up starting my own makeup company. Your life is one big Slumdog Millionaire timeline and every jade egg you are collecting in your pussy will hatch when the time is right.