Vanderpump Rules Recap – 1/11/16

As long as we’re on the subject (since I just brought it up), here are a few things I don’t miss in the slightest:

• Those incessant blizzards that rocked the east coast last winter. Yes, I realize that I might have just committed the weather equivalent of shouting, “Looks like a no-hitter!” during the ninth inning of a baseball game right before the batter smashes a grand slam homerun straight into the outfield bleachers, but should a month of continuous snowfall accompanied by ice thudding from the sky suddenly commence, please blame Mother Nature, not me.
• Thinking that I have to say yes to everything I’m asked to do at work. There were those early years when I tutored for the SAT and helped students write college essays and ran classes designed to get kids a better score on the Regents exam. I was even suckered into being the advisor for the Trivia Team my first few years, an act that mandated that I accompany kids who loved shit like physics and trigonometry to academic decathlons where I had to read questions that I not only didn’t know the answer to, but often I couldn’t even pronounce half of the words in the question. Even the time I dove into a pool and then unknowingly conducted an entire conversation with a guy I was interested in for fifteen minutes straight before realizing my left t*t was hanging out did not make me feel as big a moron as I did when I went to those trivia competitions. Finally recognizing that I was allowed to say, “f*ck no!” to random requests at work changed my life.
• In terms of technology, I do not mourn the commercial-crammed days when I lived without XM Radio, the dark ages when DVR was just a figment of an excellent idea in some madman’s mind, and the years my phone didn’t contain that beautiful “block” button that I’ve started to use pretty frequently.
• I do not miss the days when I refrained from telling people in my life who were behaving like pathetic assh*les that they were acting like pathetic assh*les and I definitely don’t miss the nights I couldn’t sleep because I was far too consumed with running the imaginary conversations I should have had with them in my mind. I also do not miss the years when my nearest and dearest were less than honest with me. Maybe it’s a loss of patience or maybe it’s the gaining of patience or perhaps I’ve just formed an allergy to bullsh*t, but I’d much rather have the difficult conversation for real than perfect it a hundred times in my mind for imagination’s sake and nothing else.
• I can’t even pretend to miss the dewy mornings when coffee didn’t spurt instantly from the Keurig that sits in a place of prominence on my kitchen counter, especially since I never properly learned how to make a pot of the stuff on a normal coffee machine and it turns out that exploding coffee grinds are a real pain in the ass to clean up.
• I’ll never again long for the years when my salary was so low that I internally debated every now and again how maybe settling for a guy with money and not much else wouldn’t be the single worst choice I could possibly make – and that includes the time I got those terrible choppy side bangs that not even my closest friends could react to with anything but horror.
• I was once certain that I would, but I do not miss those flavored ramen noodles that made my hair smell like chicken or that month when I went on an all-candy-corn diet (scoff all you want; it worked) or when I moved out for the first time and realized that it meant I could buy any kind of cereal I wanted – that it didn’t have to be one of the healthy kinds – and I truly began to believe that Apple Jacks tasted like a sugary form of freedom. I mean, sure, it might have been the single most liberating experience I’ve ever had inside of a supermarket, but that doesn’t mean I miss that day.
• I also don’t miss the banana clips that could never properly hold back my too-thick hair, the year everyone (including me) wore a tiny Prada backpack for no good reason at all, the nights I spoke to guys in bars who rocked fedoras completely without irony, the years I was convinced thongs had to be equivalent to having a perma-wedgie, and the money I spent on Juicy sweatpants because I managed to convince myself that my ass would look best in ridiculously overpriced aqua terrycloth.
• And more than any of it, I do not miss Stassi Schroeder.

Yes, my dear friends, it looks like Stassi will soon be galloping back to Vanderland on a wounded pony and I for one could not be less excited to see her. Her return feels the very opposite of triumphant; in fact, it strikes me as remarkably similar to the reaction I have when that one student who graduated five years ago continues to stop by every few months just to say hello. “Time to move on!” I always consider bellowing his way, but I just keep the interaction to a swift, “Nice to see you,” before I go fleeing down the hallway and away from a kid who is perpetually ensconced in the dynamic that was high school. I’d argue that Stassi continues to be stuck in a high school mentality too and that high school probably felt like her glory days when she ran that f*cking cafeteria like an Adderall-guzzling Gestapo agent who inspired fear in her lowly minions with just a withering glance or a flick of her newly-dyed hair. I cannot forget how, at the start of this series, Stassi would mandate who her “crew” were and were not allowed to speak with and how she would threaten minor punishments like castration done with a rusty chainsaw to anyone who dared violate a single one of her decrees.