Not Watching Girls: Recap, Volume 3

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | January 27, 2015 | 7:30pm

Entertainment

Not Watching Girls is where we detail the real-life foibles, exploits, and hot and hilarious haps of what we were doing in our exciting, glamorous, and emotional lives in our Brooklyn apartments during the half-hour the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls airs.

Due to an interest in cultural fluency I made a vague and possibly unkeepable promised that I’d try to watch HBO’s Award-Winning, Critically Acclaimed Girls at some point, but not this week; Sunday evening, your humble narrator was bombarded with a small pile of transcribing. The thing about Girls is that, though it occupies a 30-minute spot on television, the episodes are only something like 22 minutes, which seems “doable.” The thing about transcribing is that even if your interview is 22 minutes long, it will take you at least twice that to write out, even if your typing is swift and nimble, and maybe longer if you have to numb the experience with several glasses of wine. I am not saying that happened but I am saying it has happened before. This work, this woman’s work, it is often aided and abetted by $9.99 Malbec from the corner booze store. It is not unmarred, but it is life.

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The wooden stool on which I perch is glossed in a double-coat black lacquer. It was a gift from someone who left it out on the street. The desk is a table purchased for $99 from one of those small-box furniture retailers that lines beautiful Williamsburg’s Graham Avenue, a.k.a. Avenue of Puerto Rico. I recently discovered that my coworkers Kate Dries and Erin Gloria Ryan have a similar table, but they use it as a table and not a desk because they are not Monsters.

But the thing about beautiful Williamsburg and Avenue of Puerto Rico and Borinquen Place and all of that is that Williamsburg is still deeply Latino? Like, even still? But people don’t talk about that. Not because mass amounts of kewl mostly white post-collegiates and also kewl mostly white families with dinero to blow like so much whitegirl-zooted-up-at-Kokie’s are not still fighting to move to beautiful Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and doing so in droves—but because mentioning that beautiful Williamsburg, Brooklyn, retains a large population of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Méxicans, Ecuadorians and the like would be disadvantageous to well-heeled mags’ trend pieces on the resurgence of the artisanal pickle industry. It would also be giving said Latinos visibility that could be spent using valuable column inches on Johnny Caucasus’s smoking hot facial hair grooming techniques.

Anyway there is a show about this that is pretty good. This episode features HBO star Raúl Castillo, who you might know as Sexy Richie from Looking, which is a hot show about the beautiful Bay Area that appears on critically acclaimed cable pay channel HBO directly after Girls.

The transcribing went okay. I procrastinated, and the wine sucked up more time than the typing. As happens. Transcribing has been a fool’s errand since they snatched the original 4Loko formula off the shelves. I made time for a short break to watch Looking, a show about how a baby-faced programmer dumped Sexy Richie in order to be his boss’s sidepiece. There was a sex scene between two very attractive men and then it ended.

Before that, though, during Girls, my friend Claire gchatted me:

Claire:

oh my god

julianne

how is zachary quinto really on an eight-part mini-series called the slap

where he slaps someone else’s kid

and the neighborhood falls apart?

Zachary Quinto is on Girls this season, I think, and Claire thought this week’s episode of Girls was “good,” but with a question mark, so maybe she thought it was just better than the previous week’s episode. I heard that there is a scene in which the character of Lena Dunham yells at her colleagues in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop about being stereotypes of themselves and that everyone should just be real, like her character is when she writes, instead of posturing and trying to do creative writing, and just being real. But writing real shit about your own life will get you in trouble and besides, everyone does that, all the time.

Sometimes transcribing is so cathartic. And wine.

HBO’s Girls airs Sundays 9 PM EST.