Help! I’m a career woman in the big city and I want out this Christmas.
A new Hallmark movie special.
Life in the Big City is great—there is so much to do, so much to see, and I don’t need a car to get around. But life in the Big City isn’t always rainbow, sunshine, and happy hours. Like everyone else here whose parents don’t work in oil, I have to work to sustain this big city lifestyle. I don’t live as big as the city I live in (I actually live quite small), but I do have to work a whole fucking lot to pay the bills and the same money is only giving me less these days. This isn’t a unique problem, we’re all feeling it, but I am taking this personally.
Have you noticed how there are fewer newsletters entering your inbox these past several months? I could blame my poor time management skills or the absurd amount of birthday parties I’ve had to attend (love you, Sagittariuses) but I will be blaming my job instead. I’ve got a big girl job now, and that entails sometimes working ten hours overtime in a week for something not that important. That is something I had to do last week and I am mad about it, and should be over it, but I am not. I do not dream of labor. I dream of writing newsletters weekly, and my job is getting in the way of that.
So here’s my proposal: this year, make ME the Big City Working Gal like a Hallmark Christmas movie. When I go back to my hometown for Christmas, present me with a hometown hunk that I will clumsily run into so many times in a span of two days who will show me the meaning of Christmas and make me reconsider my vapid, busy city lifestyle and move back to a smaller town where I live my days with the love of my life and a passion for the winter holidays.
I’m aware that there are a few problems with this idea—the first one with the job that I have. In a typical made-for-TV Christmas movie, the female protagonist has a job that is super high-paying and prestigious, like a vice president of some kind of business or in publishing or something cool like that; the other kind of job is a quaint small business owner of something pretty impractical, like a bakery. I have neither kind of job. Sure, I am 29 years old, but my position is relatively entry-level because my first priority is always improv comedy.
I may be the right age to be magically convinced to settle down in my Christmas hometown but I am not successful enough for the gods of Hallmark romances to help me out. But you know what I do have? A dead mom, and Hallmark rom-coms love a woman with a dead mom. I have not done a scientific study on this, but I think the majority of romantic protagonists are at least a half-orphan, if not a full orphan. Celebrating the first Christmas without my mom (who, of course, absolutely loved Christmas) with the rest of my immediate family would be the perfect setup for a movie-like holiday romance.
Now there’s another very big issue with this plan: the hometown heartthrob. I go back to my hometown more than most people and I can tell you that by going to the grocery store in town and by seeing former Batavia High School alumni on Facebook, that there are no hometown heartthrobs who still live over there. The guys who still live in my hometown are not cute at all (and are probably already married) and all the cute guys from town were smart like me and moved to the Big City and don’t match with me on dating apps. So where are we going to find someone so charming and handsome enough to convince me to leave an affordable walkable city? The plan: we move the setting next door to Geneva.
If you are not aware of the geography of the Fox Valley area, where I am from, Geneva is the neighbor to Batavia and is cuter, pricier, and better in literally every way. Sure, Batavia is “coming up” but Geneva has never been down. When you think of a picturesque small town full of holiday cheer, Geneva is just that. It’s the town that has a train that goes into the city and a downtown area full of cute, family-owned chocolate shops and artisan marketplaces. I also know very few people there so I may be able to find someone from there attractive, as I know absolutely no lore from their past that would put me off.
Even better? Our high school sports teams were rivals, and if this was a movie all the adults in town would still be so invested in high school sports (they very much are in real life too) that this would be a bit of tension—if we are from rival towns how could this ever work. Both towns are competing against each other for a prize for best Christmas tree/cookie recipe or something (this does not exist).
When the town turns the tree lights on, me and my suburban future husband kisses me on the mouth and then my dad, whose daughter has never been in love before, lets out one tear and says something like, “Your mom would have been so happy to see you like this.” I end the lease of my Big City apartment six months early and say goodbye to all the people that knew me more intimately than this random Christmas-loving man could ever possibly know me. Because I got to be a little horny on Christmas, my entire life’s dreams go straight out of the window and suburbia is my future. My dad is happy, my hometown is happy, a car insurance company somewhere out there is happy.
All of this is worth it to never do overtime again.
The Ghost Rats have their last Date Night show THIS FRIDAY (the 15th), 10:00pm at the Bughouse. Get tickets here, and also vote for us for best improv/sketch troupe and best comedy show in the Chicago Reader’s Best Of!