Illo: David Saracino

Over the weekend, my friend told me about her 2-year-old son’s anal fissure. We were strolling through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, admiring the cherry blossoms as our kids scampered Frogger-style through three lanes of Bugaboos, when she confessed that he couldn’t poop without crying.

“Poor guy,” she sighed. “He won’t take baths, either.” Then she proceeded to describe the wound in detail, before adding, “It’s the kind of thing some people would put on Facebook.” I didn’t need to scroll through my news feed to prove her right. In the past week alone, I have seen photos of a grotesquely infected eye, a placental encapsulation and a “potty” full of urine. 

Posting cringe-inducingly intimate information for public consumption is nothing new (hell, Mandy Stadtmiller and Lena Dunham make careers out of it), but there’s something about the parental overshare that’s especially creepy, probably because in 99.9 percent of cases, it’s nonconsensual. It’s one thing to whore yourself out for media attention, mass retweets and blog page-views (I say this confidently, having reviewed a set of what can only be described as “vagina weights” for a website in 2011); it’s another thing to whore out your kids.

Take, for example, the idea of baby shaming, in which parents post photos of their (mostly) preverbal children holding signs outlining their various transgressions (“I hit Daddy in the face when he told me he loved me ... and then I laughed!”). Upon grazing the zeitgeist sometime last year, this practice quickly expanded to include older children; however, the sight of a teenager standing in a busy intersection wearing a sandwich board filled with shortcomings struck a slightly less hilarious note, perhaps due to the obvious emotional abuse.

Now, the Tumblr blog “Reasons My Son Is Crying,” in which a father pauses to take a photo every time his young child experiences existential anxiety, is the shame meme du jour, and I personally can’t wait until the titular son grows up to start his own blog, “Reasons My Dad and I No Longer Speak.”

Outrageously confessional personal essays are another popular method of ensuring future therapy sessions for your knee-high family members. “I love my son more than my daughter,” a mom blogger named Kate wrote breathlessly on the parenting site Babble. Her post instantly went viral, attracting commenters who came bearing both casseroles and pitchforks. But that was in 2011. Now Kate looks like a total wuss compared to the scores of parents who readily admit, in print, with a byline, to not loving any of their kids at all. In a culture that values page-views over scruples, no tirade can ever go too far. Mommie Dearest has a HuffPo login, and she’s not afraid to use it.

At this juncture, I feel I should own up to the fact that I am, as an individual at least, a huge oversharer. I recently took it upon myself to inform the Internet that my menstrual cycle had finally returned after an 18-month postpartum drought, and I once wrote a blog post comparing my pubic hair to Buckwheat from The Little Rascals, which all but guarantees a stage in the not-too-distant future during which my son will refuse to look me in the eye. I try to heed the example of breeder-mocking blogs like STFU, Parents and keep my kid out of my deep emotional need for online validation, but this very column—which will live forever in page caches even if you end up using the paper version to line your cat box—will ensure that Sam will someday have a Hansel-and-Gretel-like trail to the roots of his various neuroses.

It’s easy to become an oversharing parent, because as soon as the cord gets cut, your TMI meter essentially goes with it. Becoming a mother or father means bidding farewell to the days when the frequency of another person’s bowel movements could fairly be classified as “too much information.” Ditto the texture of their rashes, or their tendency to fondle their genitalia while bathing.

We gleefully report on the antics of our children as though they are not our own flesh and blood but tiny actors in the stage play of our lives, hired to entertain us—and, through our reporting, all of our friends—with their adorably naive bon mots. Something about the fact that it’s a child you’re talking about makes it seem okay to share things like “Have you seen Camden’s skin tag?” or “Tallulah stuck my toothbrush up her butt the other night.” It’s a tunnel-visioned affliction that assumes everyone else is as interested in the minutiae of your obsessions as you are, kind of like people who get an iPhone and suddenly cannot stop talking about their new apps.

The problem is that kids are real human beings who have every right to their personal privacy, even if they aren’t old enough to understand it just yet. And if the oversharing is extreme enough, their lives can be impacted in potentially serious ways. One mom blogger I read inadvertently got her 6-year-old kicked out of school for openly complaining about its administration on her website. Another was contacted by police when a (fully clothed) photo of her daughter was recovered from the computer of a pedophile. And then there are the online media ambulance-chasers who capitalize on big news stories by throwing their personal anecdotes into the mix.

Remember “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”? I’m surprised that no one released a “My Son Could Have Been a Boston Bomber” trend piece. And while I realize that these types of stories might help other parents feel better about their challenging or abnormal children, that’s simply not enough to justify exposing a teenager’s deep emotional issues to the world at large—a world that will someday include his or her future employers, co-workers, partners and children.

Who knows what my life would be like had my own mother had access to Facebook in 1980. My friend Salvador and I famously played a game we called “Look in Butt,” which would surely at least have merited a status update, if not also a tastefully censored photograph. And I’m not even going to touch the preteen years, during which I developed acne, struggled with insomnia that could only be cured by listening to cassette tapes of Garrison Keillor and lived through what I can only refer to as The Tampon Incident due to the residual shame. Becoming an adult is humiliating enough; there’s really no need to live-tweet it.

To that end, I set limits as to what I will and won’t share about my son. I won’t ever write out his full name online, to keep him from being Google-able before he’s able to control his own Internet identity, and I’ll never intentionally shame or humiliate him just for a laugh or a Facebook like. I don’t care as much if he’s embarrassed by what I write and share about myself, but I want him to feel like I protected him as much as I could.

But even the most protective mother would be hard-pressed to refrain from discussing any compromising details about her son in private, undocumented conversations—especially when she’s been drinking. Getting too anal retentive about this stuff never ends well. That’s how fissures form.

editorial@observer.com

Bros.

How many more Girls parodies can YouTube handle?

At least one more, according to 25-year-old video editor Anthony DiMieri, the creator of  Bros.

Mr. DiMieri's completely unique series follows four bros as they embark on a transformation, from New Jersey frat boys to full-blown Brooklyn hipsters.

"The stuff I was writing about, I sort of based on real-life experience,” he said, completely seriously, to Metro.

“I definitely lived a similar lifestyle with the Pickleback shots and PBR. There is some truth to the stereotypes, but we really went over the top and made it cartoonish.”

Mr. DiMieri is hoping Bros will be his big break. So far, the first episode of the series has been watched more than 20,000 times and the official Twitter handle for Girls even started following him this week.

"That was a big deal because it was like, ‘Ok, the people at HBO are watching this,’” Mr. DiMieri said to Metro. “I think Lena Dunham and I could probably collaborate and write a really hilarious episode, maybe about bringing the girls to a frat party."

Let's hope not.

Lena Dunham and Lesley Arfin.

HBO's critically acclaimed show Girls is mixing it up for Season 3 ... and leaving a few names behind. Don't start crying yet: it's not any of the cast members. In an article last month by Joe Pompeo, a source spilled the beans that three of the show's L.A. writers will not be returning to the already-small writers' room. But why?

Well, relocation, to start. The eternal struggle between L.A. lifers and chronic New Yorkers: the oldest story in the book. But also, more things!

The trio of deposed scribes--senior writer and ex-Vicer Lesley Arfin, former Observer reporter Deborah Schoeneman and Steve Rubinshteyn--were allegedly told before the start of Season 2 that the Dunham brain trust would be moving from L.A. to New York, where the show is filmed. Which actually makes sense, in terms of condensing the operation ... the show already shoots here, why fly out to L.A. to write it? But the downsizing seemingly had less to do with cross-country moving costs and more with giving Ms. Dunham more control over her show.

In an email to The Observer, Ms. Arfin, who had previously gotten in some hot water over a controversial tweet she made during the first season, wrote:

Really the bottom line is that she wanted a smaller writers room and she wanted it to be in nyc and me, deb, and ruby weren't able to do that.

That line seems to suggest the "she" in question in Ms. Dunham herself, who along with being one of the writers, directors and stars of the show, also holds the title of executive producer.

(Ms. Dunham declined to comment on the story.)

Although there has been no official announcement about replacing the three writers, one could read between the lines of HBO's statement to Capitol in its list of writers who did make the cut: Judd Apatow, Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Murray Miller, Paul Simms, Sarah Heyward "and, occasionally, Lena’s parents."

Laurie Simmons and Carol Dunham have never written an episode of Girls, to the best of our knowledge, and neither has Mr. Simms. But if Dunham was really behind taking a nine person-writing staff and cutting it down to six (not counting the occasional parent-written episode, which holy God, actually sounds crazy-amazing), one could reasonably conclude that the 26-year-old wunderkind was taking a firmer hand on the reins for her singular vision of what Girls should be.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: Adam Reed does the same thing with Archer, and we love Archer.

And hey, there can't be ten voices of our generation, can there?

Spring Break forever...until you stick a Q-tip in your ear. (THR)

We'd actually go see this film. Wouldn't you?

illustrations by Alex Bedder.

These questions regard last night’s episode of HBO’s Girls. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Please welcome The New York Observer’s recap illustrator Alex Bedder as tonight's visiting scholar-in-residence of Girls studies. Alex Bedder comes to us as an associate professor of pop culture from Paper magazine university, and is the author of a New York Times best-selling Tumblr. Catch his Grammy-winning* podcast, "Let's Talk About It Pod."

1. This episode seems to be following last week's spiraling dark tone of the show. I never thought I'd say this, but I long for the days when Marnie making out with Jessa was the worst thing that could happen in a Girls episode. If you were comparing the two seasons together, which of these analogies make you want gnaw your wrists open the most, and why?

A) Picking splinters from your ass is the new eating cupcakes in a bath.

B) Black Swanning your ear drum is the new overdoing it on the eyebrow pencil.

C) Falling off the wagon and practically date raping your new girlfriend is the new accidentally smoking crack and massaging Ray's penis.

D) Charlie's "Let's fuck in the middle of my office party" is the new "Let's fuck and pretend you are a child with a Cabbage Patch lunchpail."

E) Shoshana is the new Marnie.

F) Marnie is the new character that we secretly adore because she just puts herself out there and is so cute with her cover songs.

Tonight’s dark-sided episode was a buffet of cringe-worthy moments, and there were several that made me get up and sit behind the couch for a second, a method of handling discomfort I perfected as a child by not being able to watch that scene in Titanic where the ships crew assumes Jack assaulted Rose.

All of the analogies make me miss those simpler times of confronting your gay ex-boyfriend about contracting HPV so much that it's almost too hard to choose! Because I did not secretly adore Marnie's Karmin-esque cover of "Stronger" (that could just be attributed to a personal fear of impromptu musical performances), and even though the concept that Shoshanna is the new Marnie is almost as bad as finding out a new character is BOB on Twin Peaks, it really comes down to Hannah's self harm via Q-tip and Adam's sex scene as the analogies that made me want to gnaw at my arm like I was in 127 Hours.

Adam's boozed up, watch-it-with-one-eye-open self-destruct with Carol Kane's daughter from Roswell seemed to be just looming from their vanilla post-Sandra Bullock movie-night hookup. Comparing Natalia learning that Adam may not be out of place in his "dark" apartment to Ray discovering just how quirky and engaging Shosh is while she was tweaking out of her mind was is a pretty devastating thought. However, I'd have to go with just misuse of the Q-tip as the worst bite-your-wrist moment, because it makes me miss when the worst thing Hannah used to do to herself was not being able to say no to people who'd make her look like Bon Qui Qui.

2. Two out of three of Hannah's health care specialists (save last week's therapist) have been Indian-American and kind of mean. Does this count as diversity or stereotyping? You may answer the question culling from Dunham's real-life experiences as we know them, save for that shit going down at Oberlin right now, which has nothing to do with Girls; seriously, are you people insane?

You could read it as stereotypical that both of these characters are Indian-American, which is more in line with the arguments from the first episode regarding the Asian girl who knows Photoshop and the appearance of an African-American homeless man. If a minority is cast in these contained, one-off sort of roles, does it appear as very stereotypical? Did we raise the same question (diversity or stereotyping) with Donald Glover's Sandy the Republican or last week's Radika, "the wealthiest Hindi that Shosh knows"? It could be that these smaller roles make us more unsure of which end of the spectrum these characters fall into, while a character with however much more to do is easier to make a call on.

In regard to them both being seemingly rude to Hannah, I think that has more to do with her presenting them with a juvenile and awkward situation. The doctor in this episode was dealing with an unhinged 20-something who had lodged a Q-tip in her ear canal, and in her first season visit to the clinic she basically told the health care professional who was about to test her for STDs that she wanted AIDS. In my experience if you do or say something incredibly stupid regarding your health, a health care professional sets you straight.

3. What throwaway comment best reflect 2013's New York/Brooklyn douchebag scene thus far?
1) "Sandra Bullock or whatever is really charming. I only wish the best for her."
2) "Restaurants are my passion. Going out to dinner is just part of who I am."
3) "Marnie told us about the AMUs. We are both exceedingly happy for you! Oh my god, twenty thousand? That's like, insane.
4) None of the above/choose your own.

Things to consider: The feasibility of Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock starring in a rom-com this year (or anyone outside of Ryan Reynolds saying they "wish the best for her"); the pronunciation of M-U-A as AMUs; foodies being the most despicable breed of self-describers on the planet.

...Bonus 3.5. Sorry, just remembered three more lines that were so dead-on in capturing the actual voice of this generation: "I dabble in the Macintosh Arts"; "How pissed are you for missing the game?"; "Except Mother Teresa never blew my cousin. But seriously, we love this girl!"

I haven't been actively rooting for Sandra Bullock since While You Were Sleeping, so I would almost go with Adam's newfound appreciation for her. But really, can you get more douchey than asking why your significant other is catering to you by referring to their adorably neurotic behavior as "geisha shit"?

4. John Cameron Mitchell has some great lines this week as her e-book agent (publisher?). "I can't wait to not read those." "Where's the sexual failure, where's the pudgy faced slicked semen and sadness?" "I just had an epiphany, if you aren't getting fucked, make it up. Can you make it a novel?" Not to mention an Anaïs Nin/Jane Austen literary scolding from a guy whose morning read consists of "Kardashian Splashin'" and wants to name Hannah's book "Life on My Back." Though Hannah took it to an extreme, the desire to "empty out" after such a foray into the post-Frey publishing world would be natural. What would you suggest for purging those bad feelings?
4. Nothing quite as toxic and icky as watching John Cameron Mitchell's publisher ordering his twinkish assistant to stop working out before prompting you to dish about your awful sex with a teenager. Legal or not? Who knows! Who cares! That's what people want to hear! Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons is going to be great!

There's many ways that Hannah could relieve the negative feelings she is harboring after that meeting that don't involve jamming a foreign object into her ear. Compared to that, even getting hammered before five is a healthier option. Obviously talking to a friend, or that therapist from Waiting for Guffman, would also be an excellent purging option, but since she's avoiding her issues, also very unlikely. I know the responsible answer would be exercise, or meditation, or volunteering, or shopping, but for Hannah I'd recommend she just get a piece of cake, fall asleep on the F, and eat on the beach for a bit.


5. Marnie's trajectory this episode can be read as either "flailing" (by Charlie and Shoshanna), or a positive life choice (as seen by Marnie and Ray). Like objectively? She's definitely doing better than Hannah or fucking Adam's impression of a Williamsburg boyfriend on a very special episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Is she really being delusional about her singing career--a fucking bassoon? Kanye?--and if so, does it matter if it makes her happy? Basically, how should we read her statement to Charlie: "I'm really good, actually. And sometimes being good all the time feels really bad."

There's been some discomfort about Marnie pursing a singing career, mostly because you know Allison Williams can actually sing from when she put lyrics to the Mad Men theme. I've been steadily wondering if this will be some out-of-nowhere redeeming arc after breaking down Marnie for so long, or if this whole being a singer is just the final dive before a dangerous mental breakdown. You almost can't tell if she's completely delusional yet--is the room's response to her cover an indicator that she's just, as Charlie puts it, not that bad, "but not good," or that she should just stick to Norah Jones or a good Corinne Bailey Rae tune?

In the end, it does not really matter, because she's just happy doing something she wants to do. And not "just happy" in the way that she's let go of her ambitiousness and become more aware and complacent. Taking up performing has only made her more self-involved. (She did hijack the party that was celebrating the success of ex-boyfriend's app that was created to avoid her. The ENTIRE night was about her, in multiple layers.) But now instead of being driven and self-concerned in relationship to something that she thought she needed to do, it's toward something she enjoys doing. She's totally comfortable with commandeering the party, and it maybe not going over so well. Being kind of a mess makes her feel good, while while being "good" and put together all the time can be exhausting and disappointing.

*Web edition

Lena Dunham at the Purim Ball.

Turns out there are at least two people in New York who don’t know who Lena Dunham is.

“Who was that girl with the two house tattoos on her back?” a couple of security guards asked the Transom as we walked into the Jewish Museum’s Purim Ball at the Park Avenue Armory last week. “The one everyone was making a big deal over?”

That, we informed our basic-cable-watching friends, was Ms. Dunham, the evening’s official Purimspieler and something of a main attraction. “Who?” they said again.

But she wasn’t the only gal with ink in the house. As we meandered alongside another tatted-up Jewess during the evening’s cocktail hour—which, like most of the event, had a distinct bar mitzvah-party feel—we overheard an old bearded dude getting a little judge-y: “Since when do Jews have tattoos?” he said.

But really, weren’t we all here to get along? From men in floral-print suits to at least one middle-aged vixen in an approximated Miss America costume, it was all kosher. Others in attendance had glitter tattoos, but we suspected those weren’t permanent.

When cocktail hour finally gave way to a seated dinner, the Transom found ourselves at a table of artists, most of whom were pals of Claudia Gould, the Jewish Museum’s director, although only some of them understood the holiday properly. So we explained, as rabbis have done for generations: Purim is that time of year when Brooklyn assemblymen learn the true meaning of racism.

To our left, Martha Rosler was very much in the Purim spirit. “Look at me,” she said, shaking her shoulders in some sort of seated dance, outfitted in a black-and-gold paisley blazer and Mardi Gras beads. “I’m wearing ridiculous things.”

On to dinner, and Ms. Dunham, as the Girls star/creator took center stage in front of the nearly 1,000 attendees, welcoming everyone to her bat mitzvah (we told you-—such was the vibe). As official Purimspieler, Ms. Dunham regaled us with the tale of Queen Esther and the Persians, all the while maintaining the speech patterns of Eloise, that children’s lit protagonist who lives on the “tippy-top” of the Plaza Hotel. “He picked Esther,” Ms. Dunham spieled, referring to the Persian king. “She was an orphan, which is pretty much the coolest thing you can be, like Pippi Longstocking or Drew Barrymore.”

With the story thus told, schmoozing took hold, and conversations naturally turned to Ms. Dunham’s breakout HBO show. Filmmaker Joe Lovett informed us he had just seen the first episode and that it was “very well done,” while some bleached blonde in a black dress had a harder time forming her opinion.

“I saw the first season and it was, like, really quite funny,” she said, “but, like, the second season? Like, I don’t know. I saw it.”

She then either stopped talking or our head exploded. It was now mercifully time to hit the dance floor. And it was just like they say in that old hip-hop ditty, which goes a little something like this:

“After Purim is the after party. After the party is (two hours of awkward middle school-grade grinding and groping just a hundred feet or so from) the Park Avenue Armory lobby.”

We just hope that, by the end of the night, someone became a man.

Illustration via Alex Bedder.

These questions regard last night’s episode of HBO’s Girls. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.

1. Even though the episode seems to insist that Hannah's OCD has been brought on by the stress of writing the book, the first time we see her exhibiting this behavior is when Adam calls her and she instinctively looks behind her--paranoid (but really, not that paranoid) that he might be following her--and then looks seven more times. And she mentions the book to the therapist only after she mentions Adam. Being that at least part of her OCD involves her persisting in behaviors that she originally does accidentally or without thinking (looking behind her, bumping into the guy at the show), how might we read her disorder as a response not to work-related stress but to Adam-related stress? And what does this say about their ongoing, if unacknowledged, relationship?

FIRST OF ALL, can we just stop for a moment and acknowledge how hard we were emotionally toyed with by HBO's DEF (Delusionally Empowered Female) programming last night? I actually spent 20 minutes trying to find dictionaries that would agree that "delusionally" was a word, just to avoid thinking about the panic induced by watching Girls and Enlightened back to back. My compulsion when stressed is to reinspect losing scratch-off Bingo cards over and over, so I actually missed most of the visuals this week. Was Shosh's hookup black or Hispanic? (Either way, can't wait for the racial Donnybrook that encounter will cost us.)

But if I have to get into it: both Hannah's trigger and her compulsions are related to sex. See also: the masturbation issue, which was alluded to last season in a throwaway line by Marnie, "You've been crazy since middle school, when you had to masturbate eight times a night to stave off diseases of the mind and body"; her ambivalence about Adam; her ambivalence about Adam regarding sex; her ambivalence about sex in general post-Joshua.

I mean, yes, the looming e-book deadline would be intolerably stressful, especially for someone like Hannah, who definitely does not have it together. With her anxiety, she couldn't even power through it on no sleep and Adderall, the way most of America's 20-somethings deal with looming workloads. Poor Hannah.

I'd say whatever the main or original trigger for Hannah's relapse--whether it's the book or Adam or her parents coming to town-- it isn't something you can deduce from the show, nor is it useful to think about. It's all of the things. Six of one, half dozen of the other, and 8-16 climaxes in one night, Jesus Christ.

2. The chorus of the song Judy Collins sings, "Open the Door," goes:

Open the door and come on in
I'm so glad to see you my friend
You're like a rainbow comin’ around the bend
And when I see you smilin’
Well, it sets my heart free
I'd like to be as good a friend to you
As you are to me

How would each of the characters understand these lyrics in relation to what happens to him or her in this episode?

Marnie: Why can't Charlie and Hannah be as good of friends to me as I am to them?

Ray: If Marnie starts singing Judy Collins right now I am just going to lose it.

Shoshannah: I don't even remember the last time I saw a rainbow. Ray is the opposite of a rainbow. He's just like ... rain.

Hannah: You are fine and good, you are fine and good, you are fine and good, you are fine and good, you are fine and good, you are fine and good, you are fine and good, you are fine and good. You are good and fine, you are good and fine, you are good and fine, you are good and fine, you are good and fine, you are good and fine, you are good and fine, you are good and fine.

Adam: This song is just so fucking real right now. I don't care how corny it sounds, no one should ever apologize for Living. I am just looking at this girl's smile and I am thinking 'Hol-y shit, yes.' Yes! You know? Fuuuuuckin' ... You just got to keep that door open.

Charlie: "That's right, Marnie. You get out what you put in. I'll be just a good of friend to you as you were to me." Unless ... maybe I should call her? No. She's not worth even 10 of my dollars. She means nothing to me. Thanks, Forbid. (Texts Marnie.)

3. Some shortsighted people suggested a few weeks ago that Patrick Wilson's character was not real but existed only as a figment of Hannah's imagination. While nothing in that episode remotely hinted at that, several elements of this one (not least the brilliant casting of the oddly vatic Carol Kane as her mother) seem to imply that all is not right, or not real, about Natalia. Is it possible that Adam has projected a fantasy woman, and if so, why is she a detective's assistant?

No, Natalia is not a projection. Adam's decision to go to AA instead of continuing to accidentally drink from the urine jar showed him taking action towards improving his mental state, which is more than we can say for the rest of this truly messed-up bunch. (It's like thanks Girls, I actually just saw Silver Linings Playbook. I don't need to watch all of you dissolve in some heretofore unknown, DSM-IV criteria-meeting chemical imbalance too.)

There is a catch to Natalia, though. Firstly because nobody's perfect, not even girls with the best jobs ever. But mostly because Natalia's independent identity may be perfect ... as a foil to Hannah's needy, messy train wreck of emotions.

4. Ray tells Marnie to decide what she wants to do "before the clay hardens." To a certain extent, Girls has consistently portrayed its female protagonists in a more unformed state, a early 20-something period of trying on different selves or different lives to see what they want to be. Given this premise, is Ray simply projecting his own fears of being too old and set in his ways onto Marnie, or is the show suggesting that unless these characters make up their minds soon, this prolonged adolescence will end in them being stuck? (Things to consider: Shoshanna realizing she doesn't really like parties, Hannah not realizing she still needs her parents, the fact that rollerblades can now be called "vintage.")

Neither. Girls would never suggest that this period of time for the characters is in any way an outlier to normal behavior, because that would essentially be telling viewers who identify with the show that their feelings are abnormal, instead of communal. Plus, it's just not true: you are not set in stone (or hardened clay) with the decisions you make in your early-to-mid 20s. Or ever, really.

And Ray isn't projecting, he's doing what he does best ... pushing someone into action. It's easy to see Ray's needling of Marnie (And woof, have they been co-habitating in Shosh's studio loft all this time? Or is it a one-bedroom? I cannot believe these living conditions have been left unexplored till now) as him somehow yelling at himself to get his shit together, but he's not. First of all, he's not dressed like a magician's assistant. But more importantly, he definitely has an answer to his own quickfire challenge, and it's the paradox du Ray: he doesn't want to be anything.  If he could do anything he wanted, he would do nothing.

So mainly this scene was to provide audiences with the experience of hearing an advance version of Allison Williams's debut album.

5. Imagine you are a psychologist who writes children's books involving a bionic dog. Create a plausible plot for such a book that you might use to illustrate the pathology behind one or more of the following: Marnie budgeting six years for her boyfriend to be a mess after she breaks up with him; Ray insisting that coming to a college party with his girlfriend is creepy because he is too old, but seeing no issue with sleeping with a college girl in the first place; Adam falling for Hannah because she acted like a helpless child around him; Shosh obsessing over getting more practice for when people are going to need her too much.

Billy the bionic beagle was a very special dog. He had a heart that would live forever. But even though Billy was a very loyal and very good dog, he was sad. He was sad because his friend Brian was no longer a young boy for him to play with. Brian was an old man now. He no longer wanted to throw the ball, or play fetch or take Billy to the dog park. But Billy the bionic beagle was still a puppy, and would never grow old. Or at least it felt that way, you know?

One day Billy went to the foot of the bed, where he and Brian had started so many adventures.

"Let's go play in the dog park!" Cried Billy.

"I can not, for I am too old to play," said Brian. "Plus, it is really creepy to see a very old guy hanging out at the dog park."

"I am sorry, Billy," said the old man to whom Billy had served many long, faithful nights.

Billy was one sad beagle, but he set his tail up straight, and snuffled his way over to the park on 62nd. Billy had not been to the park in a long time. He could find no new doggie friends to play with, because it had been so long since Brian had taken him for a visit.

Billy's bionic beagle heart felt like it was going to break. But it wasn't, as  it was made out of titanium and plastic and nanobots. Still. It didn't feel great. Billy was sad about Brian and about all the time he missed out on at the park while taking care of his owner. But he was also angry at Brian, who was too busy dying to be a very good friend.

It was time to move on. Billy had to find someone new to have adventures with, to love and nurture and watch old episodes of Ally McBeal.

"Bye, Brian," Billy barked. "Bye."

Billy the bionic dog had an aunt he owed a visit.

Bye, Billy. Bye.

This is perfect. (YouTube)

As one Observer staffer put it, "The way she said 'asshole'...just brilliant."

Good job, everyone involved in this.

Alex Karpovsky at Red Flag screening. (Getty Images)

And his fans aren’t always those you might expect.

Just last week, the Transom was walking through Union Square with Mr. Karpovsky, en route to lunch, when an older man stopped the actor on the street. He just really wanted to say how much he liked the show. Mr. Karpovsky estimates that this happens "a couple times" a day.

And in case we didn’t believe him, cut to Lincoln Center last Friday night, where Mr. Karpovsky was playing host to a double screening of his two most recent directorial efforts and old Russian men made up a sizable chunk of the Karpovosky fan club.

Then again, it was all the way up at Lincoln Center, and the movies--which were picked up by Tribeca Films for distribution--had an earlier screening on Wednesday downtown. That one ended up making it into Page Six, if only to note that his two much more private male co-stars, Adam Driver and Christopher Abbott, were in attendance.

At Lincoln Center, Mr. Karpovsky held court over approximately 50 people, talking about the films, Red Flag and Rubberneck, both of which were made three years ago. In the former, Mr. Karpovsky plays himself as a kind of fatalistic Larry David/Woody Allen sad-sack shmuck on a cross-country roadtrip to promote his (real) faux-documentary, Woodpecker. (With us so far?) In the latter, a psychosexual thriller, he plays a creepy scientist who indulges an unhealthy obsession with a coworker after a one-night stand.

Surprised by Mr. Karpovsky’s output? Don’t be. In the time of B.G. ("Before Girls”), Mr. Karpovsky was a reasonably prolific filmmaker, with other movies like Trust Us, This Is All Made Up, The Whole Story and the aforementioned Woodpecker. He's acted in dozens more.

And if this is Mr. Karpovsky's big moment--his arrival on the scene, as it were--he's not going to let it fly by with false modesty. Though he doesn't read the oceans of commentary, nor the commentary on the commentary, about Girls that's practically inescapable if you read newspapers, magazines or the Internet, he does manage to find out what's being written about himself.

"I just have a Google alert for my name," he said. "Though it's quite porous."

With an inescapable cloud of Girls-fame hanging over him, Mr. Karpovsky did confess that fans often confuse him for Ray, as have recent interviewers. But the truth is that there’s less of Mr. Karpovsky in his most famous character than one may think. Ray is a Greek Orthodox orphan while Mr. Karpovsky comes from a Jewish family in Boston, where his father is a scientist. Ray is sour and prone to screaming matches over stuff like (literal) garbage while Mr. Karpovsky is harder to ruffle.

"They'll just use Ray and Alex interchangeably," he said, referring to journalists and Internet fans alike. "Sometimes I let it go. Other people will say 'That's the most Jewishy-Jewy motherfucker. How is he not Jewish?'" -Drew Grant

Lena Dunham.

Last spring, actor Billy Morrissette was guest starring on Girls and invited me to Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to watch an episode of the show being filmed. The bad news didn’t come until the day of: due to “tension on set,” Mr. Morrissette had decided it was a bad idea to bring a guest.

And so, rather than meeting Lena Dunham myself, I had to make do with a second-degree connection, along with seemingly everyone else in New York. You see, touting one’s almost-connection to Girls, no matter how tenuous (or even imagined) is de rigueur these days for anyone under 30. Two months ago at a birthday party in Bushwick, for instance, one might have met over the course of the evening—as I did—a blogger whose cousin had been roommates with Ms. Dunham’s sister, a financial analyst from around the corner who remembered seeing Christopher Abbott, the actor who plays Charlie, working at Rockaway Taco and a jewelry designer whose best friend’s boyfriend (aka Mr. Morrissette) is played the boyfriend of Hannah’s ex-boyfriend-cum-gay roommate.

Not only are these almost-connections rampant, but New Yorkers also have a seemingly endless desire to talk about them. The only prompting a stranger usually needs to launch into a detailed description of his or her association with the cast, crew or catering of HBO’s hit show is: “Hi.”

Fame by association is so Hollywood, so what is it about Girls that causes normally celebrity-indifferent New Yorkers to desperately name-drop?

You might say it’s because the show is shot in New York, but so are a lot of shows nobody talks about. When was the last time someone asked you if you saw the latest Damages? Or mused over the dead bodies on Law & Order? Does anyone have a roommate whose sister guest starred on Gossip Girl? Probably. But I’ve never heard anyone talk about it. Louie shoots in New York and is often compared to Girls, since they are both shows whose star is also the producer, writer and director. And yet one rarely hears more about Louie than the requisite “I love it!”

One reason people may feel so comfortable talking about Girls is that many of us think it’s only by a cruel twist of fate—and a whole lot of nepotism—that Lena Dunham created the show and we did not. Knowing someone close to the show is further proof of how close we were/are/could be to having our names in the credits. “What I don’t get is why people act like being bitter toward her isn’t understandable. Why wouldn’t you be bitter toward someone who has everything you want when your life sucks?” said one man who wanted only to be identified as a New York comedian.

This confidence that we could have, should have and eventually would have done what Ms. Dunham did is a delusion, certainly, but it is also a result of the show’s incredibly personal nature. While Girls may be based on Ms. Dunham’s life, the stories are often so familiar that watching them feels like someone else is getting rich off our diary.

Upon seeing the episode where two characters make an ill-fated journey to Staten Island, for instance, Max Barbakow, a 23-year-old filmmaker, exclaimed, “Yeah, I already did that last week,” as though the show owed him money for the story line. Law & Order may be ripped from the headlines, but Girls is ripped from our heads.  

And yet, as much as we may feel that we are part of the story, we aren’t. We may identify with Ms. Dunham’s characters, we may even have a friend who has her email address, but most of us don’t know her and probably never will. It’s like looking at the Manhattan skyline from an apartment in Bushwick. You’re basically there, but out-of-towners still think you live in Jersey.

This not-quite-inclusion is why I can’t watch an episode without pointing out to anyone who will listen that that brownstone couldn’t possibly be in Greenpoint. It’s not that I really care whether Girls takes liberties with the geography of Brooklyn, I just need you to know that I know they’re doing it. We use our Girls connections and insider knowledge to assert ownership over a show that we secretly think we should have been paid for anyway.

Girls Also feels personal because there’s so much it gets right. When so many shows about city-dwelling post-collegiate adults miss the mark (see: CBS’s 2 Broke Girls and FOX’s New Girl), Ms. Dunham’s vehicle is at least a realistic representation of what it’s like to be young in New York in 2013, and that’s because the material is culled from real life.

Or so I’ve been told. (An acquaintance assured me that she had it on good authority that Ms. Dunham doesn’t like to drink, and this is why no one on the show is ever drunk and crying.)

But just as the urbanites of the ’90s didn’t know they hated low-talkers until Seinfeld told them so, we had no way to express how fun and simultaneously idiotic warehouse parties could be until Ms. Dunham nailed it in season one. Which perhaps explains why so many people feel let down by the show’s almost total lack of racial diversity. To see a show get your life so right but not see yourself represented would be maddening. As Ali Davis, a Fort Greene-dwelling fashion editor, told The Observer, “I know the show should have black people, because I’m black and I’m in that world.”

(Ms. Davis also confided that one of her classmates from journalism school used to live with series regular Audrey Gelman.)

Another reason people bring Girls into conversation is that it’s easy. Talking about the show has very few barriers to entry. You don’t have to like it, since disliking Girls is actually a respected contrarian position, whereas disliking Louie is not allowed and would never be admitted to.

One reporter I know, who lives on the Upper East Side, gave up on the show after the first season but still sends around a Facebook pictures of himself and Allison Williams from when they were in college together at Yale. He’d do fine in a Girls conversation, because the show’s plot points are only an entrée into discussion, and talking about Girls quickly turns into talking about racism, nepotism, body image, bad sex, good sex, degrading sex, sexy sex and sexism.

The bonus is that the show’s unflinching depiction of normal-looking people having sex means that a casual conversation about TV can quickly turn into a casual conversation about other people’s sex lives, which is the (usually unrealized) goal of all conversation.

The only time it’s really not a good idea to talk about Girls is when you’re with people who don’t live in New York, since there’s nothing like someone with no Girls almost-connections to make your Girls almost-connections look stupid. The problem is that they act like your experiences of watching the show are equal, as though you’re just a fan instead of someone whose roommate grew up with Audrey Gelman (true story!). Being just “a fan” would mean acknowledging that the relationship between ourselves and Girls is necessarily hierarchical. And while we may watch every episode and spend an inordinate amount of time defending it to strangers, we’re not fans of Girls. We’re more like friends, or at least friends of a friend.