Founders’ Day Punch

September 11, 2023

Sometimes I think my entire personality is just a series of quotes from Gilmore Girls. For the uninitiated, Gilmore Girls was a show that ran in the early 2000’s about a single mother and her daughter who are incredibly close. It’s set in quintessential New England (a fictional town called Stars Hollow in Connecticut), so the entire show gives off “cozy fall” vibes. The characters in the show are quirky and they talk fast – resulting in some very silly quotes that don’t make much sense out of context. I think a significant portion of the pie chart that represents my personality is one slice labeled “Gilmore Girls Nonsense”. Every single time I do my makeup, I think about Lorelei Gilmore telling her daughter, Rory “You have skin like a baby’s ass, hit yourself in the face with a giant powder puff and let’s go.” That one becomes funnier and funnier to me as I get older and my skin becomes less and less like a baby’s ass. I once heard a teammate at work explaining to someone that the plural form of “cul-de-sac” is “culs-de-sac” and I shouted “YOU GOT THAT FROM RORY.” There’s one scene in the show where Emily Gilmore (the grandmother) calls Rory and makes a passive aggressive comment, “I was going to wait until you called me, but my life isn’t as long as yours”. I use that one when I’m getting impatient with people at work (frequently). Every time I eat a slice of pie, I think to myself “I’m attracted to pie, but I don’t feel the need to date pie.” I can’t even remember the context for that one, but I entertain myself with it.

I think I’ve written about the Gilmore Girls before in this blog. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote (and would rather die than go back and read it now) but I probably regaled you with tales of how I’ve been identifying more and more with Lorelai than with Rory recently – something I thought would never happen. When the show originally aired, I was the same age as the teenage/young adult daughter on the show, Rory, so naturally I felt compelled by her exciting young adult problems. SHE GOT KISSED BY A BOY IN A GROCERY STORE?! THERE WAS A NAKED MAN OUTSIDE OF HER DORM ROOM (Marty, the one man party)?! LOGAN FINALLY CALLED HER HIS GIRLFRIEND?! WEEEEEEEEEE. You get it. Of course, now I’m the same age that Lorelai (the mother) was in Season 1. Okay, okay…Season 2. Lorelai gave birth to Rory when she was sixteen, and the show kicked off when Rory had just turned 16 herself. Throughout the seven season run, Lorelai was moving from man to man in search of her forever person. She had a lot of bad dates, some serious relationships that ended dramatically, and two on-again-off-again relationships with Christopher (Rory’s dad) and Luke (the charming diner owner in town). But she was doing all of this while also trying to make big moves in her career in the hotel industry, trying to maintain friendships and a tricky relationship with her own mother and father, and raising a kid. Obviously I can’t relate to all of this – my parents are living saints and I am sans child. But I am trying to make all of my dreams come true while keeping my young dogter, Maudie on the right path. Close enough. Oh! I also go on dates and have a fabulous wardrobe similar to (and inspired by) Lorelai.

As much as I believe that I’ve moved significantly toward team Lorelai, sometimes I find myself still feeling like Rory. I was thinking about her today. There’s one episode in particular that always stuck with me. Rory is in college and she has been on several dates with a very handsome, intelligent (and rich) young man named Logan Huntsburger. They even had a cute little adventure where the jumped off of a tower holding parasols while shouting “In Omnia Paratus!” (Latin: ready for all things). Anyway, you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that she’s been on dates with him and is a smitten little kitten. In this episode, she hasn’t heard from Logan lately, and decides to take a trip home from Yale to see her mother for the weekend to take her mind off of him. She is followed home by her roommate, a very abrasive girl named Paris. Rory, Paris and Lane (Rory’s hometown bestie) end up going to the opening of a museum in Stars Hollow – where one of the town matriarchs, Miss Patty is serving up “leftover Founders’ Day punch”. Apparently this punch packs a…punch, as it is spiked with alcohol. The underage girls skip the museum visit and find themselves standing outside, indulging in Founders’ Day punch all afternoon, while each agonizing over the men in their lives and imploring each other to leave their cell phones (flip phones!) in their pockets.

By the end of the episode, Rory is drunk and crying on the bathroom floor of Lorelai’s house. Her mom comes to check on her and Rory puts her head in her lap and asks through sobs, “Why doesn’t he like me?” I honestly think about this moment all the time. I wonder if there’s a woman alive who hasn’t looked desperately at a friend, a sister or her mom and asked this question. If you’ve ever been on the other side of this question, you know it’s a powerless position to be in – kind of how I imagine a mother feels when her child is sick with a stomach bug, knowing there’s nothing she can do and no medicine or comfort she can offer. You don’t know the answer and the man in question probably doesn’t know the answer either. That’s because there is no clear answer and there is also nothing you can say that will help. We all logically know that. But personally, I know that knowledge doesn’t stop me from getting in a bad place and pleading with someone across from me to just tell me why. Tell me what I’m doing wrong, tell me what I can fix about myself so that I never have to feel like this again. Why doesn’t he like me? On the proverbial (or literal) bathroom floor again, begging my mom/sister/friend to help me figure it out.

In the next episode, Lorelai revisits the bathroom floor situation while talking to Rory on the phone.

Lorelai: Rory, two days ago you were on the bathroom floor crying about why he won’t call you. Why doesn’t he like you, what did you do.
Rory: I was drunk. I was sick.
Lorelai: You, my beautiful, brainy, fabulous daughter, were lying on the floor of the bathroom, wondering what you had done wrong! Which is disturbing to me on several levels, including the fact that I can’t remember the last time I cleaned the floor of the bathroom.

That’s another Gilmore-ism I have used before. I literally cried on the bathroom floor over a marine named Chris once, and I told my own mother that the really scary part about that was how dirty my bathroom floor was. It made her laugh. But I swear to you, I’ve had the above conversation with myself a million times. I had it today. Walking from the parking lot into my office after realizing it’s been 4 days since the man I had been seeing briefly has acknowledged my existence, I found myself thinking “It’s okay, babe. He is the one who is missing out. You ARE brainy and fabulous, and he’s not worth crying over. You’re not going to beg anyone to like you ever again. Don’t you dare text him. HE IS PRACTICALLY HOMELESS!” Note that I DO call myself babe sometimes. The brilliant, pretty, confident, successful Lorelai inside of me tries to speak logic to the insecure, young, and hurt Rory inside of me that just wants to fall apart and ask the universe what I’m doing wrong.

I think people get exasperated with me, and I get exasperated with myself too, over how bad I feel about being single sometimes. I joke about being a walking Cathy comic – like I’m the most single person on the planet. I once had a friend kind of yell at me “IT’S ALL YOU EVER TALK ABOUT.” Maybe that’s so. Maybe I obsess over it and keep trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong and why I haven’t found my person yet. Maybe my friend doesn’t know what it’s like to be 33 years old and thinking about child-bearing years slipping away. Maybe he does. Maybe I talk about it a lot because it’s the only real interesting part of my life – without funny dating stories, what else is there for me to tell you about? The generative adversarial network I’m building at work? The pricing negotiation I’m writing tonight? How Maudie’s poop looked this morning? Maybe I’m looking for someone to just tell me “yeah, I’m struggling with that too.” I don’t know. All I know is that sometimes my Lorelai life is a little hard – I come home after a long day of chasing my dreams in my fabulous clothes, and I wish I had someone to sit down with me at dinner time to talk about it. And sometimes my inner-Lorelai turns into a Rory, and I end up on that bathroom floor again. Luckily, I’m always there to get myself back up.