1) If someone cleans your puke, they must really love you.

2) The sharing of puke stories is a requisite amongst friends.

Silverlake wine. 7:30. Thursday night. We are the only ones having fun here because we are sharing puke stories. Puking on planes, in the shower, rice burrito puke embedded in arm hair, puking at Thai festivals, puking in front of people you are trying to impress. We are in a corner, laughing really hard. Why is no one else having fun here? They're all on first dates, or posing.

"Look," says R, "Jonah Hill 40 years from now." She is right. He is an older Jonah Hill, more interested in the other women around him than the one he is with.

Behind us, a man in an I heart civil liberties t-shirt.

"That man loves civil liberties," I offer. Grave nods. The only person who is likeable here is the bartender who tells us that the wine we are drinking is organic.

"Ranga ranga," he tells us, "It means cool breeze," he nods.

He most definitely made that up.

I heart civil liberties is disturbed or curious about our laughter.

"You two think you're cooler than everyone else here," he says, and then proceeds to offer us the most stilted and prosaic lines about David Lynch and wine and the eastside. Something about this is so wrong, so inorganic. Is this really how grown-ups expect to meet, make friends, pair off, become something to one another, even for the purpose of an evening, a night? The absurdity of it. How do people make friends in LA? People here are wearing fedoras and talking about auditions. It must be exhausting to have to do this. To circulate out of need. And dress the way other people have told you to. And repeat lines that you once heard someone else recite. It is loud and packed and so strange. And it makes you realize that none of it really matters if there isn't someone to laugh about it with. How did people become so disconnected from one another? And from themselves?

"Where are all the really thoughtful, authentic people?" we ask.

Probably weeping by themselves in their apartments.

At home, I put on my pajamas and glasses and dance to Providence by the Love Language before I collapse in bed and go to sleep.