I’m a hard worker and always have been. I started working when I was 14; I printed out cheap flyers advertising my babysitting capabilities and threw them in every mailbox in my town. I had my own little babysitting gigs and was doing quite well for myself; at $4.25 an hour, I thought I was making the big bucks.

As I grew older, I expanded my professional resume with retail positions, internships and jobs geared towards my career interests. I came out of college and now have a full-time job (and this super fun writing gig to keep me sane on the side) and am working towards getting the things I want for myself in life.

I consider myself - and many women just like me - to be a part of something new: the New Generation of 20-Something Women. No more relying on a man to determine financial status, stability or success; we are independent and have our own individual goals. Our own plans. Our fate in our hands.

Growing up, I learned that if you want something, you need to rely on yourself to get it and not someone else. I am taking that theory into account and notice that more females these days are too. Years ago, women were expected to find a man, get married, have children and keep the household. Rather than growing up and looking for our Mrs., 20-something women today are looking for a job, life experiences, travel and, most importantly, a life for themselves. Read More »

Ok, so basically, this Brinkley/Cook divorce thing is your typical Hollywood story. Two famous people are happy until one decides he’d like to have sex with 18-year-old girls. Only in America! Apparently now (according to the Today Show, really scraping that barrel) it’s come out that Cook also enjoyed his porn. And not just ‘Oh lemme see some 30 second clips‘ enjoyed. We’re talking $3,000 a month in subscription fees. He really, really likes porno.

The frustrating thing about the Today Show piece is that they were calling the segment ‘Cyber Cheating,’ and while, surely, Cook cheated, and indeed he didn’t just look at porn but also used (apparently, its hard to tell with all the ambiguous language) ’sex’ sites, which we assume are swinger hubs, porn shouldn’t really be considered cheating. Granted, three grand worth of porn is divorce worthy, based on irresponsible money management and creepy factor alone, but looking at porn isn’t cheating. And if it is, every guy with a connection to the Internet is cheating. Half of them are cheating right now!

Is cybersex cheating? Arguable, but we can lean toward yes. Cybersex and ‘cyber-flirting,’ while physically harmless, reveal that you aren’t getting something from the relationship you’re in. Read More »

Christie Brinkley, who’s currently going through a very public divorce from her cheating, porn-obsessed husband Peter Cook, recently told People that she “feels bad” for the 21-year-old girl Cook had an affair with, and “forgive[s] her completely.”

The reason this is noteworthy? Because women have a tendency to blame the chick their significant other had an affair with, rather than the significant other themselves. How many of you (and I’m sorry, by the way, if you understand what I’m talking about) have felt the burn of a cheater, only to turn around and have homicidal thoughts about the person the love of your life cheated on you with? I’ll cut that bitch, you think, while tearfully trying to figure out how to convince your cheating bf or spouse back into your life.

I’m sure there’s lot of scientific evidence as to why women usually hate on the O.W (Other Woman) more than their partner, but in my opinion, it all filters down to female competitiveness and self-loathing masked by rage. Like the gossip mags (mostly read by women) that spend pages ragging on celebrity cellulite and sagging stomaches, most of us find it easier to go after a target we don’t know, rather than A) a person we do know, or B) ourselves. Read More »

Hottie of the Week
I can’t believe that I’m going to say this – but if you forget the infidelity and the fact that he probably gets his hair Japanese straightened, Mario Lopez has a smokin’ body.

Song of the week
Katy Perry, “I Kissed a Girl”.
I hate this song.

Freak Show
Verne Troyer/Mini-Me sex tape. Why don’t they just pour acid on our eyes?

Am I the only one who thinks that Jennifer Lopez would be absolutely frightening if you pissed her off even just a tiny bit? FYI, you may get the store discount if you ask nicely and don’t have your bodyguard show a gun to the shop girl. Read More »

An older friend of mine once advised me that I should stick with my college boyfriend. I thought this was strange advice at the time. I had warned so many friends of mine upon high school graduation that sticking with their high school boyfriends was a terrible idea, so I figured the same would go for college.

Weren’t you supposed to explore your options? Date? Have fun in your twenties before settling down in your thirties? Now that I’ve graduated, I know exactly why she said it. Dating post-college is a major shock to the system.

I went on a date recently with a guy who I’d met at a poetry reading. I thought he might be a few years older than me and I was okay with that, but on the date it came to light that he was actually many, many years older than me, fourteen to be exact (that’s Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher territory). I figured I’d dated older men before, so I decided to give him a chance. We talked about jobs, our shared neighborhood haunts (we both lived in the East Village), and then the subject of past relationships came up and he told me about his ex. Read More »

It’s time for the week’s wackiest news stories with Kandy Korrespondent!

A South African woman has posted a list of her soon to be ex-husbands infidelities on the truck of her car in an effort to shame him into paying her maintenance (child support).
The poster reads:

“If my soon-to-be-ex-husband thinks he can:
bed down cheap women,
buy them underwear,
wine and dine them in the best restaurants,
take them on five-star holidays,
take ‘excite’ tablets for erectile dysfunction,
go out boozing each night AND not pay me my maintenance as ordered by court,
and think I will take no action, he has another thing coming.”

This woman is totally awesome!

How to Get Pot in CA—legally: In his latest Op-Ed, Joel Stein recounts his freakishly easy experience acquiring a prescription for medical marijuana (legal in CA). His illness? Anxiety, occasional insomnia, and headaches. As he states,

“The only malady that would have made me more similar to every human being throughout history would have been ‘these painful little pieces of skin that peel up next to my fingernails.’” Read More »

It seems like everyone’s parents are divorced, and every time someone finds out that my parents are still married after 26 years, they act like my family is weird.

Masses of my friends who come from a ’split’ family love to assume that my family is NOT split simply because my parents are still married. Boyfriends assume that because I have parents that are still married that I too must want to get married.

Well, not only do I not want to get married, but I wouldn’t be surprised if watching my parents all of these years has played a role in that choice.

Sure, they’ve been together for a long time. They’ve stuck it out through thick and thin: cheating, emotional abuse, money problems…you name it. But they don’t make me want to get married.

They’re apocalyptically wrong for each other, first of all, and they’ve stuck this thing out because they believe that staying married is a religious duty. EVEN THOUGH they were both married and divorced before meeting each other. Read More »

Right now I’m inclined to try to persuade you to avoid going to graduate school in the liberal arts if you can. I want to implore you to avoid spending all that money to write papers upon papers about 16th century printing techniques and the subaltern in post colonial Jamaica. What are you going to do with all of this knowledge? Teach? You could do that with your bachelor’s. Yeah, you’ll get more money with a Masters or Doctorate, but what is money, really? Can it buy back your sanity?

Also, apparently, going to grad school is the first step on the road to divorce.

That being said, you really shouldn’t listen to me, because my beseeching you to invoke the Rosie the Riveter within and strike out into the real world comes from my own frustration as a master’s student in the liberal arts. As I write this, I’ve been waiting two weeks for my adviser to email me back about the teaching assistantship that would pay my tuition. Everyday that she doesn’t write me back is another day that I am closer to having to take out another exorbitant loan. This is one of the many such hassles a grad student has to deal with in addition to the mountainous pile of intensely boring papers. Read More »

Maybe you’ve heard about this criz-azy Youtube video by actress and now jilted ex-wife Tricia Walsh Smith (her used-to-be man owns a bunch of big Broadway theaters in NYC). Smith was so angry at her grandfather of a husband for dumping her, that she recorded herself going on a giant tirade about the whole thing (which included her breaking down into tears and calling his secratary to question her about “con-domes” [seriously, that’s how she said it] she found at their shared apartment) and then uploaded that tirade onto YouTube.

Maybe she was so pissed off at getting dumped she just went black with rage and couldn’t think of any other way of getting the attention she needed. Maybe she thought the best revenge was one served to millions of Internet users all around the world. Who knows what made Smith share her very dirty laundry with the general populace. People get irrational when they’re kicked to the curb. The thing that’s important about this weird story?

She’s not the only one.

According to this NYT article, it’s becoming more and more acceptable to spill your guts to the world via blogging, and more and more acceptable to include really intimate details about your relationship (or current lack thereof). Read More »

So, Papa Joe might find me and kill me (or send out a swat team of lawyers). But I don’t care. I’ll put it bluntly, and to him: “Papa Joe, your family is hideous, and you’re to blame.”

I hate thinking about the Simpsons. I try not to think about them. Ever. But when I do think about the Simpsons, and conjure up their faces in my mind’s eye, it makes me want to stab my actual eyeballs with needles or a really sharp knife. Since I like my eyes, and appreciate all that they do for me (good jobs, eyes!), I try to avoid images of the Simpson clan. Nevertheless, the girls appear on a lot of my magazines and are picked on at most the blogs I surf every day. Inevitably, I am forced to think about them, even look at them.

I’m sure some of you think I’m being unduly harsh when speaking in such venomous tones. Indeed, the Simpson camp would agree with you. So, by all means, go ahead and join that nest of vipers. But I can’t help being critical. In my mind, they rank up there with the worst of the Hollywood hacks, a close tie with Parasite Hilton or Lindsay Blohan.

OK, that’s hyperbolic, as I am thinking of more counter-examples myself, not to mention that the Simpsons, like Lohan, are in a different category than Hilton types, who were born, literally born, with golden spoons in their . . . well, you get the point.

These days, the competition to make it to the realm of beyond-pitiful is steep. Nevertheless, my dislike for the Simpsons is extremely intense. When did it all begin? Let’s see, I remember that “innocent” reality show . . . aaaaah, yes, The Newlyweds. That guy, Nick Lachey . . . that’s when he was in the picture, too. But Papa Joe effectively cut him out, didn’t he? Read More »