The Cat Marnell to Alix Earle pipeline

My favorite dog breed makes me feel othered

Alix Earle partied for 24 hours straight and vlogged the entire thing. She made several TikToks about the party, but you can get a pretty good summary in this debrief podcast episode she posted on YouTube, in which she complains about being hungover whilst wearing a grey sweatsuit I probably can’t afford.

The 24 hours involved several outfit changes, naps, hangover IV drips, Ubers, yachts, etc. I have not been to Miami before but this all seems pretty par for the course. Xandra Pohl, a self-identified “crazy blonde miami DJ” and close friend of Alix, was also recently interviewed on The Running Interview Show and opened the interview by stating that she had been out until 6am the night before. All of this is fine; if Alix and Xandra (both presumably named Alexandra, and yet going by pretty unconventional nicknames — one wonders what would be so wrong with Alex, Lexi, etc) want to rail lines and make TikToks about it, then, sure, more power to them (#JusticeForPartyGirls). But it is interesting that we’ve gotten to a stage where we experience social media content with cognitive dissonance so thick that a girl who makes it pretty clear that she takes Class A drugs on a regular basis also has a scholarship in her name and raised $100k for hurricane relief alongside the Red Cross.

Like Alix, I have also partied for 24 hours straight, but I felt deep shame about it and did not vlog any part of it — in fact, I have memories of staggering my party girl-era social media posting so it would look like I’d been “out” for less time than I actually had (e.g. posting photos from one party on a Friday and another party on a Saturday when in reality both parties had taken place on the Friday night). What I mean is that partying has always been glamorous and fun, but it also used to be hidden. In high school my friends and I used to take great pains to blur out the cheap beers we were drinking in our Facebook photos, and this practice of hiding our behavior was mirrored too by the media; Lindsay Lohan’s impressive mathematics around quantifying the number of times she’d done cocaine comes to mind. It’s also why I and every other indie sleaze sad white girl fell in love with Cat Marnell’s gorgeous Amphetamine Logic, in which she told countless stories of her waking up in the morning hungover at a stranger’s house and smudging MAC lipstick on her mouth and cheeks in a yellow cab to the office where she, of course, was called in to an HR meeting and forced to beg to keep her job, which, of course, worked, because she was so Beautiful and Talented and Keeping It Together. And repeat.

a harrowing and very 2014 photo of me from my Party Girl era