wine and cheap perfume

This phrase, coined by this week's edition of TimeOut, perfectly encapsulates a phenomenon that is sweeping the city. Suddenly everyone is flaunting their inner dork, which would be plenty annoying in and of itself. What makes it tenfold is that in most cases, this "inner dork" is a complete contrivance. Like, high-five! You're finally going public with your exhaustive Ms. Pac-Man habit, your massive Signorney Weaver crush, and your Star Wars figurine collection. Aren't you awesome? Like, everyone is flexing their capacity-for-uncoolness muscle so hard lately they're even less becoming than the tangerine-colored men and woman who flex their actual muscles un-ironically on the pages of greasy muscle magazines. Why don't you come clean about things that are really embarrassing, like the fact that you spend hours taking pictures of yourself laughing to post online, in spite of the fact that you're alone in your apartment, listening to Tracy Chapman and eating low-carb candy? Now THAT'S dorky. But no one talks about those things. No one will tell you that that's what they actually did with their weekend night. On that same token, my friend Josh put it best: "It would be so refreshing to ask someone what they did this weekend and hear them say, 'I went to a REALLY fancy club in a REALLY nice outfit, got WASTED and danced SO HARD!" Cause we all do that too, sometimes. We just don't admit to it. That would be genuinely dorky, which no one wants to be.