When I first moved to Los Angeles at age 27, I lived across the hall from a makeup artist. We had matching apartments on the second floor of a sunny four-plex, but that’s where our similarities ended. I worked from home, wore sweatpants everywhere (it wasn’t cool then), had zero friends, and sat on the couch all day complaining to my boyfriend, who also had zero friends. In contrast, the makeup artist across the hall wore hip clothes, had the best skin I had ever seen up close, and did cool stuff around the clock, coming and going with her lighthearted buddies and walking around town with one hot stylish dude after another. Everything about her life was so deliciously L.A. that it pained me to witness it. The gentle melody of drunk giggling up the stairs late at night filled me with self-hatred and despair.

Nevertheless, we slowly became amiably acquainted. One afternoon, when I encountered her chatting on the front steps with a friend, I asked why I hadn’t seen her hot boyfriend around lately. “What happened, did he dump you?” This made her burst out laughing. Imagine Ariana Grande being asked this question — the dewy incredulity, lit from within like a carefree human lava lamp. “That guy was a loser,” she said. I nodded solemnly. Didn’t she realize I was a loser, too?

Apparently not, because a few days later, she asked me to hang out with some of her friends at a cafe nearby. When I showed up, everyone seemed cheerful and well-adjusted, and everyone looked like Chloë Sevigny. No one seemed anxious or depressed. No one insulted themselves out of the blue for no reason.

This made me nervous. Keep in mind, I had just moved from foggy San Francisco and I definitely belonged in chilly Brooklyn, but I was taking what I thought would be a brief detour in Los Angeles because my boyfriend was a Second Assistant Director and he thought that “film” mattered. (Film! I mean, my God!) That summer, we had seen “Saving Private Ryan” and afterward, we stood outside the Vista Theater smoking Du Maurier cigarettes like serious tools and he said, “I have some problems with that film.” And I said: “Stop right there. It’s not a film, it’s a movie. There are three blonde children touring a graveyard at the end. Tom Hanks cries in one scene. It’s a sentimental spectacle, not some hallowed work of art.”

Man, it was so great to be horrible, back when I was young and pretty! In fact, I want to urge every young and youngish woman out there to take advantage of their hotness for as long as possible, because it’s fun and it’s good for you and everyone should literally be punished by how amazing you look. You need to grind their faces into the shag carpet of what an unbearable smoke show you are. Because so many complete dolts are going to make you pay for so many stupid reasons moving forward — for being interesting, for having a brain in your skull, for being bored by them because they are objectively boring, for growing into a mature adult with firm boundaries and clear expectations. So smear your raw hotness all over their dumb-dog faces for as long as you possibly can.

Anyway, there I was, unexpectedly hanging out with these normal people, people so attractive and well-adjusted that they never felt the need to call attention to their hotness or smash it into the eyeballs of everyone within reach. They were just effortlessly successful in a very L.A. way, going out for drinks with big-deal directors, attending celebrity weddings every other weekend — possibly because they looked so right for the part or possibly because they swanned about in celebrity-loving places and were just witty enough to make friends but not nearly clever enough to lose them.