It’s Sitcom Summer!

Girl, it’s 7am don’t hit the gym hit the diner!

Every time you watch a sitcom every single one of those characters has such a seemingly warped timeline for their day. We spend a nearly too significant amount of time on breakfast scenes, then there’s after work drinks, time at home, but I’m hardly ever seeing any of those guys clock into work. I didn’t watch friends religiously, but I don’t know what any of them did for work. In New Girl I’m vaguely aware that Schmidt does something in an office, and in Modern Family someone is a lawyer—I’m losing the plot.

The point is, we see far more of these characters’ lives outside of their jobs than we do inside of them, and watching it feels sort of normal. I don’t really wish I saw more screen time of Monica working at whatever she did or the guys at the cheers bar in the office instead.

That said, growing up watching all these sitcoms gave me a warped perspective of what the working world would really look like. Of course I didn’t expect to clock in for two scenes worth of work each day and then go out with my friends in vintage Dior and Prada kitten heels each night. It’s television for crying out loud! I was aware of what the working world might look like, but it was sort of a mystery what it might look like for me. I thought I’d have a job in publishing by now, I thought I’d be in New York perhaps or maybe abroad (big expectations for less than a year post grad, I know—sue me) I thought I’d work in an office maybe have a chair.

Instead I found myself getting all too easily sucked into my ever so strenuous barista job—you can laugh it’s a joke, mostly— I spent all my time at my job, I got home and thought about all the things I need to do the next day at my job, I doom scrolled on LinkedIn for better jobs and harassed poor souls who had committed the crime of going to my school and working at those jobs with needy try hard messages that sound like “Hey looks like you also went to school AND had a major?! Could we have anything more in common? How did you get your job? I wanna know all about YOU!” (I still do that on occasion and to my fellow alumni reading this now please help a girl out it’s never too late), I woke up at 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 and clocked into my job.

There’s no time to be a person outside of my job unless I create it, and the sitcoms make the creating it seem effortless. Particularly those damned Gilmore Girls and their daily 30 minute 3 course breakfasts at Luke’s Diner before Rory had to be at high school?? an hour away??? It’s an anomaly that riddles me to this day, but in a way it inspired something beautiful for my friends and I.

We call it “Sitcom Summer.” Sitcom Summer was born out of a yearning to hangout, but no free time to hangout in. Life was looking far from a sitcom, and everyone was always working. No one’s days off aligned, and going with the flow would put us all hanging out once a month or once a year or something terrible like that. To remedy this vile and evil curse we decided to take matter into our own hands. Rain or shine healthy or hungover, we would wake up early and have breakfast at a diner “like they do in the sitcoms.”

At diner breakfast no one talks about work really or sits on their phone or rushes their meal. We talk about celebrity gossip, tv shows, music, our friends, our partners or attempts at finding one, the last breakfast, and the new things we want to do and see and try. We aren’t made of money, so it only happens once a week, but I’ve found waking up for breakfast can change the course of an entire day. The day feels like it belongs to me and not my job. I grow closer with my friends (shout out Anna and Mikah, my Sitcom Summer sisters).

I had a really hard time adjusting for a while after college ended. My friends all moved away, back home, other states. Others got jobs and partners and I worried that the girlhood I’d had in college maybe disappeared once you grow up. Maybe college really is the good ol’ days everyone made them out to be, and in some ways that’s true. But I’m writing this now because I just made this groundbreaking discovery that it doesn’t have to be, and it’s now my personal mission to make that everyone’s business!

Make time for your friends! Set your alarms! Get a fat stack of blueberry pancakes and a shitty cup of coffee at 7am! Go have a sitcom summer—maybe it’ll turn into a sitcom life!