My girlfriend almost ghosted me after our second date. The reason was simple; we talked too much about the media. Becca works at Vox, I'm a freelancer, and on our first night together we marinated under the tangerine lights of an anonymous Italian restaurant in Downtown Brooklyn addressing the crucial issues of our time: The people we thought were annoying on Twitter. It was the most euphoric date I've ever been on. My swarming cornucopia of takes about [REDACTED,] [REDACTED,] and [REDACTED] had finally found a reciprocating audience; someone who could see me and hear me, seven minutes into an aside about my frustrations with The Outline's invoicing process, or a multiversal dissertation on Mel Magazine's unique brand of horniness. Those conversations are rendered hilariously immaterial by the crushing priorities of reality -- there are, to put it lightly, more important things going on than the flimsy chafing between New York media types -- but freelancers spend days and nights cooped up in psychedelic mind-prisons with no Slack channels to blow off steam. Any outlet to remind yourself that your job isn't imaginary, and your inner thoughts aren't fundamentally deranged, is self-care. Safe to say, I thought the date went great.