But it’s a lot easier to get through the makeup process when you’re twenty-five and can legally be wasted during it. And besides, on this day, I was getting the good stuff. BuzzFeed was paying for everything, or rather, BuzzFeed had to pay for everything, because I didn’t have any money. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I would’ve done without a company like BuzzFeed—you can be nominated for an award, and you still gotta fly yourself to the city it’s in, get yourself a hotel room, get an outfit, hair, makeup, shoes, transportation to the venue, a male prostitute to keep you warm that night. It’s a whole big deal. But I guess that’s what credit cards are for.

There was a brief hiccup when the hairstylist decided to give me 2004 Green Day emo throwback comb-over bangs, but we managed to course-correct soon enough.

I squeezed myself into my hideous suit and finally hopped into a van with my entourage—a BuzzFeed publicist (there to ensure that I didn’t embarrass the company, I’m sure), me, and my date for the evening, Jeremy, a video producer who’d helped create the mess that got us there in the first place.

When you pull up to an awards show, it’s absolute chaos. After the initial shock hits that you’re on a red carpet, just like on TV, and there’s lights and cameras and beautiful people wearing horrifying amounts of bronzer, you start to realize that there’s absolutely no order or reason to what is happening. I imagine this is what animals who have been held in captivity feel like when they’re released back into the wild. There’s a faint sense of familiarity to everything—these are human beings with faces and limbs, I recognize those things—but everything else is sheer pandemonium. Or at least controlled pandemonium.