My roommate and I finished Gilmore Girls this Wednesday. She got me hooked earlier in the year, which was not in the plan. I’m a scifi-fantasy-action girl. Gilmore Girls is a romantic slice-of-life dramedy. But Chloe insisted she couldn’t watch it alone, and if she were a Bible character, she would definitely be the persistent widow. So I agreed to watch the first episode, and if I didn’t like it that would be it.

I’ll keep things short by saying as soon as we finished that first episode, I clicked onto the next one. And a routine was born. We watched about three to five episodes almost every night for three months.

The show is still not my genre of choice. It’s rife with toxic relationships and the not-like-other-girls attitude of the early 2000s. But I don’t regret watching it. I ranted at Emily, related to Rory, cooed over Jess, and shipped Luke and Lorelai hard. I also developed a crush on Finn. We don’t talk about that.

At first we just watched, but soon we were pausing mid-episode to rant and staying up another hour afterward to talk. We analyzed the relationships and made bets on how well they would go. We discussed the portrayals of neurodivergency (how much of Kirk is Asperger’s, and how much of Kirk is Kirk?). We’d randomly tell each other, “Luke punched Christopher!” or, “Paris has a boyfriend!” I also drove Chloe crazy by predicting what would happen (sometimes correctly).

As we reached season 7, it got real how far we had come. We looked at clips from Season 1 and mourned the lost youth and innocence. And we decided we had to go out with a bang.

Now, the Gilmore Girls’ eating habits are a subject of much discourse. It drives me crazy how little they actually eat on-screen—I mean, Rory runs out on a hot fudge sundae after one or two bites. Also, how do they afford so much fast food? And to quote Lorelai, “It takes years of training to eat the way we do.” Chloe and I, having been raised in health-conscious households, didn’t realize how true this was until we had The Idea.

The Idea was, of course, to eat all Lorelai and Rory’s favorite foods on our last night. That meant frozen pizza and poptarts and all kinds of candy. I’m not saying we don’t have sweet teeth, but we go for dried fruit or Ghiardelli chocolate. And here we were with our Walmart basket of Rollos, Heath bars, and two kinds of M&Ms. “What have we done?” we mourned as we laid out our spread on the coffee table.

That night was an emotional rollercoaster. Rory’s boyfriend proposed. Lorelai’s dollhouse broke. Kirk spent the night suspended over town without a pillow. It was typical Gilmore Girls’ craziness. I got a little teary when we started, thinking how we were almost done. By the last episode, I was sobbing. I didn’t want it to be over. Not just the show itself, but the whole thing—watching stuff late into the night, eating junk, laughing or crying depending on what happened. 

A few years ago, I read this children’s picture book called The Memory Box. Ironically, I don’t remember too much, but the premise was a boy visiting his grandparents. At the beginning of the visit, the grandfather shows the boy this box and explains it’s his memory box. They’re going to fill it with things from days or events they don’t want to forget. The grandfather is developing Alzheimer’s or dementia (I forget which), and he wants reminders of his best memories. That stuck with me, and now I make a habit of looking for those memory box moments. They’re in my favorite bookstore, and in the best parts of Coldplay songs, and in the night Chloe and I went to Walmart for ice cream at 10 p.m..

At some point, everyone realizes they’re not a child anymore. Life suddenly feels stiff and sterile. It’s impractical to stay up late and get impromptu ice cream and watch a cheesy show. We need to be doing things, we need to be ready to do things, and we find ourselves caught in the world of Clocks, where everything is confusing and time is running out. We try fake personalities, music, social media, drugs—anything to get the color back in our lives.

Do you remember being a kid and having a bedtime and a snack limit? Remember how exciting it was when your parents let you stay up late or gave you an extra snack? There’s a difference between hedonism—living for pleasure—and having a treat now and then.

I think we’re putting too much pressure on ourselves to get it right. Yes, after our Gilmore Girls binge I was dead tired and staring at a box of poptarts we’re never going to finish. But this is how I imagined adulthood when I was little. I can’t stay up late every night, of course, but if I have an opportunity to make memories and bond with my roommate, I’m seizing it. I’m paying bills and living on a budget. I think it’s fair to have that late-night ice cream too.