The Need for a Vaginal Sherpa

I’m about to talk about bi-ness and we’re all going to have to deal with the fact that it’s coming from someone who knows very little about it (that’s more for me than for you).

I’ve known I was bi since I was 17.  I was the stage manager of the school play and we were doing a rehearsal during tech week. I was up in the booth, and across the auditorium on stage, a girl was performing a song and dance number and I was transfixed. I suddenly felt butterflies and I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. When I noticed these sensations, I thought “Oh shit I know this feeling. This is how I feel when I like a boy. I guess I like girls, too.” And that was that.

I thought that since my acceptance of it was so logical and swift that the rest of it would be easy. Though, as I’ve come to lament severely over the years, logic and emotions are about as great at working together as the executive and legislative branches (I am so, so sorry that that’s the comparison that came to mind).

Logically, it makes so much sense to me that people can be attracted to all kinds of people. I wouldn’t have felt the way I did about that girl in high school if it weren’t possible. I also have very strong feelings about the fact that bisexual people remain bisexual regardless of who they are or aren’t dating. Some people seem to think that a bi person is straight when with the opposite sex and gay when with the same sex which is fucking ridiculous. You don’t become asexual when you haven’t gotten laid in a month. Or maybe you do, I don’t know your truth. I’ve even heard gay people say they don’t think bisexuality is real which I find equal parts insane and offensive. Like maybe they went through a phase of saying they were bi before accepting themselves and that’s why they feel like it’s fake and I get that I guess? The point is people are fucking stupid and bisexuality is real.

So after my brain defiantly states these things and I feel confident about my opinions, here’s what I’m actually dealing with:

Do I really like women or did I just decide I did to be “interesting” because I’m white and came from a wealthy background and want to have street cred? How would I even go about hitting on a woman? How do I even know who’s interested? God it must be so hard for gay people to know who’s gay. Or is it? There’s such a community around it all now it’s like its own world. I don’t know anything about that world. Can I even say I’m bi if I’m not a part of the community? What if I’m one of those straight presenting women who just wants to kiss women for fun and then run back to the comfort of a heteronormative lifestyle, leaving my gay brethren behind? If I even managed to hook up with a woman, I bet I would be terrible. I’d have no idea what to do and I’m used to knowing what I’m doing and I don’t like the idea of not knowing what I’m doing. I say I’m bi and I’m extremely liberal but am I actually comfortable with the idea of walking hand-in-hand with a woman in public? I don’t think so and that’s so fucked up. What’s wrong with me? Am I even liberal?

It’s a bit of a mess.

Something that should be so simple (I like men. I like women, I will do as I feel accordingly) becomes at once a crisis of identity. I don’t know why I struggle with it so much. If someone said to me “Am I allowed to call myself bisexual? I’ve never hooked up with a woman and I’ve only been to two pride parades and I left early because my back hurt.” I would say “Of fucking course, you idiot. You are genuinely attracted to both genders and your identity doesn’t need to fit someone else’s fucking standard or your idea of what someone else’s standard is and you don’t need to pay dues to gain membership to The Community.”

Except that was SO FUCKING HARD TO WRITE because for some reason I truly do feel like I should pay dues. I’ve had an extremely easy life as a straight presenting woman in a world that makes it nearly impossible for anyone who isn’t straight and cis to love freely and openly. I can imagine it sucking for someone who lives life as an out gay person to see people occasionally hooking up with people of the same gender but mostly living a life that is the norm and therefore getting all the benefits while suffering none of the unjust bullshit.

I can try to present this as being socially conscious all I want, but my fear of being party to oppression is actually just making me oppress myself. Which, like, props to The Man for the inception level brainwashing.

I definitely need to just get the fuck over myself and own my shit but it also has made me realize how not far along we are in terms of actually accepting these kinds of differences. I was at one of the women’s marches (“one of the women’s marches.” This is good journalism.) and I came upon a booth for an organization whose entire mission statement is essentially to spread the word about how bisexual people are still bisexual no matter who they’re with. Reading their sign felt like crying while accepting a hug you didn’t know you needed.

I don’t actually have much wisdom to offer here because I’m still very much in the thick of this identity crisis. Some of the best evidence of that, in fact, is the title I decided on before I even started writing this thing. I was talking about all of this with a friend moments ago and I said “what I really need is a vaginal sherpa,” the idea being that if someone shepherds me through an encounter with a woman, I’ll have done the hard thing and will finally feel confident claiming bi-ness. But that’s some fucking bullshit. I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s a great title and I’m basically the Shakespeare of our time. But I am what I am regardless of circumstances. When (or if) the time comes that I feel ready to act on female attraction, I’ll find a way to do it just like I’ve found a way to do everything else in life that I somehow managed to make 100 times more complicated than it should be and I won’t be any more or less bi after the experience. And I’m not any less bi simply because I haven’t fully found comfort with it.

Identity is weird and hard like a dick, but you are who you are. You’re going to have to tell your brain that that’s the case whether or not it agrees all the time (she said to herself). Since our brains are idiots, let’s all support each other as we find ways to be our own vaginal sherpas, kay?

Thank you.

I’m Normal Until I’m Insane, and Maybe You Are Too.

I feel the need to open with an acknowledgement that I am not writing about the current situation with the Supreme Court and America in general. Part of me feels badly that I’m talking about inconsequential shit when such big and horrible stuff is going on and the rest of me is like you know what fuck it because this is all I have left now. If you don’t want to read this right now, though, I understand. I have, at times, yelled at people for promoting their work on days when shit that I view as tragic has happened and possibly that was just me being a dick. But anyways, that’s not what we’re discussing.

This week we will be talking about how eventually in every relationship (romantic, sexual, friend to a lesser extent) everything will be going great and then I ruin it by getting needy and insecure. Anyone relate? (Please oh god please say yes).

I don’t know why it happened this way, but I kind of started out my romantic career the way others start out drinking: too much too early, in severe excess, and by not shutting the fuck up about it. The way other teenagers drank heavily at parties to cover up the fact that they had yet to formulate a personality, I threw myself into someone else’s world hoping to attach their likes and accomplishments to my own resume.

I somehow decided that all relationships had to be serious and that everything in them carried enormous weight. My first boyfriend was a nice enough guy (and is lovely now. If you’re reading this, I know we were young and stupid and I am sure you’ve grown into a lovely person and I enjoy our occasional exchanges) but did not want to be as serious as I did and he didn’t know how to handle that and I didn’t either. We were together for about 10 months, lost our virginity to each other, and I was certain we would get married. Thinking back on the relationship, all I really remember aside from pockets of happiness here and there was being miserable and anxious. I was always worried about something. I was always trying to fix something. And I wasn’t having any fun. When he tried to break up with me, I wrote him an 8 page letter about why he was wrong and then made him say it was a “break.”

If I had had any sense of self worth and knew who I was as a person, I’d have at some point known that that situation was not for me. But for some reason I didn’t, so I didn’t.

The kind of super shitty part about it is that right after that I dated one of my best friends for about a year and while I’m sure we did stupid and unhealthy things because we were 17, it really was a great match and someone I should have been serious with. So when he broke up with me out of the blue I was devastated and it also kind of reinforced this weird story I was forming in my head of “Relationships are deep, amazing, and serious, and you have to constantly be on guard or they’ll end and everything will be terrible and you’ll have nothing.”

Then rather than, I don’t know, figuring out who I was or joining clubs (I don’t know what people do) I just kept dating person after person chasing the high and trying to cover up the low of the last. Then they would all break my heart because no one can be trusted and if you aren’t constantly checking in to see how everyone is feeling then everything falls apart!

This cycle isn’t super unique. A lot of people fall into a cycle of being addicted to the rush of a new attraction and then insecurity and resentment and distance set in when they realize that maybe it wasn’t what they thought it was. Or whatever, again, I don’t know what other people are doing but that sounds right. Right?

Then one day, many years later, I decided I would make myself be single for awhile and break the cycle of filling the void with another person. So I got a vibrator, kept a journal, and started watching Arrested Development.

And then a few months later I started seeing someone long distance, New York to LA, with almost no prior romantic engagement with them. I can’t be prefect all the time. I mean this is the same year that I stocked up on lentil soup before Hurricane Sandy but forgot to get cash and cried in the middle of a pizza place the day after the storm because I couldn’t buy hot pizza.

Even with the knowledge that I have issues with being my own person in a relationship and even with the strong desire to change, it still gets me.

Nowadays when a relationship of mine ends, with the help of a lot of therapy and meditation and a bunch of other LA magic non bullshit bullshit stuff, I am able to let myself feel the pain of it and give myself the space to recover. I no longer jump right into something to mask the pain or to give me validation. I check in with my motives if I decide to have an “encounter” (listen, my parents might read this. I know it could be better but this is a real concern for me) and ensure that I’m doing it for enjoyment and not to fill a gap in self worth.

After my last relationship ended, while it was hugely painful, I quickly felt I was really able to breathe and be myself again. I started laughing as much as I feel like my true self does. I was excited to work on artistic projects again. I became charming as fuck again. And of course people were into it. Feeling stable and excited, I started….hooking up with a couple of my friends (I’ll get over it eventually!). I wrote a journal entry about one of the encounters and how I had been seeing a couple people (I won’t include the uncomfortable details. Maybe upon private request) and the entry ended with simply, “So honestly things are fucking great.”

And I remember feeling that way. So free and happy and excited and alive and appreciated and loved by my friends.

And then this week, here’s what happened in my head:

“Oh no he’s not texting me as much. Should I not have said that? Am I texting too much? What if he doesn’t actually want to see me? What if he’s not interested anymore? What if he doesn’t feel the way that I feel? How do even I feel? What are you even talking about? Where is this going? How will this end? Do I not want it to end? What would that mean? What have I done? Was that all make believe? I mean, the time together is so fucking wonderful I want it all the time. Why wouldn’t he? Does that mean he doesn’t enjoy it as much as I do? I knew last week when everything felt amazing and I wouldn’t let myself ruin it for me that eventually I would ruin it for me.”

Casual.

And might I remind myself (and tell you, reader, for the first time because you don’t live inside of my head yet) that just a week prior I had told him that he was overstepping boundaries and I didn’t want to hang out all the time and I needed to maintain my independence and keep my oxytocin attachment crap in check because I’m recently out of a thing, as you know. And now I’m the one wanting more time and attention.

Somehow I get in a space where I think the other person isn’t equally capable of having complex needs that have nothing to do with me and change constantly.

I recognized my familiar refrain immediately, yet that brought me little comfort. I was thinking about it a lot on the way home from work yesterday. I thought about how this is just something I’m going to have to be aware of and battle probably forever. And then a friend of mine called me asking for relationship advice. I immediately thought “I’m probably the worst person for the job right now, but go ahead.”

He talked about how he will sometimes be overcome with love for his girlfriend and then the next day he’ll think “I don’t feel that way right now. I’m looking at her and I’m feeling nothing. And then I think were those feelings a lie? If they were a lie, I’m a bad person. She is so perfect and great and if I don’t feel the same way and I really don’t love her as much as I thought I did yesterday then I’m being an awful person by letting her be with me. But then sometimes I’ll start being worried that she doesn’t really like me as much as I like her I mean she’s so perfect. Why would she like me? And then I can’t even enjoy my time with her because I’m so inside my own fucking head and I’m driving myself crazy and ruining the point of the whole thing. Am I insane?”

“Yes, dear friend. And you’re in good company.”

We then talked about how our respective pasts have given us certain false beliefs about relationships that then lead to irrational fears and anxiety. I told him that it would be something he would have to continuously be aware of and work on and that he wouldn’t just step into perfection one day, but slowly progress. And sometimes it won’t feel like you’ve progressed at all. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re right back where you started. But that’s not true and you can’t listen to that. You just have to keep taking care of yourself and learning to listen to your true self.

Because those thoughts that he had and those thoughts that I had aren’t fucking real. But he and I are extremely stubborn and logical people so we’re really fucking good at convincing ourselves that our irrational fears are rational. Like “Sure this could be fake but also don’t they say that intuition is extremely important in relationships so if I feel like something’s not right I should definitely listen to myself. I mean I don’t want to be one of those people who ignores these feelings for years and ends up in a marriage where no one is happy and then we have to have a messy expensive divorce. You’ve read about how horrible and common divorce is. This is the kind of shit to look out for if we’re to change the way these things work and improve the way society deals with relationships. I mean we’re the future. Be the change you wish to see.”

Uhuh.

I told him about a therapy technique that a lot of people use and that has been super helpful to me. It really helps to name the crazy thoughts and not only name them but make them kind of funny so you help yourself snap out of the belief that what’s going on in your head is somehow the most serious issue on Earth. So I told him how I identify my anxious thoughts.

I’d like you all to meet Stergil. Stergil is a little green, cartoon snake and he wears a ratty tophat. Stergil is a failed vaudeville performer. When I’m doubting my career goals and dreams and wondering if I’m good enough or if anyone cares about what I’m saying, I realize it’s just Stergil being a fucking dick because he feels bad about his failed career and he wants me to feel bad too and he doesn’t want to see anybody succeed. Emily V Gordon talks about the same technique in her amazing book Super You.

Now the truth is, Stergil is a dick but he’s actually coming from a place of wanting to protect me. Stergil knows that I’ve had my heart broken multiple times by people who pulled away from me. But Stergil is still a fucking idiot.

I had only really used Stergil for career issues before, but when I told my friend about him I realized that Stergil also had a lot of failed marriages and he doesn’t believe in letting your guard down in any kind of relationship because everyone will just break your heart anyways.

So now when I am trying to ruin the best fucking shit life has to offer and I think “But why isn’t he texting me back?” I”ll say, “Stergil, listen, I’m sorry your second wife left you too even though she knew how much the first one hurt you but get it the fuck together, man. You can’t keep shittin on everyone else because you feel bad.”

But progress not perfection is the name of the game, as I’ve learned from a friend of mine who’s an avid member of the Al-Anon world. For those who may not know, Al-Anon is kind of like a spinoff of AA and is for people who have alcoholics/addicts in their lives and it helps them with things such as codependence and blah blah blah (this is good journalism). I sound really optimistic and on top of my shit right now but I didn’t this morning or yesterday. I was a bit of a wreck. But I realized that I have a fucking cold and am PMSing so in a very real way I’m less well equipped to reign in Stergil. And one of the reasons I know that Stergil is real and that he’s full of bullshit is that I just took a klonopin and smoked some weed and I FEEL FUCKING FINE. I am myself. I’m sneezing all over the place and I haven’t eaten in 10 years, but I am myself.

The goal of course is to be able to get there without self medicating, even if I do have a prescription and weed is legal and safe (I’m saving the shame I feel about taking medication for my mental health for a whole other blog post). But it helps me know that when I really am being myself, I do not have those thoughts.

Am I Carrie Bradshaw?

This is shaping up to be a bit of a sloppy dismount because, as I mentioned, I am sick right now so I’m not working at full capacity.

So, uh, go find your Stergil and tell them to fuck off. Be yourself. Laugh at things. Don’t take yourself seriously. Listen to your truths and enjoy amazing shit. You deserve it.

Oh and vote in November. Please.

The Time My Friend Thought I Asked Him To Remove My Contact Lenses, or The Contact Fallacy

When I was about 20, I was at my best friend Duckers’ house smoking weed. Smoking tends to dry my eyes out so if I’m wearing contacts I almost always have to switch to glasses at some point. I for some reason felt the need to say out loud “I’m going to have to take my contacts out at some point.” He mumbled some sort of acknowledgement and we went back to (probably) watching South Park. Somehow, and I truly and deeply wish I could remember how, we discovered that he had thought I’d said “You’re going to have to take my contacts out at some point.” This would become one of the most important moments of my entire life.

The fact that he thought I said that and gave no reaction to it made me so utterly upset. Immediately. Viscerally.

The amazing thing is that we both knew instinctively that even though we didn’t yet know why, we both felt deeply that it was a very valid thing to be upset about. So rather than arguing, we launched a two person investigation into the intricacies of this interaction. After discussing for awhile, we were able to break it down into three feelings:

1. Why the fuck, after 8 years of knowing me and knowing me well, would you think that I would say “YOU’RE going to have to take out MY contacts.”
2. Why the fuck upon registering in your brain that I had said something so utterly absurd did you not say something about how weird it was?
3. Oh my god, do you NOT think that that’s an insane thing to say?

In that moment, I suddenly felt like if he thought that that is something I would say so casually that he must not know me as well as I thought he did. Also, I would hope that we are close enough that if we think the other person has said something insane, that we wouldn’t just brush it off and move on. I would hope that we would say “I’m sorry, I hope I’m mistaken here but if you said what I think you said you’re fucking insane and as your close and personal friend I’d like to discuss it.” Lastly, I REALLY hope this doesn’t mean that you don’t find that as insane a statement as I do. Much of our connection is based off of finding the same shit crazy or weird and being able to dissect it and make fun of it. If you don’t think an out of nowhere request for you to remove a contact lens from my eyeball with your hands just ’cause is unsettlingly strange, you must not be the person I thought you were and our connection is a lie.

We didn’t know the depths of this at the time but we were essentially picking apart the main components of true intimacy: understanding, honesty, and respect.

Let’s pick apart honesty first because it feels like the least triggering for me. Honesty and realness is one of the most important things to me in any meaningful relationship. If I have to bullshit with you or I talk about you behind your back about something I haven’t said to you (or plan to say to you), you are not someone I consider a friend. It is still a struggle for me to understand that other people do not handle their friendships with the same philosophy, but it has gotten easier over time. It is weird to have to learn to not hold others to the same standards to which you hold yourself. If I thought that it meant people hated me every time I learned of them having discussed me behind my back, I would have like 2 friends. I know that their actions mean different things for them than they would for me. I don’t fucking know WHY no one else seems to give a shit about honesty as much as I do, but that’s for another time.

My relationship with honesty has evolved over time, though. It used to be a lot more of a burden. In relationships I used to feel that if I wasn’t telling them every single negative or worried thought I had about our relationship that I was being dishonest and our relationship wasn’t real. Thankfully I’ve moved past that, but I still have to fight the urges to puke up my emotions and offer premium access to the Arielle Stream of Consciousness channel. Additionally, I have finally gotten to the point where I don’t feel like I can’t have a real connection with someone if I don’t tell them they have a lot of blackheads that I’d like to fix (I’m serious. I honestly have the thought “well if I don’t tell them, are we really friends?”).

That said, I still maintain that if I say something that seems off or offensive or whatever, any true friend should say something about it. I only brush people off or let them say stupid shit if they’re someone who doesn’t mean that much to me (excluding of course grandparents and things like that. I love them dearly but they are old and insane). I’m trying to find the best way to describe this, because it has such a strong and specific feel to it but I haven’t found words that feel satisfying or adequate enough yet. I’m in a hotel room right now and the setup actually might work. Let’s try. So in the middle of this multi-level hotel is basically a covered atrium. It’s like a tall donut if donuts were square. Or like one of those stupid popsicle stick towers we were always making as kids for no one in particular. All the rooms are along each 4 sides of the carved out center, so on one side of my room is a window to the outdoors and on the other side is a window to the rest of the hotel. I can see what everyone else is doing but I’m not actually with them. The way I feel about friendship and realness is like this hotel: anyone I consider a friend is in my room with me. They’re going to hear everything I’m thinking out loud, they’re going to see me naked, and they will smell my poop. And we’re all stuck in here together being equally as naked and talky and poopy. We see the people outside and we might open the door to say shit to them, but they’re not inside with us. We are judging them through the window and talking about their stupid hair or their weird shoes or why they feel the need to use the word “actually” at the beginning of most sentences. Everyone inside already knows it’s weird to do those things, or they’re being lovingly made fun of for it because we can’t keep secrets in here and there aren’t enough corners to run to where we can gossip without being overheard. And it’s not that people on the outside of the room are always on the outside. Sometimes I talk about someone’s hair who’s on the outside of the room but then my friend on the inside talks to them through the open door enough times that I HAVE to bring them inside because with my room you can either be out or in; you can’t stand in the doorway. It’s also possible for me to kick someone out of the room for being a real dick. I do have some boundaries. But, obviously, not many since I just described friendship as pooping in front of a room full of people.

Respect is really rather similar to honesty for me in that I feel if you respect someone you should be honest with them and that honesty is a sign of respect and care. Aside from like the normal baseline level of human respect, I have no reason to respect the woman across the atrium who’s wearing socks and sandals so I don’t really care about whether I’m real with her so if when we’re in the elevator together and she asks me where I’m from and I say Washington and she thinks I mean Washington State I maybe won’t correct her. If a friend of mine made such a mistake, I would feel an obligation out of respect for them to make sure we’re on the same page. A possible character flaw of mine is also that I have trouble respecting people who feel wildly differently than I do about particular things. If you find enjoyment in pop music and don’t listen to anything else, I probably don’t respect you to the fullest extent I’d like to to feel comfortable calling you a friend (there are a few exceptions but these people have won my respect in other ways, not that my respect is something to strive for or anything but if we’re being real I obviously think it is). Lately I have been working on finding it INTERESTING rather than THREATENING when I have a different experience with something than someone else does. It’s still a work in progress. Like I’m at the stage where I still feel irritation bubbling up and I basically yell “HOW INTERESTING TELL ME MORE” at them. But the people who are in the closest circle of my friends (let’s say, on the toilet with me while I’m pooping) tend to feel the same way that I do about a lot of things. I’m not saying this is a good thing. But it is a thing.

Additionally, it, like, really pisses me off when someone mishears something and rather than figuring it out with contextual clues they decide to willingly be an idiot about it despite the fact that the rest of us are trying insanely hard to properly understand people all the time. And they always think it’s hilarious. You know the people I mean. The ones where when you say “How far is it to the restaurant?” and you have to repeat yourself they say “Oh my god I thought you said ‘Plow Mars innit? I’m feeling gaunt.’ And I was like, ‘HAHAHA WHAT?!'” Shut the fuck up, Susan. Respect the rest of us enough to use your goddamn brain for two extra seconds and figure out since we’re on the way to a restaurant that’s PROBABLY WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

Now for understanding. This one is going to be rough.

I have a deep, pervasive need to feel understood. I think we all do, although I’m not sure exactly how it manifests in anyone else so I’m just going to talk about what it’s like for me.

When I was a kid, words were constantly flying out of my mouth without permission and getting me in trouble before I even knew what had happened. I was either saying something rude and inappropriate that had somehow passed through the extremely weak, pre-9/11 TSA that is my mouth or the thing that I did mean to say somehow transformed into something completely different while it was being manufactured by my tongue and teeth. My cries of “But that’s not what I meant!” were always met with “You should think before you speak,” as if I had any control over the matter. The biggest emotion I feel when I look back is feeling deeply misunderstood.

I carry an immense fear of not being able to express myself because something in me wants to avoid ever feeling like I did back then ever again. To this day, my most frequent nightmare involves me being in some form of Locked In Syndrome where I can hear people and see them and I want to respond to them but I just can’t get the words out of my mouth.

When I’m talking, I try so hard to avoid expressing my thoughts incorrectly that I’ll often take such long pauses between words that people think I’m done talking and say “What?” Like I’ll be trying to express how I feel when I wake up and my immediate thought is that it feels like I’ve been hit by a truck but then I think like wait but I’ve never actually been hit by a truck so maybe that’s not how I feel and maybe the person I’m talking to’s sister just actually got hit by a truck and anyways maybe I shouldn’t complain about such a privileged thing at all it’s not like I’m sleeping on a sidewalk but I still want to explain why I’m grouchy right now. But all that’s come out of my mouth is “Sometimes when I wake up, I feel like…” followed by me staring off into the distance. So, no, of course it doesn’t make sense. I was in the middle of  a sentence. You have half of a thought. But that’s my fault, not yours.

I somehow got it into my head that if someone doesn’t understand me perfectly on the first try, they’ll never know who I am as a person. Like if they only hear me say “When I wake up it feels like I got hit by a truck” they won’t also know that I understand it’s not a horrible problem to have and that I understand other people have it worse and also that I don’t even know what it’s like to be hit by a car and that it’s important to me to be fair but also that I definitely am a bitch in the morning and am kind of okay with that. And if I can’t fit all of that into one, neat sentence, clearly I’m a failure.

Not only do I think I need to perfectly convey the entirety of my being in one thought in order to express myself honestly, I for some reason feel like if someone thinks I’ve said something that I think doesn’t align with who I am, that that must mean they know nothing about me. And that they’ve never known anything about me. And that no one really knows anything about me. And that no one will ever know anything about me. And that I’m 10 again and in the play Bye Bye Birdie and we’re doing the scene where his groupies sing and I’m one of the groupies and we’re singing “Oh Conrad we love you” except out of my mouth comes “Oh Conrad we hate you” in front of everyone’s parents and now everyone thinks I’m a troublemaker when really I probably just had the song that the non fan group sings in the next scene stuck in my head because I heard them do it, oh I don’t know, 100 fucking times during rehearsals.

So it’s crazy that this extremely simple to explain issue doesn’t already have a word for it, we feel.

We usually just call it “that issue” or “the contact issue.” If I were a better writer I’d have built up to that beautifully and talked about how it really is The Contact Issue because it has to do with HUMAN CONTACT!!! But I’m not cool enough to hide the fact that I was extremely excited by the convenient coincidence and it felt dishonest to pretend otherwise.

After going through all of this with you, though, I think it should actually be called something else. Because while it is a term that describes a certain (EXTREMELY SPECIFIC) misunderstanding, it’s really more about how the issue makes us feel than anything else.

It is my dream to find someone who knows exactly what I’m saying all the time on every single level and knows what I would or would not say. But I don’t even fucking know myself that well. I’m not going to stop being bothered by this and I’m going to still call it The Contact Problem because I love explaining it to people and seeing whose faces light up because they have felt it, too and we can all be in a nice cozy hotel room together. But I actually think it’s more of a Contact Fallacy. The fact that Duckers thought I had asked him to remove my contacts from my eyes probably had nothing to do with how well he knows me and everything to do with the fact that we were high and mostly paying attention to South Park. The idea that the misunderstanding means “I am not understood” is a fallacy. It’s not true. I am really hating every second of writing this paragraph because I want it so badly to be that I’m misunderstood and Duckers and I are special. But I’m trying to be a better person or something ugh.

I mean don’t get me wrong, we are special and I’m difficult to understand. But I want the point of The Contact Fallacy to be to remember to laugh at misunderstandings rather than to have an existential crisis over them. And I’m going to try to remember to prop the hotel door open on that safety latch thing. Except Susan can’t come in. Susan’s an idiot.

Exceptional, or How I’m Constantly Being Sent Home with Someone Else’s Appendix Surgery Video

When I was about 5, my sister went to an amazing sounding summer camp. Every day when we would pick her up, I couldn’t wait to hear her tell me all about all the art projects and swimming and horse riding she had done and all the friends she had. When I was finally old enough to go to the same camp, I had overwhelming first day of school type nerves and excitement. Even though she had told me all about it for years, I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I got there. Not knowing what to expect is one of the main tent poles of the anxiety I’ve had my whole life, so when the head of camp gathered every single camper together and told us “I’m going to list off all of your names and when you hear your name, your group will cheer for you and you’ll run over to them! That’s your group for the rest of the summer!” I was immediately relieved.  I knew the plan and I was pumped.

He began listing off names using a megaphone. Each kid would run excitedly to the group they were assigned to as group cheered and welcome them. As more and more names were listed and more and more groups cheered, I could barely contain my eagerness to be welcomed into my own group and be able to feel special, too. It had occurred to me that it was odd that I hadn’t been called yet considering I usually come first alphabetically, whether by first name or last name, “But look how happy everyone is! I’ll be that happy soon, too.” The group began to thin. “I mean I’m definitely supposed to be here, right? It’s Monday and mommy said Monday we were starting camp. And my sister is here too. And daddy dropped us off. So, yeah, I’m definitely supposed to be here. Unless they meant to drop me somewhere else and got confused? Or maybe I didn’t understand them! Maybe I was supposed to stay in the car! My sister is looking at me. Does that mean I did something stupid and she knows it? Oh boy I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here….”

And then it was just the two of us.

“What are your names?” someone said. I’m sure my sister answered them because we started walking somewhere else with them but I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of every single organ in my body trying to exit out of my mouth in a disorderly fashion.

Eventually they somehow got my mother on the phone and though I could only hear the camp staff’s side of the conversation and I was like 7 and don’t remember much, I will use my educated imagination and say it went something to the effect of:

Camp: Hello this is camp why are you children here?

Mom: Hello camp, this is Mom. What the fuck are you talking about?

Camp: Hello Mom. Your children are not on our list.

Mom: Hello, Camp. That’s news to me since I signed them up weeks ago and gave you money, you fucking shit heads.

Camp: I am sorry, Mom. You are right.

Mom: I know, Camp.

Camp: We will put them in groups now.

Mom: Good. Probably now they’ll be the weirdos because the other kids have had like an extra half hour to bond and have a fully formed in-group mentality and my children will now be seen as outsiders who must be thwarted. Call me please if my children are murdered.

Camp: Roger. Have a nice day.

I went on to have a perfectly fine summer, but this was the beginning of an entire life of being the exception to every system I come into contact with.

Years later, I became a counselor at that same camp. Originally we had a clock-in system where we would just write down our names and arrival times. Eventually, they wanted something more high-tech that would hold us more accountable so they introduced a fingerprint scanning system. One day after work we were all to come into the office and scan our prints so they could set up our clock-in account. The line moved pretty quickly since the process was pretty easy. Then I got to the front.

Camp: Just put your finger down and when it flashes it means it’s got your print and you’re good to go.

Me: It’s not flashing.

Camp: Hm…lift it up and try again?

Me: No.

Camp: Is your finger really cold? Maybe warm it up?

Me: It’s still not working.

Camp: Okay well let’s figure it out tomorrow so everyone else can go home.

They tried to get my fingerprint on file for the next few weeks but eventually gave up. Every morning, they put a clip board next to the fingerprint scanner so that I could sign in on paper. Every day, I dreaded having to explain to whoever was in front of or behind me why I couldn’t do the finger scanner. To this day, I remain the only one in the history of camp who had to continue paper sign-ins.

My freshman year of high school, I was on the dance team. I had danced all of my life up to that point so it was a natural choice for me. But I found that I didn’t love it as much as I used to and decided after the first semester that I would drop dance and try theatre instead. Though I was leaving, I was extremely proud of the work I had done in the first semester. All the dancers worked well together as a group and it is such a rare feeling to feel part of anything in high school. For the winter festival, we did a performance on pointe that everyone kept telling me I was amazing in. It was taped and our pictures would be featured in the yearbook. It was one of the first times I remember feeling accomplished and recognized. When the yearbook finally came, due to the angle of the picture, the only part of me you could see was my foot. I went to look for my name next to the picture and it wasn’t there. The yearbook staff had labeled the picture based off of who they could see and not from an official list of who was on the team. The school completely lost the tape from the winter performance that year. There is no record of me ever having danced at my high school.

The summer of that year, while working at the aforementioned camp, I had to take a week off to get my appendix removed (for the full story, see my page). It was such an ordeal but since I’m usually able to have a good sense of humor about shitty things, I was kind of entertained by the whole thing. When they told us that they send every patient home with the internal video footage from their surgery, I was so excited. There was no way I wasn’t having everyone over for a viewing party of my internal organs. Once I was all stitched up and well enough to go home, they handed me my forms, my aftercare instructions, and a DVD, but:

Hospital: For some reason we weren’t able to save the footage from your surgery, but everyone basically look the same on the inside and we didn’t want to send you home empty handed so here’s a copy of someone else’s surgery.

There’s a clinic I go to when I don’t feel like bothering my regular doctor with my hypochondria, and they’re often doing blood work for me. At first they would just call or email with results when they came in, but then they set up an online system where each client could log on to see their results and keep track of all of their records. I won’t insult your intelligence. We all know where this is going. No matter how many times I try their login procedure, it always says I have an existing account and no one in their office can figure out how to access the account the system is referring to. They kept giving me the instruction slips every time in hopes that the registration code would work. It never did. Now I have an actual email relationship with the lab and they know they have to email me every time they get my results in. To my knowledge, I am the only client they have to do this for.

I won’t bore you with every single example, because they’re all pretty much the same. My account doesn’t work or I have the “in extremely rare cases” reactions to a lot of medications or the DMV somehow created two titles to my car so I had to go through a year long process of linking the two titles so I could become the owner of the vehicle, which they’d never seen before.

I’ve come to expect it at this point. There have been times where I’ve genuinely wondered whether I’m actually a person or if I’m some weird solid ghost who manages to live a mostly human life but for whom no human systems work properly. Other times, I felt maybe I was just invisible and only imagining the conversations I was having. Sometimes I’ll stop a friend mid conversation to say “I’m real, right?” Because obviously my extremely urgent and realistic fear of not being a human person is more important than whatever my friend was in the middle of enthusiastically telling me.

I was thinking about this the other while in bed. “I just don’t understand why I can’t be normal. I want to know what to expect when I go to the doctor. I want to have the same easy system as everyone else. I don’t want to be in limbo with every institution because they couldn’t make me fit into their protocol. Why do I have to always be the fucking exception? Why are my circumstances always deemed ‘exceptional.'”

I sat bold upright.

There are two definitions for exceptional:

1. unusual; not typical.
2. unusually good; outstanding.

I’m not invisible. I’m fucking exceptional.

I’ve wanted to be special my entire life. I’ve been spending all this time lamenting the irritation and anxiety that comes with having to do things my own way, when really this is just the most annoyingly big sign that I am obnoxiously special. I don’t want to have everyone else’s life. When people ask me where I see myself in five years I say “I don’t know and I don’t want to know.” I want a life of surprises and adventures. I should stop bitching about the surprises I’m already getting.

Okay I lied. According to the google dictionary, there’s actually a third definition to exceptional:

3. (of a child) mentally or physically disabled so as to require special schooling.

But that doesn’t fit well with my story. I’m including it anyways because I don’t have to follow your stupid writing rules. I have a video of someone else’s appendix surgery. Do you?

 

 

 

 

I Bisou’ed Olga – My Trip to France Part 2

If you’re following along in your blogpostprayerbooks, this is going to be the “Wow! Things are so different in another part of the world and it has really, truly opened my eyes in ways I never expected!” part.

After taking a train from Paris, I spent the first half of my trip in Grenoble where my friend Megan lives. Though I was really looking forward to seeing Paris for the first time, I am very glad for my time in Grenoble because I got to see what life might actually be like for a person my age living life in France.

These are the things I learned about life in France:

1. They really do eat pastries for breakfast and baguettes with every meal.

Every morning, Megan would go out while I was still sleeping and get pastries and a baguette for the day (have I mentioned she’s amazing?). For breakfast, we would eat soft boiled eggs, fruit, an interesting yogurt/cheese hybrid type substance, and some of the pastries that she had picked up. My favorite was one that had almonds in it. The part of me that is overly concerned about sugar intake freaked out internally, but I told myself to shut the fuck up because we are in France and we’re going to have ourselves a French old time and enjoy ourselves doing it, dammit. Also no one in France is fat or has diabetes (statistic is 100% made up but also seemingly 100% accurate) so I think people only die of things in America, probably because of some sort of international accord that I don’t understand because politics isn’t my strong suit.

For lunch, we would picnic with sandwiches or simply a baguette and cheese.

One night, we went to a very nice and traditional French restaurant. I ate steak (I broke vegetarianism for the trip). It was delish. We also made friends with some Israeli table neighbors who were cool until one of them started talking about how Trump isn’t that bad and then we went home.

2. France does not believe in air conditioning.

France puts Los Angeles to shame when it comes to lack of proper climate control. Everywhere is hot and everyone is sweaty and no one is talking about it, aside from Megan who obviously realizes they’re all insane even if they are saving the Earth for all of us.

3. People bike everywhere.

Not only is everywhere hot, but everyone arriving everywhere is already sweaty because they biked there in 90 degrees. This, too, is not addressed. This, too, will save the planet. Basically, France is just one giant eco friendly humble brag.

I did expect the biking due to my trip to Amsterdam a few years prior. When I went on that trip, I hadn’t ridden a bike in approximately ten years. I don’t know if you know much about Amsterdam, but picking up biking there after a 10 year break is comparable to deciding that because you played basketball in your backyard with your little brother a couple times when you were 10 that you could hop into a pickup game at age 20 with tall, fit people who play every day and are actually secretly on a professional team and are just there for funsies and it’s possible they’re on steroids or were, at the very least, born with super human strength that is yet to be understood by scientists. By some fucking miracle, I biked that whole trip and left mostly unscathed (one of my Toms got mildly ripped when I had to squeeze between a parked car and an oncoming car and hope for the best). I don’t know if it was the magic of weed or if God smiled upon me for my first European jaunt, but whatever happened there made me overly confident that I’d make it through France okay, too.

Megan planned a really beautiful, romantic French day for us. We would bike to the train station, take a train about an hour outside of Grenoble to a town with a beautiful lake. We would then bike from the station to the lake and spend the day laying in the sun, swimming in the water, and biking around the lake in the cool breeze with baguettes in our baskets and sandals on our feet.

We borrowed a bike from one of her wonderful and kind friends. I would use Megan’s helmet because, in Megan’s words, “I have fancy French health insurance and you don’t.”

The bike we borrowed was, I want to say, 50 lbs. It was almost definitely more like 25-30, but a large, unwieldy metal object has a way of becoming impossibly heavy when you have to carry it up and down multiple flights of stairs at train stations.

I tried to feel confident about biking to the train station. I was definitely wobbly and looked like a freakin idiot, but I managed to get there okay even with the addition of a few leg bruises from clumsy bike carrying.

After the train ride, we got off and started our journey to the lake. There was less city traffic than around Grenoble and we were amped about our lake picnic and the beautiful view we would have, so we went a little faster than we had before. I started to really feel like I was doing it. My friend was killin it ahead of me and I was following her. She turned, I turned. And I was even getting less wobbly!

We were almost there! She took a right turn seamlessly and I…did not. I saw a car out of the corner of my eye and froze. In fact, I straight up just stopped in the middle of the street in front of the car and fell over. My ankle snapped as I fell and the 75 lb bike fell on top of me. If you were to ask me how I did this, I would liken it to a time you might have tripped over absolutely nothing and not known how to explain it anyone, even yourself.

I knew I would be okay, but the initial pain was too much for me to do much of anything. The man in the car started getting out and presumably asking if I was okay, but I don’t speak any goddamn French so I just started waving my arm at him in a swatting “I’M FINE JUST MOVE ALONG” type motion which did not seem to get the message across well enough because he continued to stand there. Eventually I yelled “MEGAAAAAAN!” and she returned to rescue me (as one does when they suddenly look back and see their friend on the ground under a bike waving their hand lazily at a Frenchman) and tell the cab driver, probably, that I was okay and he could go, or perhaps that I was just her simple minded cousin who has trouble with basic tasks such as riding bikes but not to worry because she’ll be okay soon and it’s good for her to try things on her own sometimes.

Somehow, miraculously, despite the horrible pain upon falling, I was able to walk and (lucky me) continue biking.

4. France can be stunningly scenic.

We made it to the lake and it was truly stunning.

The breathtaking beauty of this place took up about 20% of my brain while the other 80% was concerned with a combination of how bad my ankle would turn out to be and how I was possibly going to return back to the train station (and then from the train station back to Megan’s) without killing myself. Considering it was sudden lack of confidence that had fucked me over on the way to the lake, a post-injury trip was seeming less doable as time went on and panic rooted itself deeper within me. Not to mention the fact that the seat of the bike was so hard my taint was as bruised as the apple that’s been floating around in my bag for 5 days wondering if it has a purpose. I was stuck in the most stupid, bike themed self-fulfilling prophecy of all time.

Megan kindly distracted me from my worries by taking me through a 15 minute synopsis of Big Little Lies so that I would never have to watch it. Megan is a hero.

Eventually it was time to leave. Megan, with the patience of a saint or someone who has just stopped giving a fuck, let me walk the bike through “scary areas” (ones where there were cars or people) and we made it back okay.

The next day, we had planned to take a hike early in the morning but I decided based on the state of my ankle that I should pass.

We went to the Grenoble Bastille, which can be hiked but instead of further cankling my cankle we took a murder machine to and from the site.

I’m sure I learned a lot about France, but  I can’t say with honesty I remember much of it at all. The coolest part of bastille were the caves. They were chilly and utterly silent. The walls and floors were wet and despite thorough googling we couldn’t figure out how a man made cave would hold water like that. If you happen to know how that works, please hit me up: aandreano11@gmail.com.

Also here is France from the Bastille’s point of view (plus me not knowing what to do with my arms or face):

5. The Bisou.

America has the handshake, Miami (decidedly separate from America) has the one cheek kiss, and France has the bisou. Technically, I think “bisou” simply translates to “kiss” but I heard it used colloquially to refer to the double cheek kiss that French people do upon both meeting and greeting. It’s used as universally, casually, and with as little meaning as when Americans say “it was nice meeting you” – you know, when you’re with your friend walking and talking and all of a sudden they run into someone they sort of know and they talk for a couple minutes and they’re not exactly important enough to fully introduce to you so you just stand there awkwardly trying to look like you’re neither annoyed nor intruding so you manage like a glazed half smile and then at the end of it all, you remark upon how incredible the experience was in the biggest lie of your life?

That’s what the bisou is. Or at least that’s what it can be in certain situations, such as this one here:

I was at a bar with Megan and her friend when they saw someone from their PhD program walking down the other side of the street with his girlfriend Olga. They was too far to call to, so they just spent a lot of time gossiping about him and Olga. I can’t remember whether Olga was bitchy or just weird but whatever it was, we don’t like Olga. Unexpectedly, dude and Olga crossed the street and changed direction which put them on a course for us. When they came up to our table, I was positioned at their access point and Megan and Bea were busy talking to dude so I ended up in an obligatory Bisou with Olga, the non-French stranger about whom I had just been engaging in shit talk. And then they left. It was nice meeting them.

6. France is big into street art.

I don’t know why I found myself surprised by this, but at least in Grenoble street art is a big part of the landscape. Some of it was grand:

Some was tiny:

And some was just perfect:

I saw the tag “Kunt” in multiple locations around Grenoble but we never snagged a pic of it.

As we got on the train to leave Grenoble after my 4th day, we mused “Maybe we’ll see some Kunt in Paris.”

“The Exit Row is a Serious Job” – My Trip to France Part 1

About a month ago at this point (I’m really not timely with these things. My friend is currently doing his travel blog AS he’s traveling and I hate him), I went to France for the first time to visit my friend, Megan. Megan is lovely. If you ever get the chance to meet Megan, you should. But don’t startle her. She doesn’t like strangers just coming up to her. Try calling to her from afar.

I’m trying to figure out how to break this up so that it makes sense and so it’s most interesting to you. I’m really putting in a lot of work for you. How do you feel about starting with my travels there? We’ll get through it quickly, I promise. Not much happened.

“People in exit rows should take their job more seriously” – My Trip There

My lovely friend Andrew agreed to drive me to the airport in the morning while it was still dark out, so I got him some dark chocolate as a gift. Andrew revealed to me on this car ride, while I still had the smug smile of a gift giver on my face, that he, in fact, only likes milk chocolate. “This trip will go well,” I thought.

I learned upon checking in for my first flight that Canada is metal:

I spent one hour of the flight watching Pete Davidson’s SMD and the remaining 3 1/2 hours watching the man in the window seat of the exit row who, instead of taking his job seriously, was sleeping. I mean do you think you’re just there for extra leg room, buddy? I watched you give verbal confirmation to the flight attendant that you felt up to the task. Want to switch seats because I will gladly remain unnecessarily alert for 4+ hours. One time when I was like 7, I heard a weird noise while sleeping at my Grandma’s house and I stayed up for a good two hours with my arms stretched out over my stuffed animals and my eyes wide open because no one was going to hurt my beanie babies on my watch. Get your shit together.

Eventually we landed in Canada, no thanks to window man, and I guess I probably got on a plane to Paris.

My plan was to sleep as much as possible on this flight because I would be landing around 8 AM France time. I immediately drugged myself with a cocktail of klonopin and Benadryl and pulled out my neck pillow and earplugs. Despite my well thought out sleep accommodations, I did not rest undisturbed for very long because there were 3 middle aged women behind me chatting loudly the entire flight. At one point I gathered the courage (rage) to say “Can you please keep it down? I am really trying to sleep” (badass). When we landed, the women were changing the times on their watches, laughing, saying “Oh my goodness it’s morning here! I guess we’ll just sleep all day today! Ha Ha!” HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA.

So I was to take a train from the airport to my friend, Megan (you remember Megan) in Grenoble. About a week before my trip, she gave me extremely detailed instructions that I turned into an extremely easy to follow, numbered, to do list that I ran by her to make sure it was accurate and I still texted her from the station to clarify various steps. Additionally, everyone spoke English so it didn’t even fucking matter.

I will describe my train ride to Grenoble in a series of screenshots and pictures:

 

And then I was in Grenoble.

Up Next:

“I Bisou’ed Olga” and “Will we find more Kunt in Paris?”