I CAME OF AGE IN A BAKE SHOPPE

Jana: In high school, I was lucky to be employed. First, I worked at a doctor’s office. There, I filed things, listened to office gossip, and was paid $10 an hour, under the table! But when fall came I gave up that incredibly sweet job for my true love, soccer (I hated soccer). And then when the season was over, I found myself without the hourly rate I’d grown so accustomed to. I needed something else. Something BETTER.

Luckily for me, my best friend, Nell, worked at the local bakery, Ye Olde Bake Shoppe. The Bake Shoppe was just one block away from the high school, across from the grocery store. They sold cakes and cupcakes and blueberry boats and eclairs – even cannoli. The shoppe was owned by an old Italian couple, whom I shall call Peter and Martha. Peter was generally grumpy and racist. Martha was generally sweet and apologetic. It was the classic family-owned joint!

Here we are, taking pictures at work. But not wearing makeup. But WEARING a bejeweled “Brooklyn” t-shirt, and a pendant necklace.

First, let me tell you a bit about Peter, the man. Peter never learned my name. I know this because a customer once requested a cake for “Jenny”, and Peter’s response was: “Hey look, someone asked fer your name!”. I NODDED, so he of course still believes that my name is Jenny. Peter was racist, which we knew because when one of our good friends came in, an asian person, he requested that we ask him not to come around anymore. “Bad for business, those people,” he said. WE NODDED, because we knew how to stand up for what was right. And, when a vendor tried to sell Peter a new drink, something called Vitamin Water, to keep in the cold drinks case, Peter ran him out. “Mark my words,” he said to us. “That’s goin nowhere.” We, of course, nodded.

Now, when I entered into the bakery picture, Nell had already been there for a few months, and Peter was QUITE taken with her. He trained me on frosting cupcakes, saying, “Have you seen Nell frost? That girl really has somethin, I’m tellin ya”. I silently nodded and tried my hardest to make a swirl at the top of the cupcake. I could tell by the look on Peter’s face that the swirl was passable, but disappointing; this assumption was later confirmed when Nell received a 50 cent raise, while I toiled at $6/hour for the entirety of my career there.

Still, I worked there for over two years – we both did. One thing we came to learn was that the “day old” baked good table actually consisted of baked goods that were at LEAST a week old. We quickly learned to lie about this to customers on a daily basis. Lying was a major part of the job. For example:

Customer: Excuse me, is this coffee fresh?

Me (huge smile): Sure is!

Customer (pumps coffee pot): Um, it’s actually empty.

Or, sometimes customers would come in to pick up a cake when Peter and Martha were out, and Nell and I, alone, would have to take the reigns and write the message – something like “Happy Birthday Emily”. Not so hard, you’d think, except that we were actually terrible at this. Our solution was to take the cake in the back of the store, do what we had to do, and then shove it into a box and tape it shut. Usually, the customer would request to see the cake, and sometimes we could get away with saying the box was already taped up. But with persistent customers, we just fuckin opened that shit up and then endured the horrible moment when the person saw the cake: WE BOTH KNEW, them and us, that something horrible had happened. But no one said anything. They paid. We cursed ourselves. It was over.

As the years went on and Peter and Martha began to begrudgingly trust me, I spent huge amounts of my alone time in the bakery, and I passed the time by writing notes to myself (I called it my “bakery journal”). I recently came across these notes, and I will share one with you:

This is obviously all mortifying, not the least of it that I thought I might just find myself in the next two weeks. GOOD LUCK. 

Obviously, this was an important time in my life, one during which I made huge strides towards maturity. It was at the bakery that I wrote most of my “poetry,” and it was there that I logged the majority of my young-love-obsession hours. Here is a final piece that I wrote, in which I bare my soul. Standing amongst the buckets of frosting (which I very frequently had spoonfuls of), I came to be who I was.

Teenagers have DEEP THOUGHTS.

Catherine: Little Jana, civil rights activist. Enacting change one docile nod at a time.

A Brief Example of Why Maybe I Failed My Driver’s Test Twice, and Only Passed The Third Time Because the Cop Used to Work For My Dad

Catherine: I parked on a hill that was divided by a sort of weird road-blocky-thing, so right in front of my car was a cement block and a big fat yellow sign. I took the parking brake off, spun the wheels and pounded into reverse. Upon not moving, I pushed the gas harder.

Then I realized I was in drive, driving 30 miles an hour into the sign. Items scratched: The front of the car. My pride.

I am basically really dumb, that’s what I learned.

That’s all.

What I Did For Love (of weird theater, and in the pursuit of completely unattainable dreams)

Jana: Aright guys, huddle up. I’ve been watching a lot of “Friday Night Lights” lately, but what I really want to talk about today is the series of weird plays that I was in during my college years. Please enjoy.

THE GAS HEART

The Gas Heart is a “Dada” play. “Dada-ism”, which I don’t really actually know anything about, is a form of art in which nothing means anything. The play “The Gas Heart” is just six characters (character names: Mouth, Ear, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow) talking complete nonsense. Really. They talk, but they don’t actually SAY anything, at all. This is huge amounts of fun for the audience! I played Eyebrow, and the director conceived of my character as a mental patient, in a straight jacket. My lines were uttered while pacing and shaking back and forth.

“Eyebrow”

It was the first part I got in college, and my proud parents drove to Vermont all the way from Boston to see the show. They weren’t, in the end, that glad that they had come. Luckily, they’d had lots of experience sitting through really terrible productions I’d been a part of, so it wasn’t a NEW bad experience, just ANOTHER one.

THE MEASURES TAKEN

The Measures Taken was the one act play I was cast in the following year. This, too, was mostly people saying things that didn’t mean anything. Except that this one had an underlying theme, which I believe had to do with the right of the common worker. I THINK this was the point of one montage in which one of the (white) cast members wore a coolie hat and acted out a conflict in a factory of some sort; however, I can’t be sure.

Mostly what I understood about the play was that I was dressed in all black, usually crawling around the stage, and always speaking in unison. There were four “leaders” who also carried long sticks, which must have symbolized their power.

Wisely, that year my father stayed home. My mother, though, trekked three and a half hours to sit there and again be perplexed and, undoubtedly, pissed off.

THE BOOB PLAYS AHH NOW WE’RE REALLY GETTING INTO IT

Ok Guys. So, yes: in college I was in not one, but TWO, plays in which I was topless or half-topless for a number of minutes at a time. This is a weird thing about me. It’s a thing that I now look back on and think: What? That was weird Jana. That was really weird. But it happened, and one day I’ll tell my grandchildren about it and they will either think I’m badass or be totally grossed out (definitely the latter, of course).

It all started with a play called “La Ronde”. “La Ronde” is entirely about sex, and when it was first produced in Germany way back in a different time it was incredibly scandalous. It starts with one couple who has sex, and then the next scene is the dude from that couple and a new lady, and the scene after that is that same lady and a new dude, all the way until we’re back with the first lady again. The circle. You understand.

I was cast as lady #1: luckily, Lady #1 did not have a name other than “Prostitute”. Now, you should know that this was the first big lead I’d had in college, and actually the first lead I’d had since my shining moment as “Peter” in “Peter Pan” way back in the 8th grade. So, naturally, I was excited and proud! I saw the cast list, FREAKED OUT, and called my mom right away. Prostitute! I’ll be playing the Prostitute! What? Oh yeah, she does have to get naked, is dad home so I can share the news?

So, there it was. In the final scene, for no actual reason that I am now, in hindsight, able to discern, my character let go of the blanket she was clutching, spent one to two minutes topless in front of full audiences, and then found her nightgown hanging on the bedpost and pulled it over her head. On opening night I was very nervous, and when at last the moment came to dress myself the nightgown seemed to be just a pile of fabric, and it took me what seemed like YEARS to find the opening that I could pull over my poor, naked head. As a result, I ended up topless for three to four minutes while I searched for it. This was really uncomfortable for, I’m sure, everyone.

The rest of the run went smoothly. My parents came, many other people came, we got decent reviews, and most people I went to college with have seen my boobs.

Here I am backstage, in my Prostitute costume. That red thing around my neck is a “Ho band”, which ladies of the night used to wear so that dudes knew what kind of ladies they were.

But Jana, you may be thinking, didn’t you say you were in TWO plays in which you showed your boobs to strangers? Well, reader, I did. The kicker here is that in the second play I only showed ONE boob. Which at that point, I was like, one? Oh sure. Right or left? Whichever. Who wants to get lunch after this?

But seriously, I was cast as the first female actress on the English stage in the 1600s, and in one scene she gets her portrait painted, and the painter says that nobody’ll believe she’s really a lady unless she shows a tit (actual dialogue). So then she opens up the corset that the costume department designed specifically for this moment, and literally takes out one tit so that she can be forever remembered that way. And of course, when I’ve been saying “she”, I’ve been meaning me, me right here, this is what I did.

My parents are great people. They did not make too many jokes when I again called with the news that: I got the lead! What? Yeah she does but just one this time!. They came and supported me. There was talk, of course, amongst the theater department, that I was being typecast as the girl willing to show one or both of her boobs onstage. We laughed! Just college, kids doin whatever they have to do for their art because later they will definitely work in that field. You know how it goes.

Here I am in my specially designed for one-boob-display costume. Although I would never have admitted it, I think the photographer captured the strain I must have been feeling from all of this toplessness.

So there you have it. And when I say “There you have it,” I don’t mean that I have now given you the complete story of the weird plays that I have been in – oh no. I simply mean, that’s all that I will tell you for today, because I have to go watch another episode of Friday Night Lights.

Catherine: First off, I want to commend the Jana for watching FNL – it is the best show ever, and the fact that Tim Riggins isn’t “real” or “into me” will always depress me.

Oh, RTT… the memories. The happiness, the massive destruction, the forgetting lines on stage. Memories, people. Here I am, looking wonderful backstage, in Jana’s first boobydebut. I would like to add that Jana and I tried, really tried to lose weight for this damn show so we wouldn’t frighten people with our bodies. It didn’t work, but even if it had, with faces like this (see below) I don’t think it would have mattered much/at all.

Additionally, I would like to add that I assistant directed on Jana’s second booby show, and that that moment of the show was just SO FUNNY and if I could speak with the playwright I would be all like, … why did you put that moment in there? It is so weird. And so is like, a lot of what is happening (ie – one character descends from the SKY in a chariot, completely naked, covered by a shield thing?)

This, from a backstage series of photos. Clearly, I was unstable.

Mirrors: If You Kick Them, They Will Break

Jana: Throughout my childhood and into my adolescence, I played soccer. I didn’t LIKE soccer (in fact, it made me VERY nervous and upset), but I did play it, every year: every fall, every spring, and lots of winters. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my adulthood trying to figure out why, the fuck, I kept playing, if I hated it so much, and all I can come up with is that a) I really wanted to be like my sister, and b) I really don’t like change. I’m a routine kinda girl! In the fall, I played soccer, because when I was eight I followed in my sister’s cleated footsteps and signed up for soccer clinic, and then it was just accepted in my mind as a perennial part of my life.

Me on the soccer field, looking a little angry and a little scared. Look closely for a glimpse at my hair horns (you’ll also want to note the receding hairline, caused by my obsessive need to pull the ponytail as tight as possible).

However, although I deeply hated my own soccer team (note: to any former teammates who may stumble upon this, it was entirely because I was such a weirdo. You were all really nice to me even though I was so weird, so thanks! Go Waves, and all of that! – yes, our team was called the Waves. What?), I remained genuinely invested in the soccer career of my sister. Starting out as a Purple People Eater, her star rose quickly, and she made varsity as a FRESHMAN. That’s unheard of, people. I was beyond proud.

One year, her indoor soccer team had a tournament. Now, indoor soccer doesn’t really matter, but I was a big fan (again, not of PLAYING it – I hated that too, but did it religiously). The tournament at hand was on a Sunday, and consisted of many games in a row, with teams being eliminated as they went. It was a lot like the Olympics, if the Olympics were held in a really depressing indoor sports facility in Burlington, MA, that also hosted birthday parties.

But what better did I have to do with my Sunday? I’ll tell ya: nothin. I was pumped. I went, I stayed all day, I have a weird feeling that I was wearing purple pants of some kind. And my sister’s team was KILLIN IT! They kept winning and winning, and I was overjoyed.

But then, in the final game, things seemed off. The other team was coming off of an hour’s rest, and my sister’s team had played straight through. The other team had lots of subs, and ours only had one or two, or something. The ref made bad calls! I don’t know. Honestly, I do not know nor can I identify with the version of myself that was really invested in this. But invested I was. So invested, in fact, that when they eventually lost the game I was very worked up; I’m sure my hair was frizzing out even more than usual and my cheeks were red. I felt a familiar rage boil inside me, and I knew I had to let it out.

Here is how I chose to let it out: I walked to the bathroom. The bathroom was a rectangular space, and on one end of the room hung a full-length mirror, presumably for young athletes to admire themselves fully pre- and post-games. Without a second thought, I bolted to the far end of the room, got a running start past the sinks, and did a FLYING KICK into the mirror.

Here is what happened next: THE MIRROR BROKE. OBVIOUSLY it broke. It cracked down the middle. Why did I think that it might NOT break? Why did I not consider the cold, hard, fact that mirrors break when you kick them, let alone RUN at them and then kick them? But still! I saw the mirror crack and it destroyed me in an instant. I felt that flash of fear that actually feels like your heart has cracked. What had I done? I was overcome with guilt. I was crying. I was deeply, deeply ashamed.

I couldn’t face anyone right away. I picture myself behaving like someone in a movie who has just shot someone else – alone, shaking my head a little, pacing up and down the empty bathroom. I probably also shook my hands out, like really close to my chest, like an “ahhh what just happened” shake. Once I’d fretted enough, I tried to brush the tears off of my face, hung my head, and found my mom. Then I whispered to her what had happened, in between gulped sobs. Being reasonable, she was confused, but she was just like…. ok, let’s go. This is a large, asshole facility. They can fix their mirror. I couldn’t believe her nonchalance! So we left, while I cried. I continued to feel guilty about the mirror for years to come, until gradually I stopped feeling guilty and started just feeling like… why’d you do that, Jana?

Catherine: YOU DID A FLYING KICK?? Why is this not on tape somewhere? I can see it now, your purple pants flying through the air as your bobby-pinned head lets out a cry of disgust. Also, since you intentionally broke that mirror, I believe you signed up for way more than just 7 years of bad luck, which explains why your life still sucks.

Bonus Post: The Versatile Blogger!

Guess what? We know a girl, Jhani, who is wonderful. Jhani and I (Jana) spent our freshman year of college living down the hall from each other, doing a lot of hallway drinking, checking to see who was free to hang out by opening our doors and simply shouting “HEYYYY” and seeing if we got a response, etc. COLLEGE, right? Anyway, Jhani has an amazing collection of earrings, and is beautiful and wonderful. Please read her blog, A Girl Called Jhani, in which she writes beautifully about her life and the people in it. It’s really lovely in every sense of the word.

The rules for this nomination are that we write 7 things about ourselves, and then nominate two more people. So, let’s do this in order! Here are 7 things about US (3.5+3.5 = 7).

Jana:

1. There is a store in my hometown called “Paper and More.” When I was a kid, I thought this name was absolutely hilarious. Whenever we drove by the store, I’d look at my dad and go: “MORE? You mean they sell MORE than PAPER?”.

2. I was once run over by a dog while attending a college graduation party. I was only about 10. At the same party, someone threw someone else in the pool, and that person’s cell phone was in his pocket. Cell phones were still really new. The wet person swore a LOT and my friend’s parents ushered us past him and out of the party. When I was run over by the dog, I don’t think much happened except that I like, got up and brushed myself off and vowed to hate dogs forever.

3. Once in high school my friends and I ate at our local Friendly’s. A few weeks later, we received word that everyone who had eaten at that Friendly’s within the two week period during which we’d dined there needed to get a shot, because one of the employees had hepatitis. There was a free clinic set up a the local hospital. My friend and I waited in line for an hour on one of our summer vacation days, and then got shots in our asses (HURTS).

3.5. I don’t floss that much and my dental hygienist is Russian and she YELLS at me because that shit BLEEDS. I actually really appreciate her yelling. Once I had 10 cavities at once and……

Catherine:.…… IT’S CATHERINE, TAKING OVER, BOOM. I want you to know that I have never had a cavity in my life and that last night, while drunk, I decided I really should floss. Blood was everywhere.

4. I have the cutest cat in the world, Maggie. I will never write about her on the blog probably, because nothing even remotely bad or depressing happens that has to do with her. Every morning we have ‘morning cuddles,’ where we have sequentially better and better cuddle/cat scratching for anywhere from 1 minute to three hours (yesterday, I’m looking at YOU.)

5. Once, in college, I was drunk and found an open can of beer in the parking lot behind my dorm. I drank it.

6. I just rearranged my room so that my desk faces out a window. I am now realizing that it faces into the bathroom of the apartment across from mine. The class is frosted, sure, but I totally just watched someone take a shower. I feel like a stalker…

7. I went to Poland with my family when I was 19, and there is a magical park there where the peacocks run free. It is truly lovely. What sticks with me most, perhaps from the entire trip, is that in Polish you call a peacock a “puff.” And the word for yes is pronounced “tape.” So, all that afternoon, my brother and I pointed to peacocks say “Puff?” “Tape!” We found it HYSTERICAL.

Those are our facts! Now to the nominations. We nominate some ladies who we know and love:

The Hodgepodge Photographer – This is the website of our incredibly talented friend, Jess Hodge. Jess spent college daily astonishing us with her skills as an actor, and has spent every day SINCE college daily astonishing us with her skills as a photographer. This is what talent is, people. It’s here. Look at these pictures! They’re insanely beautiful!

Chimerically Yours – This is a fashion blog created by another beautiful and talented friend, Molly Sullivan. Molly puts together unique, pretty outfits, and wears them like she was born in ’em. We are huge fans of everything that is Molly. Check her out and marvel.

Baby, Let’s Cruise Away From Here (Here Being These Horrible Memories)

Catherine: Ahoy, mates!

Happy New Year. I hope you listened to Jana’s New Year’s advice and are as such not starting off the new year in a mild/severe depression.

Anyways. So. Come with me and travel back to 2004, my senior year of high school. My music teacher had invented a club solely for the purpose of being able to take a trip somewhere. It was aptly entitled “The Music Travel Club.” In its first year, it was decided that we would go on a CRUISE! SUPER EXCITING! (Less exciting however, considering that the following year they went to EUROPE.) But no matter.

As I excitedly packed for the magical vacation, I envisioned boys fawning over how cute I looked in my … shorts? I don’t even know what I was packing when I really think about it. My senior year of high school I wore, without fail, either sweatpants, scrubs, or massive gray sleep pants to school. Often paired with a tight fitting t-shirt. So, I’m not sure what I packed, but I know they were all small, girly-ish type things (that I don’t have any recollection of.) This trip was gonna be the best, guys. Having high expectations never meant the worst could happen. Not ever in history.

The morning I awoke at about 5:00am to get to the airport an hour away (we were flying out of PROVIDENCE, which, perhaps you will recall from Jana’s earlier post, is a city of vile, terrible, horrible things) (I mention this because I live 15 minutes away from Boston’s Logan airport) – this is all one sentence guys – anyways, that morning I got my period. If you are a guy, and that grosses you out, do NOT read on, because it is all downhill from here. I put on my dirty sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and headed out. Who am I kidding, I was already wearing the sweatpants. I lived in them. These were – and remember this you guys – my only long sleeved or long legged items.

At the airport, a cold I had fought off (I thought), returned with an angry vengeance. So. Period, bad. Stuffed up, barely able to breathe. Check. Ok.

We land! Beautiful Florida! Except, what’s this? What is happening? Why can’t I HEAR out of my left ear?? Oh, right, because my ears haven’t popped yet. Just the left one. Super uncomfortable. This goes on a long, long while.

Moving along.

We get on the boat! We have an interior cabin. AKA, the room with no windows that is very, very small and that, when you wake up in the middle of the night (or morning) because you are pretty sure your period is EVERYWHERE, will be the blackest black you can imagine. Ok. Period, dirty sweatpants, stuffed up, ear still hasn’t popped, cabin of despair. You with me?

As we change out of our travel clothes into our cute ‘let’s explore the boat’ clothes, it begins to come to my attention that our room is FREEZING. There is no visible way to fix this. So, we get out of there quickly and hope hope hope that that gets fixed. Exploring, we are explorers. Ok. Hmmm… now, this is weird. The rest of the boat… it’s sort of cold too… and by cold, I mean they are blasting the air conditioning. Reallllllllllllllly going for it. Three day cruise on an ice cube ship and what are my clothing options, let’s go back and recall – sweatshirt, dirty sweatpants, summer girly attire. From here, you are free to envision what I spent the duration of the cruise looking like.

Skip to day two, we arrive in KEY WEST! AWESOME! As we (roommates and I) get dressed, we turn on the TV to see the live feed of the outside world – their substitution for not having a window, nor one out in the hallway, or even anywhere on our deck – which is, by the way, above water. Shouldn’t have been so hard to do. But yea, Key West, a chance to get out of my dirty sweats and into some sexxxy clothes. But no. It’s raining. And, when we get outside, it comes to our attention that it is also windy. And cold. We shop around, half heartedly. I purchase a pair of terry cloth black short shorts with Corona Extra written on them. I am 18. I am SO cool.

Later that night/morning, I awake (probably to blow my EXTREMELY STUFFED UP NOSE) and find that, hmm, I can’t open my eye…? That’s weird. What is all this goop on it? Why does it feel goopy? I stumble to the bathroom mirror in the black blackness and find that my right eye has been encrusted in goop, goopy crust, and like, tears. I have NEVER seen this shit before. Ever. My roommates are, rightfully so, disgusted. When the ship pharmacy opens in the morning, I go to them. They ask what is the problem? I look at them, with one eye, and am dumbfounded. At some point they must have said, ah, I see, “YOUR EYE IS COVERED IN GOOP AND IT IS PUFFY AND GROSS. You have conjunctivitis. We are actually out of the medicine that treats that, so here are some eye drops that might help, perhaps. They are $18. Hope you aren’t in high school, when this might be extremely embarassing!” THANKS GUYS.

QUICK RECAP: Period, nose that doesn’t even let air in or out, dirty sweatpants, ship that you could leave ice cream out on and it wouldn’t melt, puffy conjunctivitis that they can’t treat. Let’s continue, because yea, this post is long, but we aren’t even done yet.

We arrive in Cozumel. It is gorgeous. It is lovely. I look horrible, but I am happy to be off the ship. In Cozumel, the legal drinking age is 18. I consume. Kamikaze shots, Sex on the Beach, B-52s, I get drunk. We bring an empty pineapple that once had a drink in it back to the ship. We are all drunk. It is a good day.

The night comes. I wake up, in the middle of it, and go to the bathroom. And everyone – we are about to get real. If you do not want to get real, please skip to the next paragraph. Ok. You still here? Alright. We are getting real now. I have the pooooop explosion, as can be expected from eating Mexican food and getting drunk, and also, what I don’t know at the time but know now, is a hemorrhoid. As an 18 year old, I had NO idea what this thing was, no internet on the boat, and no, I wasn’t about to go up to a chaperone and go, “HEY! I think my butthole is like, eating itself? Or is, oh, I don’t know, enflamed?” So this I held to myself, in fear, and discomfort.

FINAL DAY. For once, it is sunny outside the boat. Let’s go tanning! But instead of sunscreen with a low SPF, or even no sunscreen at all, let’s use tanning oil, because just because we have fair, fair Irish skin, that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to get tan. Even though we have never had a tan before, ever, and there is no reason to think that it is even possible that we could get one. Awesome. Let’s all fast forward to two hours later – I see myself in a mirror, I look AWESOME. I. Am. Awesome. Let’s go forward another hour, HOLYFUCKINGSHITIAMAMONSTERWHOWILLNEVERFINDLOVE,MOSTLIKELY. To be clear, what I saw was a raccoon mask of red on my face. I hadn’t put tanning oil on my face, I’m not stupid, but I had touched my face and eyes several times with tanning oil remnants on my hands. So, picture, please, the brightest red imaginable, the color of a lobster will do, then put it in a splotchy, rorschach pattern, on my face. And just know that I had an improv show the week I got back, and also that I woke up 30 minutes early every day that week to attempt to put makeup on my face, and also know that it ended up looking like I was a burn victim trying to hide something by making their face as pale as a ghost.

So yeah. That was my cruise. My performance on this ship, as that was the “music” part of it all, was atrocious, because I developed a very sore throat. I got my period, wore dirty, dirty sweatpants, endured the cold of Siberia while on a luxury ship, had my nose defect from my body, got conjunctivitis, probably also got a bunch of zits, (if you didn’t get real skip this part – but yea, I got hemorrhoids), had a red lobster face, sore throat, and all this transpired as I returned, nightly, to the room of darkness. I haven’t been on a cruise since, but, weirdly, I REALLY want to.

This picture was taken the summer after high school. I am, as you see, in sweatpants. I cropped everyone else out of the picture because I don’t wanna be like, wanna be in my blog post I wrote about that time I got conjunctivitis? But yea, even though they aren’t there, I want you to know that none of them are in sweatpants. Just me. 

Jana: For me, this post explodes when you describe your butthole as, I don’t know, eating itself. Because WHAT the fuck is a hemorrhoid, honestly. Catherine, this vacation makes me want to die a million little deaths. On a personal note, I am reminded of how FUNNY I thought it was when I got pink eye in 6th grade or so, and my mom thought I was playing a trick on her when I wouldn’t open my eyes in the morning for school. Of course, it turned out that I was actually incapable of doing so, because of the goop that was glueing them together. Oh, we laughed and laughed.

Life is just so full of disgusting ailments, is what I really want to say. Some people manage to avoid them in public situations, and some people get them all at once, rapid fire, while on a cruise. This is just the kind of people we are.