As Meg and I mentioned during our Elephant in the Room fit of honesty last month, we’ve been invited to speak at Yale. Let me set the
scene: we were working on the most recent book, which was, hands down, the most
difficult thing I’ve ever done. I can’t speak for Meg, but for her sake I hope it was the most difficult thing
she’s ever done. As of Friday, I’m too old to be drafted unless the homeland is
invaded, and barring unwelcome advances in technology I’m unlikely to give
birth, so I think writing It Seemed Like A Good Idea… will stand for a while as the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
You know how when you have something unpleasant or draining
ahead of you, you start doing everything in your power to avoid it? Well,
unfortunately, I’d already done all the niggling little tasks I had to do while
postponing writing my graduate thesis “Laughing at Hitler: Nancy Mitford in an
Age of Extremism.” Actual title, and I got a good grade on it. Not only did I
get a good grade, I’d been so reluctant to sit my ass down and finish it that I also had a clean
refrigerator, resumes uploaded to multiple job websites, an organized recipe
file, and my Christmas card list made. So with all that done, all I had to do
to distract myself during the tearful orgy of obscure pop culture references
that was the writing of It Seemed Like a
Good Idea… was obsessively check my email and the Amazon sales rank of The Misanthrope’s Guide to Life, back
and forth, over and over, like an epileptic terrier. I’d gotten no email in six
hours and Misanthrope’s was
persistently hanging out at a “respectable” level and so I was more or less
doomed to start working when we got an email with the subject line “Possible
Reading/Book Signing at Yale?” If you can imagine, this managed to distract us
for a solid hour, for which I’m almost as grateful as I am for the invitation
itself.
This started me thinking. Before I was officially the Other
Bird and was just an occasionally recurring character, Meg, Ex-Co-Blogger Eddie, and I got together in Philadelphia and I may or may not have (but
definitely did) streak a dorm at Penn. It was empty for the summer, so I’m
fairly sure the only people who saw me were Meg and Ex-Co-Blogger Eddie, both
out of the corners of their eyes, but still. With this head start, what if I
just did a hijink, one single hijink, at each Ivy? I liked this idea so much I
made myself a scorecard, with the seal of each Ivy, a check box, and a blank
spot to write in a summary of the hijink. I couldn’t figure out how to do it in
Paint or Photoshop, so presented here is your VERY OWN WORD DOCUMENT Ivy League
Hijinx Checklist, so you can play along at home.
On the off chance I run through all the Ivies before I
outgrow this idea, there’s always the Seven Sisters. If, in six years or so,
you pass a hitchhiker in Massachusetts carrying a crate of whoopee cushions and
a cardboard sign reading “Mount Holyoke or Bust,” pick me up. We’ll have some
fun.
5.) I only became
friends with my sister a few years ago. Which sounds weird because now she’s
one of my best friends and I was just her maid of honor, but it’s true. I think
five years is a hard age gap between siblings. You get stuck in these roles where
one of you is the obnoxious little sister who desperately wants to hang all the
time, and the other is the bitchy older sister who doesn’t want to hang because
you’re nine and hi, I’m in high school. It’s hard to shake that mindset.
This is going to make both of us sound like raging
alcoholics, but I think the catalyst for us becoming friends was my turning 21.
Being able to go out to bars and drink together changed things because suddenly we
weren’t being forced to interact with each other in a family setting anymore—we
were electing to hang out in a bar.
With our friends. Like normal people. It was kind of the push we needed to
realize that “HEY, IDIOTS—you guys aren’t five and 10 anymore. You’re grown-ass
adults. Get to know each other.” And we did. Specifically on our family
vacation to Napa Valley the summer after my Junior year. There was this
extremely important moment between us in a hot tub (emotions were
involved—where else?) one night when I was like, “You know
what, guy? I like you,” and she was
like, “Shit—I like you right back!” and we’ve been friends ever since. Mind you
this was also the vacation when we shared “The Most Naked Experience of Our
Lives.” That may have had something
to do with our bonding. Allow me to explain…
So, a few days into our vacation in Napa, my sister found a
write-up for the Calistoga Day Spa in my dad’s travel book. Intrigued by the
spa’s hot springs and mud bath treatment, she suggested we take a drive up and treat ourselves to a little spa day. Considering the last time we had
a spa day together it ended up being the Gift
of the Magi explosive diarrhea/sun poisoning spa treatment swap debacle that
was Scottsdale, Arizona, I was in. This spa had large, farcical shoes to
fill…and fill them they did.
Now, I don’t think of either Becca or myself as prudes. Because
nudity? Fine by me. I, personally, hate to wear clothes. Pants and I
specifically have had a long, tumultuous history together. As I’ve mentioned, at any given moment I’m typically wearing a white wife beater with no
bra and booty shorts and accidentally flashing my bits to whoever happens to
be in the room. And am I embarrassed? No. It’s your fault for being in the room.
But as we drove up to Calistoga that day, I started to get a little nervous
about just how naked I would have to be in front of my sister. Because
remember, we weren’t really friends at this point. She was my big sister whom I
both adored and feared. God forbid see my big ‘ole hooters.
“So…I get the concept of a mud bath,” I said to her, “But
how exactly is this going to work? Like, will we be in separate rooms? Are you
completely naked in the bath? Should I wear my bathing suite?”
“I’m sure it’s up to you. Just do whatever you feel more
comfortable with. And we may be in the same room, but I’m sure there’s a little
divider or a sheet or something.” OK. I could handle that.
We got to the spa, checked in and were told to go to the
locker room and change into the sheets waiting for us. Once we saw
how big the sheets were, we decided to skip the bathing suites figuring this
would be like any other spa treatment where the masseuse/technician (?) works
with you to discreetly move the sheet to continually cover what needs to be
covered. We wrapped up and headed for the door marked “Spa Room”.
As I pushed open the door, I expected to walk into another
dimly lit, zen room with private little alcoves where we’d individually receive
our treatments. Instead, I opened the door to reveal what was essentially a
large, sterile garage with two mud-filled tubs manned by what can only be
described as a pair of sturdy-looking
Eastern European women. Moreover, the tubs were situated directly next to each
other. And when I say directly next to each other, I do mean directly next to each other:
In fact, as I looked around the room, it occurred to me that
everything was set up in two's and located just a romantic handhold away from each other. And spoiler alert: that
is because we had accidentally scheduled the romantic “Golden Haven Baths for
Couples” treatment, which according to the spa’s website allows you to “share
this wonderful Napa Valley spa experience in privacy with your companion only a
few inches away.” We had no idea that’s what had happened, mind you. At this point,
all I could think was, “This feels oddly………….intimate.” Suddenly, one of the spa technicians
barreled towards us.
“TAKE SHEETS OFF,” she barked at us. We, in turn, stood
frozen.
Seconds passed.
“Wait…………like off
off?”
“OFF!”
It took me a few seconds, but I finally realized that this
woman wasn’t going to discreetly move our sheets around anything; she was going
to take them and discard them. Like,
for the rest of the day. I was going to spend the rest of the day naked, getting
in and out of a series of tubs in a small room missing a fourth wall with my
sister and two large, and to the best of my knowledge, Hungarian women who very thought we were lesbian
lovers.
My sister and I then turned to each other and exchanged this
look that so beautifully conveyed, “SHIT’S ABOUT TO GET REAL NAKED—LET’S GO WITH IT,” without either of us having to say
anything. And thank god for that because just then the spa technician, sensing
our hesitation, reached out, grabbed both of our sheets and yanked them off for
us. Again, up until that point I hadn’t really considered myself to be that big
of a prude, but there I was clutching my pearls all, “WELL, I NEVER!”My hands briefly floundered north and south in a desperate attempt to give myself some coverage, but I ultimately decided to fuck it, suck
in, stand up straight and walk over to the damn mud.
The hot mud treatment was actually pretty cool. You
basically just float in hot, heavy mud up to your neck while the Hungarian
women apply a steady flow of fresh, cold washcloths to your forehead. It was
incredibly relaxing and probably would have been sensual had I not been a pubic
hair away from an equally naked relative at the time.
As the bath went on, however, my relaxation slowly turned into anxiety as I became increasingly more concerned about how we were
going to get the mud off of ourselves. Or out
of us, frankly. Because the mud was heavy. And the mud was hot. And the mud was
settling. Everywhere.
My concerns were quickly addressed when the Hungarian women
reached into our tubs and pulled us out. After they got done removing some of
the excess mud by giving us one helluva standing rubdown (which, again,
probably would have been sensual had it been done by anyone other than a
well-rooted Hungarian woman convinced I was gayer than a chestnut), they
motioned towards the wall behind us and said, “SHOWER.”
The so-called “shower” area in question was actually just a tiled
wall with two hoses dangling from the ceiling and nary a piece of nylon to separate
as far as the eye could see. And let me tell you people something: you haven’t
experienced pure embarrassment until you’ve stood an elbow jab away from your
sister and shot hose water up your ass
while the Lucy and Ethel of the Eastern Bloc leer on disapprovingly. That is embarrassment. That is something that can never be
undone. That is something that can
one-up any story about tripping up a few stairs at the bank, thank you.
After The Traumatic Showering it was time for our mineral
water baths, so Tweedle Dee and Tweedle OOF led us to a pair of old timey Victorian
bathtubs separated by the distance of a sweet whispered secret. It was at
this point that Becca finally acknowledged the elephant in the room and was
like, “Dude. Your boobs are really
big.” “Yeah, I know. But your boobs are really nice. Big, but not unmanageable.
I think if I ever got a breast reduction, I’d want to make ‘em your size.” I mention this conversation because I
love imagining what the spa technicians must have been thinking about the state
of our relationship if that was our romantic tub conversation. Talking
about each other’s breast size in the most clinical way possible and referring
to each other as dude.
Finally, it was time for our last treatment: a schvitz in the
steam room. I hate steam rooms. Primarily because I hate heat, sweating, and
small spaces. So, pretty much everything about a steam room. This steam room,
however, was like a steam room on crack. First of all, they handed us each a
meager washcloth when we walked in which was laughably unhelpful. I sat down
and held mine up in front of me for a long time trying to decide which
direction I should go in until Becca finally said, “Dude. Lower.” Even worse, the steam came in from the sulfur springs so it
smelled overwhelmingly like rotten eggs, and it was hot in a way that would
make Hades ask for a Dasani. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I have never
been so uncomfortable in my entire life. After a few minutes I couldn’t take it
anymore, so I stuck my head out the little porthole in the glass door,
turned my head to the left, and started gasping for air. Which is exactly when I locked
eyes with the incredibly nude woman standing across the room, waiting to start
her spa treatment.“SHIT!” I
ducked my head back into the steam room. “BECCA, I JUST LOCKED EYES WITH A
NAKED WOMAN ACROSS THE ROOM WHILE I WAS GASPING FOR AIR AND I THINK SHE THINKS
I’M A PERVERT SO WE CAN’T LEAVE UNTIL SHE’S IN THE MUD BUT I THINK I’M GOING TO
DIE IF I HAVE TO STAY IN HERE ANY LONGER AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.”
“…Want my washcloth?”
After we got back into the car, we drove in silence for a bit as we both tried to process the sheer absurdity of what just happened.
Becca finally broke the silence with one of the most astute observations I think I’ve ever heard:
“That……………was the most naked experience of my entire life.” Because it was. It was the most naked experience of
my entire life. It made getting a full-body mole check at the dermatologist’s
feel like standing in an empty cornfield in a three-piece suit and a chastity
belt. I’ve had sex with strangers and
felt more modest than that. It was just really, really…naked. But also really
bonding, in a weird way. I think all great friendships should start out with a
wacky misadventure. I just don’t think they should all be so…naked.
(Sidenote: Every time I write that it was just so…naked, I can’t
not automatically say it in my head in the “I THINK
THEY WERE…ASIAN” voice from Cable
Guy.
So we had an earthquake! A legit-ass, LA gangster-style earthquake! And I was VERY much in the shower shaving my legs when it happened. Because really, knowing me, where else would I be when a 5.8 freak earthquake in DC hits? I actually kind of resent how perfectly wakka, wakka! it all was. The only way it could have been better is if I had been about to make my final move in a Jenga competition or if I was an Ace of Spades away from finishing a really impressive house of cards. But no, I was in the shower shaving my legs. And it was a time.
So I was standing in the shower, congratulating myself on successfully finishing my left leg, when everything started to shake. My first instinct was to turn down the music coming from the mp3 player on top of the John, because obviously that would shed some light onto the situation. I’m pretty sure this felt like a natural thing to do for the same reason why I can’t listen to the radio and parallel park at the same time. (Because I’m a ~GiRL~!)
Once I had established that it wasn’t The Doobie Brothers causing my entire apartment building to shake (although, to be fair, Bose makes a hell of a speaker and Michael McDonald has got some pipes on him...) my next thought, naturally, was TERRORISM: WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE. It was at this point that I became acutely aware of how extremely naked I was and all I could think was, “Not like this.” I didn’t think about my friends, I didn’t think about my family, I didn’t think about my trademark fiery passion for life—I thought “we’re being bombed, my apartment is going to collapse, and some poor, poor fireman is going to have to fish out my half-shaved naked corpse from under my bathtub and I’m going to end up on the cover of Time like that kid in Vietnam.” As a resident of downtown Washington, DC, I’ve played out what would happen if there's another 9/11-like terrorist attack in my head plenty of times. Typically I grab my Handycam, head to the streets and alternate between delivering cutting-edge guerrilla journalism and nursing the wounded back to health via tiny, gentle sips from a Deer Park sports bottle. Rarely am I in the shower surrounded by my overwhelming nakedness, gauging how far up my leg I can stop shaving before ultimately deciding, “fuck it—I’ll wear pants.” While in completely character, it's just not the way I want to go.
As my bathtub rattled back and forth, all I could think about was this episode of Boy Meets World I saw once where Eric and his roommate move into this shitty apartment and Eric is all, “Dude, this place is going to be a chick magnet!” and his roommate’s like, “Just because we have our own place doesn’t mean girls are going to fall out of the sky!” and at that exact second, the girl from the apartment above theirs crashes through the ceiling and lands on their couch. I was 5,000% positive that my bathtub was going to crash into the apartment below mine, except instead it being like BMW where a hot girl gracefully falls onto Will Friedle’s couch, it would be me covered in generic-brand shaving cream crashing through the ceiling and squashing a gay man or three. I had to get out of the bathroom and find clothes.
I then proceeded to sprint out of the bathroom, through my closet, thereby bypassing literally every piece of clothing I own, and stopped at my bed. When I realized I couldn’t strap a Queen size bed over my genitals, I turned to run back to the closet, tripped over myself, and slammed my left (freshly shaved) shin onto the edge of my coffee table.
CASUALTIES! CASUALTIES 2011!!!1!
As I crumpled to the floor, curled up in the fetal position, and accepted that the obstacle course that is my apartment (open studio apartment with AN single coffee table) had doomed my fate, it occurred to me that the shaking had stopped. I walked over to the window, pulled up the blinds and looked around. There was a construction crew working on the building next to mine, so I thought maybe they dropped something…heavy? But no, because the office building across the street had been evacuated. It was then that I finally thought, “Did we just have a fucking earthquake?” It was also then that I thought, “Am I standing in my apartment window at the top of the K Street Triangle gawking at people completely nude?” The answer to both of these questions, as it turns out, was yes. We had had an earthquake. And I was hanging out in the window, tits to the wind all, “Y’ALL FEEL THAT?!?!!” I’m going to skip to the end of this story and let you know that it took me a good 45-minutes to properly clothe myself. Getting on Twitter, trying to call people, and continuing to stand naked in my window like the star of the homeliest little whorehouse in Amsterdam all took precedent over walking 15-feet back to the bathroom to throw a robe on.
The moral of the story is that I’m fine. A few picture frames fell over. The books in my bookcase aren’t perfectly lined up to the edge of the shelf anymore, which while genuinely annoying is nothing compared to my friend Dave’s fallen Snoop Dogg action figure:
While I’m glad that everyone is OK and it obviously could have been much worse and we’re all lucky and blah blah blah, this experience did ignite a fiery rage deep, deep inside of me. While continually updating my Twitter feed and waiting for AT&T’s network to get off the rag, I became obsessed with the smug-ass West Coast dipshits tweeting shit like, “Sorry DC, I’m from Fresno. This is nothing. #JustSaying”. The best one I saw was from this West Coast transplant who said something to the affect of, “Ugh, seriously MD/DC/VA? Stop calling people. I have actual work to do.” Oh, I’M sorry, asshole. I know in a perfect world we’d all be like, “SNOZZBERRIES?! WHO EVER HEARD OF A SNOZZBERRY?” and go back to licking the wallpaper, but in the world I live in where earthquakes are rare and loved ones are awesome, it feels reasonable to want to get on the horn and make sure everyone is OK. I was a microsecond away from retweeting her and adding “get in your fucking cage” before I remembered that we have a book to sell and 10% of $10.95 is $1.09 and half of $1.09 is 54-cents and the average Subway footlong is five-dollars and change, so perhaps I should stay in my own lane.
One of my biggest pet peeves in college was a group of people I liked to call “Weather Snobs”. Weather Snobs were those assholes on your floor who wouldn’t let you appreciate how shitty the weather was because they were from somewhere colder/hotter/rainier/literally anything-ier than everybody, and you complaining about the weather was a farce compared to their K-12 experience. You’d sit in the dining hall and complain about the 20-degree weather and they’d crawl over from three booths down, peeing their pants at the opportunity to be like, “You think this is cold?! I’m from ROCHESTER. In ROCHESTER we wear bikinis and flip-flops and roast pigs and thank the Egyptian sun god Ra for his sweltering rays in 20-degree weather, you fucking retard! You’ve never experienced cold weather until you’ve lived in ROCHESTER. GARBAGE PLATES! HOUSE OF GUITARS!” I didn’t think it was possible to find a more horrid group of people than Weather Snobs, but now I have—Natural Disaster Snobs. I’m not saying that yesterday’s experience could rival Haiti or Japan. I don’t expect the Red Cross to come knocking on my door today and offer to replace that wine glass that fell over or give me a Capris Sun because I look slightly parched. I am saying, however, that when you live in Washington, DC (or New York for that matter) and your building starts to uncontrollably shake for no reason, your first thought typically isn’t “ThiS iS gOiNg To MaKe FoR sOmE gNaRLy WaVeS, dude!”, it’s “Welp, they blew up the World Bank and we’re all going to die.” Sorry there’s nothing irreverent or ironic about that reaction. I'll tell you what: next time there’s a natural disaster and I want to call my loved ones to make sure everyone’s OK, I promise to do so while wearing an ironic moustache, holding a pug, riding a unicycle, standing under a string of pennants, and playing the autoharp. And instead of asking my mom if she’s OK, I’ll ask her, “What’s crackin-a-lackin’?” Can I take up your precious AT&T space that way, you fucking asshole?
…That being said, I did have people over last night for martinis and confetti cake, or Earthcake, as Helena dubbed it.
I hereby award Tulane Chris 50 points for streaking through UPenn's Hill House on the Fourth of July. Here he is streaking through "The Fish Bowl" under Benjamin Franklin's watchful gaze:
Only a patriotic top hat separating your eyes and his manhood:
I call this one Hats Off to America! (Sorry it's so shaky. My hand was understandably fluttering):
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