From the desk of Christopher Turner-Neal

First of all, Meghan, I was going to go to the DMV in Mandeville across the lake which I expected to be generally less plague-ridden. And did you tell them I needed a new driver’s license because I got mugged in February? No, of course not. I cannot explain why I thought I needed a driver’s license to be quarantined.

I… was also alive the past seven years? You missed:

- DRAMATIC weight fluctuations

- Bedbugs

- Me leaving my boyfriend (who is now married, lol/gross)

- I moved back to New Orleans

- Turns out dating in your thirties is b-b-b-bleak, these men be going off warranty

- I don’t know, work stuff

- I got into an intensive drag workshop that I have to do over Zoom now so I’m spending a lot of time trying to figure out how eyeshadow works while thinking about death (which I guess is Meg Rowland cosplay [too soon?] [not soon enough?]) (I'll allow it.)

I guess I’m having a good pandemic so far, as these things go? I’m not fired (YET LOL) and I like my apartment. I have an mouse which I resent largely for being bold enough that I SAW it, so like now I have to try and kill it so it doesn’t shit in the corner and give me hantavirus and I die of the “wrong plague.”

I’ve gotten real into foraging (stealing) loquats, which grow well around here. I found a straight-up BLaCkBeRrY BrAmBLe the other day out by the park and went ham.

I’ll write something actually funny (well, I guess we’ll see) about my quarantine diet and/or eyeshadow later this week. MEG, TELL THEM ABOUT MY TRIP TO MARYLAND. I’m happy to see y’all. (It's on the docket!)

Dude, fuck yesterday

Corona-Log Day #20:

I woke up yesterday at 3:30pm (DON'T JUDGE ME, I HAD TO DO WORK THE NIGHT BEFORE) from a dream where I was back in high school trying to get to my classes, but I couldn't see anything because everything was blurry. This was because, I soon realized, I had somehow managed to fall asleep with both eyeballs directly on top my clenched knuckles, and then proceeded to take a very blurry, very discombobulated speed-shower. I usually perform an elaborate puppet show for my nieces from 4-8ish everyday to earn me keep, and now I was running late. I was also starving, but I figured I'd wake Niece #2 up from her nap before fixing myself a little something-something.

The micro-second I started going upstairs, a giant tree fell across the street, completely knocking down the power lines. No electricity. No internet. Nowhere to go. But more importantly, that meant I couldn't open the fridge to nosh on leftover guac. I did, however, see this as a golden opportunity to take a discreet little puffity-wuffity from the old HeY nOw!1! while the neighborhood watched Dominion Electricity do their thing. And let me tell you; that situation was taken care of with a speed and efficiency I have never seen before in my life. 45-minutes later and we had electricity again. BAM.

I then proceeded to chug a beer on an empty stomach and pass out in the back of my nieces' 5 o'clock Zoom play-date, quite literally ass-up. When it was over, I made my way to bed (not entirely sure where the kids went, looking back) and FaceTimed with Janna, which turned into going down a HeY, HoW bAd Do yA tHiNk thIsS iS gOnNA gEt??? rabbit hole that ended with me hiding under the covers and being kind of weird and not talking to anyone for the rest of the night.

We had take-out tacos for dinner. The kids went to bed, and the adults went to the screened-in porch to chill and watch another episode of McMillions, but the internet was still down, so we just fell asleep right there.

Fin.

I mean............I hear it. I hear the privilege. I realize that none of this sounds that dramatic or impressively bad, but in the moment, losing electricity and the internet felt like the end of the world. I have no time for mundane inconveniences right now. None. I got my period early last week, and was like, "OH, SO NOW I HAVE TO MENSTRUATE ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE!??!?" Menstruating basically just involves standing there. But still.

This is to say I'm in a corona-funk. I'm really anxious and on-edge. I've decided my next post is just going to be a giant list of things that are irrationally annoying me right now, so get ready for that!

Love,

A very frustrated and tired and pissed off and hungry and fat and scared and horny and beautiful and fat and tired Meg
@meg4lyfe

Follow-Up FAQs

1.) How is Evie?
Evie is great, thanks so much for asking. If you're new here, Evie is my parents' prized Tonkinese show cat who replaced me when I went away to college 9 billion years ago. We infamously didn't get along at first, then fell in love when I moved back home and got mono in 2008. The weekend my mono officially got really bad, I remember lying on the cool tile floor of my parents' kitchen—ALONE, mind you, because Rich and Di went away to the Eastern Shore for a jaunty weekend with Becca and Geoff — Also worth noting they brought me back madras booty shorts to make up for it, and it worked like a goddamn charm—and Evie put our differences aside, sauntered over, and stuck by me all weekend. We've been best friends ever since, and she's had a bit of a cult-following-within-a-cult-following on this here blog.

Here's a one-act I wrote about cat-sitting her that got me into grad school

Here's a picture of a porn star with little Evie heads covering her NSFW bits

Here's a picture of Evie with little porn star heads covering her NSFW cat bits

2.) Is Chris coming back to blog, too?
Man, who knows what that homo is up to. I mean, I do, because we're still actively best friends. So, yeah, I think he is! I asked if he wanted to and he said yes. But he said it (texted it) with the same vague enthusiasm he reserves for when I'm a pound of gummy edibles deep at 2 o'clock in the morning and text him 14-inch long iMessage pitches for various spins on the same ghost-hunting reality show idea. (It's called Low-Key Ghost Hunters. Sometimes he doesn't reply at all.)

For new people, Christopher Turner-Neal is a William Faulkner/Joe Exotic hybrid I've loved ever since I jerked him off on Abigail Breslin's older brother's couch in college. He was visiting a mutual friend and went back to Tulane to immediately come out of the closet, but we stayed friends. Then best friends. Then unhealthily co-dependent parasitic life partners, which is where we currently reside. He co-wrote a large chunk of the blog back in the day, and we wrote poopie-poopie fart joke books together. You'll like him. He's funnier and a better writer than me, but then again, I'm better at social-distancing, SooOooOO...*

*(This is a reference to the fact that I recently publicly shamed Chris on Instagram for trying TO GO TO THE NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA DMV DURING SELF-ISOLATION, and he was super bitchy about it, and now he's going above and beyond by delivering meals to elderly people, possibly to make up for it.)

3.) Are you still the sardonic voice of 20-somethings everywhere?
No. I am very much not the sardonic voice of 20-somethings anywhere, and I shouldn't be the voice of anyone at any age. I dicked around on Blogger for a solid hour last night trying to take that off the blog title, then lost interest and fell asleep watching Dairy Week on The Great British Bake Off. 

I don't know anything about 20-somethings. Maybe late 20-somethings, but certainly not early 20-somethings. I watched Euphoria and it shocked me to my core. I literally sat down, put my readers on, and googled, "Is Euphoria really what high school is like?" It also took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that Jules is trans. The establishing shot of her injecting herself with hormones within the first 15-seconds of the show wasn't heavy-handed enough for me. I honestly thought she was diabetic. I was fully prepared for a Steel Magnolias-style irresponsible Diabetes decision-making plot-line and was shocked when it never came. It also didn't seem weird to me at all that she met what's-his-name's dad on Grindr, because you really do have to cast a wide net.

4.) What is the bag and why are you sorr for it?
The bag is the bag, and I will always be sorr for it.

5.) How can I contact you?
Ignore my blog email because I only ever check that account every few years and then want to flush myself down the toilet because I've missed an important email and have to respond three years later like a jackass. I will eventually update the header, sidebars, etc.

Email me directly at meghan.c.rowland@gmail.com or DM me on Instagram - @meg4lyfe. I'm here. I'm in a way, too. We'll get through this.

See you tomorrow.

Meg

Guess who's back. Back again.

Here's what you've missed since 2012:

- I moved to New York City and spent a delightful three years living with my long-time best friend, Eileen, in a converted two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. Very Broad-City. Too many stories to choose from. Good thing I have your attention for a few more months LOLLoloLOLOL.

- I went to grad school from 2012-2014 at The New School and assistant-managed (sort of; I was in what we call a KEY HOLDER position in the retail biz 💅) the Upper West Side Paper Source location. This is, of course, lolz for two reasons: 

1.) I spent many a shenanigan-filled year working at the Georgetown location in college and again after I was controversially fired by Boss #1 and #2 in the aughts for BLOGGING. AT WORK. Though, now less of a source of paper and more of a source of tacky desk tchotchkes owned by a questionable Saudi oil conglomerate, old P. Source has always been there for me in tight financial spots, and I thank them for that.

2.) It gave me a free pass to live out my Kathleen Kelly You've Got Mail Upper West Side retail cosplay fantasies in a very real, very other-people's-money-involved kind of way. 

- Grad school was a laborious process, but at least I didn't make any friends. I actually do owe the New School creative nonfiction writing MFA program a debt of gratitude (and tens of thousands of actual paper dollars) for helping me open up and write four chapters of a dark humor memoir I would still greatly like to finish one day about my life as a lady with vulvodynia. 

Vulvodynia, if you don't know, means that VAGINAL INSERTION during SEX is very extremely painful for MY VUVLA. This pain has been on my radar well before my (delayed) SEXUAL blossoming; TAMPONS were/are painful, too. A pencil. A toothpick. Or less sharp and more appropriate things like fingers and dildos—any touch is painful. It makes SEXUAL INTIMACY tricky. Because then you do that classic thing where you think no guys will be interested in you if they can't easily bang you out, so you either don't date at all, OR you do date, but, for reasons you're still trying to work out in therapy, you don't tell your partner that it hurts when you have sex, and eventually you start resenting them because they want to do something that hurts you all the time, and you start dreading seeing them at all because now you're in a full-blown relationship with someone who wants to marry you and stick his shovy dick inside your tender puss for the rest of your life and—Ack! Cathy! You've done it this time! And you never learn!

Because now you're 34 and still single, and everyone wonders why, because there has to be A Reason, and you want to be like, I COULD BE MARRIED IF I WANTED TO, I JUST HAVE A BROKEN COOTER AND I CAN'T GET ANY DOCTORS TO TAKE ME SERIOUSLY BECAUSE THEY ALL THINK MY "WOMAN PROBLEMS" MUST BE FROM REPRESSED MEMORIES OF BEING MOLESTED, EVEN THOUGH I'VE NEVER BEEN MOLESTED. WHICH I KNOW, BECAUSE I CALLED MY MOTHER ON THE TELEPHONE IN 2012 AND ASKED HER.

So, yeah. It's like a whole thing. 

- In 2015, my literary ambitions slowly derailed when work took over, and I've been working full-time in the fashion/e-commerce/branding/writing/marketing game ever since. I've been meaning to start a new blog for years and years and years, and yeaaaaaaaars, and years and years and years, but it never felt right. The timing was off. I was too busy with work. I wasn't inspired. Nobody would read it anyway. I'd have to design and market it all over again, and now I'm a branding and writing professional, so it has to be bigger and better than before, and goddamn do I hate a high bar. There were multiple efforts to start this bigger, better, more professional blog, but they never came to fruition because, ultimately, I was paralyzed with fear.

But now it's 2020 and I know what actual fear feels like. Until 11 days ago, I still lived in New York in the cutest, smallest, baby studio on the top floor of a walk-up on the Upper West Side you ever did see. (One block away from Eileen!) Now I'm back home in the DMV, living in the guest room of my sister's house in Virginia with her and her family until question mark. (BTW - I acquired two nieces since I saw you last.) 

And the thing is; it's fine. I work, I get high, I play with my nieces, I chill with Becca and Geoff, I eat way better than I would ever have at home. I take long meditative walks and listen to podcasts. If this extremely privileged experience is the totality of my coronavirus experience, I'm fine with that. But I also know that this is just the beginning, and I'm anxious about what comes next. So, I've landed on three ways in which I can be helpful during this awful experience:

1.) Do the grocery shopping for my elderly-as-fuck-so-stop-going-to-the-bagel-store-every-morning-Richard-Rowland parents

2.) Help Becca and Geoff with the kids AND provide stoned commentary on true crime docu-series, nightly

3.) Blog. Because I sure as shit know this helps me, and I hope it helps you cope with this ridiculously inconvenient, scary, awful bullshit, too.

I have no idea what I'm going to write about. I'm rusty. Everything is still going to riddled with dumb-dumb spelling and grammar errors and it's going to look dated, but I don't care. Because while I am scared, it's not about this anymore.

Welcome back. See you tomorrow.

Meg
@meg4lyfe

Read Meg's new piece for Refinery29!

It's just a slideshow of me being a lonely, snarky asshole, but I still call that journalism when I go home for the holidays.

A (Misanthropic) Look At The Top Dating Apps

xoxo

Read Meg's new piece on Medium!

IT'S NOT EMBARRASSING AT ALL! IT'S NOT CAUSING ME ANXIETY AT ALL THAT I NEED TO BEG THE WORLD TO READ THIS BECAUSE PAGE HITS FEED MY MOUTH HOLE/IT'S A VALID CAUSE, BUT BY DOING THAT, I HAVE TO TELL EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU ABOUT MY BUSTED VAG! NOT NOT NOT EMBARRASSING!

https://medium.com/ladybits-on-medium/af3edf0f79b6

Miss you. Should we talk? Let me know.

"Have you ever been on a motorcycle?"

A commenter notes: "Not enough applause GIFs in the world for this post!"

Try. See if you can find enough applause GIFs. If you only know one thing about me, know that I love a GIF.

Sometimes, when the night air seems cold and the world is a mean, friendless place, Meg and I will ask each other random questions via text. I don't really need to know her cup size or when she thinks the race war will begin; I just need to know she's there. However, because we're both what is politely called "colorful" and coarsely called "batshit," sometimes these late-night questions lead to stories, like the other night when Meg asked me if I'd ever been on a motorcycle.

The answer is yes. Longtime fans will remember my post about a date that ended in a shed in the woods watching Entourage under a Confederate flag with the central star replaced with a whiskey ad. Well, this is... not nearly as bad. Several years ago, I made a date with an-older-enough-to-be-exciting-but-not-like-OLD-old man on some internet.com website. Looking back, it's hilarious that 31 used to be "fascinating and older" and not I'LL STILL BE COOL IN THREE YEARS, RIGHT?!?!?!, but time makes fools of us all. I drove over to his house, and before we left he wanted to introduce me to his roommates.

All thirteen of them.

The house was huge with several bedrooms, but then eight dudes just... lived in bunk beds in the finished basement.Most of them were gay, so I guess it functioned as a generic sleepaway camp/armed services/hostel/prison fantasy. Introvert that I am, the idea practically gave me hives. There was also a generalized scrotum-and-Cheeto odor that under normal circumstances I might have found comforting, even arousing, but the thought of the endlessly recirculated air down there alarmed me. Then I met Asher, who lived in a cage.

Can I tell you what's not sexy? People who are big into being obviously kinky. Be your own butterfly, go right ahead, but there's something about people who need casual acquaintances to know that seems desperate. Thus it was with Asher. He slept in a little cage - he was a small guy, and the cage was of a size that he could wiggle around more or less freely in it but not really stretch out. He had a blanket over the top against drafts (DRAUGHTS, in the UK) and to make a surface he could drop his glasses, billfold, and keys on. I was not going to bend down and look in on him like he was a terrier - I refused to play - so I carried on small talk with the area of his legs I could see and successfully contained my questions until my date and I got out to the driveway.

Me: Was he locked in?

Him: Oh, yeah. When he's ready for bed he finds someone to lock him in for the night.

Me: What if there's a fire?

Him: Oh, Tim's job is to make sure someone lets Asher out in an emergency. You know how you're supposed to have a plan for fires...

Me: What if he has to pee?

Him: He holds it, I guess.

Me: If he has an accident, is one of you supposed to rub his nose in it?

Him: I guess. I don't know. He's a nice guy.

A nice guy. The hell? He wants to be locked in a cage at night, which, ignoring the BDSM subtext, is wildly dangerous, but it's okay because he doesn't steal or carve "FOR THE REICH" into people's foreheads with a broken beer bottle?

By this point, we were on his motorcycle, so I had to shut up. I didn't get to ask any more questions about Cage Boy because my date spent the evening telling me about his coati (!) and his nine-year-old daughter (!!!!!!!!!!). Three days later he texted me to tell me he had a nice time but was moving to Denver - you know, 'cause. So, fair warning, if things go south with Giant Camel I'm just going to prostitutes. Fingers crossed, I can avoid ever going on another date.

@OMGLOLCTN