! Embarrassing Moments
Some moments I think about all the time:
College. Bus ride from the sorority house to campus. This pair of twins was staring and snickering at me the whole ride, and I was glaring at them like, “What’s your problem bitches?” When I got to class, I was running my hands through my hair and had not one but two pieces of “KISSES” paper from a Hershey’ Kiss candy stuck in my hair. Like, damn, how’d that happen? (Also, shoutout to my past self who could not live without a bowl of kisses on her apartment kitchen counter whilst in college. Good times.)
Also college. Right before the start of sophomore year. I'd just gotten my tonsils removed, which everyone thought was weird because I was “too old” for that, and I had to practice singing, at the top of my fucking lungs, songs for sorority rush. I could hardly speak, much less sing, and some unnecessarily intense senior girl paused the entire skit practice to yell, “WHY AREN’T YOU SINGING?” at me. I was like, “Because I just got my tonsils out?” It definitely came out like a question and I was beet red, but the bitch stopped after that. (Sorry that I call everyone bitches.)
Grad school, year one. The first 10 minutes of an English class I was TAing. My professor (and thesis advisor), a frail but angelic woman in her early sixties, always started off her freshman/sophomore English seminar with a joke to her students. One time, she asked if I wanted to share a joke with the class. I said, “Sure, why not.” And I ended up telling an anti-joke—one that I still find absolutely hysterical—to the kids, which apparently horrified them all. I sat at my little desk in the front left corner of the room and said, “How do you make a plumber cry?” And the whole room was silent. I continued: “You kill his whole family.” I got some startled, short chuckles but mostly everyone looked at me like “WTF are you OK?” And I was like, “YEAH, ARE YOU???” Ugh, that’s my favorite joke.
2014 or 2015. A text I sent to a boy who didn’t like me enough to talk to me consistently. “I just saw a fat version of you running on campus.” At the time, I thought it was kind of genius, but now I’m like, oh, is that kind of fat-shamey? I was just a desperate loser who wanted attention, so give me some grace.
2016. Pretty much the whole year. This was a transformational year. I finished up undergrad and headed off to Texas for grad school. I really leaned into the whole tortured intellectual identity and acted way sadder and smarter than I needed to/probably was. I definitely became super sad once I moved to Texas and was far away from my family and stuck in classes with performative academics, and I kind of became one myself. I wanted more artsy tattoos (lines from dismal poems, etc) and to use my extensive vocabulary at completely unwarranted times. I wish I had just stayed true to myself more, but you have to learn things however you learn them, ya know.
