I live for moments once I feel encyclopedic. Yesterday, at a backyard party, people asked who sang the song that was playing and I screamed out “Keyshia Cole” with slightly an excessive amount of enthusiasm. I used to be right, and I lit up with such delight that I felt silly.
I at all times think I’m annoying people, when in point of fact people aren’t fascinated by me in any respect. Liberating. Anyway, I like being right. It’s fun to be right, and folks who act prefer it’s so Zen and funky and humbling to be unsuitable are … unsuitable! Recover from yourself! Humility is so 2019; this yr is all about shameless bragging.
I would like to see your vacation pics. I would like to see your degree. I would like to see your accomplished pile of lovely, fragrant folded laundry. I would like to see you win.
Enough misery. Wear the crop top, flaunt the promotion, show me that salad you made and the french fries you ate when the salad wasn’t enough. As for me, I watched each season of “Summer House” in lower than a month. After I typed that sentence, I went to calculate what number of minutes of TV that added as much as. I closed the calculator inside seconds of opening it because some mysteries are best left unsolved.
Attempting to be deep is exhausting. I’m definitely getting dumber. Why am I an authority in Mormon swinger TikTok drama? Meanwhile, I don’t know which plants are native to my area. Related to this uptick in Mormon swinger knowledge: I blew through my TikTok limit today (again!). So, once more, it’s time to do my self-care theater of deleting whatever social media app I’m allowing to damage my life before becoming bored again and redownloading it after three hours.
“In case you’re bored, you’re boring” — honey, prepare the starboard side, because that ship has sailed! I’m boring! And depressed, and anxious, and exhausted, and unwilling to observe a feature film unless I feel it’s going to be bad. Where’s that within the D.S.M.? Don’t tell me.
A friend recently told me that there aren’t any lightning bugs in Seattle. I couldn’t consider it. It was the identical betrayal I felt once I discovered that the restaurants in my hometown weren’t all mega-popular national chains. It kills me that I won’t get to see every little thing you’re keen on, irrespective of how hard I try, irrespective of who you might be. I don’t care when you see the identical colours I see — the colours aren’t necessary to me — but I would like you to see a bug’s butt activate and off because the sun slips away behind the trees of my yard back in Ohio.
Perhaps my friend was unsuitable. Perhaps she wasn’t taking note of the bugs throughout her all those years. Perhaps she was at all times surrounded by lightning and had no idea. Doubtful.
Now I’m back in Latest York. I used to be gone for therefore long, and now you should utilize your phone to get on the subway. What the hell? Will we like that, or does it suck? Please don’t tell me; I don’t think I actually care. Is that bad? I just don’t feel like I can care about every little thing anymore. There have been a pair years once I cared about every little thing, and all it got me was an ulcer.
I never know what button to press on the gas station. I’m pretty sure I selected diesel for the primary few months of driving because I used to be too scared to ask. Oops! Thankfully I totaled that automobile, so nobody will ever know what I did to its internal organs.
Often, I realize I used to be in the fitting place at the fitting time shortly after I’ve left. The ache creeps in and I would like to show around and go right back to where we just were. I talk myself out of it — everyone’s already on the way in which home. Too inconvenient. And the way humiliating, to be the just one craning my neck toward something that ended. It probably meant more to me than it did to you. But what when you’re looking, too? Is that something that happens only in movies, or should I be looking out for longing glances more often?
Sometimes I say I haven’t any goals, and I mean it. Is that pathetic or lovely? A bit of each, I feel. I think that I can do every little thing and nothing. I think I’ll disappear as quickly as I got here, that I can hate olives someday and love them the subsequent, that I’ll keep finding latest things to like about myself and others. I think that someday I’ll turn around to look behind me and also you’ll be looking, too. We’ll meet right back at the center and sit back down in seats so freshly vacated that they’re still warm. There’s something a few warm chair that’s disgusting, unless the warmth comes from someone you already know and love. Isn’t that funny? Heat from a butt continues to be heat from a butt, irrespective of which butt it got here from. I digress.
I hope you get to see lightning bugs a minimum of once in your life. Their light shines on as quickly because it shuts off until, before you already know it, the summer is over and the bugs are dead and also you and I are still here, watching the world get larger and smaller and louder and more cluttered. I’ll outlive thousands and thousands of lightning bugs, but my butt won’t ever be a light-weight source. We’ve all got our special little things that nobody else can claim. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine, pulsing gently in tandem because the pink summer sun climbs back up across the horizon.
Episode is a weekly column exploring a moment in a author’s life. Mitra Jouhari has written for “Big Mouth,” “High Maintenance” and other television shows. She is a co-creator and star of the comedy series “Three Busy Debras.”
