Lbabwah

by Maria Yagoda

According to one of my more observant friends, I am not a human but a robot with a pretty solid sense of how humans behave. She’s gathered some compelling evidence: I almost never experience thirst or seek out water, and when I do, I’ll make a grand show of it to keep up the act. I side with Tracy Jordan here: water is nothing more than “clear bathtub juice.”

There’s also the laughter issue: I don’t really laugh. I find things funny, but I’m rarely moved to spontaneous vocalizations of glee. Instead, I smile and offer a nasally “HEH,” a guttural “heh heh,” or emphatic nose exhale when I want to show someone I recognize what they said was a joke, and that it was nice. This can be off-putting. Even when something strikes me as truly hilarious—that dog that looks more like John Travolta than John Travolta, for example—I don’t laugh, or even smile.

Something happens when you grow up, as the tragedy of existence sets in. Human babies laugh about 300 times a day, while human adults only laugh 20 times. Maria, of neither demographic, laughs two times daily, three times max, but only if she watches that scene in It’s Always Sunny when Danny DeVito’s character, naked and sweaty, breaks out of a couch he was sewn into.

“People learn to put roadblocks in the way of their laughter,” offered Enda Junkins, a national laughter therapist/mogul, when I called her after Googling “laugh feel better therapy i'm depressed science?” I was interested in learning to laugh like my human friends, yes—but my desire to experience the transformative power of routine laughter was far more powerful.“The more you practice laughing, the fewer controls you have on it,” she told me.

On her website, Laughter Therapy Enterprises, Junkins provides several tips for laughing more and breaking down some of the roadblocks. Suggestions include: “Wear hats that make you laugh,” “Buy and listen daily to a tape of laughter, a laugh box, or a laughing toy,” “Laugh with your co-workers for a few minutes for no real reason at all,” and the best one, “Wear light-hearted, temporary tattoos that help you cope.”

She advises laughing for five uninterrupted minutes every day. I vowed to do ten minutes a day for two weeks because I wanted double the benefits.

My first morning on a strict laughter regimen, I began with exercises I found on the Internet. I held an imaginary cellphone to my ear and laughed into it for two minutes, and then transitioned to a move where I spread my arms, looked up at the ceiling, twirled, and laughed heartily for three. My fake laugh was unconvincing—the sounds were labored and maniacal, like a mall Santa who has had a long day—but I didn’t need to convince anyone. After the exercises, I felt a lightness in the top of my head that resembled joy.

There are two types of laughter: fake and genuine. But in the laughter therapy universe, a laugh is a laugh. Endorphins don’t care whether you’re laughing because a joke was funny or if you’re just imitating the sounds; if you go through a specific set of physical processes—open mouth, smile formation, “ha” noises—you feel better. According to several studies, laughter minimizes chronic pain, lowers blood pressure, improves alertness, helps with insomnia, and combats depression. In a 2010 Times article, psychoanalyst Rob Marchesani referred to laughter as “natural Xanax.”

I wanted some of that natural-Xanax-goodness, and not just because I yearned to laugh with the ease and whimsy of a likeable person. I craved more joy. I wanted to feel the way women are meant to feel when they eat 100-calorie yogurts: bubbly, free, sensual, ecstatic. Yet when I eat yogurt that pleases me, whether it's low-cal or even full-fat, I’m still a chronically depressed woman who relies on medication to live, a woman never too far from gloom. If I believed in the power of chemicals to do good things in messed-up brains, I figured, I should believe in the power of laughter, which, it turns out, is chemical.

Each day on my laughter diet began the same as a regular day: Wake up. Eat whatever half of sandwich is left on my pillow from the night before. Gear up emotionally to start working in bed, as a freelancer does. Grow saddened by the long stretch of day ahead, so full of nowhere-to-be and children’s gummy vitamins and reloading Twitter.

But on these mornings, when the prospect of existence antagonized and nagged at me, I fought back. I put on my novelty sailor cap (an impulse purchase from Croatia that is now the only thing I love), played a 12-hour laugh track reel, and strolled around my room, laughing, listening to laughing, and tipping my sailor cap at imaginary friends on the streets of Bushwick. Five minutes were enough to neutralize my mood. At nights, I’d repeat the routine, swapping a striped onesie for the sailor cap and subbing Broad City for the laugh track.

A fun feature of my apartment is that the M train goes through it. One night, the sound and rumbling woke me, even though I was three Advil PMs and two long-expired beers deep. I almost committed to fury, my go-to state, but then decided to try something different. “HA HA HA, HO HO HO, HEE HEE HEE,” I howled, making sure to engage my stomach, chest, and head with the techniques I’d learned on YouTube, the people’s university.

I finished laughing and the rumbling was gone. As the M is a sporadically-running trash train, I savored a luxurious 30-minute window to drift back asleep.

‘Laughter yoga’ is the combination of words that gives me the most dread. “Yoga” because I’ve never been able to touch my toes, privately or in front a group of skinny people, and “laughter” because being asked to laugh with strangers for a whole hour evokes the trauma of attending college improv shows. As I made my way to a free midtown laugh clinic, I worried that the group would find me out as a joyless loser who couldn’t even fake laugh like a real human.

There were five of us; everyone but me was a laughter yoga veteran. Two of them—short, jovial women in their late sixties—took off their shoes, so I did too. I smiled at everyone like smiling was a thing I always did.

Vishwa Prakash, our jovial instructor, began the class with “laughing introductions”: weaving in and out of each other, laughing hysterically and hugging each person we “met.” We then breezed through a series of exercises where we acted out goofy scenarios, again, laughing nonstop. We sprayed unwieldy hoses. We rode unwieldy motorcycles. We flossed our teeth. We flossed our brains. We were babies. We were monkeys. Between each laugh-experiment, we chanted the refrain— “HO, HO, HA, HA, HA” set to the motions of clap, clap, chicken flap, chicken flap, chicken flap —as we assembled back into a circle. Then, we’d cheer: “Very good, very good, YAYYY!!” before Vishwa explained the next move—whether singing “Deck the Halls” using only “Ha!” sounds, or convincing a police officer, in our most impassioned gibberish, that we had been wrongfully pulled over.

“Grabdly greeky ta ta baja hahahahaha,” I explained to a young Albanian woman as she belly-laughed. I waved my arms frantically, pointing to an imaginary traffic sign and making begging gestures with hands. “Hahahaha fla bee fla fla trun tak!”

It’s incredible how quickly you can adjust to your nightmare and even start to enjoy it. I guess this is my life now became my mentality after only five minutes. Laughter yoga was like improv comedy, but better, because it was improv’s total inverse: an abundance of laughter, yet zero pressure to be funny.

By the end of the hour my throat was dry and my cheeks ached. I don’t think I real-laughed once, as the others seemed to, but no one cared, especially not me. I was buzzing.

In 1900, French philosopher Henri Bergson published Le Rire, a book that explores the sociological significance of laughter. Bergson posits that for a person to laugh at a joke or a man who just slipped on a banana peel, that person must maintain a certain level of detachment from the seriousness of the subject’s situation. As in, the laugher doesn’t know the man who slipped, or that his girlfriend just broke up with him via Snapchat, compounding an all-around awful start to 2015.

Let’s forget about the man and look inward. Could the reverse work? To laugh at oneself or by oneself, then could that detach oneself from the seriousness of one’s own situation?

Yes. 100%. And that is an incredible tool to have in your Depression Toolbox.

“Laughter doesn’t change the facts; it changes how you relate to those facts,” Junkins told me. “It moves the challenges out of your face.”

One morning towards the end of the second week, I woke feeling especially sullen. After peeling my iPhone off of my sweaty thigh, an email told me I didn’t get the job I’d applied for, a blow made worse by having just spent $100 on several business blouses (my name for shirts that don’t have text on them).

My roommate was in a slump, too. New York is awful, we agreed, talking on the couch, egging each other on, yearning for Vitamixes we’d never afford, cursing the M train. But soon I had to excuse myself to laugh. My morning laughter exercises had become so routine, like coffee or self-loathing, that I couldn’t wait too long to do it. I chuckled off into my bedroom, closed the door, and spread my arms wide to open up my chest. The laughter still wasn’t organic—I hadn’t gotten better at human laughing, like I’d hoped—but the lightness crept into my chest and the buzz crept into my head. The high came quicker and easier.

The rest of my day felt relatively sunny. Junkins speaks on laughter around the country, and her favorite subject is ‘Hattitude:’ how goofy hats and clothes can transform your mood. Embracing this ethos, I slipped on my ankle-length, Philadelphia Phillies maxi dress over leggings and a turtleneck and laughed to myself on the subway, as I headed towards the café I reappropriate as my office. The magic of laughing alone for no reason, or prompted by a group of ladies spraying imaginary hoses at you, is that it weirds you out so quickly—being such an abrupt departure from the normal—that you forget to worry about anything real.

“Nothing changes a mood faster than laughter,” a woman in my class had said when we sat in our closing circle, each of us hoping no one traced the foot smells back to us personally.

I play a laugh track when I work now, pretending I’m on The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, a world of fun hijinks and miscommunications. Realized I forgot to take my birth control last night? Laugh track surrounds me. Picked my lip until it bled? Laugh track plays right through that. LOLz all around.

There are several activities I know feel good but don’t always find the time or chutzpah to do. Run. Exfoliate. Change my sheets. Change my pants. With laughter and ‘hattitude’ and exercised silliness, I vow to take the time, every day, to separate myself from the severity of aliveness. All it takes is a robot laugh, a real laugh, or even a sailor cap to experience that quick hit of release.

Maria Yagoda is a writer living in New York who aspires to own several dogs with underbites.

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@rockabillyjay

Plot twist. [x]

24 Classic Moments From King of the Hill

by Emma Whitford

I attended my first rat class on a Sunday afternoon in January. The snow melted overnight, but by morning it had refrozen into black ice, which made the walk between the 4th Avenue-9th Street stop and the future Morbid Anatomy Museum, located in a vacant, pre-renovation nightclub in industrial Gowanus, extremely terrifying. This probably explains why most of the registered students bailed at the last minute, even after paying $185 for a dead rat, scalpel, access to a box of accessories fit for Barbie and expert instruction.

When I arrived, Katie Innamorato, the teacher, was wearing a polyester wolf jumpsuit with pointy ears, a row of white fangs, and a lolling red fabric tongue. She was arranging the rats on a folding table as if setting up a child’s birthday party. The rats, bright white and all the same size, were “feeders,” or mass-market snake snacks. After the three other students who braved the elements—a bearded deer hunter from upstate, his amulet-necklaced wife, and a teenager in a hoodie whose mom dropped her off with lunch money—were settled in, Katie started instructing: massage some warmth into the rat’s limbs, then place its belly flat against the table, and part its fur along the spine.

As a member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, Katie would never cut into an animal that wasn’t hit by a truck, dead from natural causes, or donated by a feeder farm. (She recently owned a wild fox as a pet, though it now resides at the Staten Island Zoo.) The Rogues, as they call themselves, number some 40 working members, and have enough followers these days—Katie has nearly 3,800 on Instagram—that she has been able to support herself by teaching all over the country and making her own specimens (they’re into mutations and chimeras, like two-headed kittens and squirrels with partridge wings).

Katie, who is 24, has always been interested in dead animals. “In high school, I started picking up really disgusting road kill off of the side of the road and burying it in my back yard, to clean the bones,” she said. “I’d dig them up months later, whiten them, and sell them online.” Four years ago, she found a mentor in Sussex, New Jersey—a traditional taxidermist (think lodge-style deer mounts) who was willing to share his expertise with a novice. Katie brought her skills to college at SUNY New Paltz, where her 2012 fine-arts thesis exhibition featured an open-eyed doe lying on its side, moss sprouting from her ears, and a transparent dome attached to a hole in her side that allowed the viewer to peer, glass-bottom-boat-style, into her belly. Her inspiration was two-fold: cannulated cows, which have viewing windows in their stomachs, for science, and Joel-Peter Witkin’s “Cornucopia Dog,” a photograph of a dead dog with a Thanksgiving cornucopia spilling out of it. “I was like, ‘Oh shit! This is the perfect way for me to incorporate living things into these dead animals!’” Squint, and her work is hardly morbid. “It’s about remembrance—a way for me to memorialize my subjects.”

Sitting in a folding chair by the nightclub’s former bar, my stomach had long since turned. The initial scalpel incisions were gory—white fur split open to reveal a bright red sliver of glistening viscera—but the guts themselves are surprisingly neat and contained, like little pink balloons. And with the exception of one infected liver (the hunter’s wife, after holding a poker face for nearly an hour, had to run to the bathroom), the class fell into a rhythm.

Joanna Ebenstein founded the Morbid Anatomy Library in 2009 as a companion to her blog of the same name. The tiny, overflowing research library and private collection (the forthcoming full-fledged museum is a logical next step) is dedicated to more than just taxidermy (think Korean Koptu dolls to guide you through the afterlife, and 17th century commemorative hair jewelry). But Joanna, an artist, curator, writer and historian who has always loved animals and been fascinated with death, has a more cohesive mission: to explore, through exhibitions, classes,and lectures (Wet-Specimen Preservation, The History of Bodysnatching), macabre artifacts that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

Last year, Joanna spent six months in London, tracking down a rare collection of tableaux by Walter Potter, a self-taught, 19th-century taxidermist, whose work—scenes from Victorian daily life enacted by birds, mice, rabbits, and squirrels—had never been properly photographed. Joanna’s new book, written with Pat Morris, Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy, is the first to hone in on the facial expressions of Potter’s creatures, and their meticulous accessories: tiny playing cards, cigars, and beer steins.

Fashionable taxidermy peaked in the late 19th century, when it was common to find stuffed birds in a genteel living room. Potter, interested in small-scale projects, had plenty of material to work with in his tiny farming village of Bramber, West Sussex—birds found dead under telephone wires, excess kittens and bunnies from breeders, rats killed by farm dogs. One of his most popular pieces, The Kittens’ Wedding (1890), features twenty tiny rats in morning suits and brocade dresses, looking on as the groom slips a ring on the bride’s paw. Potter’s contemporaries didn’t consider it conventional, but they didn’t consider it creepy, either.

In 2003, while studying fashion design at Pratt, Divya Anantharaman did a database search for “Beatrix Potter.” The results brought back Walter Potter instead. (The Peter Rabbit author and the taxidermist were contemporaries, but not related). Years later she recalled, in a blog post , “I saw humanity—all that is humorous, frightening, and something in between.”

Potter inspired Divya to pick up taxidermy as a hobby, and eventually abandon a career in fashion A few weeks after Katie’s rat class, I met her at a diner in Fort Greene. A close friend of Joanna, Divya teaches the other half of Morbid Anatomy’s taxidermy classes. While Katie favors bigger projects like deer and foxes, Divya loses herself in minute details: “I love how tedious it is to scoop meat out of a bird’s wing. It’s meditative.” Her pearl-studded fancy pigeons and flower-wreathed antler mounts attract a lot of attention on the internet.

Potter inspired Divya to pick up taxidermy as a hobby, and eventually abandon a career in fashion to practice and teach full time. Attracted to the way ivy creeps over an abandoned building, she analogizes, “Death moves over things—ultimately, you can’t prevent it.” To a taxidermist, this acknowledgement is thrilling: Divya is never going to run out of material for her art.

As a Rogue, she works with the deformed, injured, and old, embellishing bald spots, birth defects, and tire marks with materials like fake crystals and real flowers, which she preserves at peak-bloom vibrancy with glycerin injections. (“That’s one of my few secrets.”) The contradiction is mesmerizing.

One of Divya’s most recent projects is a baby lamb: Covered in pearls, it hangs from the ceiling by a pink, polka-dotted ribbon looped around its belly. Below it, a cloud of pink tissue paper and tulle evokes piñatas and tutus, which, Divya explains, emphasize how young the lamb was when it died. As Divya puts it, “Everything dies.” But, “That’s just a way to celebrate life! You know, to realize the sanctity of it all.”

On a Monday night in February Joanna squeezed me in after a full day of meetings about fundraising. Compared to Katie and Divya, Joanna is unassuming—with shoulder-length blond hair and round glasses, she’s more children’s librarian than Oddities case study.

The Morbid Anatomy Library felt like a moodily-lit walk-in closet. I asked about a collection of what looked like wax ears, displayed in a glass case on pins like a butterfly collection. It turned to be a collection of tiny models of developing human embryos, purchased at a flea market. Sitting across from me at the wooden worktable that takes up most of the room’s walking space, Joanna pointed around. “There’s the wax moulage with a skin disease I made in London. That skeleton was donated by a friend of a friend, and the two-headed duckling is from my father.” It’s hard to imagine inching around the library clockwise without missing something.

Which is just how Joanna likes it. When it comes to established museums, she wants their respect, but not their curatorial standards. “Museums are like icebergs,” she explains. “Ten percent of the collection is on display at any given time, and 90 percent is backstage.” Her five-year plan is to showcase not just private collections on loan from quirky collectors with left-field interests, but “the pieces from public collections that would never be shown otherwise.”

Joanna studied intellectual history at Santa Cruz where, she says, she “read objects as texts.” Since college, her goal has been to understand “the ways in which human beings have changed, so that certain objects now seem bizarre to us, even though they weren’t at their conception.” When I asked for an example, Joanna introduced me to “the centerpiece of all of my research”—a framed photograph on the wall behind us that depicts Italian sculptor Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus, constructed around 1790 at La Specola, a wax workshop and museum in Florence. The naked female body, a life-sized prop for anatomy lessons, is made of wax. Her organs are nestled in a hollow stomach.

The Venus lies in a glass and rosewood case, a display typical of Catholic saints at the time (although religious likenesses were always clothed). Susini’s sculpture represents a blurry situation: for so long, representations of death had been in religion’s wheelhouse. Now, scientific representations were becoming more common. The Venus is the product of a brief time when “the torch, being passed from the Church to science, lingered in both hands.”

The Venus was a hit, drawing audiences all over Europe. For Joanna, she is a constant reminder that “we’re living in the only time and place where death has become so demonized.”

Joanna’s hope for the Morbid Anatomy Museum, when it opens this June, is to give visitors the opportunity to time travel—to appreciate oddities stripped of their oddness, as they might have been appreciated at the time of their inception. To this end, the inaugural exhibition of Walter Potter tableaux couldn’t be more fitting. But the museum will be also be a bigger, more accommodating classroom for Divya and Katie. Their attitude towards death, manifested through taxidermy, is contemporary and contagious.

Even though Joanna doesn’t do taxidermy herself, she gets it: “When I started collecting, I found myself saying out loud, ‘This really adds some life to the room!’ I can see how that might sound crazy. After all, these things are dead. But over the years I’ve realized that objects can flicker on edges–repulsive and attractive, spiritual and clinical, dead and alive. I am definitely attracted to that flickering.”

Check out the Morbid Anatomy Museum Kickstarter here. This Friday, they’re hosting a big fundraising party at Proteus Gowanus.

Emma Whitford is an editorial assistant at New York magazine. She also enjoys reviewing fiction for Publishers Weekly. She is, deeply, a New Englander.

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[available here]

THIS IS THE GREATEST IDEA OF ALL TIME [x]

by Meaghan O'Connell

Ten thousand Euros for every baby. That’s the reward the Finnish town of Lestijärvi promised local parents in 2012 for every new child born. Now, two years on, it seems that the plan, due to last until 2016, has been working well. Too well in fact. Such has been the spike in births that Lestijärvi is now reporting a new problem: it’s run out of family-sized housing.

There is a baby boom in the tiny town of Lestijärvi, Finland (population 850) and with “Turns Out Paying People Thousands of Dollars to Have a Baby Works Pretty Well” Feargus O’Sullivan is on it.

New parents in Lestijärvi (pronounced “give me moneyyyyy”) are cranking ‘em out at 14x the rate they did before the incentive went underway. To be fair, one baby was born there in 2012, and 14 babies were born post-incentive in 2013. Unfortunately you do not get the $10K in a lump sum (*puts condom back on*), rather Lestijärvians receive $1,000/year for the first 10 years of their kid’s life, which, it should be noted, is not all that crazy of a notion in Finland, home to the famous BABY BOX:

The practice of doling out baby cash and gifts – sometimes referred to as haikararahaksi or “stork money” – is actually a nationwide practice that all Finnish parents benefit from in some form. Around 70 municipalities pay €500 or more for each new child born, typically in areas away from the major Finnish cities whose jobs and facilities lure families without financial incentive. Lestijärvi’s closest rival in generosity offers €3,000. Some municipalities give more token gifts instead, such as flowers, books, clocks, apple tree seedlings or – probably the lamest gift in the Finnish stork money arsenal – a city logo to stick on the baby’s bodysuit. All this comes on top of government gifts that provide most of the basic kit new parents need for their babies’ first months.

Photo: photodeus

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MY GOD, YOU’RE SO SQUISHY.

SAMUEL, YOU SLIMEBALL. KISS ME AGAIN.

I COULD GET LOST FOREVER IN YOUR FLAPS AND FOLDS.

STOP TALKING AND TAKE ME, SAMUEL. FILL ME WITH CHILDREN, NOT JUST POETRY.

YES! AND YOU AS WELL, SHEILA. AFTER ALL, OUR HERMAPHRODITIC REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEMS ALLOW FOR MUTUAL FERTILIZATION. 

THAT’S SO SEXY.

I KNOW.

by Jia Tolentino

Here is a video tutorial about making layer cakes that are also "scientifically accurate representations of the subsurface on Jupiter and Earth, right from the outer atmosphere down through the crust, mantle, and inner core." The video is sort of mesmerizing, and there are also step-by-step instructions here.

Alternately, legalize it, etc. [Via]

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by Sara Barron

In the fall of 1997 I arrived to New York University as a college freshman with two priorities. The first: to waste my parents’ money on a theater education. The second: to get drunk.

I accomplished both my goals, although in different ways and for different lengths of time. Which is to say: I wasted that money over the span of four years, but got drunk only once.

•••I never had an alcoholic drink all throughout high school, and that was owed to both (a) a lack of social invitations, and (b) a fear of projectile vomit. While there was an extent to which this disappointed me about myself, there was also the overarching sense that it was as should be, that I was someone who belonged at home.

Nonetheless, I wanted to change this fact about myself once I hit college. I felt the false promise of self-reinvention. I bought a tube of dark lipstick and a Blackstreet C.D., and when finally I caught wind of a sorority party, I decided to attend. I spent the week leading up to it doing dexterity exercises in my dorm room to insure that if someone did throw up in my general vicinity, I’d be nimble-footed enough to steal away.

My overall thinking was that the vomit risk was worth it for the revels that awaited. I’d never been to an alcohol-laced party before, but I had seen a few John Hughes films. I hoped to go to the party and meet a beefcake-y guy who hoisted girls up above his shoulders. Who’d hoist me up above his shoulders.

“Put me down!” I’d yell.

“Only if you do a shot!” he’d yell back.

So I’d do a shot. And then another. And another.

“You’re crazy!” he’d shout. “Most girls can’t handle their liquor!”

“But I can,” I’d say.

“Yes. You can,” he’d say. “You’re a real special lady.”

This, in all likelihood, would be the beginning of a mostly physical relationship in which I’d use the beefcake for his body, but keep him at an arm’s length.

I attended the sorority party with a young lady named Melanie who I’d met in a freshman year acting class called Masks of Comedia. Pre-party, Melanie and I had dinner in our dorm’s cafeteria. It was during this time that I carbo-loaded so as to prep my body for proper alcohol absorption. I ate one sesame bagel and two plates of refried beans. Having finished, I removed the napkin I’d tucked into the collar of my delicate chemise. I looked Melanie in the eye in much the same way Jennifer Connelly looks Russell Crowe in the eye in the movie A Beautiful Mind when she says, “I need to believe… that something extraordinary… is possible.” I conveyed a fear of the unknown, I like to think, but also hope. Hope. Of meeting men who hoist women up above their shoulders. Of men who get you drunk, but make you feel understood.

“We can do this,” I told her. “I truly believe that we can.”

Melanie and I arrived to the sorority party at 9 p.m. on a Friday night. I had expected it to take place in some attractive Greenwich Village brownstone, and that is because I’d thought the sorority scene was made up of refined and wealthy ladies. ‘

Instead, it took place in a rundown apartment building just east of Union Square. A total of eight sisters lived on the first and second floors, and to host their party they used their individual apartments, the stairwell between the apartments, and, finally, the ground floor entryway. So when you walked in, you walked in.

When I walked in, the process of doing felt rather like passing from the natural world where there was fresh air and reasonable human behavior into an insane asylum designated for the treatment of grubby, promiscuous women. People were screaming and flying every which way. There were indeed a handful of beefcakes, but in person the smell of their cologne was just too much to bear.

The experience gave me a sense of not belonging, and Melanie made it all worse by abandoning me upon entry to chug a monstrosity called a “Forty Ounce Beer.” She chugged three in a row before meandering along to the sorority’s mascot, a jumbo, stuffed animal panda. Melanie straddled the panda, then dry-humped the panda.

At that point, I knew I’d have to soldier forth alone.

I knew I had to do what I was there to do.

I escorted myself to the bar.

I say “bar,” although it is perhaps better described as a filthy kitchen counter stocked with bottom-shelf booze. In order to serve myself, I had to squeeze between two couples that were both French kissing. I was about to tap one of them on the shoulder to ask them to move, but before I had the chance, one of the young ladies jerked out of her embrace so she could projectile vomit. The vomit went everywhere except on me, of course. I had trained for exactly this scenario. I propelled myself at top speed out of the kitchen in the first floor apartment, up through the stairwell, into the kitchen of the second floor apartment. There, I found another filthy counter stocked with the identical bottom-shelf booze.

From the options available, I chose a festive looking punch for the singular reason that it smelled like suntan lotion. It reminded me of a sunny day at the beach, which, in turn, helped calm me down after seeing someone vomit. The punch tasted like cough syrup mixed with gasoline. It wasn’t great, but it was doable. So I parked myself in the beanbag chair beside its serving bowl and began to drink. Over the course of the next hour I did so with negligible interaction from fellow partygoers. At one point I tried stretching my legs out for a more flattering presentation of my figure, but this just caused one of the perfumed beefcakes to trip over my foot and yell, “Watch your fucking feet!” and so I tucked them in again. I continued with my drinking.

I drank steadily for a total of two hours, at which point I was drunk. I thought, Oh, okay. So this is drunk. I felt confused and a little bit sick. I pushed myself up out of the bean-bag-chair and hobbled out the front door and into the stairwell. This should not have been a problem, but I’d lost the ability to balance, and to make matters worse, I’d worn a high peep-toe heel for my exciting evening out. I hobbled toward the staircase, then down the staircase. I made it only halfway before the inevitable trip-‘n-fall. Lucky for me, though, an emaciated sister had been standing at the bottom to break my trip-‘n-fall.

“AHHHHHH!” she screamed.

She was awfully loud for someone so teeny-tiny.

So I apologized, like you do, and seeing as how our bodies had landed such that I appeared to be mounting her from behind, I tried to make a joke.

“Buy a gal a drink first, right?” I tried. But the sister was not amused.

“What the fuck?” she screamed.

And then I farted in response. It was not intentional. It was merely the choice my body made on my behalf.

The sister screamed again.

“She’s farting!” she screamed. “On me!”

“Not technically,” I said. “Technically, I’m farting above you.”

One of her male contemporaries charged over and grabbed me by the collar of my delicate chemise.

“You’re outta here,” he said. “That shit was disrespectful.”

I’m not convinced a person does himself a favor mentioning the word “respect” at a sorority party. He, my molester, held me by the collar of my delicate chemise while the sister lay at our feet huddled in the fetal position. Beside us stood a young woman who’d removed her own brassiere so she could use it as a toilet. People were applauding in response, and, I’m sorry, but my feeling is that if one woman is allowed to urinate into her own brassiere—and believe you me: I am glad that she is—then another woman should not be chastised for a little toot. A little root-toot. A little trumpet de la rumpet.

I made the choice not to argue, however, and tried for the sake of a smooth exit to tell him I was sorry.

I took off my high peep-toe heels and made my way out the front door. I walked shoe-less back to my dorm and, having arrived, realized I had to vomit. I threw up in my awful freshman toilet in my awful freshman dorm. As I did, I thought, This is fucking disgusting. I’ll never drink like that again. It’s a common enough promise for someone in a regretful situation, but the noteworthy thing here was that I meant it.

I never drank like that again.

From that day forth I always drank in moderation. I established a system and was thrilled to see it worked. Prior to the next party I attended, I went out and bought myself a stopwatch to keep track of my drinking. I would allow myself one drink per hour, for up to four hours. I would use the stopwatch to time the intervals. I would stock up on bagels prior to the party for proper alcohol absorption. Each time I had a drink, I’d eat a bagel.

What this all meant, then, was that I attended this second party wearing a stopwatch, as well as a backpack that was large enough to carry many bagels. I thought I looked cool in a practical sort of way, but then someone said, “Cool backpack,” and although I said, “Thank you,” I did also intuit that what he meant, really, was, “That is not a cool backpack.”

Then someone else said, “Oh. Hey. Where did you get that bagel,” and I said, “I brought it in my backpack.”

And he said, “Do you have any more? I’m totally starving.”

And I said, “I do have several more. But I have to eat them all.”

“You have to eat them all?”

“Yes. I have to eat them all. I don’t like… Oops! Sorry. That’s my stopwatch. I can have another drink.”

What with my backpack and my bagels, I was not invited back to many parties. And that was just as well, I guess, for I had been right all along: I was better off at home.

 

Photo via paul-w-locke/flickr.

Sara Barron is the author of two essays collections, The Harm in Asking (out this week) and People Are Unappealing. Her work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, on Showtime's This American Life, NPR's Weekend Edition, and The Today Show. She is a frequent host of The Moth: True Stories Told Live in NYC. She's on Twitter @sarabarron.

11 Comments

by Emma Carmichael

From last week, but maybe you missed it, Hairpin pal Kassia Miller was over at McSweeney's documenting The Queso Dip Consumption Ritual Between Female Roommates, which, I don't know, you could find relatable, possibly:

A day, a week, a month will go by before either roommate dares discuss the jar of queso dip. Several jars of salsa, bags of chips, the odd tub of icing, all of these foodstuffs will come and go. But Queen Queso shall remain, biding her time as the roommates bide theirs.

The first step toward consumption will begin with a casual aside: “Oh, I noticed we had some queso?” one roommate will remark. While delivered as an off-the-cuff observation, the twinkle in the roommate’s eyes will betray her true intentions.

She is obviously “DTQ”: Down to queso.

[McSweeney's, photo via]

3 Comments

by Jia Tolentino

Australia's Philip Island Penguin Foundation has put up a call for penguin sweaters. This is important for visual reasons, and also general reasons pertinent to tiny penguin survival. At the Guardian:

“If somebody puts oil into the sea … a little penguin swimming along pops up to the surface and finds out he’s come up in a circle of yukky stuff,” Blom said. “The first thing he wants to do is get to shore because he loses all of his waterproofness.”

She said penguins became very cold and waterlogged when the sea water seeped in towards their skin. A ranger or member of the public could then take them to a rescue organisation such as the foundation.

A jumper prevents a penguin from cleaning oil from its body with its beak, and keeps it warm until conservationists can release it back into the wild. The little penguins, which live mainly around the coast of Victoria, are not as immune to the cold as their southern cousins.

Here is a penguin knitting pattern. "Flipper opening about 4 cm in length."

(Excess penguin sweaters will be donated to other organizations or placed on penguin stuffed toys that raise awareness for the penguin cause. Of course, cash is the decidely less cute but more efficient way to send penguin or any other form of aid, and Penguin Foundation also has an Adopt-A-Penguin program!)

3 Comments

[cyanide&happiness]

via

via

by Mike Dang

I was 10 doughnuts in when I came to Endgrain Restaurant’s table, and I was in no condition to want or enjoy anything.

But their doughscuit — half doughnut, half biscuit — was transcendent, an impossible mix of doughnut-fried sweetness and crumbly biscuitness. Every last nook of free space in my body was full, and I bought extras. I ate one at home later. The next morning I had more. I’m not entirely sure I’m going to finish writing this sentence without going out to get another.

And so it begins.

Photo: Christian Cable

21 Comments

[poorlydrawnlines]

Useful Children’s Books for People in Their Twenties [more] [collegehumor]

Previously: NSA Surveillance Children’s Books

[theawkwardyeti]

by Jia Tolentino

At the Smithsonian Magazine, Jessica Gross writes about sociologist Thomas Linneman's analysis of uptalk through the delightful-sounding study of "100 episodes of Jeopardy!, which he watched mostly in the evenings, on his couch with his dog at his feet." You will likely find Linneman's conclusion unsurprising: uptalk "might serve to reinforce existing gender norms."

Women uptalked more than one and a half times as often as men. Perhaps signaling a lack of confidence, uptalk was also much more common for incorrect answers as correct ones. Women answering incorrectly uptalked a whopping 76 percent of the time.

But then the analysis gets interesting: While men who were $10,000 ahead of their nearest competitors uptalked less than men who were $10,000 behind, women in the lead uptalked more frequently than their losing female counterparts. And while men correcting other men uptalked less often, their uptalk frequency more than doubled if they were correcting a woman’s answer.

Women’s uptalk doesn’t just indicate uncertainty, Linneman concludes; it’s also meant to compensate for success. Men, on the other hand, don’t want to seem uncertain around other men, but use uptalk when correcting women as “a weird form of chivalry,” he says. “They’re in a public arena, they’re telling a woman [she’s] wrong, and they know they have to be careful about how they do it.”

There is a theory about how uptalk became popular in Australia and New Zealand in the '50s, and then spread westward in the States in the '80s. But one linguist at Penn says that "uptalk has probably been the default pattern of speech for a thousand years or so in some varieties of English in the British Isles," and that people often also use uptalk to order multiple food items. "For example: I want two poppy seed bagels? One sesame? And a pound of lox?" That's probably better than I sound normally? Which is like, I'll take everything, bye? [Smithsonian]

3 Comments

[feelsrightdesign]

The Actual Lines From Movies That People Always Say Wrong [via]

Previously: Overused Movie Poster Cliches

4gifs:

Unedited

amajor7:

BYE

via

binart:

i’m seeing all this neat motivational stuff going around so i made a comic of it