Weird but Normal

by Mia Mercado

  During another class about cultural differences and philosophy—this professor loved to talk about “other cultures” in the context of words like “savage” or “barbaric”—he decided to employ me once again in a hypothetical situation. He did this with students often: Let’s say Danielle grows up in a religious household or What if Guy in the Front Row Who Always Wears a Racing Jacket decides to run for office.

  However, during this lesson’s hypothetical scenario, I got Mia is “female circumcised.”

  The professor proceeded to explain a situation in which I was married to Walter, the student who sat next to me. In this hypothetical scene, I cheat on Hypothetical Walter, to which Actual Walter turns to me and goes, How could you?!? And Actual Me is like, Not now, Walter. Now, in this hypothetical culture, cheating is a legally punishable offense for women. So, Hypothetical Me gets her “clitoris scooped out” with “something like a melon baller,” as my Actual, Real Life Philosophy professor explains, so that I can “never experience pleasure” ever again.

  Now, is this right or wrong? the professor asked the class. I still don’t know which scenario, hypothetical or actual, he was talking about.

  College Hookups 301

  COURSE MATERIAL:

  A sneaky condom from the front desk

  Enough pent-up horniness to jump on the first person who makes eye contact with you

  PREREQUISITES—TO TAKE THIS CLASS YOU MUST HAVE COMPLETED THE FOLLOWING:

  Bad High School Make-outs in Your Parents’ Basement 101

  Quietly Masturbating While You Pray to God Your Roommate Is Sleeping 202

  At least one foreign language course at the 100 level

  After years of masturbating in silence, I had sex for the first time my senior year of college on my boyfriend’s roommate’s futon. It was fine. My sexual education in college was sporadic. I took Making Out 201: Does Kissing Someone’s Neck Mean They Think You’ll Give Them a Blow Job? I repeatedly failed Imaginary Relationships 501: Getting the Boy Who Calls Me Crying Every Night to Say I’m His Girlfriend. I also took a trimester-long elective called Romance 102: Inevitably Hooking Up with the Guy from Calc Who Keeps Texting You “when r we gunna hook up?” at One in the Morning.

  You may also have taken this class if you’ve ever realized, after a thirty-minute conversation and fifteen minutes of making out, that the person you’re hooking up with has a roommate and that roommate is currently asleep ten feet away from you. You’ve definitely taken the class if you still chose to spend the night anyway.

  Graduation 401

  COURSE MATERIAL:

  Student loan statements you try not to look at

  One or more of the following: a chunky sweatshirt with your university name; bad poetry from an introductory creative writing class you will hold on to for a little too long; half-memorized guitar chords to “Wonderwall”

  An excited fear of what’s next

  I eventually transferred for a second and final time to the university from which I have my degree. Sometimes I wish I’d had a more standard college experience. One with decidedly more pomp and circumstance, which is also what I call my left and right tits, respectively. I wonder who I’d be now had I spent my college years having weekend benders and late-night hookups and, well, just a little bit more fun. Other times, I’m just relieved to be done with the whole formal schooling thing. I graduated from college in three and a half semesters (hold for applause). This is less an example of my ambition and work ethic and more evidence of how much I like being done doing a thing. I hated going to college; I like being able to say I am a college graduate.

  How I Take My Coffee

  I used to take my coffee with cream. I was young and didn’t understand things like “quality” and “strong brew” and “my own lactose intolerance.” Life was so much simpler then.

  Once, I dated a guy who took his coffee black so I started taking my coffee black. I would nod reflexively when he said things like “quality” and “strong brew” and “Isn’t the mandolin in this song so good?” and “Did you come?”

  Now I take my coffee very seriously, sniffing each individual bean and asking, “What will you make me capable of doing today, my small friend?” Maybe one day, when I’ve had too much caffeine or, more likely, not nearly enough, I will hear them reply.

  Today, I take my coffee with a bagel. I say it like “bah-gel” and the cashier looks at me funny. I apologize and order a croissant instead. I don’t even want to tell you how I pronounce “croissant.”

  I typically take my coffee in latte form. I get it with oat milk on account of not wanting to diarrhea to death. The way you order an oat milk latte is very specific. You go, “I’m so sorry but do you have oat milk and can I have that and again I am so, so sorry.”

  After a few minutes, I take my coffee from the shaggy-haired barista. Our fingers graze briefly as my hand meets the warm cup. I look up. He smiles. “Martha?” he asks. I laugh.

  “It’s pronounced Mia.”

  “No,” he replies, “This coffee is for Martha.” A woman pushes past me to grab her coffee. I ask if they have a coffee grinder I can shove my whole body into for just a sec.

  Finally, they call out “Mya,” and I take my coffee.

  I take it to a table in the back, near an outlet where no one can sit behind me. God forbid someone sees me working or writing or googling “Pepsi girl how old now,” which is, in a sense, working.

  I take my coffee into my hands, sipping slowly at firs—oh fuck, fuck shit, that is so, so hot oh my god I barely even touched it to my mouth and now I’ve lost my entire bottom lip.

  Some days, my coffee takes me. We dance in a caffeine frenzy around the café, swirling together in a flurry of brew and body. We move as one. I don’t know if I am more her or she is more me. We laugh. We sing. “I take you as you are,” my coffee whispers to me. I weep a single tear. It tastes like espresso and salt.

  I take my coffee to go.

  Procrastination but Make It Look Put Together

  I am a slut for procrastination. Spending days doing absolutely nothing, when I know I have many things to do, is perhaps the greatest love of my life. (Sorry to my husband, family, et al.) I will continuously put off whatever mandatory task needs to be done, coming closer and closer to the quickly approaching deadline, until I am eventually on my knees reciting the Procrastination Lord’s Prayer:

  Our Father

  Or Mom or Grandma,

  Stepdad or Great Aunt,

  Estranged Brother or Half-Sister,

  Younger Cousin Who Is Somehow

  Taller Than Me Now,

  Or Zaddy or Fuckboy or Grandma

  oh wait I said that already . . .

  The prayer ends when I run out of relatives I can name or I’m a day out from my due date. No forgiveness is granted. I am led straight into temptation. Then I spend a hurried twenty-four hours panic-working, trying to put together some semblance of whatever it is I should have been doing for the past week or month or twenty-eight years. It’s like sexual edging but for responsibilities. And I do finish, eventually.

  This is not some cutesy attempt at being Relatable™. Like, “Ha ha, look at me! I’m such a silly mess of a woman! Isn’t it funny when women are messy but only if they are hot and young, too?” (I am, of course, very hot and perpetually young, but that is beside the point.)

  I don’t know when calling yourself a “hot mess” became a whole personality, but I do feel like it corresponds with our collective love of talking about procrastinating. Procrastination is gross (at least in terms of being a productive human person), and we all love to talk about gross things. We love to huddle around our icky shit pile of an id, oohing and ughing over its icky shittiness. It’s the “Smell this and tell me if it smells bad” effect but for coping with our inability to cope.

  People love to talk about procrastination if only as a way to further procrastinate whatever it is they should be doing. If I wanted, I could probably build an entire Etsy
shop stocked with screen-printed T-shirts that say “I’d rather be procrastinating” and novelty mugs emblazoned with “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my procrastination.” You can go ahead and steal those ideas from me. Just know if you make a million-dollar fortune off my intellectual property, I will come for my 15 percent. Yes, I even procrastinate my creative integrity.

  It just feels so, so good to not do something you are told to do. It is the whole reason I became an English major. John Mulaney has a joke about how he spent $120,000 to have someone tell him to read Jane Eyre and then he didn’t. I have a joke where I just rewatched John Mulaney’s Netflix special to find that exact quote when I could have very easily googled it, but I kept thinking, Maybe I’ll get inspired to be funny if I watch hours of someone else doing it??? I’ll think of a punch line eventually.

  I do not wish to be this way, in a constant state of procrastination. I wish I always spent my self-designated work hours actually doing work instead of doing . . . I honestly don’t even know what. If someone were to look at my daily schedule and try to figure out what my job is they would say, “Changing from one set of pajamas into another set of pajamas, staring at her dog, and eating string cheese while staring at a blank Google doc?” The amount of time I actually spend typing words is humiliatingly small. My ego drives a cherry red Porsche to compensate for it.

  Yet I refuse to grow or change. I continue to procrastinate because I like it. I like it because, while it is happening, it feels really, really good. However, I am equal parts “hedonistic goblin” and “people-pleasing chameleon,” and how I think other people see me is perhaps my greatest motivator. I want to do absolutely nothing, and then I want to be recognized for all my hard work.

  This is a habit I’ve been feeding since elementary school. That is when I first felt the joy of being given a task, not doing it until it was absolutely, undeniably necessary, and still getting praise from the teacher. The habit grew hungrier in middle school when I’d complete assignments in study hall immediately before class and still fare better than my classmates. It grew ravenous in high school when I learned I could write a full paper the night before it was due and still get a relatively good grade. The habit, now as much a part of me as arms or my teeth, solidified in college. This was when I declared myself an English major, said quietly to myself, “I will not read even one single book,” and proceeded to scrounge up lukewarm but professor-pleasing takes based off back covers and SparkNotes. College is where some people’s procrastination goblins go to die. It is where mine grew a second head.

  As that goblin grew, so did my desire to be loved and adored or, at the very least, seen as “nice.” Not for any reason in particular, aside from maybe the fact that I am a Midwestern, half-Asian woman. So niceties, submissiveness, and pleasantries are my presumed personality, but I DIGRESS.

  It is with absolute shame that I say I didn’t question much (religion, politics, why boys I liked wouldn’t touch me, why seeing boobs made me want to touch myself) until I graduated from college. Until I was about twenty-one, I would form and voice opinions based on the people around me, and my hobbies adhered to whoever I was in love with at the time. In third grade, I wanted to be a vet because that’s what my best friend, Becky, wanted to be. In seventh grade, I learned The Simpsons theme song on the piano because the boy I liked (who would eventually become my “boyfriend” for two weeks and dump me over AOL Instant Messenger) often quoted the show. As a freshman in college, I thought about learning the rules of hockey because the only boy who expressed interest in making out with me played hockey. (I didn’t learn about hockey. I did make out with him. Baby steps.) If you could procrastinate having a full personality, I was doing that at the whim of the people-pleasing lizard monster I was growing inside of me.

  At the second of the three colleges I attended—yes, of course, my love of procrastination applied to figuring out what I was going to do with my life—I took a public speaking class. It was a general education requirement I’d eventually need to complete. So, for once in my life, I decided not to put off something that would be inevitable.

  Something you need to know about me is I was always, always the person whose report card read, “Has good ideas but needs to speak up more in class.” My internal Molotov cocktail of self-consciousness, anxiety, and general fear of looking stupid would build inside me during class. Any class: math, English, tech ed when I cut my finger open on a coping saw and was like, “Do you think it would bother the teacher if I told her I’m bleeding?” I could never get myself to speak up. When the bell would ring, I would combust silently in the back row, middle seat, both angry that I once again spent an hour saying nothing and relieved that I could finally be done waiting for myself to say nothing and leave. Needless to say, public speaking was not my forte.

  I will call my college public speaking professor “Mr. Y” because that sounds anonymous and also kind of sad for some reason, which—honestly?—perfectly encapsulates him. Mr. Y was a very gentle man in every sense of the word. He spoke gently. He moved gently. He just had a general presence that made you feel like, Shh quiet, baby is sleeping. I don’t remember Mr. Y being a particularly good teacher. This isn’t to say that he wasn’t or isn’t a good teacher; it’s just that I honestly remember very little of what he taught. Maybe that speaks for itself.

  Mr. Y started off our very first public speaking class by telling us a little bit about himself. So little, in fact, that I really only remember him (our public speaking teacher) telling us (the public speaking class) that he had a deep, deep fear of public speaking (the subject he was teaching right now at that moment). He did not say that he previously, in the distant past, was afraid of public speaking and now he was on the other side of that fear, here to tell his tale of triumph. He made it very clear that public speaking was still something he very much feared. So much so, he said, that fear may at times prevent him from coming to class. The public speaking class. That he was teaching.

  In some ways, I respected his honesty. I applauded his vulnerability and willingness to share what clearly affected him on an intimate, personal level. I both admired and envied his ability to tackle the thing he feared head-on, working through it in a direct and inescapable way. I am a greedy skank for other people’s secrets, and I felt privileged to be gifted with one of his. In other ways, this was a college course I was paying money for which added to my growing student debt so, like, maybe this wasn’t the best form of exposure therapy. The class was unconventional, to put it, as Mr. Y would, gently.

  When a student gave a speech, Mr. Y and two of our classmates would grade the speech. We were graded out of five points on things like content and clarity. Mr. Y did this evaluation-by-committee as an effort to grade fairly. However, a thing about college students grading other college students is that none of us were super good at grading on account of . . . we were all students. No one in the class was getting an A, which had less to do with actual performance and more to do with student graders whose entire feedback was, “I just don’t feel like it was a 5 but it was still really good!:):)” The only critique I remember getting over the course of the semester was from a fellow female student who suggested that I “maybe wear a necklace next time.” To this day, I still don’t know what the fuck that meant.

  Because the class average was so low, Mr. Y offered an unlimited number of extra credit assignments to anyone who wanted to bring their grade up. The assignments involved writing summaries on chapters in the public speaking book he had us buy but never actually assigned as reading. Put another way, the infinite extra credit for this public speaking class involved no actual public speaking. I did the extra credit, obviously.

  Since I knew I could easily make up for any poor speech grade, my motivation to work on my speeches dwindled. I would write my speeches the day before class, the night before class, the morning of class. A low point came when I still hadn’t started writing my speech and I was due to present in two hours. Rather than doing the norma
l and sane thing of trying to write some semblance of a speech or asking for an extension, I devised a plan.

  Our speeches required and relied heavily on a visual component. (Again, it wasn’t really the best public speaking class.) I decided I would go to class, speech nowhere close to prepared, and wait until I was called to the front. Then I would walk up, confidently and completely normal like, “This is the good and fine walk of someone who has done her assignment on time and is ready to present.” I’d hand my professor a CD-ROM upon which I’d scrawled in Sharpie something like “Mia Mercado Speech Final Draft 2.” (This was 2009. Google Drive was but a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye.)

  I would watch Mr. Y put the disc into his desktop computer. I would watch the disc get spit out. I would look confused when he would try to put the disc in again and the computer would come up with an error message that read: “Disc empty.” I would shrug and feign confusion like, “Sorry, Professor Who Is Thirty Years Older Than Me and Definitely Didn’t Grow Up with This Technology. Me don’t know computers either!!!”

  I would nod when he suggested that perhaps it was a computer error and follow him to his office to see if he could get it to work there. I would walk a few steps behind him, just in case the cadence of my feet gave me away. (Do I normally walk heel-toe or toe-heel or sashay sideways or backbend into a crab walk or roll like the hard-boiled egg of a human I am?!?) I would watch as he put the disc into a second computer, mimicking panic as it continued to come up empty. “I swear it was working on my computer!” I would lie.

  The whole time I would be well aware that I, an adult person paying hundreds of human dollars for this course, had just handed my college professor a blank CD. I would know full well that the PowerPoint had not been started, let alone completed and burned correctly onto the CD. I would know that he, a gentle and sympathetic person, would feel bad and let me do the presentation the next class session without docking me any points for being late. I would get away with it completely unscathed save for the residual feeling of guilt that I’d carry with me until I died.