Weird but Normal

by Mia Mercado

  More than once, I stole socks and a bra from my mom’s dresser to essentially play “boobs.” I’d lock myself in the bathroom, put on my mom’s bra (which was bigger and therefore hornier than mine), and stick balled up socks in each cup to fill it out. I did this over all my clothes and with zero awareness about the Oedipus-adjacent complex I was living out.

  The orgasm-less climax of this confusing pent-up sexual energy happened while bopping around on the extremely old computer my dad had set up in the basement. It was an old, boxy Macintosh that barely had a functioning word processor. Our family only kept it to use as a play computer in the basement because my dad never throws away anything ever. Sometimes I would play around on the computer’s calculator, adding 1 + 1 and hitting “equals” as fast as I could, seeing how high I could get the sum to go and how quickly. (The things I found boring and the things I found exciting in middle school are almost indistinguishable.) One time, while going to open the calculator application, I noticed another app I hadn’t ever opened labeled “phone.”

  I knew this computer wasn’t connected to the internet or a phone line and that the “phone” function had no way of actually working. So, I decided to play “phone.” In the same way you can track someone’s internet rabbit hole by going through their browser history, you could see my game of “phone” progress from dipping a toe (dialing our home number) to playfully splashing (dialing “911”) to flirtatiously splashing (“calling” Taylor, a cute boy whose number I’d memorized with the intention to never call him ever—very normal and chill!) to swan diving into soaking wet oblivion. When I realized you could type letters into the phone, I lost my horny mind and “called” every boy I’d ever had a crush on. Then, pulse racing in my chest and my pants, I typed the words “sexy sex-filled breasts” and pressed “call.”

  Did I think “sex-filled breasts” were a real, physical thing? Did I hear the phrase “heaving bosom” once and decide to take some creative liberties? Did I want a pair of boobs to answer the phone???

  To my simultaneous relief and dismay, nothing happened. As if “sexy sex-filled breasts” hadn’t maxed out the horny words I knew, I went to type some more. When I did, a dropdown list of every number and phrase I’d typed popped up. I panicked.

  I closed out the application and re-opened it. “Sexy sex-filled breasts” was still there. I restarted the computer and opened the phone app back up. Still saw “sexy sex-filled breasts”—again, the words, not a picture. I typed in a bunch of gibberish, “called” a bunch of fake numbers, hoping to push “breasts” off the list. They remained.

  I resigned to the fact that I would inevitably be found out. That my parents, who would certainly have the impulse to use the nonfunctioning phone application on this barely functioning computer, would see my “sexy sex-filled breasts” and disown me or banish me to hell or both. I wish I could go back and tell twelve-year-old me not to fear or feel ashamed, that literally no one would find out about my “sexy sex-filled breasts” until I wrote it down eight times in this book.

  Attention Target Shoppers: This Store Is Now Rife with Sexual Tension

  While recently checking out at Target, the cashier struck up a conversation with me and asked what I was drinking. This is a pretty standard Target experience. Because it was near the holidays and because I am exactly the kind of person you think I am, I was drinking a peppermint mocha I bought at the Starbucks inside the store. She misheard me or misinterpreted me or mistook me for someone much bolder and, for some reason, thought I was referring to my vagina as a “peppermint mocha.” I still am not sure what the fuck that even means. Our conversation ended with her telling me to make sure I get someone to “drink” my “peppermint mocha” because “it’s Christmas” and I deserve it. It is the best sexual education I have ever received. Anyways, I have a theory that Target stores are corporately obligated to be extremely sexual. This is what a realistic store announcement would sound like. Please read it aloud in a breathy, perky, and kind of horny way.

  * * *

  Hey, Target Shoppers! Just a reminder that the store will be closing in twelve hours. You may think this is a premature announcement, but we know how much you like to take your time wink wink and also nudge nudge. We do understand how these Target runs often go: you come with the intention to quickly grab laundry detergent and toothpaste, get summoned by the siren call of our clearance racks, eventually finding your limbs entangled in a mess of 80-percent-off plaids and thin cardigans with small pockets. Suddenly, it’s 10 p.m., you’ve abandoned your spouse and children, and still haven’t made your way to the Tide Pods. We want to make sure you have plenty of time to stare longingly at a pair of $10.99 fake Keds, biting your lip while whispering, “I shouldn’t . . . should I?”

  We know you don’t think of this as just another shopping trip; it’s some much needed “me time.” At Target, we know the only places women find a moment for themselves are in giant bubble baths or while retail shopping. Target is one of those places where a woman can really let her guard down. It is perhaps the only space she feels safe enough to spend a full twenty minutes lost in a manicured fantasy as she touches one of our seven thousand bottles of nail polish. Men shop with a purpose (tires, sports pants, beef jerky, condoms). Women shop for pleasure (shoes to look at but not walk in, blouses that caress you in places no man ever would, big zucchini but not for the reason you’re thinking).

  We’ve just been informed of a situation in aisle 7 where a group of Target shoppers (known as an “orgy”) have fallen into an endless loop of complimenting each other’s handbags back and forth. Please do not use this as an invitation to go to aisle 7 and look at the bags. Yes, they are from Target, and yes, they were on sale.

  In the meantime, have you signed up for a Target RedCard yet? What about our Cartwheel coupons? Are you familiar with Target’s rewards program? That’s the one where we make sure our fitting room attendants don’t judge you for trying on a mountain of $8.99 tees that will shrink the second you put them on at home. A new shirt feels as good as sex if you’ve never experienced sexual pleasure even once.

  Looking for a gift for your friend’s baby shower? A card for your friend’s birthday? A quick romantic fling built around a shared love of discount jeggings? What about buy four, get one free super plus boxes of tampons, you capitalist li’l skank? Target has everything you need and even more things you don’t but will buy anyway. Plus, screaming about how they got their pants on sale is as close as most straight women ever get to cumming.

  Make sure you don’t miss our Archer Farms brand pasta deal! For a limited time only (which starts right now and ends when the world does) you can get a $5 Target gift card when you buy just thirteen boxes of dry macaroni. You’re not going to find a deal like that at Walmart! Lick our ass, Amazon! What are you going to do with that much macaroni? Who cares! It’s about the experience you’ll get in the store when the woman behind you in the checkout line demurely asks, “Did you get that on sale?” And you’ll turn around, flirtatiously bat your eyelashes, and say, “I always do.”

  Here at Target, we do things a little differently. We know that straight men have space to express their sexuality through things like actual sex. Ladies, on the other hand, have chocolate commercials, Venus razors, the idea of a buff man standing near an ironing board, long-wear lipstick, eating a muffin with chocolate chips in it to “be a little bad,” gently touching swaths of soft fabric, shiny hair that holds a curl, slimming tunics, and perfume samples.

  Sorry, did you say you were looking for . . . lube. Shh, shh, keep your voice down. Yeah, of course we sell lube—we’re Target. We’ve got everything. If you can’t find something you’re looking for in store (vibrators, erotic massagers, something that looks like lipstick but definitely isn’t) or something you’re too ashamed by your female sexuality to buy (see aforementioned list), Target.com has everything you need that you don’t want to make eye contact with another person in order to get.

  Thank you for sh
opping at Target. Expect More. Pay Less. Fingerbang a Glade candle at a discounted price.

  How to Date Online

  I came of age in the early ’00s when chat rooms were associated with the seedy underbelly of cyberspace and AOL mailed free internet minutes they stuck inside CD-ROMs somehow. Dating apps were barely a twinkle in a future Silicon Valley bro’s eye when I was learning about the dos and don’ts of dating. If you would have told twelve-year-old Mia that now we all use full names and email addresses and put daily pictures of ourselves online, twelve-year-old Mia’s parents would have overheard you and been like, “The internet cannot know your last name or see your face! Do you want to die?!?”

  I was twenty-four and fresh out of a long-term relationship—one in which I’d felt lonely and stagnant and ready for newness—when I first saw dating apps as a viable option. A couple of my friends said I should try Tinder, giving me permission to do a thing I definitely wanted to do. I’d said I wanted something new and that’s basically Tinder’s business model: a brand-new person on your phone every time you swipe. Creating an account with a group of friends rather than alone in my living room took some of the sad and lonely “me want dick!!!” energy out of the process. Out of a combination of curiosity and the deep and constant desire for affirmation, I created a profile.

  I had Tinder for an entire fifteen days. If I had to guess based on my experience and the comparative experience of friends and family, this is the perfect amount of time to be on Tinder. In that two-ish weeks, I learned a lot about the single, twenty-four- to thirty-year-old men in the greater Kansas City area. Too much, some might say. (Me. Me would say that.) For example:

  You can just be a person in the world who lists “Travelling Cunnilingist” on a dating app profile. There is a person in the world—specifically within zero to twenty-five miles of my world—who had that as the entire contents of his bio.

  1.1To be fair, my entire bio was just a pizza emoji. (It’s called being aloof and chill and in total denial about your lack of either. Ever heard of it?) Both the Travelling Cunnilingist and I exist on the same spectrum of terrible dating app profiles. I will say, though, that I rarely trust a straight man who is adamant about how much he loves to go down on women. Like it’s some act of bravery or he’s a feminist activist. Like his willingness to, God forbid, please a woman is symbol of his allyship. No thank you. I would rather fuck myself.

  If you’ve never had the pleasure/curse of looking at a dating app, everything people say about straight men’s pictures* is true. I can’t tell you the number of dogs and national monuments, guys with girls they claim they aren’t dating, and guys with children they adamantly specify they haven’t fathered I swiped through in a mere fifteen days.

  My racial ambiguity is an icebreaker that transcends every space, as evidenced by one of the first messages I got, which read, “Three tries to guess each other’s ethnicity?” I gave him exactly zero.

  While I did not match with the guy whose hobbies and interests were exclusively “butt rubs and pizza,” I now have the title for my new mixtape.

  You think you’ve seen it all, and then you see someone who’s used two of their five pictures to pay homage to their deceased mother with screenshotted Snapchat photos that read “RIP MOMMY” in red swoopy lettering. Also, now I’ve got to add “Future children must create mini-obituaries for me in any and all dating profiles” to my will.

  A moment of clarity came when I was presented with a person who, at the end of a long “About Me” that listed his appreciation for standard interests like sports and travel and coffee, ended his bio with, “I prefer the original definition of marriage.” Homophobia was as crucial and casual a part of his personality as having been to Cabo once. And while I had zero intention of swiping right, I STILL CLICKED THROUGH HIS PICTURES. His bio was like, “People of the Jury of Tinder Mia’s Brain: We all know what kind of person I am, or at the very least, what kind of person I want to present myself as. We all know this will go nowhere given my loud stance against marriage equality. Or perhaps by “original definition of marriage” I mean the one in which a woman is viewed as the property of a man. Or maybe the one where you give a guy a goat and are then entitled to all his daughters or something like that. Whatever the case may be, all parties present know this would never and should never work out. Buuut, like, you should probably just check my pics to see if I have any where I’m not wearing a hat or you can see my face from a different angle.”

  After swiping right on a few profiles that weren’t entirely horrifying, I went on a total of two dates. The first was very okay, which I’ve since learned is a success story in terms of Tinder dates. The second was equally okay until he pulled out his didgeridoo.

  That’s not a euphemism. My date took out a literal didgeridoo and just . . . started playing it. I’d turned around for a second to pet his dog (also not a euphemism), and when I looked back, there he was, nose-deep in a didgeridoo. If you’re not familiar, didgeridoos are long, tubular instruments. There’s some debate about whether they’re in the wind or brass family. There is zero debate about whether they’re something you just whip out thirty minutes after you meet someone.

  Not to sound inexperienced, but this was the first time I’d heard a didgeridoo in person. The noise was startling, to say the least. I’m not sure what warning he could have given other than “Wanna hear what it’d sound like if a boat had a sinus infection?” If you’ve ever been surprised by a baritone fart that somehow sounded kind of nasally, you know exactly what it’s like to suddenly hear a didgeridoo.

  If you’re wondering where you even look when someone is playing an intimate didgeridoo concert, the answer is I still don’t know. Eye contact seemed intrusive, but staring right at the didgeridoo seemed worse? I’m familiar with the awkward romantic serenade—no straight woman attends a liberal arts college without hearing “Can I play ‘Wonderwall’ for you?” from an English major named Brenden at least once—but the didgeridoo is not particularly melodic. It’s more like “Can I play this one sustained note from ‘Wonderwall’ for you?”

  Still, my date continued to proudly bellow on the instrument—a four-foot-long instrument that he brought home on a plane from Australia—that he’d later tell me he’s “dabbling in.”

  “Oh . . . okay,” I said after my date finished his song/note.

  “Do you want to play it?” he asked, sincerely, with no hint of innuendo whatsoever.

  We didn’t go on a second date, and I deleted Tinder pretty soon after. This is, in great part, because I met Riley a few days after the didgeridoo date. Had I not met Riley, I’d probably still be on Tinder, eventually having swiped right on the Travelling Cunnilingist and using my proficiency with the didgeridoo to cover my deep sobs of loneliness.

  It’s strange how lonely casual dating can be. But being lonely in a relationship is equally strange. It’s very “alone in a crowded room,” but that crowded room is just two people on a couch watching Netflix on separate devices and asking what the other wants to do for dinner back and forth forever. However, that loneliness also comes with the comfort of knowing you’re with someone who at least cares about you to some degree. There is zero comfort or care in Tinder or its dating app ilk.

  Sitting alone in your dark bedroom, a glass of wine in hand, expressionlessly swiping through profiles is one of the most isolating ways to meet people. However, playing Tinder—let’s not kid ourselves, Tinder is basically Candy Crush, but the candy is dicks—with friends in the room with me was more fun than I should admit. It was like the board game Dream Phone but Steve isn’t just on a playing card; he’s real and has a shirtless picture and oh my god, he’s messaging you right now.

  The second I opened up Tinder when I was by myself, I felt a familiar kind of loneliness. It was one I’d felt years before when I spent nights sitting on Omegle for hours. If you weren’t in college in the early 2010s, you likely missed the random video chat website phenomenon. Sites like Chatroulette and Omegle wou
ld access your microphone, webcam, and last shred of innocence and randomly pair two users up to video chat. What could possibly go wrong with that?

  My friend Sami, who taught me what sperm isn’t and has seen me cry onstage to “Wind Beneath My Wings,” introduced me to Omegle a few weeks before I left for a summer-long internship in San Francisco. Playing Omegle with Sami was extremely fun. Our Omegle game went like this: We’d try to find someone to talk to, telling each other we’d be down to chat with “literally anyone who seems cool!” while both separately hoping to find random groups of college boys to flirt at. We’d begin clicking, hoping we wouldn’t be randomly paired up with someone showing their penis (oh wow shock gasp can you believe that’s what these sites eventually turned into?), and screaming whenever we inevitably saw a stranger’s penis.

  Omegle was my pre-Tinder Tinder. During that summer in San Francisco, I would spend a humiliating amount of time clicking “new” to generate a random video chat. Then, I’d start a riveting dialogue with strangers like “Hey” and “What’s up?” The only time I have ever experienced an earthquake, I was video chatting with someone on Omegle. I thought a car had hit my aunt and uncle’s house and I ran out of the room to see what happened. When I returned, house and humans unharmed, the guy I was chatting with didn’t believe I’d just experienced a minor earthquake. He thought I was trying to find a reason to hang up, called me a bitch, and hung up on me.

  Unless you gave any identifying information to whoever you were chatting with, ending the video chat had no consequences. You were anonymous, aside from the part where you showed your full face and whatever bits of your body you felt like. It was the perfect place for me to get instant affirmation from people far too old or far too young to be affirming me.