by Mia Mercado
A real low came when I spent a good half hour getting ready to go on Omegle. The best part about being a woman is not our prerogative to have a little fun, but how ingrained the concept of “natural beauty” is in our brains. I know how much makeup to put on so I don’t look like I’m wearing makeup but I still register as “woman.” I know how to do my hair so I can say, “Oh, it just does this on its own” and have most straight men go, “Cool.” I signed onto Omegle that night looking my natural best.
I began the night by closing one chat in a panic, thinking I’d somehow matched someone I went to high school with. This was an international website. The likelihood of that actually happening is laughable but did not assuage my “Oh no I’ve been found out” fears. After clicking past more anonymous penises than anyone should ever see, I eventually started chatting with a guy who I thought was cute. My type, for the record, is any man who will look at me. We realized we were the same age, had similar interests, were both doing internships away from home, and were very, very lonely. The last was an unspoken commonality.
We typed back and forth for a few hours on Omegle, our cameras enabled but microphones turned off. I could justify revealing my entire face, a small portion of my bedroom, and the intentional hint of a bra strap to this stranger. But letting him hear my voice? Nope, too personal. In the chat space, we asked each other a range of extremely innocuous to humiliatingly personal questions with zero transitions. It was the kind of conversation you only feel comfortable having with a stranger when you’re nineteen and desperately alone. Eventually, we exchanged Skype names and started video chatting there. After Skyping for a couple weeks, we exchanged phone numbers. We spent the next couple months texting each other all day and video chatting for hours nearly every night.
There isn’t a convincing way to say “All we did was talk” without it sounding like a lie, but truly, all we did was talk. It was exactly what my nineteen-year-old self craved: a boy (!) who would talk (!!) to ME (!!!). It was the kind of connection every person has at least once early into college, where you both are like, “You’re so much different than everyone else. They’re all fake and you’re real.” It felt like the first time maybe ever that I liked someone and they liked me back equally.
The fact that at the end of the summer I flew across the country to meet a stranger I met through Omegle is both wildly uncharacteristic and extremely me. My parents were as concerned as you would expect parents to be when their nineteen-year-old daughter says, “I’m flying to Texas to meet a boy I met on the internet. He’s real, I promise!” He was real, and he was late picking me up from the airport.
We spent five days together in his hometown, just the two of us. I remember it feeling magical and exciting and quietly adding “Texas” to the mental list of places I might live after college. I remember walking through a botanical garden, giggling through an art museum, and driving through a Sonic drive-through, all three feeling equally romantic. I remember telling my mom and my sister how great he was, how much I liked him, how it seemed like he actually liked me, too.
I remember, when I recounted my trip to friends, brushing over the amount of time he and I spent brainstorming fake backstories for me, God forbid someone he knew saw us out together. “I’ll say I’m from . . . Philadelphia?” I suggested thinking it sounded cool but vague. I tried to remember, sitting on the plane ride home, what his face looked like when he asked me to stay in his room after neighbors unexpectedly showed up at his house. “It was probably so I didn’t feel awkward,” I remember convincing myself, like pretending to not exist behind a bedroom door was a normal occurrence. And though I committed to memory the night the girl he’d told me was his ex showed up at his house unexpectedly and he asked me to play invisible in his bedroom again, I didn’t tell anyone about it.
Our pseudo-relationship fizzled almost as soon as it began. About a month after our first meeting, we met for the second and last time. I flew to his college town one weekend after school started, excited to meet his friends and pretend the two of us met “through a random mutual.” As we stayed cooped up in his fraternity house bedroom, running out of things to talk about, I realized something was off. He didn’t want the two of us to hang out with any of his friends, which was difficult because he lived in a frat house. He didn’t want classmates seeing us out eating together, a nearly impossible feat in a college town. After the second night of sitting on his twin bed, I realized he didn’t want people to meet me, the physical embodiment of how lonely he had been this summer. I both resented the instinct and understood it entirely.
When I flew back to Wisconsin, our long-distance chatting turned from something I looked forward to into a chore I felt like I was convincing him to do. I learned that he and his ex maybe hadn’t fully broken up. I realized he was never going to call me his girlfriend. I knew the relationship was officially over when I drunkenly texted him “happy new year” and he responded with something like, “k.”
I haven’t casually dated enough to have any real advice for anyone stuck in the lonely rut that often is casual dating. In case you need a recap, I only spent two weeks on Tinder, and I also bought a $300 plane ticket to meet up with someone from Omegle. My dating experience exists on the two extremes of the casual dating spectrum. Sometimes dating feels like hopping between different kinds of loneliness. Sometimes you spend half a year video chatting with a stranger and realize you’ve learned a lot about yourself in the process. I learned that I am more spontaneous than I believed myself to be. Also, I’m a natural at the didgeridoo.
Treating Objects like Women
Hey, Remote. What are you doing way over there? Why don’t you come over here so I can treat you like a remote deserves to be treated? What I mean is, I’m going to push your buttons. But, like, really well. I said I’m gonna push your buttons really well! Why are you ignoring me, Remote? Are you calling me lazy? Think I can’t get up and turn you on? I mean, turn the TV on. See, now you got me all flustered. It wasn’t a compliment or anything because I’m pretty sure TVs require you to use the remote in order to even change the channel now. So, shut up, whatever. I WANTED TO WATCH NETFLIX ON MY COMPUTER ANYWAY.
Damn, Bathroom Floor. Are you trying to kill me looking like that? Because a lot of accidental deaths occur in the bathroom. I bet I could make you so wet after I took a shower and realized I should really buy a bath mat and shower curtains and maybe a more absorbent towel.
What’s up, Netflix? Where’s that square-faced smile I like? You down to marathon? What do you mean, “Am I still watching?” Yeah, I’m still watching. You can’t tell me not to watch. It’s a free country. I can still watch. Don’t put the entirety of the Final Destination franchise in my face if you don’t want me to watch all five movies at once. Again, it is a free country, and you can’t take that right away. Who do you think you are? Hulu? YOU’RE NO HULU.
Hulu. Hey, Hulu. Whoa, whoa hold on—why’d you just throw out that you’re “subscription-only” now? Maybe I have a subscription somewhere else. Maybe I wasn’t even looking to watch anything. Maybe I was just checking to see if you have any updates to your user interface. I can do that without a subscription. Not everybody that checks your site is looking for a subscription. I didn’t even bring up subscriptions. You did. And you know that I could get your log-in information if I wanted to. I could get the log-in information of literally any subscription-based streaming service here, SO YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY I EVEN CAME TO YOU, DAMN.
I wish you had a twin, Sock I Found Under the Couch.
Hey, Cutie. Oh, you’re one of those Halo oranges? My bad.
You come to this little spot often, Roomba?
Smile more, Mirror.
I’m gonna tear you up for real, Expired Coupon from Target for a Toothpaste I Never Buy.
Excuse me, Leftovers in the Back of the Fridge? I was just wondering what you are. Like, where are you from? Are you Chinese? No? Are you sure? Are you Mexican? You look like you could be Mexican. You sure you’re no
t Mexican? I have a lot of friends who go to Mexican restaurants, so I can usually tell. Oh, are you from one of those Asian fusion restaurants? I just want to know because I love Asian fusion restaurants. I DON’T CARE THAT I CAN’T HAVE YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE MY ROOMMATE’S LEFTOVERS. JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU ARE, BITCH.
A Nice Piece of Satire You Can Take Home To Your Parents
You make a trip home to visit your parents, and they ask the question you’ve been dreading: “So . . . have you been seeing any new satirical articles lately?”
Of course you have. You’re reading the best satire of your life. With modern technology and social networking, you have access to more humor than your parents could have imagined when they were your age. You’re a young adult, living in a blue city, with a presence on every major social media platform. All you do is skim satirical articles.
But you can’t tell them that. Your parents don’t want to hear about the night you spent cozied up to a Twitter thread accurately comparing Trump to a misbehaving toddler (and not just because you can’t even remember the handle of the person who tweeted it). You and your parents want very different things in a piece of humor. And it’s nearly impossible to find a McSweeney’s in the sheets and a syndicated Modern Family episode in the streets.
Remember Chewbacca Mom? God, they loved Chewbacca Mom. Why can’t you find something that’s like Chewbacca Mom but just words? Maybe you could watch Chewbacca Mom on mute and read the captions together? That has to be some form of social commentary you can agree on, right?
Nobody wants a repeat of the time your parents caught you swiping through headlines on The Onion, and you made the mistake of thinking it’d be something you could enjoy together. You had to keep explaining this isn’t what people are talking about when they call something “fake news.” Then it became this whole thing when they realized you don’t actually read the articles. (“How can you even know anything about a piece when you’re swiping so quickly?!”)
As open-minded as your parents want to say they are, they’re just not going to like an imagined dialogue between Melania Trump and the Statue of Liberty, two women designed as decorative gifts from foreign nations. They want someone dressed as the Statue of Liberty reading the Declaration of Independence in Melania’s voice. To which you’ll say you want something with a sense of humor. And they’ll say that does have a sense of humor. And now you’re watching Chewbacca Mom for the fiftieth time.
This is usually when your mom brings up something she saw on Facebook. “Did you see your cousin Bethany found the perfect mash-up of a golden retriever dancing to that song from Trolls? Doesn’t she just seem so happy?” You ask if she means Bethany or the golden retriever. Nobody laughs.
You’ll have to remind yourself their intentions are good when they try setting you up with Aunt Jacqueline’s email chain. You didn’t even know you had an Aunt Jacqueline, let alone want to commit to her weekly messages probably filled with screenshots of the Yahoo! home page. Regardless, you say you’ll think about it.
You know they just want you to be happy, even if they’ll never see what you see in someone like John Oliver. Perhaps one day, you’ll run into an essay when you least expect it, and it’ll make you laugh in a way you haven’t in a while. A piece that somehow agrees with you politically without seeming political at all. A piece that transcends bubbles while still acknowledging them. And you’ll think, “I can’t wait to tell my parents about you.” Until then, you’ll always have Chewbacca Mom.
I Don’t Know How to Be a Bride
Riley and I got engaged in the summer of 2017. We were both in bed—him about to go to sleep, me doing a crossword puzzle—when he started playing what I thought was a podcast. This is pretty standard for our nightly routine. Yes, it is very cute, and yes, you should clap. The podcast sounded weird and I didn’t recognize it, so I asked Riley, “What is this?” Then the theme song to Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams’s 2 Dope Queens started playing, and I said, “Oh, okay,” and went back to my crossword.
Then the episode started talking about Tinder and didgeridoos, something extremely specific to my experience with Tinder. The “podcast” was actually a mash-up of sorts that Riley made, combining clips from our favorite songs and shows and Michelle Obama speeches into one aural love fest. If you’re wondering what the whitest way to get engaged is, it’s through a custom podcast. I can say that because I am half-white and have lots of friends who do podcasts. His proposal was essentially a twenty-five-minute audio tour of all our inside jokes. It ended with a bunch of voicemail messages from family and friends from all parts of my life. It is still the best gift I’ve ever received, and it still makes me sob. If you listened to it you’d probably be like, “I don’t get it.”
He proposed using this shitty ring I found in our silverware drawer that I’d wear sometimes because my taste, like the ring, is shitty. We planned on exchanging actual rings at the wedding ceremony after a conversation about getting married months before the proposal.* The conversation went something like this:
HIM: Do you want an engagement ring?
ME: Do you have to wear an engagement ring and a wedding ring?
HIM: I don’t know.
ME: That seems like too many rings.
HIM: Okay.
We thought about both of us exchanging faux engagement rings, but we quickly realized that would require just so much explanation to all our family. I’m sure there is some traditional, beautiful, patriarchal reason why women get engagement rings and men don’t, but I don’t want my Google ads to be heteronormative nonsense and T-shirts that say “HE LIKED IT SO HE PUT A RING ON IT” for the rest of forever. I already had to explain, every time someone asked to see the ring, why I didn’t have an engagement ring, and no, I wasn’t upset, and yes, I was sure.
The thing no one tells you about getting engaged is how quickly everyone asks you every single detail about the wedding. The questions are well-intentioned and kind, but also just so, so funny. Like, do you think in the twelve hours since we’ve been officially engaged we’ve nailed down a date, a venue, a caterer, who’s invited, what we’re wearing, and the seating arrangement? Could you imagine how truly bonkers that would be? People would call the cops.
While both Riley and I are very much planners, him admittedly more so than me, we knew little about planning an actual wedding. Especially in terms of what people expect out of a wedding.
To understand how little I know about wedding planning, once I brought taco dip to a wedding shower after misreading the invitation to an almost impressive degree. It said to bring your favorite vegetarian recipe. I, for some reason, misinterpreted that as “bring a dish to share.” I showed up with a bag of Tostitos, a giant pan of taco dip, and zero actual gifts.
If you thought since that mishap I’d learned my wedding shower lesson, I assure you, I did not! More recently, I was at a bridal shower, surrounded by panties, prayer cards, and also the bride’s grandmother, and all I wanted to do was scream, “WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON HERE?” I didn’t, which, honestly, does show growth. However, the invitation said to bring a pair of cute panties in lieu of a card. My brain went “Cool, cool, so just the underwear then,” and once again, I! Didn’t! Bring! A GIFT!!!
This was far from a political act or something rooted in some personal vendetta; I honestly just didn’t know how many and what type of gifts are expected in all the events leading up to a wedding. Also, what would you even do with seven silky bathrobes?!? If it’s any consolation to the brides, these shining examples of me not understanding how to appropriately act at wedding showers is what keeps me up at night.
Riley and I had a co-ed wedding shower because a family friend was kind enough to organize one. We told people not to bring gifts because we already somehow had three toasters and did not need any more. Unlike me, everyone followed directions.
If you’re in need of a good gift for any occasion—bridal shower, wedding, birthday, an apology for bringing taco dip when you weren’t sup
posed to—I have one that is perfect for any and all celebrations: money. Just give the couple some money! I don’t know who in the Bible Belt said money was a thoughtless gift, but I would like to talk to them, hand them a twenty, then take it away and ask who’s thoughtless now. Having a Kitchen-Aid Stand Mixer does give me little homemaking butterflies in my stomach, but you know how else I can get a KitchenAid Stand Mixer? With some money that you give me!
Our wedding registry consisted of one item, and that item was money. Actually, it said to not worry about gifts since more than half our guests would be traveling for the wedding. However, if they wanted to give us something, our favorite color is cash.
The wedding planning process is so strange. You have to know how many people you want to invite before you can find a venue before you can figure out what food you’re going to order before you can decide how much alcohol to buy. It’s a party planning logic puzzle where the clues are like “Two of your aunts don’t get along but you can’t ask which ones” and “Your cousin said ‘No bread’ but you don’t know if that’s an allergy or a preference.”
Riley and I planned our wedding together, pretty much just the two of us. This, I learned, was an anomaly. “That’s so nice he’s helping you plan!” people would say. “Wow, you’re letting him make decisions?” they’d joke. Not because I’m some controlling, Type A, “I’m in charge of the group project” bitch. I mean, I am, but the assumption was that I, the female bride in this heterosexual union, would be doing the decision making for the wedding. I barely like deciding what to eat for dinner. The idea of being solely responsible for researching, narrowing down, and decided dozens of things for 120-plus people is my personal version of hell.