Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  So I’m known to leap past levels, but, more impressive, three months into my relationship with #28, I actually created a level all on my own.

  I call it the bladder-oversharing level.

  One night in early April I was making dinner at #28’s house. Lucky for me, he was used to cooking for two kids and didn’t have a history of foodies in his past relationships, so my cooking struck him as interesting and exotic and not-pizza. As the smell of red curry and Thai basil wafted through his kitchen for probably the first time ever, I felt like a culinary ambassador.

  He was standing in the kitchen with me, leaning on the counter and chatting as I cooked. It was a deeply domestic scene, and the significance of it wasn’t lost on me.

  At one point, he said something funny. At that same moment, tragically, I happened to be gnawing on a chunk of baby carrot. I proceeded to inhale a relatively large chunk of carrot, which caused me to start coughing. And not just small, ladylike coughing but the kind of full-body hacking that happens when your esophagus believes it’s in a life-or-death struggle with a vegetable.

  And that’s when it happened.

  I pretty much peed my pants. (I was wearing a skirt, but you get the idea.)

  It wasn’t one long pants-peeing but a series of smaller cough-induced urine explosions that soon escaped the bounds of the urine-soaked crotch area until it wasn’t just a pants-peeing anymore, it was a shoes-peeing.

  One would think that in a situation like this, I’d be with my esophagus—just straight up putting all my energy into surviving this carrot battle—but all my brain could think was Did I just fucking pee on my boyfriend’s floral kitchen mat? Did that just happen?

  He asked me if I was okay and could he help and could he get me some water and I kept shaking my head no as if to say, Don’t come near me! I’m a monster.

  Finally, the coughing fit ended.

  I stood there in my pee shoes and wished for a teleportation device that never came.

  “Do you need anything?” he asked.

  I don’t know, I thought. Adult diapers? A pressure washer? A time machine so I can go back and tell four-years-ago-me to do more Kegels?

  At this point I was still in denial about him finding out; my mind raced with ways that I could distract him long enough to get upstairs and shower.

  Should I start a fire? I could start a small one—not big enough to do any real damage, just big enough so that the cleanup would take approximately twenty minutes. I wonder what percentage of house fires are started by people who just peed their pants and are trying to cover it up.

  I finally decided I had to tell him because the small pool of urine at my feet was going to give me away no matter what. I mean, unless the entire kitchen was engulfed in flames.

  “Um. Underwear?” I responded. “Pretty sure I just peed my pants.”

  Ah, intimacy.

  Those memorable thresholds we cross, like the first kiss, the first time you cry in front of your partner, and the first root-vegetable-induced bladder explosion.

  So here it is. Here’s the first moment that I can’t hide my humanity from you, no matter how hard I try.

  I thought back to the reasonably well-dressed and well-spoken bon vivant I’d presented myself as on the second date. That was such a cute skirt. It didn’t have any pee on it.

  I remembered the social butterfly I became when he met all my friends on Valentine’s Day.

  And then there was the decent cook who enjoyed a good laugh, the person he’d known just three minutes before.

  Dead. They were all dead.

  Or not dead, exactly, but definitely flailing around on the wet kitchen floor and needing to be woven into a new, incontinent version of me.

  He ran upstairs to get me a pair of his boxer-briefs, which I knew wouldn’t look as sexy on me as they did on Justin Bieber, so I was going to turn them down.

  I went into his guest bathroom and took off my wet underwear while he was gone and (I’m sorry about this, I really, really am) put them in my purse.2 Thankfully, there wasn’t enough collateral damage to my skirt to make it unwearable. I pulled it off, put my foot into the sink, splashed water all the way up my leg and onto the floor in another puddle, then did the same with the other foot. I used his hand towel to dry…everything and then refolded it and put it back on the towel rack so that the unused side was available to future guests who hadn’t peed themselves.

  When I emerged from the bathroom, he offered me the boxer briefs and asked again if there was anything he could do. I told him to stay out of the kitchen for a couple of minutes and he went and sat on the couch. I cleaned up the floor and the floral kitchen mat using paper towels and Lysol, wondering why his kitchen didn’t have a biomedical waste-disposal unit.

  All the while, I was wondering how one brings sexy back after an incident like this. Justin Timberlake probably never peed his pants while making dinner for Jessica Biel. I mean, what am I, eighty? Or rather, what is my vagina, eighty? (“I’m not eighty, but my vagina is!”—Worst pickup line ever.)

  Three months is a significant moment in a relationship. It’s often that fish-or-cut-bait point, where you’ve gotten semiserious but not totally serious, when you start to think, I’ve already invested three months in this. Is there enough there to invest more, or should I come up with an escape plan?

  Complicating matters during this time is that you’re still deeply in the limerence phase of love. This is a word coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov to describe that phase of love where you’re still obsessed with the other person—his desires, his feelings, what it feels like when he touches you, what he’ll look like in a tux on your wedding day. It’s that one to two-year phase when you’re not thinking clearly because your neurons are all clogged with lust and misguided hope. Limerence is probably why some relationships that are doomed last a bit longer than they otherwise would.

  But if anything can break through the fog of limerence, it’s a splash of pee.

  This is what was going through my head as I finished cooking dinner and we chatted.

  HIM: Anyway, I think we’ll be able to get the project back on schedule, as long as things go smoothly this week.

  MY BRAIN: I’m sorry…I didn’t hear what you just said. I peed my pants earlier.

  I was distracted for most of the remaining food prep—to the point that I’m lucky to still have all my fingers—but then we finished cooking and sat down and had a lovely meal, and I forgot a little. (Give me the right entrée, and I’ll forget I accidentally ran over someone with my car.)

  Then we retired to the couch, where we chatted some more, made a couple of hilarious adult-diaper jokes, then made out. So he must’ve forgotten a little too.

  It turns out, sexy did come back, and just a couple of hours later.

  The only way I can explain it is that I was dating someone who liked humans.

  I woke up the next morning and cooked breakfast without incident. I looked across the table at him as I ate my eggs and realized that while I wasn’t planning on testing the boundaries of his affection for me like that again, I almost definitely would. Again and again, against my will.

  Why do I know this?

  Because I once put a tiny candy bar down my pants so I wouldn’t eat it.

  Because I cry when I get angry, which makes me angrier.

  Because I like John Denver. Unironically.

  These are bombs that are just waiting to go off someday. And they will go off.

  Relationships are all fun and games until someone pees her pants or likes John Denver.

  And that’s where the real intimacy begins—when you realize the other person can forgive, disinfect his kitchen, and move on with his affection for you largely intact. And when that happens, your affection for him grows because of it.

  I think falling in love is half attraction to the best parts of someone and half gratitude for that person’s ability to forgive the worst parts of you.

  Whatever the reason, we seemed to b
e falling for each other, so if you’re looking for relationship advice, I’m kind of an expert now. I just tell people to buy a family-size can of Lysol and hope for the best.

  1 Zero. That’s how many naked people I saw dangling from ropes from December to April. If you’re keeping track, that’s a 400 percent decrease in dangling naked people from three months earlier.

  2 Yes, I know it’s bad, but y’know what? You pee all over your boyfriend’s kitchen floor, and then I’ll allow you to judge me. If it makes you feel any better, I was able to wrap the nonwet parts pretty well around the wet parts. But it was still disgusting.

  The MRI

  Wherein I Go on a Medical Adventure of My Own Making and It Is Louder Than Expected

  Turning forty has so many perks.

  Crepey skin. Back problems. Crushing regret.

  But my favorite perk by far is the thing most of us see happening to our parents—you know, the ones who refer to Kiefer Sutherland as “Southern Kieferland.”

  It’s called mild aphasia—or word-finding issues—and it happens to some degree to all people as they age.

  I noticed it for the first time while doing a weekly guest spot on a popular Portland podcast called Cort and Fatboy. The title sounds like the show had a lot of ah-ooga! horns and fart noises, but it was actually quite smart.

  It was a pop-culture/sci-fi/“Why did this TV reboot ruin my childhood?” podcast, and Bobby, aka “Fatboy,” the producer of the show, was an encyclopedia of arcane pop-culture knowledge. If you were trying to come up with a name, all you had to say was something like “Oh, you know…the kid from that show with the kids and the other kid died of an overdose?”

  “Johnny Whitaker from Family Affair?”

  Yes. Holy shit.

  Compared to him, anyone would feel slow on the uptake, but in the beginning I thought I could hold my own.

  After a year or so, I noticed that I was stopping a lot to ask for movie titles and I would get caught mid-quip because the name of the person I was lambasting would exit my head forever without leaving a forwarding address.

  Oh yeah? Well, tell that to Gary Busey! was what I’d want to quip in response to a crack made by one of the boys.

  What would come out was “Tell that to…that guy with the big teeth who got in a motorcycle accident and lost his shit on Celebrity Apprentice that one time.”

  Doesn’t have quite the same sting.

  At the time, I was still hosting Live Wire!, and when you’re already anxious about looking like an idiot in front of four hundred people, the fact that you no longer trust your brain makes the situation untenable.

  I would research guests for hours, trying to get an angle on them that no one else had, and I’d embed the details of their careers and my questions into my brain so that I’d never draw a blank. But I did draw blanks, despite careful preparation.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that, at least in part, the anxiety itself was what was making my brain unreliable.

  When you’re under stress, your body releases cortisol, also known as “the stress hormone” and “kind of a dick.” I don’t mean to disparage cortisol because it does some good jobs, like shutting down unnecessary bodily functions so you can deal with whatever is causing the anxiety. If you have a bear eyeing you like you’re his dinner, for instance, cortisol tells your digestive system to stand down for a while so that your more important survival techniques—such as running like the dickens—can have all the resources they need.

  However, the downside of cortisol is that it erodes away the synapses—the connections between the neurons—in the prefrontal cortex, which is where the brain houses short-term memory.1

  Ever notice that you’re least likely to remember where you left your keys those times when you’re in a massive hurry? And if you’re nervous on a date, you suddenly can’t remember the name of your second child? (“I’m pretty sure it starts with an L…or maybe a P? Anyway, it’ll come to me eventually. Let’s talk about you!”)

  You can thank cortisol for that shit.

  Like I said—kind of a dick.

  And because of the weekly dread ball that grew in my chest every time I hosted Live Wire!, cortisol and I became very well acquainted.

  The show always featured comedy—original sketches, stand-up comics, essayists, and interviews, which very often took a humorous turn, even with seemingly serious folks like Susan Orlean and Chuck Palahniuk.2

  As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, it was the interviews that made me the most anxious. Those unscripted moments were when my synapses needed to fire faster than they did in any other part of the show, but, ironically enough, it was that very anxiety that slowed them down to a crawl.

  While written work might be well crafted and satisfying in its own way, an off-the-cuff bon mot that hits hard can make the audience feel honored to be there. And the magic of any great improvised performance is that not only is the performer being wildly clever, she’s doing it in a situation where she has to push through the murk of increased cortisol. It’s an extraordinary talent, and I was able to access it enough to make me good at my job but not enough to make me great.

  I started compensating by going deeper in interviews instead of trying to be funnier. It masked the problem but didn’t make it go away.

  If you’re still young and spry and you’ve never had word-finding issues, fuck you.

  I kid. Let me try that again: If you’re still young and spry and you’ve never had word-finding issues, let me explain how it feels.

  Imagine that the words in your brain are in a gigantic labyrinthine library, with each word represented by a book spine that, in your youth, you were able to pull down and access immediately. Every day, there are more and more of those books that no one reshelved because your neurons have gotten lazy over time, and you have to wander through the aisles to find them because you weren’t really paying attention in school when they covered the Dewey Decimal system. You might see the book on a cart someone’s pushing away from you, so you run after it. Sometimes you catch up to it, and sometimes you give up and Google it.

  This was happening to me on a fairly regular basis, causing me to “Um” and “What’s that thing where you…” a lot more, but I wasn’t worried enough to do anything about it. Then, in the spring of my OFW year, it got worse.

  I wasn’t catching up to the cart anymore. Words were no longer at the tip of my tongue or anywhere near it. They were just gone.

  And each time another one went away, I became more paralyzed with fear.

  You might know this because you’re currently reading my book (thank you!), but I write for a living. I also perform live all the time.

  I felt like I was losing the things that made me, me.

  I’d spent most of my time with comedy people in my personal and professional life, so I’d never been the funny one. But I was always one of the funny ones. Humor was a huge part of how I related to people, and it was disappearing in my daily interactions. Which, not surprisingly, looked a lot like happiness disappearing.

  And while this was happening, I felt like my tenure at Live Wire! was coming to an end. There had been rumblings of making a smaller, more intimate show and I had a feeling that it probably wouldn’t include me.

  And as much as that made sense, the idea of making such a seismic shift after twelve years left me feeling completely lost.

  So the stress over the show was ramping up at the same time the stress over my memory was ramping up, and the inside of my brain started to feel like an old clock, sometimes running too fast and other times grinding to a halt, usually at the most inopportune moments.

  Occasionally, I would lose a word in the morning, the same way any normal, not-nuts woman in her forties does.

  But I have generalized anxiety disorder. So as soon as that happened, my anxiety would spike. I started to Google memory loss and word-finding issues.

  Here’s a piece of advice: If you’re having memory-loss issues, don’t Google me
mory loss. Go to your doctor. Because absolutely nothing good comes up when you Google memory loss. You’re not going to hit a page that says, Sometimes memory loss is caused by an impending lottery win or Memory loss could signal the onset of the greatest batch of chili you’ve ever made in your life.

  Google has wreaked so much havoc on the medical world that there’s now an unofficial diagnosis for people who believe they have one or multiple diseases after Googling their symptoms: cyberchondria.

  I have this. I spend an inordinate amount of time on WebMD, which I call Pinterest for Hypochondriacs. They just need to let you create boards with your favorite disease families in them, like Dermatological Disorders I Probably Have, New Viruses That Are Definitely Going Around My Office, and Cute Cats That Might Have Given Me the First Human Case of Feline Leukemia.

  What diagnoses did my WebMD memory-loss searches lead me to? Early-onset Alzheimer’s, dementia, and a brain tumor.

  So—the opposite of really good chili.

  Each time I’d stop in the middle of a sentence, my chest would tighten, and warm tingles of fear would wash over my whole body.

  I’m losing my mind.

  I won’t be able to write anymore.

  How will I make money?

  Scott and Mom will have to take care of me.

  I won’t remember who they are.

  I’ll become even more of a bitch.

  I won’t be able to remember all the things I used to hate.

  What if I start watching Real Housewives of Atlanta and enjoying it?

  I finally got my doctor to send me to a neurologist. He gave me a couple of quick tests in his office and didn’t seem that worried.

  “The good news is you don’t have any of the immediate hallmarks of a degenerative brain disease, but if your word loss feels higher than that of your peers, it may be cause for some concern.”

  The first part of the sentence was completely erased by the second part.

  That’s how generalized anxiety disorder works. It’s like your life is the Godfather series, and all you can see are Sofia Coppola’s parts in the third one.