The Hazlitt Tumblr

You Can’t Have Diarrhea Around a Beauty Queen

My friend’s annual Christmas party is a death trap for my stomach. In 2014, the meatball tray was my demise. I felt the initial rumble, then the flash of pain, and I made the hurried dash to the bathroom. I texted my friend outside, telling her that I would be in here for a while. I send these texts frequently. My absence would have been noticeable—there were only two people left at the gathering: the host, and a beauty queen with looks reminiscent of Miranda Kerr.

Though her pageant days are behind her—her most recent title was Miss Global International Canada 2012—I still couldn’t help but feel totally mortified. Hunched over for what felt like an hour, but might have been only half that, I chastised myself—you can’t have diarrhea around a beauty queen! Each second that exceeded the acceptable average time to be in the bathroom felt excruciating.

Later, I reminisced about it with a fellow Irritable Bowel Syndrome-sufferer. We both came to the same conclusion: beautiful girls don’t poop. It was a sexist, absurd thing to think—and by thinking it, we had deemed ourselves ugly women with an embarrassing problem. But a part of me believes it to be true.

Watch Me Bathe

Water offers a screen in its still reflection, a vessel to consume the trees and the rocks and the birds and the black mold that grows around us on the bathroom tiles. Humans are transfixed by water’s stillness, and by its turbulence, as a sublime solace. We find comfort in the rare liquid as a stabilizer: as our bodies enter it, we are fetal, we are washed, we are fine. Yet, fear is enacted by the waves of a hurricane, outlines of lemon sharks swimming behind them.

Sitting with one’s body submerged, chin at water level, is a waiting game. The swimmers in the slow lane use it as a means to escape death; algae microbes use it as a way to eat and stay alive. I use it in the same way I use Saturday morning sleep-ins, Snapchat procrastination, or alcohol: as a way to enter that liminal grey space where I can live in the present and quiet the exasperating voice in my head.

Gravity

The deer flies through the air almost elegantly as it ricochets off the hood of the car, its long, slender legs stretching out like a dancer’s. Time stands still as fur and flesh rotate around the still point of the deer’s eye, focusing on Jonah through the windshield with a look of pure terror. Then, as if time were completely irrelevant to begin with, everything speeds up, the deer landing with what Jonah can only imagine is a sickening splat against the pavement as the car continues down the stretch of road like nothing has happened, Jonah staring in shock at a small patch of fur-covered skin caught in the hood, flapping in the wind.

The Cat Psychic

Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. “No way,” she said. “Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.” And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.

How Am I Going To Make Fun Of The New Radiohead Album Without Listening To It?

My fondest musical memory is being a teenager and slow dancing in a dark, dirty kitchen to Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.” I was dancing with a man, not because I was experimenting but because all the girls were taken and the cough syrup was kicking in pretty hard and I really wanted to slow dance like everybody else. The kitchen was filthy, actually, broken furniture amid smeared pasta and its days-old hard encasing red sauce, and if the light wasn’t broken, it eventually would be. But the stereo worked, and Redding’s eternal pauses between the words “these” and “arms” and “of” combined nicely with the gravity-sucking effects of the Robitussin to make all of us slowly, so slowly, circling each other in the debris feel real romantic, or at least instantly romanticized. And it was an old soul song and we knew what was up, nostalgia shooting forward and backward on the timeline like The Flash. It’s why I’m patient with today’s indie/DIY insta-history kids: I get wanting epic moments so bad that you psychically will them upon your own life.