Backstroke of the West

they were contemporarily hated for just being these giant grey monoliths

so people were immediately confused, and that confusion turned to anger because martial law means people can get arrested much more easily, and also, what the general fuck? and protests began at parliament, and the combination of protestors and police were blocking the way in.

and then 190 parliament members showed up in the middle of the night, at least some of them had to to jump a fence and/or evade police not letting them in, and they got inside and voted 190-0 to un-declare martial law. not a single person there voted to maintain martial law, and not a single person who would have voted to maintain martial law bothered to show up. that vote happened at around 1am.

and within a few hours the president announced that fine, he will undo martial law. and then he undid it. and then people started calling for his resignation or impeachment.

YOINK!

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.