EPISODE 21: "All You Can Eat"

    One time I accidentally actually participated in gym class and it was crazy. I was fresh off of a solid zero hours of sleep because I stayed up the entire night playing Mario Tennis for the GameCube, which is easily one of the best mario sport games and I’m not just saying that because I kicked all of my straight cousins’ asses at it while playing as Peach (okay yes I am.) it was badminton week in gym and that day I forgot to use my normal strategy of standing just outside of the boundary lines to make sure that if the ball was coming to me I wouldn’t technically have to hit it, and instead I just actually played. I was also playing for two, not because I was pregnant (though that would probably be a way better story) but because Yeliz was my partner and she wasn’t feeling well, so she was going back and forth between toeing the boundary line and straight up just sitting down. And nobody even questioned her because she’s a power player. I mean, not a power player in badminton, clearly. But just in life.
    Anyway, like some kind of messed up 80s coming of age story, those Mario Tennis skills translated to real life badminton skills (not even the same sport, but whatever brain) and I was returning shots back to the other team like my life depended on it. We still lost every single game and placed lowest in the class-wide tournament, but that’s not important. I mean, it was important for our gym grade, but not for this story.
    My hunger for competition only grew through my senior year, even though I was barely there. I missed so many history classes that I almost wasn’t allowed to graduate. Except then we split into teams in our history class to hold an election and due to the perfect storm of one of the other groups arguing for the legalization of lightsabers during military action, some Russian bots (just assuming), and the popular girls accidentally voting for me because they didn’t realize they could vote for their own candidate, I ended up winning the election by a landslide. And I’m kind of convinced that that’s the only reason I didn’t end up flunking that class. I mean, you can’t fail the president. That’s in the constitution, I’m pretty sure. (Or maybe not, I don’t know, I didn’t really show up to any history classes.)
    After the election, Yeliz, Gulsah, and I decided to go out and celebrate at an all you can eat sushi place, which sounds disgusting but hear us out. It’s not like buffet-style where it’s sitting out for potentially decades at a time. Instead they hand out these menus where you check off everything you want and pay a flat fee per person and on the bottom of the menu is a vaguely threatening message that says “DO NOT ORDER WHAT YOU WILL NOT EAT.” Which was just sensible and loud enough for us to be scared into only ordering what we knew we liked, which meant lots of generic but delicious rolls. So delicious and generic that it took us halfway through our platter to realize that we’d accidentally been given and were eating someone else’s food. Since we were already halfway through and stuffed completely full, we decided to just shovel the rest into our mouths no matter how painful it was, pay, and never speak of this ever again out of bloated embarrassment. We finished, gave ourselves a congratulatory but exhausted cheer and planned to head out. Unfortunately the sushi place also realized that we’d been given the wrong platter and then promptly placed ours down where our empty platter once was, and the words “DO NOT ORDER WHAT YOU WILL NOT EAT” echoed in the air as if Mufasa himself was speaking to us. Which, we were so full that all of us felt half dead, so communion with the spirit world really wasn’t too far fetched.
    I wasn’t hungry, but we were also out with Gulsah’s sister and her sister’s boyfriend (who looked suspiciously like Joe Jonas but just enough where you could never really be sure and it felt too awkward to ask) and when the second platter came out he just started digging in. And then because the Ancient Greek goddess Monica Geller is at the very core of my being, I took that as a challenge and decided I was going to finish it off on my own. I had what I can only describe as a competitive blackout because I couldn’t tell you what happened beyond that except that ten minutes later the second platter was gone, my friends all looked disgusted with me, and I was asking who wanted to go get ice cream.