- Have a UTI
- Repeat grades six and seven, objectively my most awkward years
- Grade six gym class specifically
- Use a gas station restroom—the scary outside kind where you have to procure a hidden key that’s covered in E. coli, shigella, and streptococcus
- Have a second UTI
- Untangle holiday lights
- Menstruate for an entire month
- Go to the gynecologist for frequent UTIs and unusually long period
- Lick an ATM keypad
- Time travel back to high school and realize there is no toilet paper in the bathroom stall after I have defecated, meaning I need to quickly relocate and pray that no one walks in and sees me pantsless and unwiped in the three seconds it takes to get to the second stall
- Slip on ice (hit head)
- Get caught masturbating
- Read The Grapes of Wrath
- Catch someone masturbating
- Skydiving snafu
- Bite the inside of my cheek while eating
- Bite the same part of my cheek again while eating
- Sleep in an underwire bra
- Run into a shocked Katie T., the most popular girl in grade ten, while I am sans pants and shuffling to the second stall on my urgent search for toilet paper in the high school bathroom
- Paper cuts all over
- Get too drunk and throw up an entire box of Ms. T’s Four Cheese Medley Pierogies (I am not speaking from experience)
- Voluntarily eat a Beggin’ Strip (again, this is not a personal experience)
- Get a haircut that I thought would look cool but is actually too short and now I am crying in the parking lot of a Hair Cuttery (this definitely did not happen to me)
- Swim in a landfill
- Dance like no one is watching to discover that someone is in fact watching
- LASIK eye surgery, feeling all the pain
- Get my picture taken by the suddenly cruel and conniving Katie T. as I desperately try to cover my bare and dirty ass without directly touching it, hearing the loud shutter sound of her pink Motorola RAZR echo off the high school bathroom’s walls
- Gut and stuff a Thanksgiving turkey
- Smoke a cigarette backwards
- Wear wet jeans and sneakers for an entire day
- Throw up in my mouth and then swallow it, or as I believe it’s called in the medical field, “acid reflux”
- Make small talk with my neighbor in the produce section of the grocery store
- Make small talk with my neighbor in line at the cash register after we have already had an awkward run-in at produce
- Kidney stones
- Have Katie T. threaten to release the most embarrassing photo of me that has ever been taken to the entire school if I don’t give her the answers to the Algebra II homework, quickly agree to the deal, then finally make it to the safety of the second stall to discover there is no toilet paper there either
- Die
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