Gate 5A

We live in a world where children and adults alike are obsessed with colorful rubber bracelets shaped like animals. Except that they're only shaped like animals until you slide them onto your wrist - then they're just shaped like squiggly circles. All these people, I think, have in common that they like to distort and be distorted. And they partially like these things because everyone else does, or at least seems to.

Anyone who says the mass appeal of a thing doesn't make it less attractive is either lying or desperately holding onto their childhood. The first time I saw the animal v. squiggly bracelets, a little girl on the train was wearing them and passing them back and forth with her little sister. That day, I was wearing rubber bracelets too. They were neon and had little gold and silver charms dangling off them, and I felt an instant connection with this tiny human. Like I was looking into the past and she was looking back at me.

Then, a couple weeks later, I started to notice those very same bracelets on other children on other trains. Then on adults. Then on my contemporaries. I felt like something had been stolen from me. In my moment with that little girl, I had seen something. And now my vision was gone. Either that, or everyone else saw exactly what I had seen. Either way, something once living was dead.

I hate those bracelets now. They follow me and haunt me. La Guardia Airport sells them, in packs of 20 or 30 or 50, for the low cost of your individuality. I see them while I'm standing lockjawed at a checkout counter, trying to help the cashier figure out how much change she owes me. I gave her $20.50 for a bag of chocolate-covered peanuts that cost $4.34. I silently bemoan our nation's rudimentary education system, until I realize that I'm mindlessly fishing my iPhone out of my bag to double-check the math, my own insecurity the reel on the hook.

Over the loudspeaker a very gay flight attendant announces that Jonathan Singer is late for his flight to Savannah. Suh-van-uh. I think to myself, popping peanuts into my mouth, that Jonathan Singer sounds like a name I've heard. Jonathan Singer sounds like a famous writer. Jonathan Singer sounds like he has something to say that the world needs to hear. I pop more peanuts and decide I'll google him later.

I walk by the frozen yogurt stand, which at 8 p.m. has been gated and shuttered, prompting my peanut purchase. This is of course the only time I've ever craved frozen yogurt while inside La Guardia. I take this as a very bad omen and think about what it would feel like to be inside a plane that is crashing to the ground. I think about tweeting my concerns, hoping that such a tweet would jinx the universe into not letting me die. The universe, however, does not respond to pinch/poke/you owe me some coke.

Sitting at my gate, I see that the girl across from me is carrying three items: a LeSportSac, a Longchamp, and a Crumbs bag filled with cupcakes. The holy trinity of consumerism. I imagine her ambling through her parents' front door, presenting them with cupcakes which they then cut with plasticware and share before bedtime. They hug her and tell her how proud they are of her for moving to the big city and starting to make a life for herself. She divides her face with a pretty little smile, wondering why the kitchen counters suddenly look so small and far away.

Behind me, I hear a jump rope hitting the carpet. I hear the distinct mmph-whack-mmph-whack-mmph-whack of plastic rope hitting carpet. I recall that sound vividly from a million gym classes of my childhood, plastic rope against rubber floor and sometimes against flesh legs when kids miscalculated the distance between their soles and the floor. I whip my head around to discover it is the sound of a woman's flip-flops slapping against the heels of her feet as she hurries from gate to gate. My heart sinks deep into my abdomen, anchoring me to the sticky pleather seat.

I wonder if pilots think about how easy it would be to crash a plane each time they find themselves behind the controls. I know I would.

Throwback Thursday: Meghan Edition

I went to my grandmother's house for Christmas last week, and I was inspired by a photo of myself I found on one of the tables in her living room. I actually laughed out loud when I saw it, and then I found myself feeling very confused about why, of the hundreds-if-not-thousands of photos taken of me since I was born, she would have chosen this particular photo - framed and everything - to grace the top of her lovely table. It was taken ten years ago - making this post all the more topical as we close out the decade - at my 13th birthday party, which was the first time my parents let me invite boys over to our house - a piece of information that, by all accounts, makes this photo all the more embarrassing.

1. I have those amazing straight-across-the-fohead bangs that pretty much defined my childhood until the age of 15 or so.
2. I am also rocking the butt cut. You know, parted straight down the middle. No shame.
3. That appears to be a beaded choker.
4. Yes, that is cake with a screenprint of the Backstreet Boys on it. I. know. I remember that screenprinting on birthday cakes was, like, a big deal in middle school. You just took whatever photo you wanted on your cake to the bakery in the grocery store, and they somehow created an edible version of it.

Wait. I was getting ready to write a snarky comment about how ridiculous a screenprinted birthday cake is, but I have changed my mind. This is awesome. If I could have a screenprint of Lady Gaga on my next birthday cake, I wouldn't even think twice about it. Then I would have them sprinkle it with edible glitter before topping it with an edible hair bow, and I would take a photo of myself holding it the same way I held the BSB cake when I was 13, and I would do a side-by-side comparison of little baby Meghan and somewhat-more-grownup Meghan.

It's shocking how little things change, even when they change a lot. For good measure:



At least I wasn't alone in my choice of the butt cut. Nick rocked it for quite a long time. But I didn't care about him because I was in love with Brian, who never had the butt cut. Conclusion: My taste in men > my taste in haircuts.

This is not necessarily still true.

It's a kind of Magic

This is Magic. Yes, he is a dragon with wings. Yes, he is a Beanie Baby from approximately the year 1997. And yes, he lives with me. And there's a reason for that.

When I was 11, the summer between my fifth and sixth grade years, my appendix burst and I subsequently got a really bad infection that put me in the hospital for two weeks.  I had surgery to have the rebellious organ removed, then I was on an IV drip for a few weeks after that. My parents had planned a big vacation to DC and Busch Gardens in Williamsburg (suburban Virginia, not hipsterban New York), but obvs we weren't able to go. I was of course heartbroken, because when you're 11-year-old me, all you care about is summertime and roller coasters*.

So anyway. I was in the hospital, getting poked and prodded with needles,  and I was sad because I was keeping my parents and myself from summertime bliss. Furthermore, I had no idea what was going on inside my body. I knew that I was on a lot of drugs, and that sometimes I hurt and sometimes I didn't, and that I couldn't eat good food (like ice cream) and that my mom now had to help me use the bathroom. Children live their lives in these very distinct and simplistic terms, because children have no concept of their own mortality.

At some point during my hospital stay, my mom brought Magic to stay in the room with me. In 1997 the Beanie Babies craze was just taking off and I'm sure they wanted to make me feel as normal as a kid spending her summer in the hospital could. So Magic came to live with me for a few weeks. I don't really remember the extent of our relationship, but I know he was always in the room with me, watching over me.

Time passed and nurses fed me jello. (PS, Why is this the only fucking food considered appropriate for people in hospitals? It just seems like the most unnatural choice possible for sustenance, and my constant consumption of it for weeks on end probably helps to explain my present-day disdain for the  grotesque gelatin.) Anyway. Nurses fed me jello and I slowly got better. I remember after I was cleared for release, I was just so happy to be able to go home and eat ice cream again. By this point I had lost like 15 or 20 lbs. in less than a month's time. I actually remember thinking (foolishly) that this was awesome. Insta-skinny! (This just goes to show how fucked up our society is, that 11-year-old girls 1. feel pressure to be skinny and 2. celebrate weight loss caused by extended hospital stays.) Shortly after my arrival home, I was sitting on the couch talking to my parents about the experience, and I asked them how sick I had been. My mom looked at me directly and said point-blank, "You almost died."

Of course I had no clue this had been the case, because I was just a child. I had no idea how infected my insides had been, and it never occurred to me that I might be missing not just one summer of roller coasters, but lots of them. All of them.

To this day my mom claims that Magic watched over me that summer. That his presence was sort of like a cute stuffed guardian angel in the room. I mean, he does have wings, so it's basically like the same thing.

One important detail is that I did not pack Magic when I moved to New York. I opened my suitcase when I got to Z's apartment last December - where I stayed for two weeks before I found my own place - and there was Magic, folded in with my shirts and towels and shoes and God knows what else. Unbeknown to me, my mom had put him in there, just where he belonged, tucked in tightly amongst the rest of my entire life. I was not surprised to see him. He has been with me since my life was drastically changed the first time - nearly 13 years ago now - so it only makes sense for him to be present during what has certainly been the second most drastic life change thus far.

So, there he sits, on top of my DVDs in the corner of my room in Harlem, watching me laugh and cry and (not) do Pilates. He's heard every single conversation I've had in this room - happy, sad and pathetic - and he never judges. He's just a reminder that once upon a time there was a possibility that the life I love so dearly now would never have been. And yet, here it is, and here I am, and there he is, watching over me still.

Actually, I need to ask my mom if she even put him in there. It's entirely possible he found his own way into my luggage. He's tricky like that.

*I was obsessed with roller coasters. I had a VHS tape called "Roller Coaster Thrills in 3D" and I watched the shit out of it, because when you're a kid and you love something, it only seems logical to do that thing as many times as humanly possible

From New York: A random childhood flashback

I was walking around the UES recently when I walked by a gym and was overjoyed to see this happening inside.





















That's right, it's a group of little kids standing in a circle, holding on to the edges of a rainbow parachute and moving it up and down. I remember doing this in gym class when I was little, and it always made me so fucking happy. The colors would fly up and down as you watched your friends on the other side of the circle, and it always made the most amazing/deafening flapping, snapping sound. And sometimes - this was the best - you got to bounce balls or some other such object up and down in the middle of the parachute. God, pure happiness.

In so many ways I still feel like that little girl. So, doesn't that mean I'm sort of still entitled to a rainbow parachute? Or at least an equivalent. And I don't just mean creepily watching one through the window of an UES gym. I mean I want to feel the wind on my face and hear the flapping firsthand. Get on that, universe.