Why Did No One Tell Me I Was Fat In College?

Yesterday was a red letter day for me, big time. Red. Letter. In fact, I had hours to think about what those red letters would spell out while I sat on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn with a 30 lb bag of laundry, 20 lbs of quarters, not a single dollar bill, no cell phone and only the dim MEMORY of the house keys I'd left locked inside my apartment.

Oh, and did I mention it was raining?

I think we can all safely agree that my red-letters said something along the lines of, "Kick me, I'm stupid."

Not that I didn't try to look on the bright side.

Paying for everything with quarters, including a CAB RIDE into Manhattan?

Kind of fun.

Pretending, as you lug a 30 lb bag of laundry around Brooklyn on your back, that you are actually training to be Santa's helper?

Kind of fun.

Getting to spend the afternoon in the laundrymat with the mean Russian man who runs it, as he watches people scream at one another on Jerry Springer, and then watches people scream at one another on Maury Pauvich, and then watches bad actors tell each other terrible, intelligence-insulting jokes on those really crappy sitcoms that are on in the afternoons on UPN?

Not at all fun, but kind of eye-opening in an "any day now this mean Russian man is going to to bring a gun to work and hurt a lot of people" kind of way.

Suffice it to say that there was a lot of internal whining, a lot of digging for quarters, a lot of lugging, a lot of "Ho-Ho-Ho's" (to keep myself in good spirits), a lot of sucking up to the mean Russian man so that he'd let me keep my laundry bag* in his laundry mat overnight, and about 15 minutes of trying to shrink myself enough to fit through my keyhole.

* When I said "laundry bag" he apparently thought I meant "exploding bag of venomous snakes." I know this because of how insulted and astonished he was by my request.

At the end of this lugging, heavy, Russian-man non-rainbow, however, there was a really big pot of Emily's house gold.

Or so I thought.

Because, while spending five hours alone in Em's apartment, finding ways to amuse myself until my roommate could come home and let me back in to my own place, I had a chance to look at pictures from college. Pictures I haven't seen in YEARS.

And WHAT WAS I THINKING WITH THAT HAIR OH MY GOD!

And HOW COULD I LOOK LIKE SUCH A CRACKED OUT DRUG-ADDICT ON MY OWN GRADUATION DAY!

And THE PHRASE IS "FRESHMAN 15" NOT "FRESHMAN 50"!

It is a miracle that I got laid in college. So, this Thanksgiving, I will be thankful for the "Even Cracked-Out Fat Girls Can Get Laid In College" Miracle.

Amen.