tease
I kept telling TikTok I was not interested 💔 in "has Jim Carrey been cloned?" content. Look: Jim Carrey's "I hate awards shows" persona dates back to 2001, when his passion project The Majestic was a critical and commercial flop. Since then the man's whole identity has been "my work is so undervalued and misunderstood; this is all a farce." It's bitter, it's glib, and it is not the full picture. I feel like people can't handle knowing that the 'real' Jim Carrey is a little vain and does actually care what people think of him (and, given France's history of honoring the artistry of clowning, I think Carrey is eager to embrace, at this stage, any professional comparisons to Jerry Lewis). The point is, people are freaking out at character development, when this is the healthiest Carrey has behaved in years. He looks happy AF (coming off as neither manic nor depressive??). He got a responsible amount of filler in his face. Like????
Anyway, the TikTok algorithm finally got the message, stopped showing me Jim Carrey conspiracy content, and eventually started showing me food instead. At last I was shown a tuna melt (the account is "sluttychefs"). Yum! I mixed up some tuna salad, heated up the griddle, and made a tuna melt of my own. I'd recently found my favorite silicone cooking tools in storage, plus one of my glass Anyday bowls—the smaller of two small ones. This is all critical, because I don't know my way around a kitchen otherwise. I guess I don't like using tools I don't like.
I put on my headphones and sang to the songs on my mp3 player. I stirred up tuna salad in a bowl. I snipped some green onion into it. I cleaned up as I went.
Eventually I twirled into the doorway of the nurses' office, danced in place obnoxiously, and then removed a headphone: "Have you eaten. Do you want to eat. Are you eating right now? ...Will you wear wigs?" The nurse smirked. I'd made enough for two sandwiches, I explained. She was good, she said. I nodded and twirled back into the kitchen, where I immediately became much grosser about licking a spoon.
I flipped the sandwich with a spatula and stared down at the golden brown sourdough. "Girrrl, look out for you," I whispered, astonished, as if I were actually witnessing something.
I took a photo of the finished product on my iPad before tucking in. Fucking delicious. Now, it is no secret that I enjoy cooking on a griddle, but I'd given away my griddle two or three years ago, after using it to cook up a storm for two friends while at AutoCamp Joshua Tree. In fact, I think the last several times I really cooked were all for the same specific friend in LA. Hm! I wonder what that means.
I sent the photo of my accomplishment to my best friend. I texted that I'd cooked in the kitchen "in my CLEAN apron, with my CLEAN tools (sanitized of whatever Californian apartment pathogens), LISTENING TO MP3S."
"If I didn't know it was tuna I'd say that looks good! Lol," my best friend replied. She does not like seafood of any type.
To this, I started threatening her with a good time. Egg salad, chicken salad, grilled cheese. "When is Easter / I'll griddle your whole family," I texted ominously.
"Lol, I'm glad you're cooking and feeling at home," she replied.
"lol," I answered. "Yeah I was realizing I struggle to cook in the 'wrong' place with the 'wrong' tools -- nervous system stuff." I continued, "Your dad has eased me back into teasing far enough that I realized I could probably cook again." Then: "Gremlin teasing for a happy resilient nervous system -- I'm realizing how crucial it is."
She agreed that he'd sure tease me—tease anyone, actually, including total randos, and that it's mortifying. I'm paraphrasing.
The number of goblins in my car have recently doubled, from one goblin to two. Shortly after moving here, I bought a plush beanbag-butt goblin, who sometimes sits on my dashboard, sometimes in the front passenger seat, sometimes smooshed into a cupholder. He has a stitched-on underbite and is my favorite shade of teal green and he just generally looks like a dear lil goober.
Not long after that, I walked past a tiny clay goblin, about an inch and a half tall, lying in a dish by the cash register at the crystal shop at the mall (I was waiting for my phone to be repaired). He was wearing a pointy hat. His nostrils are inexplicably enormous. He's cradling a tiny fleck of quartz. Eventually I looped him onto some leftover twine and hung him from my rearview mirror.
My friend needed to talk to me about some serious stuff, so I suggested I accompany her to one of her son's lessons. She typically sits and waits in the parking lot right along with all the other parked parents. (It went so well—this vacuum-sealed conversation in the parking lot—that we now have a weekly standing date.)
As we pulled into the parking lot, however, Grandpa came wheeling past us in his truck. And there was my friend's daughter, in the backseat, eating an ice cream cone: a direct violation of mom's "no sugar after 4PM" mandate. The little girl, recognizing us, smiled and waved.
"Why are they even here?" my friend exclaimed.
I was wheezing. "Literally just to get caught by you," I gasped, tears springing to my eyes.
"I'm gonna kick his ass," she said, and I pretty much collapsed in my seat.
"Literally," I whispered, "literally the funniest thing I've ever seen." Then: "You are surrounded by gremlins."
"I am," she marveled.
It was always my favorite thing about her, I admitted, now extremely bleary-eyed. Born of a gremlin mother and gremlin father, she had emerged fully-formed into the world as the least chaotic, most stoic, most grounded person I'd ever met. Even when our ages were in the single digits, she would react to catastrophe with a sigh, an eyeroll. If I were really obnoxious she would lift one brow. Tee hee hee! That's my best friend: stubborn, resolute. I could write a longer ode very, very easily.
My friend in LA and I have debated the value of "teasing" for a long time. Her own husband's childhood friend had "teased" her relentlessly, crossing every possible boundary; she no longer engages with that person. (And I think it's important to note here that she is not humorless; she's literally one of the funniest people I know, an expert at making a pointed observation that, metaphorically, sweeps your legs out from under you.) I admitted to her I had strongly mixed feelings because of where I grew up. My best friend's family had always teased: "pigtail-pulling," I told her. Had they normalized abuse?
Indeed, when I first arrived here, the family's teasing didn't 'hit' right anymore. I guess it didn't help that my gallbladder was, meanwhile, giving up the ghost. But also I wasn't a teen anymore, I wasn't in college anymore. Between my first job, my parents' protracted illnesses and deaths, GamerGate, and the general pressures of married life, I'd become pretty thin-skinned I guess. I also had no patience for competition of any kind, having to jump up and pace around during a game of Uno.
Reframing this as a diminished window of distress tolerance is really helpful. My best friend's dad has been patient with me, using a light touch when sparring with me, and maybe even learning how to better hot-swap or code-switch from teasing to seriousness and back again: tone shifts that kind of generously mirror whatever the other person's nervous system is doing. This is what is meant by "coregulation," I imagine. Big healthy dad energy—which makes it easy enough to tell "teasing" from "bullying," and if I ever couldn't tell the difference, I guess that's on me.
"I had to stop joking around at my very first job," I recently told the youngest nurse sadly. I don't remember how this subject came up, except that we'd been discussing interoffice politics, the misery of it all. It'd happened in the office early on; I hadn't lost my joie de vivre yet, I still had the juice. I'd been standing at an editor's desk, filing a piece, kind of fucking with him. Finally he looked up and said, "Jenn, do you... hate me?" It felt crazy.
"What? No, I love you," I said to him, absolutely horrified. Yep! No more jokes ever again. They were a danger in the workplace, and it seemed like men specifically did not understand them. Or I didn't understand other people, maybe, or maybe I just didn't understand young men. In retrospect, I hadn't realized I'd taken a job in an office with so many looming problems. Everyone was in danger: constant survival mode, endemic to the environment. I guess that was pretty deliberately hidden from me, initially. So everyone's window of distress tolerance was pretty narrow. Mine would be, too, soon enough.
The point is, having your sense of humor snatched away—or worse, voluntarily relinquished—is such a debuff. How are you supposed to weather any hard times without it? The sense of humor is the resilience.
I'm not saying to tolerate dickwads, to spar with them, to give them the time of day; I am saying it's easier to dispel a dickwad when you have much stronger, more cultivated dickwad tools than they have.