Kate Barberio is not pretty enough to not be funny

Step One: Drop out of university.

Step Two: Heat oven to like 400 or someshit like that.

Step Three: Cut open an avocado, mush it all up and throw some tomato sauce in there.

Step Four: Ask your Dad to buy you a whole wheat fucking pita or six

Step Five: Smear avocado onto pita.

Step Six: You know the fucking drill heat it up.

Step Seven: Toss that messy pizza in a bowl.

Step Eight: Live your life.

Today I had my orientation at my new job.

I have a long standing history of coming across as ‘mean and weird’ when people first meet me, so I tried to be cool, calm, and smile a lot. 

I tried not to be too anxious about it, but still managed to imagine a few disastrous scenarios and plan accordingly. One of those scenarios (a little bit more realistic than ‘Everyone arrives five minutes before me and form an intense clique mentality from which I am the one opposing outcast’) was that we would be forced to stand up, announce our name, position, and then tell two truths and a lie. I planned my ‘two truths and a lie’ just incase we played that.

Thing is, I forgot the one thing worse than ‘two truths and a lie.’ I forgot about ‘share an interesting fact about yourself.’

Now, see, where ‘two truths and a lie’ forces you to have to conjure up and speak aloud THREE things (terrifying for someone who can induce a panic attack just by thinking about a time when I almost did stand-up comedy) ‘share an interesting fact about yourself’ is worse, because it puts pressure on the ONE thing you say to be interesting. It’s called an interesting fact. Immediately, my two truths became useless. Instead I had to sit through 40 people sharing that they lived in Vancouver for three months, all the while going over my life and realizing what a waste it had been. Who would have known that a job at a burger place would be the thing to seal the deal on my quiet sureness that I was the world’s biggest loser? 

It wasn’t until I had stood up, said “Uh, I’m Kate, I’m a server, and it took graduating a comedy performance program for me to accept that I have a cripling fear of public speaking.” that my racing heart settled into shaking hands and I had a moment of clarity: I’m going to have to live my entire life either being mean and weird or terrified. I can switch it up, sometimes be mean and weird and then bring it home with some terrified, but it’s always gonna be one of those. At least around New People.

Still. What a wonderous thing it would have been if I could have muttered “Uh, no. No.” and then sat back down. Mean and weird FTW!

It’d be annoying and condescending for me to begin this post pretending I think I am the only person who lies awake at night remembering my worst moments. My top contenders: Being caught and publicly scolded in grade one for playing ‘waterfall’ in the school’s eastrove’s runoff, panicking mid-set my first time performing stand-up at my high school film festival, and not being able to think of a third thing for this paragraph but knowing it’ll come to me immediately after I’ve posted this. God, I’m awful.

To placate the sea of self loathing, I often call upon the tide of things I’m sad to have witnessed but am elated didn’t involve me directly. These incidents include but are not limited to: 

-Endless mocking of friend’s boyfriend’s obnoxious facebook status updates.

-That one time when a bus driver asked everyone to move back, adding, “You’d want people to make room for you if you were waiting in the rain,” to which a girl beside me replied, dumbfounded, “Uh, I’m already on the bus, sooo…”

-Witnessing a girl puke on the TTC, slip in the puke, land in the puke, realize she was covered in puke and then puke again on herself in the puke. 

These moments remind me that as awful as it was when I didn’t know an entire strand of spaghetti was in my hair for nearly four hours, well, at least I’m not that chick who spent up to six and a half minutes trying to return a bagel at Tim Hortons only to realizes that they *had* given her cinnamon raison.  There are worse people than me and my inability to detect playful sarcasm in social situations.

But the douchiest, most painfully eye-roll inducing moment (I may be adding this to the memory like colour to a dream, but I think at the time I rolled my eyes so hard I popped a blood vessel) always leaves me thankful to have mistakenly thought my boyfriend’s “How was your night?” was directed at me, not the cab driver, that one time when we first started dating. Because this thing was, by far, the most unwarrantedly not-cool thing someone has ever done in front of me. Something so absurdly self-inflating that this person’s every action afterwards would seem all the more tolerable by comparison. That is to say, she set the douche bell curb very high for herself. 

It was grade 12 drama class. Douchiest Person I Ever Met and I were in the same class, listening to our teacher, Mrs. Felt, talk about the same thing all drama teachers talk about: their lost dreams, painted in blowhard, earnest reviews of the most recent local dramatic production they saw. After something about how great the woman playing Alphaba was in the unlicensed off-off-off-off broadway version of Wicked (for legal reasons billed as ‘Wacked’) was and how she herself could never deliver such a “breathe-taking, earth-shattering” performance because she was “always an ingenue”, she started telling us all about another amazing performance she’d seen: Cirque du Soleil.

Mrs. Felt stopped her in-depth yet somehow still vague description of ribbons and contortionists ‘doing spins’ to ask, “Who here hasn’t seen Cirque?”

PAUSE. That’s right. She asked who had NOT seen it rather than who had. This teacher was a bit of a douchebag herself. 

When the majority of this class of full-time students raised their hands to indicate that they hadn’t spend the eight dollars an hour they earned at Dairy Queen on Cirque du Soleil tickets, The Douchiest Person I Ever Met looked around with her eyes glassy and wide, her eyebrows raised as if she were genuinely too shocked to register how obvious she was being, her mouth dropped open for a split second before finding the only word that could top what her face was doing. She panned the room one more time before saying, “Wow.”

***

I want to be clear. I was lucky enough too have seen Cirque du Soleil, so my repulsion was genuine and not brought on by feelings of inadequacy, jealousy or shame. No, everything I was feeling was right and true, and came from witnessing the most self-congratulating, superiority complex driven pretentious crap I’ve ever seen condensed into about two and a half seconds. 

Thank you, Cirque Fan, where ever you are. Thank you for teaching me to love myself for not being you. I sleep well, secure in the thought that I have never openly shamed a room full of people with a word that had thus far only stood to remind them of Joey Lawrence. To do so would be, well, cirque du so lame.

Cirque.

du.

So lame.

Maybe not talent. Passion? Trust? Whatever it is that makes ‘What if this isn’t funny?’ less important than ‘What if it is?’

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And vice versa.