It's hard to demand that people have fun, whether they want to or not, when the clock is ticking, the first activity is within thirty minutes, your great nephew just asked you why your arms were so big, and your rental home smells like brussels sprouts.
Not due to a strange bodily function but to your sister-in-law, chief cook and bottle washer, getting a head start on the meal she'll cook for seven of the twelve people in this home tonight.
We put in a call to the maintenance department, as Marissa feared she couldn't shower all week, as the shower in her room only produced scalding hot or frigid cold water. They knocked on the door as soon as the office opened, only to find that Marissa's fiance Todd had occupied the bathroom, which meant the maintenance guy would return when it was safe to go in, possibly ten hours later.
My passive aggressive Kareness was getting more passive aggressive by the second, but damn if they didn't show up in time for that private family boat ride, ready to don our unique t-shirts that made a statement.
A little history about how the "Karen..calm down!" t-shirts came to fruition:
When we used to come to Woodloch with friends, I was still a Karen..demanding that everyone hustle and be on time for everything. I have a way of making a relaxing spa day into a high stress event, it's who I am. So while the catchphrase of my friends was always, "Karen..start walking"(knowing I move at a snail's space) the catch phrase for my family was first uttered by Todd in 2016, in the bellowing Seth Rogen voice of his.
"Karen.calm down!" was a thing, and it was a thing long before the meme came out last summer and destroyed my name.
So anyway, I got more insane than usual a few weeks back, conjuring up every worst-case scenario that could possibly happen that would destroy this long awaited vacation.
Someone would die.
Someone wouldn't die, but would be just sick enough to force us to cancel the trip that I had so much emotionally and financially invested in.
We'd get hit by a bear.
Alligators would swim north from Florida and make the lake unswimmable.
Someone was going to fall from the zip-line, even 'though it's currently closed.
I was on item number twenty seven when Jim and Evan said, in perfect unison, "Karen..calm down" and immediately followed that with: "There's our team name! There's our t-shirt!"
Jim got stressed about ordering 12 "Karen..calm down!" t-shirts, thinking we'd offend every feminist at this resort, but we decided to just go with the flow.
(I used to be just as obsessed when we came here with friends. We rented an isolated home, and I was positive we'd get struck by lightning, or attacked by bears being that isolated. My friend Mike, who is like Todd in many ways, could only shrug his shoulders and say, "Karen is worried about bears? And fires? Is she worried about bears being on fire?" and our team name was born, as those "flaming bears" made their mark in Woodloch history.
So it's not the meme: it's all about Todd, ordering me to calm down.
We were on the boat dock, waiting to take a photo, when a random stranger passes by and says, and I have photographic proof that I'm not making this up, "who is the Karen?" as his shirt read, "I wish a Karen would"
(He never specified what the "would" meant)
I tried to say that my sister-in-law was the Karen; or her six year old granddaughter was , or her sixty-eight year old husband, my brother Steven was the Karen, but one look at me and you'd know. You'd just know I was the Karen.
The t-shirt made a big splash--everyone laughed and questioned its origins, but I didn't feel like explaining to people that I just met that I pictured a balcony collapsing under us as we posed for a family photo op, or that we'd be kicked out because someone heard Todd trying to convince Jim to smoke some weed, something he hadn't done since college.
This will not be the last time we wear those t-shirts. The trouble is just beginning.
The boat ride with "Thad" was hilarious. My smart ass nephew decided to tell the driver that we are very close with the family that owns the resort, that we met at the NRC decades ago, that we were practically Q Anon folks. As we're pulling in, he says, in a voice loud enough for the folks waiting for the next ride, "don't worry..we'll clean up the diarrhea in a minute!" because he wanted to prolong the ride.
Because he wanted Thad to spill more details about what happened when the cast of "Jersey Shore" filmed here in March.
I spent the good part of my day in the lake and the pool, entertaining my great niece who decided that imitating everything I said was absolutely hilarious, and of COURSE I almost made a six year old drop an F-bomb to get her to stop..would you expect anything less of me?
We played the challenging "That's Entertainment!" game with Todd and strangers, and realized we don't know as much as we think we do about TV, movies, and music, and we don't know how to speak up when we have to convinced our teammates that Larry Drake("Benny from "LA Law") was in "ER"..or that spiders aren't mammals that lactate.
Tonight it's a circus..and another one once we leave the rental and go to the actual circus show.
More later..
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