(I am a Christian attending a youth event at one of our sister churches along with my own small youth group. One of my friends from youth group, who is asexual, knows a girl who attends this sister church and is also at the event. She finds her and brings her over. We find a place to sit and make small talk over pizza for a while. My friend leaves to go get more punch and the other girl turns to me.)

Girl: “So, you’re ace?”

Me: *a little shocked because I haven’t said anything about it* “Um, yeah.”

Girl: *suspiciously* “Do you like dragons?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Girl: *slams hand on the floor* “EVERY ace person I’ve met likes dragons!”

(My friend came back and we talked about dragons and cake. I’m not sure which was funnier, the girl’s frustration or the fact that both dragons and cake are inside jokes in the ace community!)

(I go to the aquarium with my family when I am a teenager during my goth phase. While I do enjoy the animals, I sport a black studded trench coat and steel-toed boots. We go to my least favorite exhibit — the aviary. I stand in the shade while watching my family and everyone trying to lure the birds to their fingers and hands with nectar. The birds just lean over and lick the nectar while staying away from contact. I am listening to the keeper a few feet away from me talking about the birds. She looks at me.) 

Keeper: “Would you like to try feeding the birds? See if they come to you?”

Me: *shrugs* “I guess so.”

(The birds haven’t been on anyone, anyway, so I don’t think I’ll have better luck nor do I want it; I don’t particularly like birds. But the lady just seems so nice I have to try for her. She gives me the nectar and points out a bird to try to feed. Immediately, it lands on me. Then another. Then another! And they keep coming!)

Keeper: “Oh, they like you!”

(On the other side of the aviary…) 

Mom: “[My Name], come on; we’re ready to go! Your sisters want to see the penguins!”

Me: *screaming in my trench coat and boots while I run away from a flock of candy-colored birds*

(I live in a noisy area and today has been a bit extra loud. I recently got a new dog, and we are still working on the whole “no barking or growling” thing.)

Me: *sitting quietly at the table*

Dog: *sudden loud growl*

Me: *looks at the dog* “What?”

Dog: *growls, then looks at me*

Me: “Do you hear something?”

Dog: *looks down and growls*

Me: *hears a very faint noise from outside* “Well, they aren’t banging on the door, now, are they?”

Dog: *looks back at me, growls quietly*

Me: “If they aren’t banging on the door, we don’t need to growl at them, then, do we?”

Dog: *looks away, growls even more quietly* 

Me: “Remember that other people are allowed to live outside?”

Dog: *looks at me and gives the tiniest of growls*

Me: *raises eyebrows at the dog* “Well?”

Dog: *sighs*

It was Halloween and the local theatre was playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

My best friend and I dressed up. He went as Rocky and I decided to dress as Frank N Furter. We went all out.

When we arrived at the cinema, the usher told us that there was a half-hour wait before the screen would open to allow us inside. The film did not start for forty-five minutes.

My friend and I waited in the coffee shop past the ticket check with all of the other Rocky Horror fans, when I noticed that some people were going into the screen we had been directed to. I made a comment and my friend dragged us after the people so we could choose some good seats before they were taken.

We pushed open the doors — my friend in his golden hot pants and body glitter, me as a sweet transvestite — to a completely full theatre, waiting for the tail end of the season’s most popular action movie.

Rather than turn tail and run, my friend suddenly clapped and remarked that he hadn’t seen the film. He pulled me into a seat and I slowly sank deeper and deeper as we watched the last ten minutes of Looper.

So many people turned around in their seats to catch a glimpse of us in costume, and whispered to one another, that no one could hear the dialogue for the end of the film.

When the film ended, we stayed in our seats and watched Rocky Horror without an issue. When we got chatting to one of the ushers as we were leaving, they remarked that they had seen us slip into the theatre, but thought that the reactions we would get were too funny to bother stopping us.

While I was doing my bachelor’s in linguistics, I also took a Norwegian practical writing course. It aimed to teach an academic approach on how to write, critique, and understand various genres of text. I was in it to improve my article writing proficiency.

We usually worked in groups in this course, and one of the assignments was writing and critiquing poetry. Our teacher was a major experimental poetry nerd, so we wrote various more or less serious poems without structure as jokes, but every member of our group wrote poems. I figured we would be fine. 

Then came the day when we were to turn in our poems, and I found out that I was the only one in our group that had actually finished any poems that I was willing to turn in. I was too flustered to be angry, so I just went into problem-solving mode. I grabbed the poems I felt done with, and I was one short to complete the assignment. While the teacher was going around getting the poems for other groups I was frantically going through my rucksack to see if I had anything. I found a page from a Semantics paper I had done. For non-linguists, that’s word-math. It’s strange lambda transformations, arrows, and brackets. It was one simple sentence, “John kicks the ball,” written five or six times in increasingly more obfuscated ways with various symbols scribbled around. “F*** it,” I thought, added it to the pile, and turned it in.

The week after, we were going through our poems in class, and the lecturer was beaming. One of the poems was just fantastic! It had broken with all convention while using simple language and yet conveyed so much meaning, life, and action. It was one of the best poems she had seen and was written by one of us. And then she held up the page from my Semantics paper and wanted to know who the poet was.

This story is part of our Poetry roundup!

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