Cringeworthy by Melissa Dahl

Author:Melissa Dahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Cringe Attacks

The other day I was putting away laundry, my least favorite chore. It’s already folded, dammit. What more do you want from me? As I worked, my mind was wandering this way and that when, out of nowhere, a memory pulled me back to the summer of 2007, to the carpeted hallways of building 25 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. Suddenly I’m twenty-two again.

I’m also nervous. I was always nervous back then. Just days after graduating from college in northern California, I packed everything I owned into my Toyota Corolla and drove north to Washington State, where I’d gotten an internship in the health section at MSNBC.com. In retrospect, I was terrifically underqualified for the role. All day I would nod along in meetings while the rest of the editors discussed things like hormone replacement therapy or hospital-acquired infections or the obesity paradox, and then, back at my desk, I would conduct quiet, frantic Google searches to figure out what on earth they’d been talking about. There were so many things to worry about.

Lately, though, I’d been worrying about my clothes. The newspapers where I’d interned throughout college were very come-as-you-are, but people dressed better here, or at least my boss sure did. Sometimes, I noticed, if I showed up late but was wearing something nice, she would tacitly dismiss my tardiness. I started copying my roommate, who at twenty-five seemed infinitely wiser and more worldly than me and who on weekdays favored midlength American Apparel jersey skirts in dark, office-approved neutrals like navy and black.

But in this memory the skirt betrays me. I leave the restroom, preoccupied by all of the obscure medical terms I need to look up later, and walk back toward the newsroom. That’s when I hear a shriek of laughter to my right, coming from down the hall. I look toward the sound and see three people staring back, one of whom is literally pointing and laughing at me. I look down and—oh . . . my god.

My new skirt is tucked into the back of my tights.

In my apartment ten years later, I know I’m far away in space and time from this moment, and yet it still makes me wince. I even shake my head back and forth a few times, as if I think I can use physical force to remove from my brain the image of the office hallway, the laughing coworker, the traitorous skirt. “How embarrassing,” I whisper, out loud, to no one.

This reaction, the way I will often respond physically to a cringeworthy memory, has always seemed like an odd personal quirk of mine. But drumcowski, the king of online cringe himself, told me he reacts the same way when his mind sees fit to replay his own embarrassing memories. “You’re just sitting there and your brain decides to throw it in your face for no reason,” he says. “For me, if I’m alone, I just start shouting, ‘NO! No no no no no no no.

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