Sometimes A Pizza Is Just Not Enough

Some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning. This was one of those days when you should have just stayed in bed, warm and comfortable, because waking up was the absolute highlight of the day.

Reason enough to talk to anyone.

See, Zelma and I were bored. Terribly bored. So bored that we in our desperation went to the library. Big mistake. While there, we came across a friend of ours. Frank. Frank was a rail thin, socialist vegan who refused to carry arms in the military. He believed in women’s rights, shared wealth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was frankly the only reason why I talked to him at all. He was a very nice fellow, though, despite his appalling habit of not eating things that had given their lives to be lunch. Frank also occupied rotten old buildings, entertaining some strange delusion of the buildings actually having some kind of historical or cultural value. When he wasn’t being arrested for free-thinking, he staged protests and demonstrations and workshops for lost souls in search of meaning in their existence. Or, as it would turn out, bored souls in search of adventure and pizza.

 

I bet you can guess what happened next. That’s right, Zelma and I were in fact in possession of two extremely bored souls, and in search of pizza, so when Frank, bless his long-haired emo-heart, asked us to participate in a workshop for women, we agreed to do so for the very reasonable price of a pizza. A workshop for women, he said. He didn’t have enough participants, and we were gullible and easily bribed.

Reason enough to do anything.

We entered the room, apprehensive and, frankly, still quite bored. In the middle of the room there was a table, and around the table a few women, couldn’t have been more than five. They all seemed a little lost. All, except for one. She exuded confidence and quirkiness, two things our teenage selves found off-putting and strange. But, thinking about that pizza, we sat down and decided to play along. A few silly get-to-know-each-other games later, our boredom level had spiked to never before seen heights and we were only getting started.

Filling with dread, we watched as the quirky hippie leader brought out magazines, scissors and glue. Lots of glue. No wonder she was so strange. She told us she wanted us to access our inner feminist. We were supposed to flip through the magazines and cut out pictures that represented the feminist inside of us, past experiences and future hopes. She wanted us to express in pictures why we decided to attend this feminist gathering and why it meant so much to us.

Silently I cursed Frank and tried to find a picture of a pizza. There was no pizza in any of the magazines. I cut out a picture of piano keys. Then a black shoe. Then a pretty white flower. And a picture of some liquorice. Zelma and I worked in silence with the other girls. They all seemed completely engrossed in the task and Zelma and I did everything we could not to accidentally look at each other. I knew if we did, we would burst out laughing at the absurdity of the situation. Zelma and I are definitely not mood board people. We don’t cut out pictures from magazines and glue them to a piece of paper. In fact, we’re the kind of people who paint our nails purple and laugh at people who make mood boards, while drinking copious amounts of my own home made salmiakkikossu and listening to The Dark Side of the Moon.

Mood board, most definitely not made by me.

 And then, our eyes locked. I pulled a muscle in my side trying to keep from laughing out loud, and I can only assume the other women thought Zelma had a weird habit of snorting every now and then, just because she could. I have no idea how we made it through that meeting. I made up some kind of bullshit story about liquorice representing female liberation, and tried to explain the fact that my mood board was mostly black whereas the other women had cut out pictures of sunflowers and bright hats. Zelma just pretended she had laryngitis and couldn’t say anything.

The pizza?

So not worth it.

*

Sometimes A Pizza Is Just Not Enough