This Therapy Session May Be Monitored for Quality Purposes: Emily and Elizabeth, 2019

Last month, my friends Emily and Elizabeth came to visit me again, arriving late on Tuesday night and leaving on Friday morning. This visit was shorter than many of the others that we have had, but even though we didn't have time to do every activity that we would have liked, we had a great time catching up and having new adventures together. I'm grateful that I got to see them again, especially since it didn't work out for us to see each other last summer.

After they arrived, Elizabeth shared a story from the college where she works, telling me that she and some of her coworkers have started a grassroots campaign to reinstate the unicorn mascot that the school got rid of in the eighties, when the formerly female college went co-ed. "There would be so many people who would come to the college because its mascot is a unicorn. They are missing so many marketing opportunities!" Also, she reports that their current mascot, which is a cyclone, appears on worst mascot lists online. It seems like a clear choice.

As we hung out, I read aloud Badness for Beginners, a gloriously satirical picture book by Ian Whybrow. In this story, wolf parents try to train their little wolves to be bad, and they end up suffering the natural consequences in a hilarious surprise ending. I took the following photo before I started reading, and one of the objects in the foreground is Lydia's purple squeaker pig. When I squeezed it and made it honk, Emily flailed and gasped with far more surprise and horror than I had intended to provoke, and I felt kind of bad, even though it was also hilarious.

We stayed up late talking, and at one point, I shared funny stories from a gender reveal party that I recently attended for a childhood friend's baby. One of the stories involved my friend's soft heart for stray animals, and Elizabeth said, "Travis's mom is like that. Once, she picked up a sheep from the side of the road and had to find out who it belonged to." That is a hilarious mental picture.

The main event on Wednesday was our trip to a mall that I hadn't set foot in since my siblings got their Build a Bears in 2011. It had been even longer than that since I had traversed the mall as a whole, and it was an odd trip down memory lane. We explored the Disney store, dropped by Build a Bear for me to buy a Flash costume for a stuffed animal, and went to Think Geek. We also shopped for clothes in a department store, because I wanted to replace an item of mine that had worn out. I was wildly unsuccessful, but when I apologized for wasting the others' time, Emily reported that she had just found two things she needed at sixty percent off. That made me feel much better.

We found lots of entertaining things in a children's toy and game store, and one of the funniest moments of the whole visit occurred when Emily held up a gigantic lion stuffed animal and said, "Um. Why does this say 'plush hippopotamus?'" BEST. MISTAKE. EVER.

We stopped in the food court for them to have their lunch. I'm on a very restricted diet and can't eat out, but I did note one restaurant's sign with appreciation. "Oh, look. This restaurant has no MSG, chemical flavorings, or preservatives."

"But I love MSG!"

"It doesn't love you back, Elizabeth!"

While they got their lunches, I picked a food court table underneath a beautiful skylight.

On the way home, Elizabeth told me that at the college where she works, her boss came into the office one day with a plastic unicorn that shoots rainbow-colored foam balls. Later, someone brought to work a full-size Nerf gun that shoots the same balls and is also made to look like a unicorn. "Now we're looking for more unicorn-shaped artillery."

"It's all in preparation for changing the mascot, right?"

"Yes!"

When we got home, we played countless rounds of Apples to Apples and three games of Clue. We also played You've Been Sentenced, a game where players have to make grammatical, coherent sentences out of the different words and word forms on ten hexagonal cards. One of my sentences was, "You never figured out bombing before the maddening laughter Christopher Columbus left us." We accepted all kinds of weird things, and Emily commented at one point, "I think we're more lenient than the average player, because we have vivid imaginations."

At dinner, Elizabeth started searching for YouTube videos of Robert Pattison, because she wanted to show me that he was more attractive in Harry Potter than in Twilight. (I have never watched either.) She accidentally clicked on a video of all of this actor's shirtless scenes, and I questioned her judgment to put such questionable things on her Internet history.

She laughed. "I can delete it from my history, but it's on your wifi!"

"AUGHHHH!"

             Our next activity was a walk in the woods behind my house. At breakfast that morning, I had noticed Emily turning around in her chair to look out the window, and I had asked, "Are you admiring our view?"

             "No. I'm admiring the play equipment!"

             So, after we finished our walk, the three of us played on the swings like the staid and mature adults that we are.

When we came back inside, we finished our game of You've Been Sentenced. And by "finished our game," I mean that we finished playing with every single card in the entire box. After that, I read aloud The Neighbors, another picture book with a surprise ending, and then Emily read aloud my favorite story that I wrote last year, which runs about 15,000 words long. I enjoyed their reactions to different scenes and conversations, and colored pictures in my Frozen coloring book while I listened. I colored a few of them in conventional ways, and let my creativity run wild with others.

             The next day, we went to Barnes and Noble. I complained about the new trend of authors putting bleeped f-words in their titles, and we kept seeing more and more of these. Elizabeth would refrain from pointing one out, and then I would see it anyway and groan. In better news, I got a Peanuts DVD fifty percent off. When we left the store, we went to Applebees for lunch, and while they ate, I sat there with my water bottle, writing down the funny things they said. I also made them smile for a picture.

             When the server saw me paying for the meal at the end, she told the other girls, "Now, I need the story on THIS. How come you're the ones eating, and she even brought her own water bottle, but she's paying for you?"

I laughed. "Well! I have a very restricted diet, and so does my family. Back in 2011, my parents got an Applebees gift card for their anniversary, and since we couldn't use it, it ended up getting lost on my dad's dresser. When we were moving, it got uncovered, and my mom told me, 'The next time Emily and Elizabeth come, you're taking them to Applebees!'"

She laughed. "I see! I was looking at this situation, thinking, 'How do I score a friend like her?'"

When we got home, I showed Mom the journals that I had bought at Barnes and Noble. She saw this one and said, "That's appropriate, since you're always laughing your head off over your journals."

            That evening, Emily, Elizabeth, and I talked a lot, played more games, and then engaged in one of more unique activities. Ever since our first visit, it has been a tradition for us to probe the internal lives of our fictional characters by taking them to therapy, and this year, Elizabeth was the therapist while I pretended to be my character David. Emily filmed the sessions at my request, since I wanted to journal about this later without having to take notes during the process. 

            I struggled to stay in character, because even though I have playacted many different characters as therapy patients before, none of them had very serious life issues. It was hard for me to talk about David's childhood baggage from his perspective without feeling a little bit nonsensical, so the easiest part was when I had him act all horrified and indignant at the idea that he would have to tell anyone else about his problems in order to work through them. This, at least, I could take from my own life, even though I was otherwise talking about stuff that had nothing to do with my personal experience.

            There were two particularly funny parts. One was that I was talking in first person about "feeling rejected by my father" when I heard someone coming down the stairs. I supposed that it was Mom and called out an explanation, in case she had overheard my last line. Then Dad rounded the corner! He hadn't actually heard anything that I was saying, so it didn't matter, but I was like, "I was not talking about you! You're a great dad. I'm pretending to be one of my characters in therapy!"

            The other funny detail is that when Elizabeth made side commentary to the camera, I reacted in character by looking in that direction and gasping. "What? You're filming this?"

            Emily raised her eyebrows and said in a monotone, "This therapy session may be monitored for quality purposes."

            We laughed a lot. It's one of my favorite quotes from the visit, which is why it appears in the title.

Later that night, we told more stories, and Elizabeth talked about trips to the Cedar Point amusement park. When I complained about the trope of characters in books getting stuck on the Ferris Wheel, she said, "That only happens because authors lose sight of how many other rides people can get stuck on. Including ones that get stuck upside down!"

While we were at dinner, Emily groaned over the grandfather clock's incomplete-sounding chime at the forty-five minute mark. In years past, Elizabeth would torment her by moving the dining room table's candlesticks to the side so that they wouldn't be symmetrical in the centerpiece, but this time, we didn't even have to do anything to distress her.

Before bed that night, we read aloud stories that I've written about David, and they learned lots more about him and his life problems. But not everything! There's plenty more for him to reveal in therapy sessions in future years. Again, I colored Frozen pages whenever someone else was reading, coloring some of them very weirdly. I enjoyed sharing my stories with them, and it was fun to get their outraged reactions, random comments, and observations about subtleties in the story, some of which I hadn't even noticed while I was writing.

We stayed up until the wee hours again, and then we said goodbye on Friday morning. I'm grateful for the time that we had together and for the new memories that we made. I am so blessed to have such good friends and to have stayed in touch with them over so many years. Technology is a surprisingly good way to meet people, and is an amazing force for maintaining relationships, but there is nothing quite like spending time face to face. I'm so glad that Emily, Elizabeth, and I got to enjoy each other's presence again.