PEN15
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Now theres that existential dread I was missing in the last episode!
Have you ever been in an empty stadium at night?
The space is designed for maximum capacity, so to see it empty is almost ontologically disturbing.
And yet all the parallel and perpendicular lines are very soothing.
Anna and Maya volunteer at a 24-hour walk for cancer with her UU church.
Anna drags Maya along for these church functions, and Steve hovers on the edges.
He still seems mostly sweet, but Derick has revealed himself to be an utter chode.
Okay, a brief detour about the beeper.
- Maya looks at the beeper and knows that Ds not coming.
Does that mean its a beeper with text display or has Maya had to learn a whole numerical code?
- Whats Steves financial situation?
He has a cater waiter job, lives with his single mom, yet has a beeper?
Steve and Derrick beg off attending the Walk for Cancer because they already made sacrosanct bowling plans.
An unbreakable bowling vow, as it were.
Anna is gutted that her boyfriend wont be attending, but Maya is not so secretly stoked.
Me and you time, and people with cancer.
Itll be fun, she says.
Balancing the needs of your first boyfriend and your established friendships, yeesh.
Some women cant stick the landing well into adulthood.
Our society puts such a premium on romantic love.
All fall to the boyfriends gaping need.
She cant let anyone down, and thank God that includes Maya.
Anna is a saint of perpetual obligation.
The girls arent giving the Walk for Cancer the gravity it maybe deserves.
Their boy stuff and friend stuff take precedence over the heartfelt testimonials of the adults.
One of the boys pressures Anna (and to a lesser extent Maya) to kiss his friend.
Vivid Brandt flashbacks, but this three-way is tinged with the specter of death.
But arent they all?
She thinks they made fun of her brother, and the energy is rancid.
Apparently, Anna is gross because shes still never gotten her period.
But Maya is also gross because she could be bleeding at any time.
Derrick also calls Maya Lucy Liu, so its the guillotine for him.
Meanwhile, Steve has learned a new trick: asking Are you mad at me?
approximately every two minutes.
The girls wake up and enter the magical realism of a stadium at night.
Its humbling to realize that other people have stuff going on, like, all the time.
The luminary circle is, for Anna and Maya, the equivalent of Sartres chestnut tree.
InNausea,the protagonist sees the root of this tree and realizes that it exists.
Likewise, the bullhorn guys speech about cancer is mostly about the words we use to obfuscate the disease.
But everyone in that circle alive or dead, cancer-free or sick exists.
