dispatch from lake weekend 2025

i had a birthday and i'm feeling extremely forty-five!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

every winter a medium-to-large group of my friends and familiars all flies and/or drives to the lake to converge at a dusty, rickety, indiscriminately-heated one hundred year old lodge for a cozy weekend of snacks, games, and vicious gossiping and passing of phones next to a crackling fireplace. i’m not really a gung ho traveler but it’s hard to resist a vacation that costs sixty bucks a night to stay in a freezing old building that doesn’t have a single TV inside of it.

packing we usually leave early friday afternoon and stay until late sunday morning and, before i started being brutally honest with myself about who i actually am, i used to bring a variety of potential outfits; but deep down i know all i’m gonna wear is whatever i wear for the drive in on friday, maybe those same clothes on saturday if they don’t smell weird/look too much like the car, and if i do wear different clothes on saturday then i’m definitely wearing those same clothes home on sunday. in another lifetime i might’ve asked myself if i needed some cozy clothes to change into upon arrival friday evening, but all i wear are cozy clothes so it literally doesn’t matter. (lindy wore this with magenta bike shorts all weekend and she looked so dope i was like “should i become a different, more sartorially adventurous person?” and no i should not!!) my winter wardrobe, just like my summer wardrobe, is black sweatshirts and high-waisted black knit pants and so i pack one of each and a bunch of underwear and something to sleep in and who cares! i think this is what it is to be a grownup, being embarrassingly honest with yourself about how many times you will actually change your clothes.

another painfully adult reality of being away from your home and/or job for more than thirty minutes is deciding WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT MEDICINES TO TAKE WITH YOU. i can’t even go to the movies without at least a flonase and three types of painkillers on my person, and the place we go on “vacation” is a big, drafty, dusty ass house in the middle of the fucking wilderness where the rooms cost $60 per night and there isn’t so much as a vending machine on the property; there is no grocery store nearby, there is no charming mom-and-pop apothecary around the corner, there is no late-night walgreens serving gas-x and gatorade in a well-lit drive-thru. frankly, if i think about it too long i will have a panic attack, because i hate going anywhere that isn’t within half a mile of a level-1 trauma center.
at home i have a small pharmacy in my bedside table and i need everything in there, even the stuff that’s seasonal or expired, but there is only so much available space inside the rolling suitcase i use because i my travel requirements are too complicated for a BAG. and i barely take care of my skin at home, i’m definitely not throwing a bunch of viscous liquids in my car to use on the road???? my essentials:
-soapbox unscented makeup wipes (i first encountered these in the bathroom at the sophy hotel in chicago, and they are excellent for washing/exfoliating your face while horizontal when you don’t want to get up or get water all down the front of your nightgown)
-a bar of dial soap (not messy, will never squeeze out all over your suitcase, can also serve as an actual germ-killing hand soap not just overly stinky hotel liquified perfume)
-tooth powder (i hate goo, gimme an abrasive froth, also less potential mess)
-a big, cheap tube of unscented body lotion that can also go on your face if you really want to keep it lean, which i do so that i have more room for an epi-pen or oxygen tank or whatever other middle-aged shit i might want to take (trust me, you don’t have to do your whole THING for a weekend babe, two days with no skincare routine is fine, relax)
-this is all the ways you can use vaseline in a jam: lip balm, hemorrhoid moisturizer, under eye cream, stubborn makeup remover, dry feet softener, probably more but you get it
-nail clippers, which is also a tiny scissors if you think about it
-travel white noise machine (i have this one) or phone app or foam ear plugs or noise cancelling headphones or literally anything you can find to seal yourself off from the irritation of the world outside your skull!!!

remember when you used to be fun and cool and have anonymous sex and throw a pair of panties in a clutch and that was all you needed for a night out? yeah, me neither. if i don’t have a usb-c cord, a lightning cord in case my headphones die, a usb-a cord just in case, 3.5 headphones, and a fully charged battery brick in my bag i will literally die, not to mention my:
vitamin c pop rocks (physical illness)
prescriptions (mental illness)
b12 patches (for “energy,” might be fake)
drip drop sticks (hydration/hangover) and alka seltzer tablets (tummy upset)
sinus meds from behind the counter of a real store (you can get advil at the gas station but if you like the meth ones you better bring em)
zantac/zyrtec (one of each to cure an allergic reaction)
nsaids (for other people)
the good painkillers (for me)
i also have a little plastic case i take everywhere i go that holds a bunch of assorted goodies like hydroxyzine and trazodone and gabapentin and flexeril which can all either stop an emergency or start one, depending on my mood!!!!!

eating YOU GUYS, we are the moms of the group and mannnn i fucking hate it. okay i kind of love it, but, it’s also not really very ~sexy~ to be the ones everyone can dependably rely on to bring the costco hummus and the seltzer. i mean, my peers are in the room down the hall drinking the single bottle of booze they brought to share but because we bring the teens, and half a dozen of the teens’ friends, and the me who is as mopey and whiny as a teen, it’s on us to show up with the pretzels and the carrot sticks and the little pre-cut cubes of cheese in case someone wakes up in the middle of the night and decides the only thing that might satisfy them is a little pre-cut cube of room temperature cheese.
k drives the kids and i drive the luggage and the medicines and the supplemental potato chips and fruit snacks and shit, and every night we order from the one pizza place in town that remains open when it’s snowy out, trying to switch up our orders so it doesn’t feel like we ate the same food every day. this year, i branched out on the first night and ordered a delicious sandwich with arugula and a bunch of cured meats and sun-dried tomatoes on focaccia and it gave me food poisoning, and i’m not saying that as a euphemism for diarrhea, it was a full-on homer’s sandwich situation!! i survived, but i spent the rest of our “fun” weekend eating bananas from my house.

games the biggest activity of lodge weekend, by far, is various forms of game-playing. because there is no TV. and the wi-fi is weak and bad. and if you try to quietly read the exceptionally good book you brought some asshole will interrupt you every five minutes to call you boring. would i rather watch an endlessly buffering netflix show than spend even one minute losing at a card game? of course i would, but that is being a bad sport. depending on the constellation of available people at the time (some people go take pictures of the frozen lake, other people drive forty minutes to a real town to get coffee with oat milk, the teens can be fickle about how much time they want to spend with people who no longer get their periods), we can play a good game (worst case scenario) or one i hate (nertz) or one i can play alone inside on my phone for hours because everyone else wants to do shit like “get some fresh air” (balatro).
the most fun game to ever exist is one called 15-second animal that jessie (who is ordinarily a real moron) taught us, and we play it every year. first you give everyone playing a pen and some index cards or cut up pieces of paper. when it’s your turn, you tell everyone to draw an animal and they get 15 seconds to draw. everyone gives their drawing, as inconspicuously as possible, to the person whose turn it is and they show each artistic rendering to the group then choose a winner based on whatever they want. accuracy? sex appeal?? whatever moves you. sounds dumb but i promise it’s screamingly funny, especially because most people can’t draw an animal in five fucking minutes, let alone fifteen seconds??? and people are always calling out shit like platypus that causes you to waste the first five seconds thinking “what does a platypus look like?” anyway, it’s so fun. suggest it next time your grandma refuses to play truth or dare.

we got home sunday night and the kid (zooted on candy and staying up late) and i (full of bananas) watched the best (??) grammys ceremony (???) in recent memory (??????) and brother i lost my ever-loving shit when the abracadabra video slash mastercard commercial came on. when the beat dropped at 1:42 my soul left my body, i almost picked up the television and threw it out the fucking window what a JAM. have we ever talked about what an idiotic, psycho gaga stan i am? i’m talking slobbering over this bitch at LC’s fashion show on the hills, professionally framed artpop cover on the wall, defended the meat dress online from an account attached to my real name, spent all my rent money to go to the monster’s ball at the united center DERANGED. a real sicko.
my top 6 hardest, bangingest, bump-and-grindingest, gaggiest gaga remixes to turn the motherfucking party OUT:
stupid love vitaclub warehouse mix (if i play this in the car i will drive full speed into a wall, this is what house music should sound like)
bad romance chew fu H1N1 fix
marry the night john dahlback remix
telephone crookers vocal mix (this used to tear the club UP circa 2009)
G.U.Y. rami samir afuni remix
americano gregori klosman remix

her new record comes out soon and i threw together a playlist of all my jams to get me right while i desperately wait, and if you need something to lose your mind to while in the shower this is it. try not to judge my taste if you hate it (like i said, this is an artpop household; you’re not gonna find “shallow” on a best of gaga list over here and no we do not acknowledge the tony bennett era, are you insane) but please know that i am always right. love you bye