July 17, 2025 • 55 mins
For our penultimate Heavyweight encore, we’re joined by Pen15 co-creator Anna Konkle to revisit last season’s junior high drama — #53: Leif.
On Valentine’s Day in junior high, Leif was supposed to ask Kalila out. But he never did. Leif’s lack of action that day impacted Kalila’s life to come. And so seventeen years later, she wants to know: what happened.
For more, head over to Pushkin+, where you can subscribe to hear an extended cut of Kalila’s conversation with Anna.
Credits
This episode was hosted and produced by senior producer Kalila Holt, along with Jonathan Goldstein and Phoebe Flanigan. The supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production assistance from Mohini Madgavkar. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Special thanks to Max Green, Flora Lichtman, and Connor Sampson. In the IM recreation, Karina was played by Reagan Didier, and Leif was played by John Claassen — thanks to Greg Holt and Tony John for making that possible. The show was mixed by Bobby Lord. Music by Christine Fellows, John K Samson, Blue Dot Sessions, Katie Mullins, Florian Le Prisé, and Bobby Lord. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hello, Hello, it seems like the Spider has become
this thing that catches the fly. You're welcoming me into
the studio.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Am I the fly? No, I guess you're the fly.
I'm the spider. Feels pretty good. So so what Yeah,
As hopefully our listeners know by now, if they're paying attention.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Well, whoa, whoa. I was sensing a little attitude.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Don't antagonize the listeners.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
That's rule number one in broadcasting.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
As our dear audience should know, we have been encoring
some episodes this summer, and usually at the end we'll
have a little update with the guests about what's happened. Since, yes,
this is going to be a little bit different, I
got to interview someone I was really really excited to
talk to. She makes one of my favorite shows. It's
(01:17):
called Pen fifteen.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, we talk about it.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
We talk about it like, yeah frequently we do.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
When it was running, we really we talked about it
a lot. I have to say. It's probably one of
my favorite shows too.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
For those who don't know the show, it is made
by Anakonkole and Maya Erskin, who are two real life
best friends and they play versions of themselves at thirteen,
so it's about their middle school experience. They are playing
themselves as adults, and then they are surrounded by literal children,
people who are actually thirteen playing their classmates.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
For the first episode, that concept felt like a big
hurdle maybe to kind of like get into the story.
But I was like over it and into it like
five minutes in. Yeah, you stop thinking about the fact
they're adults. Yeah, it's like a magic trick that they pull,
and it's beautiful and so funny.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It's really good. That's right. I really think anyone who
hasn't watched it, I would highly highly recommend it. And
I was very excited to talk to Anna and Yeah,
we thought it could be a cool conversation to put
with this episode because both of us are revisiting that
same age, in her case very literally recreating scenes from
her childhood.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, so you guys end up talking about the episode
and her show.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
And about just our perspective middle school experiences.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So let's get to listening, shall we.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Let's get to listening. I'm Khalila Holt and this is
Heavyweight Today's episode. Late right after the break, I'm walking
(03:09):
to work one morning when I spot Laife heading towards me.
From the ages of twelve to fourteen, Life was my crush,
the object of my junior high obsession. I still google
him occasionally, but he's completely absent from the Internet. I
have no idea what became of him. It's like he
just disappeared. So when I see him on the street,
(03:32):
I feel my heart speed up. I wonder if I
should say hi. I wonder if I say hi in
what tone I should go Life, Life, oh Liafe. But
then as I dropped closer, I realized that the man
I thought was life is not life at all, and
in fact is not even a man. He's a teenager.
(03:55):
This makes sense given that I've not seen life since
I was fourteen years old. Still, having your heart speed
up at the sight of a teenager is a sure
way to feel like a creep. And just like that,
to quote Carrie Bradshaw, Liaife is back on my mind
(04:19):
all these years later, and I remember the exact type
of pen layfro with. I remember his birthday. I remember
how he kept his wallet on a long chain, the
first time I'd ever seen such a thing done, and
wore a quicksilver sweatshirt with holes worn through the sleeves
that he'd stick his thumbs through. He was pale, with
blue eyes, short and slight.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
I remember him being kind of like wayfish, almost like
kind of almost like a furial.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Crushes do not exist in a vacuum. They require gleeful
gossip with your friends. And so I call Itchia, who's
been my best friend since elementary school, to talk about
our old classmate Lafe.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
He had this like light blonde hair that he died
and was not a long like down to here, but
hair long like like a bottling.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But like shag. And then yeah, there go the man's bob. Once,
while away on a school sponsored trip, we phoned Leife
from our hotel room, me, Lucia, and our other friend Emily,
but three of us huddled together on the scratchy Marriotte comforter,
stifling our giddiness as we dialed. I don't remember if
(05:28):
we actually talked to the thing I remember is that
we called.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
We talked to his mom.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Our friend Emily asked if she could speak with Laife.
It's Emily, she said. Emily said, Leife's mom go upstairs
and talk to him. Then she hung up on us.
Turned out he had a sister named Emily, so weird.
Luccia's stepmom was a photographer, and she once mentioned that
if Laife and I ever started dating, she wanted to
(05:54):
take our portrait. I don't think she knew I had
a crush on him. Laife was just so short and
I was so tall that I think she found the
idea of us as a couple funny. I was already
six feet tall by the end of eighth grade. I
got pressured into playing basketball, but I was so meek
that I usually just stood there while some terrifying girl
(06:16):
shoved by me with the ball. I don't like to
look at pictures of myself from that time. Standing next
to other kids my age, I look like the teacher
or like someone's off putting sister home from college. None
of my pants fit correctly, and my socks were always
pulled up too high. I used to listen to the
song eleanor Rigby and panic. In my interpretation, it was
(06:39):
a song about how no one wanted to date poor
old eleanor Rigby, just like no one wanted to date me.
When I was thirteen. One day I was sitting by
the gym after school with my friend desiree. When she
told me, I picture you getting a boyfriend in college.
(07:00):
She laid out this whole hypothetical where me and my
future boyfriend reached for the same book at the library.
At the time I was offended college, other girls at
my school, desire included, already had boyfriends, the middle school
version of a boyfriend where you were afraid to touch
each other and broke up after a week. But still
(07:21):
I had to wait till college. But as it turned out,
I did not get a boyfriend before college, nor in college,
nor even for several years after college, And so I
concluded the problem was not my circumstances. The problem was me.
I was not datable. After meeting me for the first time,
(07:43):
people might say, oh, she was funny, but they'd never say,
is she single. I was simply not a person that
anyone could think of romantically. At college parties, boys would
grab my friends and start dancing with them, and I
would stay for a while, dancing alongside them, like I
was part of the good time, but eventually I'd walk away.
(08:05):
It was weird for me to keep standing there smiling
blankly at the wall while they were making out. By
now I'm in my thirties, and I actually do have
a boyfriend. Sam and I have been together for four years.
We live together, We've taken trips, know each other's moms,
list each other on emergency contact forms, and yet still
(08:28):
I can't shake this feeling that I'm behind, that there's
something wrong with me, that I started too late, and
now I can never catch up. Sometimes Sam tells me
stories about the girls he used to hook up with,
or about his high school girlfriend, or the girlfriend he
lived with before he lived with me. I know that
he's not trying to get back together with any of
(08:49):
these people. I know he does invested in our relationship
as I am. Still, when he tells these stories, I
feel so inadequate that I want to cry. A couple
times I have cried, and he has been confused, and
suddenly we're in an argument because I don't know how
to explain why I'm crying. I want charming stif stories
(09:09):
like that one of rhapsodizes about my past of young
love and mutual discovery. Instead, my past is a wall
I smiled at, and the only stories I have about
people I've hooked up with are vaguely unsettling to repeat.
(09:30):
I liked Leife at a time before all that, back
when it still felt like romance might happen for me,
like any interaction could be the start of a love
story for the Ages. One time I brought whole Food
sushi for lunch and felt self conscious because I'd seen
the Breakfast Club in which Molly Ringwald is mocked for
bringing sushi for lunch. But Leif walked by my table
(09:52):
and said, is that sushi? And I said yes? And
he said I love sushi. And I said would you
like a piece? And he said really? And I said yes,
And suddenly I was proud to have a lunch of
whole food sushi. Laife talked constantly about a band called
Billie Talent, a semi yelly alt rock group with lyrics
about my I started listening to them because I knew
(10:12):
Laife liked them, and from there became an obsessive fan myself.
Once I ran into Laife at a Billie Talent concert,
I pretended not to see him because I didn't want
him to think that I'd followed him there, But he
came over and said hi to me. There were little
moments where it almost seemed like he could be flirting
with me. We followed each other on the blogging site zanga,
(10:35):
and for a while there was some sort of glitch
where Life was unable to comment on my page. When
the glitch was fixed, he was so excited that he
left me one hundred comments in a row. Comment forty
two said, on the forty second day of Christmas, I
gave to Kaylee one hundred comments, lots of typing and
a pear tree. I still have a journal from that time.
(11:03):
In it, i'd write Laife all these vague letters. It
is humiliating to read these letters now, to the point
where I refuse to quote them here. Suffice it to
say that I constantly referred to him as dearest. Surrounding
the letters are my thoughts about myself, mostly how I
wished I were a different person entirely, someone charismatic and
(11:26):
sought after. Sometimes I'd have this huge swell of self
hatred that I didn't know what to do with. Once
I tried to caught myself, but the kitchen knife I
chose was not very sharp, and so it was harder
than I thought it would be, and I gave up.
When I find someone who wants to date me, I
thought this feeling will go away. I hoped that life
(11:48):
might be that someone. I'd talked long fantasies about how
we'd get together, and sometimes I'd realize what a good
mood I was in, and then I'd realize the good
mood was because of something I'd made up, something that
hadn't really happened at all. In the winter of eighth grade,
(12:11):
I finally decided enough with the secret pining. It was
time to let Laife know how I felt. And so
I took action. And by took action, I mean that
I delegated action to other people. There was a stairway
right next to our classroom that was just a single
flight and closed by doors on each side. It was
(12:33):
in this room of stairs that my friends Lucia and
Emily cornered Laife and told him that I liked him
while I ran home and hid. Afterwards, I asked them
what he said. They told me he said okay. That night,
in a fit of panic and despair, I got online.
I logged onto Zanga, and I wrote a veiled, angsty
(12:56):
post about what a huge mistake I'd made. Laife saw
the post as I knew he would, and he I
amed my friend Karina about it. And here is where
something amazing happened, because, in this conversation with Karina, Laife
said he would date me. He said he thought I
was cool. He was going to ask me out on
(13:17):
Valentine's Day. Seeing couples perform how much they liked each
other made me feel inferior. So I hated Valentine's Day
with a showy passion. Each February fourteenth, I'd wear all
black as a sign of protest. Laife's thought was that
this romantic gesture might help me to reclaim the holiday.
(13:38):
I know all this because at the time, Karina promptly
copy and pasted the ims with Life into an email
for me. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I
was so happy. Finally, I thought, finally, the thing that
only happens to other people, it's now happening to me.
(14:01):
On Valentine's Day, I got up and my mom drove
me to school. People were giving out candy and paper hearts.
I tried to look nonchalant. I went to science class,
I went to lunch, to recess, to math, to basketball,
and then school was over and I went home. Laife
(14:23):
did not say a single word to me all day.
I have no idea what happened or why he changed
his mind.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
Huh did you ever talk to him about it?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I rehash all this on the phone with Lucia. Never
did we speak directly about it, like we spoke through
you and Emily, through Karina on im and like through
my veiled zanga posts. Interesting and having been my best
friend for all these years, Lucia into It's what I'm
(14:56):
building up to. So you want to try to find
him more? Yeah, but I'm afraid. I tried a drafting
a letter, and I was like, do I just sound
into safe anyway? So do you think this is completely
insane to do?
Speaker 6 (15:12):
No?
Speaker 4 (15:13):
I mean, I'm sure you wrote. You're a very good
writer and a thoughtful person, so I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
The way you approached it was good. Since googling Life
had always failed me, I turned to a public records
database that I get through work. I was hoping to
discover a possible mailing address for Life, and I did,
looks like maybe he lives in Arizona. And I saw
he had like a from twenty twenty court thing from
(15:40):
defacing a political sign. Well, I guess you don't know
which direction. I know it's a good direction. I want
to talk to life directly, the way I never did
back then. I want to know what he really thought
of me, and why he never asked me out on
Valentine's Day. All these years, I've believed this story about
(16:05):
how people don't see me romantically. But if I can
to the beginning of that story, if I can see
myself differently at thirteen, it could reframe everything that came
after I name dropped you in the letter name dropped
me because I'm so well known well. I was like,
we used to live together, but now we both live
(16:25):
with our boyfriend, so that he wouldn't think I was
like trying to date him now Highlafe, I wrote in
my letter, I don't know if you remember me, but
we went to Near North together. I had a huge
crush on you, and I was hoping you'd be up
to talk to me about what you remember from that time.
I hang up the phone with Lucia and I walked
(16:46):
to the mailbox. I send off my letter. But then
(17:07):
several weeks to go by and nothing. Did Laife get
the letter and decide to ignore me? Or do I
just have the wrong address. Usually when reporting a story,
I tried calling at this point, and I did find
a phone number for Laife. However, the idea of dialing
it makes me want to lie down in the middle
(17:28):
of the street and simply pass away. And so, just
like I did at thirteen, I recruit someone else as
an envoy.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
And who is it? Someone else? You?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Oh yeah, it's you.
Speaker 7 (17:40):
Okay, So I'm sort of like that whole quorum of
girls all in one adult man.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
This is a regular host of this program, Jonathan Goldstein.
I want him to call Leife on my behalf to
see if Laife got the letter. I would be open
to speaking with me.
Speaker 7 (17:58):
Yeah, no, I don't think that'll be awkward at all.
Let me get my pattern down here. Hi, there was
this girl. Her name was Khaleila hol.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
You should say Kaylee first. I think you would know
me by Kaylee.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Hi, I'm Kaylee Holt's boss.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
What you say like that? It is really weird.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
That is weird.
Speaker 7 (18:16):
No, Hi, you don't know me, but I was enlisted
by an old school chum of yours.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Oh, don't say school, an.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Old flame, a paramore.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
My confidence is decreasing with every passing second.
Speaker 7 (18:29):
I won't embarrass you in front of your crush.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Are you joking, choking on this bon bun.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
As my boss asphyxiates on a piece of candy. I
weigh the pros and cons of just making the call myself,
but in the end I make the same choice I
did back then, better to send an incompetent in my
stead while I hide at home. I obsess all day Thursday,
(19:00):
I obsess all day Friday. Jonathan doesn't offer me a
single update. I can't even tell if he's made the
call yet. Than the week begins and I still have
no idea what he's done. Okay, but whatever you did
do it worked because Friday night checked my email and
I had an email from Laife saying that he would
(19:22):
talk to me.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Wow.
Speaker 7 (19:29):
Okay, well, let me just say I am almost one
hundred percent certain that I had nothing to do with that.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Well really, because it happens that day.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, it is suggestive.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Jonathan tells me that he had indeed tried calling Leaife's number.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Okay, here's the call.
Speaker 8 (19:48):
You ready?
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Okay?
Speaker 9 (19:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Okay, Hello, is Laife there?
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Could I speak to him?
Speaker 6 (20:01):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
This is her?
Speaker 1 (20:03):
This is Laife.
Speaker 6 (20:06):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
I just want to make sure I have the right person.
What is your middle name.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
Seek doodles.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
No, No, that isn't. That isn't the life that I'm
looking for.
Speaker 6 (20:26):
I'm on a toilet rin.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Though, Okay, is there anybody else in the house.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
In his email, Lafe proposed that we talk in nine days,
which is kind of a weirdly long time. I can't
help but worry that he'll bail last minute, that this
will be just like Valentine's Day all over again. So
in the meantime, hoping she might remember some clue about
what happened back then, I text my old friend Karina,
(21:03):
the one who broke her this whole Valentine's plan with
life on I AM.
Speaker 8 (21:07):
When you texted me that it was you, I was like,
oh my gosh, Like, did something.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Happen she calling me to say that miss Bergen died,
Miss Bergen being our longtime principal, which.
Speaker 8 (21:21):
She did, by the way, he didn't I didn't hear that.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Yeah, may she. I felt deranged, texting Karina that I
wanted to speak with her about life a random kid
from her eighth grade class. But Karina responded, I legitimately
thought about you in life last week, So, just like
we used to in junior high, the two of us
(21:45):
chat on the phone about a boy and then he
I am you shut up?
Speaker 8 (21:50):
Did I send you the conversation?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yes? So then I and buried in an old AOL account,
I find that email from Karina with the whole conversation
between her and Life laid out.
Speaker 8 (22:07):
I would like, absolutely love to see it.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Let me send it to you. I will. Life screen
name was chaotic detortion, which I think is just chaotic
distortion spelled wrong.
Speaker 8 (22:17):
Okay, let me read this okay at ten seventy pm.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Nice and as Karina reads, here for you, dear listener
is a dramatic recreation of that I Am exchange, with
two young actors playing the roles of Karina and Life.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Hey, Hey, Life, what's up? Kayley's talking about what I think?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
She is?
Speaker 10 (22:41):
Right on?
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Zanga, hold on, let me see Kaylee likes me, right, Did.
Speaker 11 (22:49):
Lucia and Emily tell you something?
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Yeah? After school the other day? Yeah, she does well.
If she comes on, will you tell her something? Yeah?
If she comes on, tell her that I'll go out
with her.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
But my health is always screwed with my life, so
I'm probably not going to be able to be one
hundred percent boyfrid material.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Laithe had some sort of illness the whole time I
knew him, but I never knew how sick he was
or what he was even sick with. He sometimes had
to leave school early, he was on crutches for a while,
and there were days when he just looked frail. But
at thirteen, we didn't think to ask any questions. Back then,
Karina just thought it was sweet he was considering his
(23:35):
health in his role as my future boyfriend.
Speaker 11 (23:39):
All but do you like her?
Speaker 3 (23:43):
This is kind of awkward.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, all these years later and that, yeah, I makes
my heart start pounding. I was wrong, I think see
I was wrong. He liked me, he said he liked me.
But then it goes on.
Speaker 10 (24:06):
Ohmg, don't tell her. I'm not crazy about her, but hey,
she likes me. I don't hate her or anything. And kaylee'school,
Yeah she is.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
So you want me to tell her that you'll go
out with her? Why don't you just talk to her
on Monday?
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Do you think I should?
Speaker 12 (24:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 11 (24:28):
Because I mean I don't think she would believe me,
and it would be nicer if you told her. Are
you getting her something on V Day?
Speaker 3 (24:35):
I guess when is Valentine's Day?
Speaker 11 (24:38):
Next next Tuesday, Omga, you should tell her on V
Day because she hates V Day.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
WHOA, yeah, oh will.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I always thought it was Laf who came up with
the Valentine's Day plan, but it was actually Karina. It
wasn't a romantic gesture at all. It was the gesture
of a thoughtful friend.
Speaker 8 (25:00):
But I don't remember anything after that. I didn't even
remember that. He didn't end up saying anything, like he
didn't end up saying anything to you at all.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
No, we never talked about it, No, Kaylee, he did.
Speaker 8 (25:16):
I'm pretty sure he mentioned his health again. Maybe I
like followed up and he was like, honestly, my health
just like really isn't the best.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So did life not ask me out simply because he
was too ill? Was his not asking actually a romantic
gesture something worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy or did he
just not like me? I'd ask Slaf to talk on
Zoom and I pray I won't break out or have
(25:52):
a bad hair day, because you know, I want to
look good. The morning of I put on an eyeshadow
that someone once told me was flattering, and wear a
T shirt for my favorite band because I figure it's
cool to like music. Then I head to the studio
and test the my her phone. Hello, Hello, all right,
(26:12):
that's working. I feel ill. I feel physically ill. Oh
my god, Okay, I can do this. Here we go
(26:40):
on the zoom camera. You can't even see my t
shirt or flattering eyeshadow. So that was a lot of
wasted effort. I see that Leaife is in the waiting room.
I press the admit button and he appears on screen.
Speaker 11 (26:54):
Hi.
Speaker 13 (26:56):
Hey.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
In spite of his deeper voice and tattoos, life seems
the same, like there's no discrepancy between the person I imagined
all these years and the one I'm actually looking at.
How are you?
Speaker 6 (27:12):
I'm great, I'm doing great. How are you doing?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I'm doing you know. Unfortunately, faced with the person I
imagined all these years, I suddenly can't remember how to
have a conversation. It's like I've lost twenty years of
social skills. What what what's your life?
Speaker 6 (27:35):
My life? Well? I yeah, I don't know. I just
do uh life things. You know, eat food, go to
the grocery store. I've got a dog. You know, what's
your dog of?
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Like, what's your dog's name?
Speaker 6 (27:52):
Ronan?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Good given that I'm incapable of asking any question more
specific than what is your life or who is your dog?
Life takes the lead.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
They've been doing like a lot of activisty stuff in Tucson,
and that consumes more of my time than I probably
should let it.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
In fact, the nine day delay lay fasts for was
because of his activism. A few weeks earlier, he was
at a protest with the Stop Coop City movement when
he was tasted and slammed against the ground by a
police officer. He's been recovering from a concussion at this point.
We're forty minutes into the conversation and I've somehow managed
(28:37):
to avoid asking Laife any questions about eighth grade at all,
Even though he knows we're here to talk about how
much I liked him, Bringing up that time still makes
me nervous. What do you remember about me?
Speaker 6 (28:53):
Yeah, I uh, I remember you being very tall and
maybe a little awkward. But maybe it's just because of
the crush or whatever.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
No, I was awkward, yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:04):
Like I know that you told me at some point
that you had a crush on me. We have like
a vague memory of like there's like that stairwell Lucia
telling me or something like that, like in the stairwell.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah. I ramble through my memories of what happened after
that stairwell moment, and finally up to the question that
I really came here to ask you were going to
ask me out on Valentine's Day, but then that never happened,
and I don't know why.
Speaker 6 (29:36):
Oof. I'm sorry, Yeah, I don't remember. Like the Zanga
post sounds vaguely familiar.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Can I send you, because I, in fact have these
ims between you and Karina? No way can I email
them to you?
Speaker 6 (29:53):
Yeah? See what cringeysque things I have to say.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Leife mostly reads through the ims in silence, but at
one point he makes a face and again goes oof.
When he's done, he self consciously.
Speaker 6 (30:12):
All right, well that was that was That was fun?
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Do you you have no memory of this?
Speaker 6 (30:18):
I don't know. Vaguely, I guess like it's obviously obviously
it happened.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
I mean, would be weird if I typed all this.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Suffen, Yeah, yeah, it'd be pretty weird.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
What part were you oofing at?
Speaker 13 (30:33):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (30:33):
Just I mean, don't tell her. I'm not crazy about her,
but hey, she likes it was just like that.
Speaker 13 (30:40):
Yikes.
Speaker 6 (30:46):
I don't really know what happened. Obviously we didn't date.
I don't I don't think totally forgotten.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I mean that would kind of be worse if we did.
Dan gone from your memory.
Speaker 6 (30:59):
Yeah, that'd be yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
I mean, like, it seems like you did not like me.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
I do remember you being like very funny, but uh yeah,
I do agree, though, I think I like wasn't like
into you.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
To use the eighth grade parlance, But then Lafe phrase
is a key thing. I've been wondering about the explanation
that he gave to Karina at the time his mysterious
health issues.
Speaker 6 (31:33):
I was like very very very sick. I was like
in the process essentially of getting diagnosed with Crohn's disease.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Crones is an autoimmune disease. Life's intestine was attacking itself,
making it hard for him to do basic things like
walk or eat. In the years I knew him, though,
Laife didn't know he had crones. He didn't know what
was wrong with him. He was just getting worse and worse.
It took over two years of waiting rooms and misdiagnoses
(32:04):
before he finally got to a doctor who helped him
at that point he was so sick, but the doctor
pulled his mom aside to say that she thought Leife
might die. They immediately admitted him to the hospital, where
he stayed for three months. I'm not a monster, so
(32:26):
of course I'd never say that I'm happy someone was
so ill they almost died. But hearing all this, I
can't help but feel kind of relieved, because if life
was that sick the whole time I knew him, then
it wasn't about me not being good enough. There probably
just wasn't any space in his brain for dating and
crushes at all. So I put this to.
Speaker 6 (32:47):
Liife, I for sure had crushes.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Well there goes that theory. Can I ask you how
to crush on?
Speaker 6 (32:56):
Yeah? Yeah, I know I had a crush on Soca.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
I was going to ask you that. Actually, that's what
I always suspected. You got me figured out circa up
at our school one year from Ireland, and all the
guys instantly loved her. Somehow, in that one year she
dated three or four people. I, as someone who'd never
dated anyone, found this profoundly unfair, Like what about the
(33:23):
rest of us? In my moments of insecurity, I always
used to think there's no way Life likes me, because
I'm pretty sure he likes Cerca. So while on the
one hand, it's validating to hear that my read was right,
on the other hand, it's devastating to hear that my
read was right. I move on to my next theory.
(33:44):
Do you think that any of it was height related?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Uh?
Speaker 6 (33:52):
I don't think so. I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
So what was my problem? I ask Laife if I
had some defect that prevented him from seeing me romantically,
and although he really thinks about it, an come up
with an answer.
Speaker 6 (34:10):
I'm just trying to think if like, there has ever
been anyone where I like, I'd love to date this person,
but they've got this defect.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
You know who he falls for. Life says has always
felt beyond words, especially in the eighth grade. Well, how
do you feel about talking? Am I freaking you out?
Speaker 8 (34:34):
No?
Speaker 6 (34:34):
Not at all. Okay, it's fun to catch up and
like hear what you remember. It's really nice to talk
to Yeah, you too, killy, and talk to you soon,
all right, talk.
Speaker 12 (34:45):
To you soon.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
I'd felt good while I was talking to Leife. He
was cool and nice, as he'd always been, and yet
as soon as we hang up, I suddenly feel really sad.
I sit there for a while alone in the studio,
and then, as I always have in times of stress, Hello, honey,
I call my mom. I filler in on the conversation
(35:15):
and how the only logical conclusion seems to be that, yes,
I was right, I am in fact undateable.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
Who wouldn't want to date you?
Speaker 12 (35:23):
You're awesome?
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Thanks, And I mean, I know i'm your mother, but
that is also true. I feel like that's true in
terms of like people wanting to like be my friend,
but I don't feel like that's true for like dating.
Speaker 9 (35:39):
You feel it not just from when you were younger, but.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
You feel it even now.
Speaker 9 (35:43):
Yeah, that makes me feel kind of sad. I'm sorry,
don't be sorry.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It makes me feel kind of sad, and it makes
me feel mad at people that don't see you. I
don't Oh. Yeah. I think I'm having a hard time
characterizing it because I do feel like weirdly emotional, but
also like he was nice and the conversation was good,
(36:15):
you know, So I don't want it to seem like
I thought he was like being an asshole or anything
like he wasn't.
Speaker 5 (36:21):
I don't hear that from you at all.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
I don't hear anything about any judgment about him. Yeah,
you trying to piece it together for you? Yeah, yeah,
give yourself a little space. I give myself several weeks
of space. And then as I keep trying to piece
(36:45):
it together, I decide there's one more person I want
to speak with. Very excited to talk to you. So
thanks for being up to do this weird thing.
Speaker 12 (36:54):
Yeah, no, it is weird, and I definitely feel weird
about it.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
This is Circa, the Irish girl that Lafe and the
rest of the entire fucking class was into. Because in
case it's not weird enough to reach out to my
crush after nearly twenty years, why not also reach out
to my crushes crush. I always suspected he had a
crush on you, and he said, yes, did you know.
Speaker 12 (37:18):
That M like Jesus, like he would like he would
like burn CDs for me and stuff.
Speaker 5 (37:27):
She knows.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
I feel like he also gave.
Speaker 12 (37:29):
Me a sticker that said George W. Bush is a
punk ass chump, So.
Speaker 5 (37:35):
Like, yeah, I had an awareness.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
I want to talk to Circa because I think of
her as the anti me like, here's how Circa's Valentine's
Day went. In junior high, she walked up to her
boyfriend at the time holding a Hers She's kiss and said,
do you want this or do you want a real one?
I wanted to tell me how she achieved such romantic success,
what she had that I didn't have. I had laid
(38:00):
all this out and my initial message to her.
Speaker 12 (38:03):
So I said this to my husband and he was
kind of like, well, it's obvious, isn't it. Like you
were just new and it And I think that's exactly it.
Like you guys had all been together from the age
of two, do you know? So I literally was just
new and different. I honestly think it was that simple.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
I think that's part of it. But I feel like
there was something about your personality too, Like I feel
like there was some like charisma or like confidence or
I don't know. I feel like I think.
Speaker 12 (38:33):
That that has got to be fakeatily make it though,
doesn't it? Because looking back and looking at the challenge
that was laid at my doorstep, I probably just leant
into some kind of confident persona.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Sarah only attended Near North for a single year, and
it wasn't an easy transition because of her mom's job.
She was upbraided at twelve years old and plopped down
in a foreign country. Her dad, all her old friends
stayed back in Ireland. She remembers the day she came
to visit our school for the first time.
Speaker 12 (39:08):
And I remember crying, and I remember saying, I don't
want to go there. My memory isn't a feeling invincible
or anything like, quite the opposite, like.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Like overwhelmed and shut down.
Speaker 8 (39:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
It's that sense of panic. Sirka thinks that made her
act so confident when she started school with us. It
was her way of managing Still, in the year I
knew her, she often felt insecure, and dating didn't make
that feeling go away anyway you cut it. Boyfriend, No
boyfriend junior high is hard, Sarka tells me she's been
(39:54):
married for about a year and a half. Now, how
did you guys meet? We went on Tinder. I'd ask
Slafe the same question about how he met his partner.
Speaker 6 (40:05):
Actually through Tinder. We are a tender success story. My
boyfriend threw tender too, nice.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Sarca life me. Even though I always felt like they
had some power, I lacked. Almost two decades later, we
all ended up in the same place, living with people
we met on Tinder. Back when I talked with my
(40:32):
friend Karina, I'd asked her what her impression had been
to me when we knew each other in junior high.
Speaker 8 (40:38):
Oh my gosh, Kayleie, I adored you. I remember you
being very intelligent, you were very funny. I know you
like you were, you were tall, just you know, at
that age, I feel like you always look at everyone
else and like, don't form your confidence or like embrace
every bit of yourself until later in life, and I
(41:01):
remember being like, she has so many things going for her,
Like I. I hope that she because comes more confident.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
My past self was tall and awkward and the boy
I liked didn't like me. And all these years later,
I'm still tall and still awkward, and I still often
feel left behind by romance. But then again, the junior
high me would never have had the courage to have
these conversations at all. So maybe I did become more confident,
(41:35):
and some people do want to date me. I'd want
to date me. These days, I don't think too much
about Valentine's Day. It turns out that I don't like
being one of those performative couples anymore than I liked
watching those performative couples this year. On February fourteenth, my
(41:56):
boyfriend made dinner. I did the dishes. Happy Tuesday, He said,
Happy Tuesday. I said. Then we watched TV. It was
nice now that the fern ures returning to its goodwill home,
(42:48):
now that the last month's rent is skiing with the
damage to post, take this moment to dissolve, if we message.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
If we tried, she felt.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Around for five two months.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
From things accidentally.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Hello Hello, so as promised. My conversation with Anna Konkle,
co creator of Penn fifteen, we talked about how emotional
and viscerally bizarre it is to return to that middle
school space again as an adult.
Speaker 13 (43:29):
I mean it was so humiliating. Yeah, Like the first season, especially,
nobody knew what it was.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
The crew didn't know what it was.
Speaker 13 (43:38):
So people signed up to come on set and a
lot of them haven't even read the script and they're like,
what the fuck did I sign up for?
Speaker 5 (43:45):
Like day one, Maya's and her.
Speaker 13 (43:47):
Bowlcut masturbating, like okay, wait, we're really going to try
to play thirteen, like this is so embarrassing, and then
being surrounded by the real kids and stepping on stage
and be like.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
Were you haha, you don't really think we are We're thirty.
Speaker 13 (44:02):
The night before it came out, I just got in
like the fetal position on the floor and was like,
this is.
Speaker 5 (44:09):
So embarrassing, Like what did you do?
Speaker 13 (44:13):
And you know what the truth is is it felt
embarrassing for years after actually, like people would come up
to me and say like, I love it, and I'd
be like.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
What are you doing today, Like yeah.
Speaker 5 (44:25):
I couldn't hear it. It just I felt so naked.
Speaker 13 (44:29):
How was it for you making this versus when people
started listening to it?
Speaker 5 (44:34):
Or have you had and waves of.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
This writing it and putting it together and like playing
it for people here was actually like positive, Like I
felt like, oh, I'm really expressing what I felt and
it's connecting with people. And then I feel like once
it was out in the world, it was a bit
more of a mixed bag than I was expecting.
Speaker 5 (44:52):
I mean, how people felt.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yeah, like there were people who really connected with it,
but there were a lot of people who hated it.
Speaker 13 (44:59):
Really I loved it, I mean, but obviously I'm gonna
love it, I guess.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
I mean that is something I was curious about cause
I feel like there were people who just I don't
understand why middle school would be important or why you
would want to think about it or go back to it,
Like have you run into that at all? Are there
people who just don't think about it?
Speaker 13 (45:17):
There's something about it that makes people really uneasy. Yeah,
from the pitches of us first talking about it, so
many men in particular actually like had to get up
from a table or would be like I'm getting nauseous.
Speaker 5 (45:32):
Sorry, hold on. Maybe it's like physiological disassociation. Yeah, that
a lot of people can do.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
What was it like like working with the kids, Like
do you feel like you had to translate to them
or did they kind of get it?
Speaker 13 (45:54):
Most of the kids, when they're actually thirteen, aren't at
an age that they're going.
Speaker 5 (46:00):
Oh, yeah, I get why that would be. They're like,
I didn't do that yesterday, right, if that's true? Just
so in.
Speaker 13 (46:08):
It, like seeing the social dynamics play out on set,
that was very meta. There would I won't say who,
but it would be like, oh, okay, he's the most popular.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
He's the most.
Speaker 13 (46:18):
Popular yeah, like all the guys are texting her or whatever,
and and we always found the right kids.
Speaker 5 (46:25):
I thought the kids in your podcasts were great.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Thanks to my My dad runs a community theater in Iowa,
and he helped me cast those kids. That was very sweet. Yeah,
did you do community theater growing up? Yeah? I was
never very good, but I because my dad like ran
these like kids summer camps and stuff. I did always go.
Speaker 5 (46:46):
That's a lot of pressure for your dad to run
it and then like auditioning for your day.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah. I think I wanted to be more of a
like a star because I wanted to be like close
to my dad, you know.
Speaker 5 (46:57):
But I relate to that too.
Speaker 13 (46:59):
I remember going on like some work trip with him,
and I remember like going to a pub and they're
being karaoke and a girl went up and sang yeah
Nowhere Man by the Beatles, and he was like, wow,
she's incredible. He almost like cried and he was clapping
in a really intense way. I don't remember what song
(47:21):
I sang next, but I sang a song and I
remember like finishing and like waiting for the same eyes
and being like I'm.
Speaker 5 (47:30):
Right here, Dad, and be like no, that was good.
I had been estranged from my dad.
Speaker 13 (47:47):
I mean, this is another actually crazy layer to the
whole show. It's like I hadn't seen my dad in
five years, but I'm like acting with the TV version
of my dad and the one that I missed. Yeah,
and about a year before we started writing the last season,
my dad and I had sort of been like communicating
(48:08):
more and trying to fix things.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
And then he called me and found out he had cancer.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Oh man, and.
Speaker 5 (48:18):
Filming started.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Whoa.
Speaker 13 (48:20):
So I was like trying to manage nurses and all
these other things and be there as much as I
possibly could, flying back and forth and filming the show.
But there were these scenes that were like overlapping with
these huge moments where like my dad went to hospice
(48:41):
and I had to go back to la and film
the scene where Curtis moves out of the house and
gets an apartment and he has like a midlife crisis
and gets this seabring convertible.
Speaker 5 (48:55):
Yeah, and we're in.
Speaker 13 (48:57):
The convertible, like the camera's right on us as we're
driving at night with the top down and the air
the cold air blasting, which is like what my dad
and I always did. And he had had that same seabring,
and we're having the talk about him moving out just
as my dad's gone into hospice, like moving out of.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
The world, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:18):
And I just lost it. Talk about feeling like a
kid as an adult.
Speaker 13 (49:30):
There was something about the extremeness of what we were
trying to do, like, oh, we're building sets that look
like our real houses.
Speaker 5 (49:40):
It was like stepping into a memory.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Were there particular scenes that were particularly intense to shoot?
Speaker 13 (49:48):
Definitely the first day of filming at my house, Anna
Cone's you know house I had given so many specifics about.
It was nicer than my real house probably, But you know,
my parents in real life divorced, they told me in
seventh grade or eighth grade, and I've just had such
(50:11):
a hard time accepting their divorce and walking in and
seeing the house with like both of their things, like
the drops being like together, like the loon blanket that
I had described my dad having, or the kind of
lounger you know that he had that went to his
apartment and what my mom got to eat, and it
was like it was all intermingled. And then on the
(50:32):
bookshelves or all of these like half funny half devastating
pictures of me between two loving parents and they're my
you know, set parents. So it was like silly, but
I just wanted to cry. I was like going back
to when to the good times, you know, and it
was a better version of the good times than what
I had.
Speaker 5 (50:50):
Really have a lot of pictures the three of us.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
I mean, like after doing the show and like being
in those moments again, do you see anything in that
time differently? Like did it change your perspective at all?
Speaker 13 (51:02):
H I think it's interesting how people at that age
have such different relationships with their own sexuality, Like that
part in your podcast, in the episode where the sort
of popular girl goes up to the guy and gives
him hers she kiss and says, like what does she say?
Speaker 6 (51:23):
So?
Speaker 2 (51:23):
Do you want this or do you want a real
one that's like the Like I was like, well, I
don't have that DNA, Like I don't understand, And then
she sort of went on to say, I think I
created this persona, right, but how much is that persona?
Speaker 13 (51:40):
And how much is that just a different physical comfort?
I was always like such a goodie two shoes in
that way, and like kind of known as a prude,
and I.
Speaker 5 (51:52):
Was just not physically.
Speaker 13 (51:55):
Interested in guys like that, and if somehow they were
like sensing because my friends were more comfortable with that.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah, No, it's a good point. I think similarly, I
was not the most comfortab with it either, Like I
would have these infatuations with people, but Tybia just meant like,
we're going to have this mental connection where we understand
each other.
Speaker 5 (52:17):
Yeah, yes, like it was romantic.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 13 (52:20):
I remember when we first conceived a pen and our
agents or something being like, you need to add like
character descriptions, and we just knew how we'd play them,
but we hadn't been putting words to it. And that
was one distinction that I finally was like, she's romantic.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Do you remember what else you said in your character description.
I'm like, I would find it so hard to have
to like sum myself up in a character way, right, Yeah.
Speaker 13 (52:46):
Yeah, I think like tall bad posture. I think that
I would have had the like hand over my stomach
that I always did loyal to a false friend probably
like gets her identity from how much she admires Maya,
and the fact that my admires her back gives Anna confidence.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
I mean, that's another thing I feel like you guys
captured so well. Was just like the energy that having
a friendship like that gives you where you're like feeding
on each other and amping each other up.
Speaker 5 (53:19):
Yeah, that was the saddest part I think about it.
Speaker 13 (53:21):
Ending was like that innocence of friendship as actors and
adult best friends of going like right now we get
to live in this world where playing thirteen is like
you are just glued at the hip and as you
get older, you know, so many of us will lean
(53:43):
on their romantic act to you know, like to a
romantic partner.
Speaker 2 (53:51):
I feel like that's part of what's sad sometimes about
being single as an adult is that everyone does lean
so much on their partner and you're like, wait, where
I now, I'm not anybody's number one because they're number one?
Is the person at their west? Like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 13 (54:05):
I think it's something I've really struggled with, to be honest,
and adulting is that expectation same?
Speaker 5 (54:11):
You know, I'm lucky that May and I think are
a little bit aware of it and we will go
to the doctors with each.
Speaker 13 (54:18):
Other, like, you know, there's things like but I think
it's not the norm.
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Thanks so much to Anna and to everyone who helped
put this episode together, and for all my fellow pen
fifteen fans out there. You can listen to my full
conversation with Anna if you subscribe to Pushkin Plus. I
was very excited to get all this insight into making
the show, and I don't want to hoard that insight
from other pen fifteen heads, So go to pushkin dot fm,
(54:57):
slash plus to sign up. We'll be back next week
with our final encore of the summer, and then the
new season of Heavyweight begins September eighteenth, inst
Pushkin. Hello, Hello, it seems like the Spider has become
this thing that catches the fly. You're welcoming me into
the studio.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Am I the fly? No, I guess you're the fly.
I'm the spider. Feels pretty good. So so what Yeah,
As hopefully our listeners know by now, if they're paying attention.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Well, whoa, whoa. I was sensing a little attitude.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Don't antagonize the listeners.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
That's rule number one in broadcasting.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
As our dear audience should know, we have been encoring
some episodes this summer, and usually at the end we'll
have a little update with the guests about what's happened. Since, yes,
this is going to be a little bit different, I
got to interview someone I was really really excited to
talk to. She makes one of my favorite shows. It's
(01:17):
called Pen fifteen.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, we talk about it.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
We talk about it like, yeah frequently we do.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
When it was running, we really we talked about it
a lot. I have to say. It's probably one of
my favorite shows too.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
For those who don't know the show, it is made
by Anakonkole and Maya Erskin, who are two real life
best friends and they play versions of themselves at thirteen,
so it's about their middle school experience. They are playing
themselves as adults, and then they are surrounded by literal children,
people who are actually thirteen playing their classmates.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
For the first episode, that concept felt like a big
hurdle maybe to kind of like get into the story.
But I was like over it and into it like
five minutes in. Yeah, you stop thinking about the fact
they're adults. Yeah, it's like a magic trick that they pull,
and it's beautiful and so funny.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It's really good. That's right. I really think anyone who
hasn't watched it, I would highly highly recommend it. And
I was very excited to talk to Anna and Yeah,
we thought it could be a cool conversation to put
with this episode because both of us are revisiting that
same age, in her case very literally recreating scenes from
her childhood.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, so you guys end up talking about the episode
and her show.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
And about just our perspective middle school experiences.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So let's get to listening, shall we.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Let's get to listening. I'm Khalila Holt and this is
Heavyweight Today's episode. Late right after the break, I'm walking
(03:09):
to work one morning when I spot Laife heading towards me.
From the ages of twelve to fourteen, Life was my crush,
the object of my junior high obsession. I still google
him occasionally, but he's completely absent from the Internet. I
have no idea what became of him. It's like he
just disappeared. So when I see him on the street,
(03:32):
I feel my heart speed up. I wonder if I
should say hi. I wonder if I say hi in
what tone I should go Life, Life, oh Liafe. But
then as I dropped closer, I realized that the man
I thought was life is not life at all, and
in fact is not even a man. He's a teenager.
(03:55):
This makes sense given that I've not seen life since
I was fourteen years old. Still, having your heart speed
up at the sight of a teenager is a sure
way to feel like a creep. And just like that,
to quote Carrie Bradshaw, Liaife is back on my mind
(04:19):
all these years later, and I remember the exact type
of pen layfro with. I remember his birthday. I remember
how he kept his wallet on a long chain, the
first time I'd ever seen such a thing done, and
wore a quicksilver sweatshirt with holes worn through the sleeves
that he'd stick his thumbs through. He was pale, with
blue eyes, short and slight.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
I remember him being kind of like wayfish, almost like
kind of almost like a furial.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Crushes do not exist in a vacuum. They require gleeful
gossip with your friends. And so I call Itchia, who's
been my best friend since elementary school, to talk about
our old classmate Lafe.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
He had this like light blonde hair that he died
and was not a long like down to here, but
hair long like like a bottling.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But like shag. And then yeah, there go the man's bob. Once,
while away on a school sponsored trip, we phoned Leife
from our hotel room, me, Lucia, and our other friend Emily,
but three of us huddled together on the scratchy Marriotte comforter,
stifling our giddiness as we dialed. I don't remember if
(05:28):
we actually talked to the thing I remember is that
we called.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
We talked to his mom.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Our friend Emily asked if she could speak with Laife.
It's Emily, she said. Emily said, Leife's mom go upstairs
and talk to him. Then she hung up on us.
Turned out he had a sister named Emily, so weird.
Luccia's stepmom was a photographer, and she once mentioned that
if Laife and I ever started dating, she wanted to
(05:54):
take our portrait. I don't think she knew I had
a crush on him. Laife was just so short and
I was so tall that I think she found the
idea of us as a couple funny. I was already
six feet tall by the end of eighth grade. I
got pressured into playing basketball, but I was so meek
that I usually just stood there while some terrifying girl
(06:16):
shoved by me with the ball. I don't like to
look at pictures of myself from that time. Standing next
to other kids my age, I look like the teacher
or like someone's off putting sister home from college. None
of my pants fit correctly, and my socks were always
pulled up too high. I used to listen to the
song eleanor Rigby and panic. In my interpretation, it was
(06:39):
a song about how no one wanted to date poor
old eleanor Rigby, just like no one wanted to date me.
When I was thirteen. One day I was sitting by
the gym after school with my friend desiree. When she
told me, I picture you getting a boyfriend in college.
(07:00):
She laid out this whole hypothetical where me and my
future boyfriend reached for the same book at the library.
At the time I was offended college, other girls at
my school, desire included, already had boyfriends, the middle school
version of a boyfriend where you were afraid to touch
each other and broke up after a week. But still
(07:21):
I had to wait till college. But as it turned out,
I did not get a boyfriend before college, nor in college,
nor even for several years after college, And so I
concluded the problem was not my circumstances. The problem was me.
I was not datable. After meeting me for the first time,
(07:43):
people might say, oh, she was funny, but they'd never say,
is she single. I was simply not a person that
anyone could think of romantically. At college parties, boys would
grab my friends and start dancing with them, and I
would stay for a while, dancing alongside them, like I
was part of the good time, but eventually I'd walk away.
(08:05):
It was weird for me to keep standing there smiling
blankly at the wall while they were making out. By
now I'm in my thirties, and I actually do have
a boyfriend. Sam and I have been together for four years.
We live together, We've taken trips, know each other's moms,
list each other on emergency contact forms, and yet still
(08:28):
I can't shake this feeling that I'm behind, that there's
something wrong with me, that I started too late, and
now I can never catch up. Sometimes Sam tells me
stories about the girls he used to hook up with,
or about his high school girlfriend, or the girlfriend he
lived with before he lived with me. I know that
he's not trying to get back together with any of
(08:49):
these people. I know he does invested in our relationship
as I am. Still, when he tells these stories, I
feel so inadequate that I want to cry. A couple
times I have cried, and he has been confused, and
suddenly we're in an argument because I don't know how
to explain why I'm crying. I want charming stif stories
(09:09):
like that one of rhapsodizes about my past of young
love and mutual discovery. Instead, my past is a wall
I smiled at, and the only stories I have about
people I've hooked up with are vaguely unsettling to repeat.
(09:30):
I liked Leife at a time before all that, back
when it still felt like romance might happen for me,
like any interaction could be the start of a love
story for the Ages. One time I brought whole Food
sushi for lunch and felt self conscious because I'd seen
the Breakfast Club in which Molly Ringwald is mocked for
bringing sushi for lunch. But Leif walked by my table
(09:52):
and said, is that sushi? And I said yes? And
he said I love sushi. And I said would you
like a piece? And he said really? And I said yes,
And suddenly I was proud to have a lunch of
whole food sushi. Laife talked constantly about a band called
Billie Talent, a semi yelly alt rock group with lyrics
about my I started listening to them because I knew
(10:12):
Laife liked them, and from there became an obsessive fan myself.
Once I ran into Laife at a Billie Talent concert,
I pretended not to see him because I didn't want
him to think that I'd followed him there, But he
came over and said hi to me. There were little
moments where it almost seemed like he could be flirting
with me. We followed each other on the blogging site zanga,
(10:35):
and for a while there was some sort of glitch
where Life was unable to comment on my page. When
the glitch was fixed, he was so excited that he
left me one hundred comments in a row. Comment forty
two said, on the forty second day of Christmas, I
gave to Kaylee one hundred comments, lots of typing and
a pear tree. I still have a journal from that time.
(11:03):
In it, i'd write Laife all these vague letters. It
is humiliating to read these letters now, to the point
where I refuse to quote them here. Suffice it to
say that I constantly referred to him as dearest. Surrounding
the letters are my thoughts about myself, mostly how I
wished I were a different person entirely, someone charismatic and
(11:26):
sought after. Sometimes I'd have this huge swell of self
hatred that I didn't know what to do with. Once
I tried to caught myself, but the kitchen knife I
chose was not very sharp, and so it was harder
than I thought it would be, and I gave up.
When I find someone who wants to date me, I
thought this feeling will go away. I hoped that life
(11:48):
might be that someone. I'd talked long fantasies about how
we'd get together, and sometimes I'd realize what a good
mood I was in, and then I'd realize the good
mood was because of something I'd made up, something that
hadn't really happened at all. In the winter of eighth grade,
(12:11):
I finally decided enough with the secret pining. It was
time to let Laife know how I felt. And so
I took action. And by took action, I mean that
I delegated action to other people. There was a stairway
right next to our classroom that was just a single
flight and closed by doors on each side. It was
(12:33):
in this room of stairs that my friends Lucia and
Emily cornered Laife and told him that I liked him
while I ran home and hid. Afterwards, I asked them
what he said. They told me he said okay. That night,
in a fit of panic and despair, I got online.
I logged onto Zanga, and I wrote a veiled, angsty
(12:56):
post about what a huge mistake I'd made. Laife saw
the post as I knew he would, and he I
amed my friend Karina about it. And here is where
something amazing happened, because, in this conversation with Karina, Laife
said he would date me. He said he thought I
was cool. He was going to ask me out on
(13:17):
Valentine's Day. Seeing couples perform how much they liked each
other made me feel inferior. So I hated Valentine's Day
with a showy passion. Each February fourteenth, I'd wear all
black as a sign of protest. Laife's thought was that
this romantic gesture might help me to reclaim the holiday.
(13:38):
I know all this because at the time, Karina promptly
copy and pasted the ims with Life into an email
for me. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I
was so happy. Finally, I thought, finally, the thing that
only happens to other people, it's now happening to me.
(14:01):
On Valentine's Day, I got up and my mom drove
me to school. People were giving out candy and paper hearts.
I tried to look nonchalant. I went to science class,
I went to lunch, to recess, to math, to basketball,
and then school was over and I went home. Laife
(14:23):
did not say a single word to me all day.
I have no idea what happened or why he changed
his mind.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
Huh did you ever talk to him about it?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I rehash all this on the phone with Lucia. Never
did we speak directly about it, like we spoke through
you and Emily, through Karina on im and like through
my veiled zanga posts. Interesting and having been my best
friend for all these years, Lucia into It's what I'm
(14:56):
building up to. So you want to try to find
him more? Yeah, but I'm afraid. I tried a drafting
a letter, and I was like, do I just sound
into safe anyway? So do you think this is completely
insane to do?
Speaker 6 (15:12):
No?
Speaker 4 (15:13):
I mean, I'm sure you wrote. You're a very good
writer and a thoughtful person, so I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
The way you approached it was good. Since googling Life
had always failed me, I turned to a public records
database that I get through work. I was hoping to
discover a possible mailing address for Life, and I did,
looks like maybe he lives in Arizona. And I saw
he had like a from twenty twenty court thing from
(15:40):
defacing a political sign. Well, I guess you don't know
which direction. I know it's a good direction. I want
to talk to life directly, the way I never did
back then. I want to know what he really thought
of me, and why he never asked me out on
Valentine's Day. All these years, I've believed this story about
(16:05):
how people don't see me romantically. But if I can
to the beginning of that story, if I can see
myself differently at thirteen, it could reframe everything that came
after I name dropped you in the letter name dropped
me because I'm so well known well. I was like,
we used to live together, but now we both live
(16:25):
with our boyfriend, so that he wouldn't think I was
like trying to date him now Highlafe, I wrote in
my letter, I don't know if you remember me, but
we went to Near North together. I had a huge
crush on you, and I was hoping you'd be up
to talk to me about what you remember from that time.
I hang up the phone with Lucia and I walked
(16:46):
to the mailbox. I send off my letter. But then
(17:07):
several weeks to go by and nothing. Did Laife get
the letter and decide to ignore me? Or do I
just have the wrong address. Usually when reporting a story,
I tried calling at this point, and I did find
a phone number for Laife. However, the idea of dialing
it makes me want to lie down in the middle
(17:28):
of the street and simply pass away. And so, just
like I did at thirteen, I recruit someone else as
an envoy.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
And who is it? Someone else? You?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Oh yeah, it's you.
Speaker 7 (17:40):
Okay, So I'm sort of like that whole quorum of
girls all in one adult man.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
This is a regular host of this program, Jonathan Goldstein.
I want him to call Leife on my behalf to
see if Laife got the letter. I would be open
to speaking with me.
Speaker 7 (17:58):
Yeah, no, I don't think that'll be awkward at all.
Let me get my pattern down here. Hi, there was
this girl. Her name was Khaleila hol.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
You should say Kaylee first. I think you would know
me by Kaylee.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Hi, I'm Kaylee Holt's boss.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
What you say like that? It is really weird.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
That is weird.
Speaker 7 (18:16):
No, Hi, you don't know me, but I was enlisted
by an old school chum of yours.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Oh, don't say school, an.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Old flame, a paramore.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
My confidence is decreasing with every passing second.
Speaker 7 (18:29):
I won't embarrass you in front of your crush.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Are you joking, choking on this bon bun.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
As my boss asphyxiates on a piece of candy. I
weigh the pros and cons of just making the call myself,
but in the end I make the same choice I
did back then, better to send an incompetent in my
stead while I hide at home. I obsess all day Thursday,
(19:00):
I obsess all day Friday. Jonathan doesn't offer me a
single update. I can't even tell if he's made the
call yet. Than the week begins and I still have
no idea what he's done. Okay, but whatever you did
do it worked because Friday night checked my email and
I had an email from Laife saying that he would
(19:22):
talk to me.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Wow.
Speaker 7 (19:29):
Okay, well, let me just say I am almost one
hundred percent certain that I had nothing to do with that.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Well really, because it happens that day.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, it is suggestive.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Jonathan tells me that he had indeed tried calling Leaife's number.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Okay, here's the call.
Speaker 8 (19:48):
You ready?
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Okay?
Speaker 9 (19:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Okay, Hello, is Laife there?
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Could I speak to him?
Speaker 6 (20:01):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
This is her?
Speaker 1 (20:03):
This is Laife.
Speaker 6 (20:06):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
I just want to make sure I have the right person.
What is your middle name.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
Seek doodles.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
No, No, that isn't. That isn't the life that I'm
looking for.
Speaker 6 (20:26):
I'm on a toilet rin.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Though, Okay, is there anybody else in the house.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
In his email, Lafe proposed that we talk in nine days,
which is kind of a weirdly long time. I can't
help but worry that he'll bail last minute, that this
will be just like Valentine's Day all over again. So
in the meantime, hoping she might remember some clue about
what happened back then, I text my old friend Karina,
(21:03):
the one who broke her this whole Valentine's plan with
life on I AM.
Speaker 8 (21:07):
When you texted me that it was you, I was like,
oh my gosh, Like, did something.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Happen she calling me to say that miss Bergen died,
Miss Bergen being our longtime principal, which.
Speaker 8 (21:21):
She did, by the way, he didn't I didn't hear that.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Yeah, may she. I felt deranged, texting Karina that I
wanted to speak with her about life a random kid
from her eighth grade class. But Karina responded, I legitimately
thought about you in life last week, So, just like
we used to in junior high, the two of us
(21:45):
chat on the phone about a boy and then he
I am you shut up?
Speaker 8 (21:50):
Did I send you the conversation?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yes? So then I and buried in an old AOL account,
I find that email from Karina with the whole conversation
between her and Life laid out.
Speaker 8 (22:07):
I would like, absolutely love to see it.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Let me send it to you. I will. Life screen
name was chaotic detortion, which I think is just chaotic
distortion spelled wrong.
Speaker 8 (22:17):
Okay, let me read this okay at ten seventy pm.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Nice and as Karina reads, here for you, dear listener
is a dramatic recreation of that I Am exchange, with
two young actors playing the roles of Karina and Life.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Hey, Hey, Life, what's up? Kayley's talking about what I think?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
She is?
Speaker 10 (22:41):
Right on?
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Zanga, hold on, let me see Kaylee likes me, right, Did.
Speaker 11 (22:49):
Lucia and Emily tell you something?
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Yeah? After school the other day? Yeah, she does well.
If she comes on, will you tell her something? Yeah?
If she comes on, tell her that I'll go out
with her.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
But my health is always screwed with my life, so
I'm probably not going to be able to be one
hundred percent boyfrid material.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Laithe had some sort of illness the whole time I
knew him, but I never knew how sick he was
or what he was even sick with. He sometimes had
to leave school early, he was on crutches for a while,
and there were days when he just looked frail. But
at thirteen, we didn't think to ask any questions. Back then,
Karina just thought it was sweet he was considering his
(23:35):
health in his role as my future boyfriend.
Speaker 11 (23:39):
All but do you like her?
Speaker 3 (23:43):
This is kind of awkward.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, all these years later and that, yeah, I makes
my heart start pounding. I was wrong, I think see
I was wrong. He liked me, he said he liked me.
But then it goes on.
Speaker 10 (24:06):
Ohmg, don't tell her. I'm not crazy about her, but hey,
she likes me. I don't hate her or anything. And kaylee'school,
Yeah she is.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
So you want me to tell her that you'll go
out with her? Why don't you just talk to her
on Monday?
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Do you think I should?
Speaker 12 (24:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 11 (24:28):
Because I mean I don't think she would believe me,
and it would be nicer if you told her. Are
you getting her something on V Day?
Speaker 3 (24:35):
I guess when is Valentine's Day?
Speaker 11 (24:38):
Next next Tuesday, Omga, you should tell her on V
Day because she hates V Day.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
WHOA, yeah, oh will.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I always thought it was Laf who came up with
the Valentine's Day plan, but it was actually Karina. It
wasn't a romantic gesture at all. It was the gesture
of a thoughtful friend.
Speaker 8 (25:00):
But I don't remember anything after that. I didn't even
remember that. He didn't end up saying anything, like he
didn't end up saying anything to you at all.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
No, we never talked about it, No, Kaylee, he did.
Speaker 8 (25:16):
I'm pretty sure he mentioned his health again. Maybe I
like followed up and he was like, honestly, my health
just like really isn't the best.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So did life not ask me out simply because he
was too ill? Was his not asking actually a romantic
gesture something worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy or did he
just not like me? I'd ask Slaf to talk on
Zoom and I pray I won't break out or have
(25:52):
a bad hair day, because you know, I want to
look good. The morning of I put on an eyeshadow
that someone once told me was flattering, and wear a
T shirt for my favorite band because I figure it's
cool to like music. Then I head to the studio
and test the my her phone. Hello, Hello, all right,
(26:12):
that's working. I feel ill. I feel physically ill. Oh
my god, Okay, I can do this. Here we go
(26:40):
on the zoom camera. You can't even see my t
shirt or flattering eyeshadow. So that was a lot of
wasted effort. I see that Leaife is in the waiting room.
I press the admit button and he appears on screen.
Speaker 11 (26:54):
Hi.
Speaker 13 (26:56):
Hey.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
In spite of his deeper voice and tattoos, life seems
the same, like there's no discrepancy between the person I imagined
all these years and the one I'm actually looking at.
How are you?
Speaker 6 (27:12):
I'm great, I'm doing great. How are you doing?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I'm doing you know. Unfortunately, faced with the person I
imagined all these years, I suddenly can't remember how to
have a conversation. It's like I've lost twenty years of
social skills. What what what's your life?
Speaker 6 (27:35):
My life? Well? I yeah, I don't know. I just
do uh life things. You know, eat food, go to
the grocery store. I've got a dog. You know, what's
your dog of?
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Like, what's your dog's name?
Speaker 6 (27:52):
Ronan?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Good given that I'm incapable of asking any question more
specific than what is your life or who is your dog?
Life takes the lead.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
They've been doing like a lot of activisty stuff in Tucson,
and that consumes more of my time than I probably
should let it.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
In fact, the nine day delay lay fasts for was
because of his activism. A few weeks earlier, he was
at a protest with the Stop Coop City movement when
he was tasted and slammed against the ground by a
police officer. He's been recovering from a concussion at this point.
We're forty minutes into the conversation and I've somehow managed
(28:37):
to avoid asking Laife any questions about eighth grade at all,
Even though he knows we're here to talk about how
much I liked him, Bringing up that time still makes
me nervous. What do you remember about me?
Speaker 6 (28:53):
Yeah, I uh, I remember you being very tall and
maybe a little awkward. But maybe it's just because of
the crush or whatever.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
No, I was awkward, yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:04):
Like I know that you told me at some point
that you had a crush on me. We have like
a vague memory of like there's like that stairwell Lucia
telling me or something like that, like in the stairwell.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah. I ramble through my memories of what happened after
that stairwell moment, and finally up to the question that
I really came here to ask you were going to
ask me out on Valentine's Day, but then that never happened,
and I don't know why.
Speaker 6 (29:36):
Oof. I'm sorry, Yeah, I don't remember. Like the Zanga
post sounds vaguely familiar.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Can I send you, because I, in fact have these
ims between you and Karina? No way can I email
them to you?
Speaker 6 (29:53):
Yeah? See what cringeysque things I have to say.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Leife mostly reads through the ims in silence, but at
one point he makes a face and again goes oof.
When he's done, he self consciously.
Speaker 6 (30:12):
All right, well that was that was That was fun?
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Do you you have no memory of this?
Speaker 6 (30:18):
I don't know. Vaguely, I guess like it's obviously obviously
it happened.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
I mean, would be weird if I typed all this.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Suffen, Yeah, yeah, it'd be pretty weird.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
What part were you oofing at?
Speaker 13 (30:33):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (30:33):
Just I mean, don't tell her. I'm not crazy about her,
but hey, she likes it was just like that.
Speaker 13 (30:40):
Yikes.
Speaker 6 (30:46):
I don't really know what happened. Obviously we didn't date.
I don't I don't think totally forgotten.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I mean that would kind of be worse if we did.
Dan gone from your memory.
Speaker 6 (30:59):
Yeah, that'd be yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
I mean, like, it seems like you did not like me.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
I do remember you being like very funny, but uh yeah,
I do agree, though, I think I like wasn't like
into you.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
To use the eighth grade parlance, But then Lafe phrase
is a key thing. I've been wondering about the explanation
that he gave to Karina at the time his mysterious
health issues.
Speaker 6 (31:33):
I was like very very very sick. I was like
in the process essentially of getting diagnosed with Crohn's disease.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Crones is an autoimmune disease. Life's intestine was attacking itself,
making it hard for him to do basic things like
walk or eat. In the years I knew him, though,
Laife didn't know he had crones. He didn't know what
was wrong with him. He was just getting worse and worse.
It took over two years of waiting rooms and misdiagnoses
(32:04):
before he finally got to a doctor who helped him
at that point he was so sick, but the doctor
pulled his mom aside to say that she thought Leife
might die. They immediately admitted him to the hospital, where
he stayed for three months. I'm not a monster, so
(32:26):
of course I'd never say that I'm happy someone was
so ill they almost died. But hearing all this, I
can't help but feel kind of relieved, because if life
was that sick the whole time I knew him, then
it wasn't about me not being good enough. There probably
just wasn't any space in his brain for dating and
crushes at all. So I put this to.
Speaker 6 (32:47):
Liife, I for sure had crushes.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Well there goes that theory. Can I ask you how
to crush on?
Speaker 6 (32:56):
Yeah? Yeah, I know I had a crush on Soca.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
I was going to ask you that. Actually, that's what
I always suspected. You got me figured out circa up
at our school one year from Ireland, and all the
guys instantly loved her. Somehow, in that one year she
dated three or four people. I, as someone who'd never
dated anyone, found this profoundly unfair, Like what about the
(33:23):
rest of us? In my moments of insecurity, I always
used to think there's no way Life likes me, because
I'm pretty sure he likes Cerca. So while on the
one hand, it's validating to hear that my read was right,
on the other hand, it's devastating to hear that my
read was right. I move on to my next theory.
(33:44):
Do you think that any of it was height related?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Uh?
Speaker 6 (33:52):
I don't think so. I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
So what was my problem? I ask Laife if I
had some defect that prevented him from seeing me romantically,
and although he really thinks about it, an come up
with an answer.
Speaker 6 (34:10):
I'm just trying to think if like, there has ever
been anyone where I like, I'd love to date this person,
but they've got this defect.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
You know who he falls for. Life says has always
felt beyond words, especially in the eighth grade. Well, how
do you feel about talking? Am I freaking you out?
Speaker 8 (34:34):
No?
Speaker 6 (34:34):
Not at all. Okay, it's fun to catch up and
like hear what you remember. It's really nice to talk
to Yeah, you too, killy, and talk to you soon,
all right, talk.
Speaker 12 (34:45):
To you soon.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
I'd felt good while I was talking to Leife. He
was cool and nice, as he'd always been, and yet
as soon as we hang up, I suddenly feel really sad.
I sit there for a while alone in the studio,
and then, as I always have in times of stress, Hello, honey,
I call my mom. I filler in on the conversation
(35:15):
and how the only logical conclusion seems to be that, yes,
I was right, I am in fact undateable.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
Who wouldn't want to date you?
Speaker 12 (35:23):
You're awesome?
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Thanks, And I mean, I know i'm your mother, but
that is also true. I feel like that's true in
terms of like people wanting to like be my friend,
but I don't feel like that's true for like dating.
Speaker 9 (35:39):
You feel it not just from when you were younger, but.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
You feel it even now.
Speaker 9 (35:43):
Yeah, that makes me feel kind of sad. I'm sorry,
don't be sorry.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It makes me feel kind of sad, and it makes
me feel mad at people that don't see you. I
don't Oh. Yeah. I think I'm having a hard time
characterizing it because I do feel like weirdly emotional, but
also like he was nice and the conversation was good,
(36:15):
you know, So I don't want it to seem like
I thought he was like being an asshole or anything
like he wasn't.
Speaker 5 (36:21):
I don't hear that from you at all.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
I don't hear anything about any judgment about him. Yeah,
you trying to piece it together for you? Yeah, yeah,
give yourself a little space. I give myself several weeks
of space. And then as I keep trying to piece
(36:45):
it together, I decide there's one more person I want
to speak with. Very excited to talk to you. So
thanks for being up to do this weird thing.
Speaker 12 (36:54):
Yeah, no, it is weird, and I definitely feel weird
about it.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
This is Circa, the Irish girl that Lafe and the
rest of the entire fucking class was into. Because in
case it's not weird enough to reach out to my
crush after nearly twenty years, why not also reach out
to my crushes crush. I always suspected he had a
crush on you, and he said, yes, did you know.
Speaker 12 (37:18):
That M like Jesus, like he would like he would
like burn CDs for me and stuff.
Speaker 5 (37:27):
She knows.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
I feel like he also gave.
Speaker 12 (37:29):
Me a sticker that said George W. Bush is a
punk ass chump, So.
Speaker 5 (37:35):
Like, yeah, I had an awareness.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
I want to talk to Circa because I think of
her as the anti me like, here's how Circa's Valentine's
Day went. In junior high, she walked up to her
boyfriend at the time holding a Hers She's kiss and said,
do you want this or do you want a real one?
I wanted to tell me how she achieved such romantic success,
what she had that I didn't have. I had laid
(38:00):
all this out and my initial message to her.
Speaker 12 (38:03):
So I said this to my husband and he was
kind of like, well, it's obvious, isn't it. Like you
were just new and it And I think that's exactly it.
Like you guys had all been together from the age
of two, do you know? So I literally was just
new and different. I honestly think it was that simple.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
I think that's part of it. But I feel like
there was something about your personality too, Like I feel
like there was some like charisma or like confidence or
I don't know. I feel like I think.
Speaker 12 (38:33):
That that has got to be fakeatily make it though,
doesn't it? Because looking back and looking at the challenge
that was laid at my doorstep, I probably just leant
into some kind of confident persona.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Sarah only attended Near North for a single year, and
it wasn't an easy transition because of her mom's job.
She was upbraided at twelve years old and plopped down
in a foreign country. Her dad, all her old friends
stayed back in Ireland. She remembers the day she came
to visit our school for the first time.
Speaker 12 (39:08):
And I remember crying, and I remember saying, I don't
want to go there. My memory isn't a feeling invincible
or anything like, quite the opposite, like.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Like overwhelmed and shut down.
Speaker 8 (39:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
It's that sense of panic. Sirka thinks that made her
act so confident when she started school with us. It
was her way of managing Still, in the year I
knew her, she often felt insecure, and dating didn't make
that feeling go away anyway you cut it. Boyfriend, No
boyfriend junior high is hard, Sarka tells me she's been
(39:54):
married for about a year and a half. Now, how
did you guys meet? We went on Tinder. I'd ask
Slafe the same question about how he met his partner.
Speaker 6 (40:05):
Actually through Tinder. We are a tender success story. My
boyfriend threw tender too, nice.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Sarca life me. Even though I always felt like they
had some power, I lacked. Almost two decades later, we
all ended up in the same place, living with people
we met on Tinder. Back when I talked with my
(40:32):
friend Karina, I'd asked her what her impression had been
to me when we knew each other in junior high.
Speaker 8 (40:38):
Oh my gosh, Kayleie, I adored you. I remember you
being very intelligent, you were very funny. I know you
like you were, you were tall, just you know, at
that age, I feel like you always look at everyone
else and like, don't form your confidence or like embrace
every bit of yourself until later in life, and I
(41:01):
remember being like, she has so many things going for her,
Like I. I hope that she because comes more confident.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
My past self was tall and awkward and the boy
I liked didn't like me. And all these years later,
I'm still tall and still awkward, and I still often
feel left behind by romance. But then again, the junior
high me would never have had the courage to have
these conversations at all. So maybe I did become more confident,
(41:35):
and some people do want to date me. I'd want
to date me. These days, I don't think too much
about Valentine's Day. It turns out that I don't like
being one of those performative couples anymore than I liked
watching those performative couples this year. On February fourteenth, my
(41:56):
boyfriend made dinner. I did the dishes. Happy Tuesday, He said,
Happy Tuesday. I said. Then we watched TV. It was
nice now that the fern ures returning to its goodwill home,
(42:48):
now that the last month's rent is skiing with the
damage to post, take this moment to dissolve, if we message.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
If we tried, she felt.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Around for five two months.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
From things accidentally.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Hello Hello, so as promised. My conversation with Anna Konkle,
co creator of Penn fifteen, we talked about how emotional
and viscerally bizarre it is to return to that middle
school space again as an adult.
Speaker 13 (43:29):
I mean it was so humiliating. Yeah, Like the first season, especially,
nobody knew what it was.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
The crew didn't know what it was.
Speaker 13 (43:38):
So people signed up to come on set and a
lot of them haven't even read the script and they're like,
what the fuck did I sign up for?
Speaker 5 (43:45):
Like day one, Maya's and her.
Speaker 13 (43:47):
Bowlcut masturbating, like okay, wait, we're really going to try
to play thirteen, like this is so embarrassing, and then
being surrounded by the real kids and stepping on stage
and be like.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
Were you haha, you don't really think we are We're thirty.
Speaker 13 (44:02):
The night before it came out, I just got in
like the fetal position on the floor and was like,
this is.
Speaker 5 (44:09):
So embarrassing, Like what did you do?
Speaker 13 (44:13):
And you know what the truth is is it felt
embarrassing for years after actually, like people would come up
to me and say like, I love it, and I'd
be like.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
What are you doing today, Like yeah.
Speaker 5 (44:25):
I couldn't hear it. It just I felt so naked.
Speaker 13 (44:29):
How was it for you making this versus when people
started listening to it?
Speaker 5 (44:34):
Or have you had and waves of.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
This writing it and putting it together and like playing
it for people here was actually like positive, Like I
felt like, oh, I'm really expressing what I felt and
it's connecting with people. And then I feel like once
it was out in the world, it was a bit
more of a mixed bag than I was expecting.
Speaker 5 (44:52):
I mean, how people felt.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yeah, like there were people who really connected with it,
but there were a lot of people who hated it.
Speaker 13 (44:59):
Really I loved it, I mean, but obviously I'm gonna
love it, I guess.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
I mean that is something I was curious about cause
I feel like there were people who just I don't
understand why middle school would be important or why you
would want to think about it or go back to it,
Like have you run into that at all? Are there
people who just don't think about it?
Speaker 13 (45:17):
There's something about it that makes people really uneasy. Yeah,
from the pitches of us first talking about it, so
many men in particular actually like had to get up
from a table or would be like I'm getting nauseous.
Speaker 5 (45:32):
Sorry, hold on. Maybe it's like physiological disassociation. Yeah, that
a lot of people can do.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
What was it like like working with the kids, Like
do you feel like you had to translate to them
or did they kind of get it?
Speaker 13 (45:54):
Most of the kids, when they're actually thirteen, aren't at
an age that they're going.
Speaker 5 (46:00):
Oh, yeah, I get why that would be. They're like,
I didn't do that yesterday, right, if that's true? Just
so in.
Speaker 13 (46:08):
It, like seeing the social dynamics play out on set,
that was very meta. There would I won't say who,
but it would be like, oh, okay, he's the most popular.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
He's the most.
Speaker 13 (46:18):
Popular yeah, like all the guys are texting her or whatever,
and and we always found the right kids.
Speaker 5 (46:25):
I thought the kids in your podcasts were great.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Thanks to my My dad runs a community theater in Iowa,
and he helped me cast those kids. That was very sweet. Yeah,
did you do community theater growing up? Yeah? I was
never very good, but I because my dad like ran
these like kids summer camps and stuff. I did always go.
Speaker 5 (46:46):
That's a lot of pressure for your dad to run
it and then like auditioning for your day.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah. I think I wanted to be more of a
like a star because I wanted to be like close
to my dad, you know.
Speaker 5 (46:57):
But I relate to that too.
Speaker 13 (46:59):
I remember going on like some work trip with him,
and I remember like going to a pub and they're
being karaoke and a girl went up and sang yeah
Nowhere Man by the Beatles, and he was like, wow,
she's incredible. He almost like cried and he was clapping
in a really intense way. I don't remember what song
(47:21):
I sang next, but I sang a song and I
remember like finishing and like waiting for the same eyes
and being like I'm.
Speaker 5 (47:30):
Right here, Dad, and be like no, that was good.
I had been estranged from my dad.
Speaker 13 (47:47):
I mean, this is another actually crazy layer to the
whole show. It's like I hadn't seen my dad in
five years, but I'm like acting with the TV version
of my dad and the one that I missed. Yeah,
and about a year before we started writing the last season,
my dad and I had sort of been like communicating
(48:08):
more and trying to fix things.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
And then he called me and found out he had cancer.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Oh man, and.
Speaker 5 (48:18):
Filming started.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Whoa.
Speaker 13 (48:20):
So I was like trying to manage nurses and all
these other things and be there as much as I
possibly could, flying back and forth and filming the show.
But there were these scenes that were like overlapping with
these huge moments where like my dad went to hospice
(48:41):
and I had to go back to la and film
the scene where Curtis moves out of the house and
gets an apartment and he has like a midlife crisis
and gets this seabring convertible.
Speaker 5 (48:55):
Yeah, and we're in.
Speaker 13 (48:57):
The convertible, like the camera's right on us as we're
driving at night with the top down and the air
the cold air blasting, which is like what my dad
and I always did. And he had had that same seabring,
and we're having the talk about him moving out just
as my dad's gone into hospice, like moving out of.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
The world, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:18):
And I just lost it. Talk about feeling like a
kid as an adult.
Speaker 13 (49:30):
There was something about the extremeness of what we were
trying to do, like, oh, we're building sets that look
like our real houses.
Speaker 5 (49:40):
It was like stepping into a memory.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Were there particular scenes that were particularly intense to shoot?
Speaker 13 (49:48):
Definitely the first day of filming at my house, Anna
Cone's you know house I had given so many specifics about.
It was nicer than my real house probably, But you know,
my parents in real life divorced, they told me in
seventh grade or eighth grade, and I've just had such
(50:11):
a hard time accepting their divorce and walking in and
seeing the house with like both of their things, like
the drops being like together, like the loon blanket that
I had described my dad having, or the kind of
lounger you know that he had that went to his
apartment and what my mom got to eat, and it
was like it was all intermingled. And then on the
(50:32):
bookshelves or all of these like half funny half devastating
pictures of me between two loving parents and they're my
you know, set parents. So it was like silly, but
I just wanted to cry. I was like going back
to when to the good times, you know, and it
was a better version of the good times than what
I had.
Speaker 5 (50:50):
Really have a lot of pictures the three of us.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
I mean, like after doing the show and like being
in those moments again, do you see anything in that
time differently? Like did it change your perspective at all?
Speaker 13 (51:02):
H I think it's interesting how people at that age
have such different relationships with their own sexuality, Like that
part in your podcast, in the episode where the sort
of popular girl goes up to the guy and gives
him hers she kiss and says, like what does she say?
Speaker 6 (51:23):
So?
Speaker 2 (51:23):
Do you want this or do you want a real
one that's like the Like I was like, well, I
don't have that DNA, Like I don't understand, And then
she sort of went on to say, I think I
created this persona, right, but how much is that persona?
Speaker 13 (51:40):
And how much is that just a different physical comfort?
I was always like such a goodie two shoes in
that way, and like kind of known as a prude,
and I.
Speaker 5 (51:52):
Was just not physically.
Speaker 13 (51:55):
Interested in guys like that, and if somehow they were
like sensing because my friends were more comfortable with that.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah, No, it's a good point. I think similarly, I
was not the most comfortab with it either, Like I
would have these infatuations with people, but Tybia just meant like,
we're going to have this mental connection where we understand
each other.
Speaker 5 (52:17):
Yeah, yes, like it was romantic.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 13 (52:20):
I remember when we first conceived a pen and our
agents or something being like, you need to add like
character descriptions, and we just knew how we'd play them,
but we hadn't been putting words to it. And that
was one distinction that I finally was like, she's romantic.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Do you remember what else you said in your character description.
I'm like, I would find it so hard to have
to like sum myself up in a character way, right, Yeah.
Speaker 13 (52:46):
Yeah, I think like tall bad posture. I think that
I would have had the like hand over my stomach
that I always did loyal to a false friend probably
like gets her identity from how much she admires Maya,
and the fact that my admires her back gives Anna confidence.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
I mean, that's another thing I feel like you guys
captured so well. Was just like the energy that having
a friendship like that gives you where you're like feeding
on each other and amping each other up.
Speaker 5 (53:19):
Yeah, that was the saddest part I think about it.
Speaker 13 (53:21):
Ending was like that innocence of friendship as actors and
adult best friends of going like right now we get
to live in this world where playing thirteen is like
you are just glued at the hip and as you
get older, you know, so many of us will lean
(53:43):
on their romantic act to you know, like to a
romantic partner.
Speaker 2 (53:51):
I feel like that's part of what's sad sometimes about
being single as an adult is that everyone does lean
so much on their partner and you're like, wait, where
I now, I'm not anybody's number one because they're number one?
Is the person at their west? Like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 13 (54:05):
I think it's something I've really struggled with, to be honest,
and adulting is that expectation same?
Speaker 5 (54:11):
You know, I'm lucky that May and I think are
a little bit aware of it and we will go
to the doctors with each.
Speaker 13 (54:18):
Other, like, you know, there's things like but I think
it's not the norm.
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Thanks so much to Anna and to everyone who helped
put this episode together, and for all my fellow pen
fifteen fans out there. You can listen to my full
conversation with Anna if you subscribe to Pushkin Plus. I
was very excited to get all this insight into making
the show, and I don't want to hoard that insight
from other pen fifteen heads, So go to pushkin dot fm,
(54:57):
slash plus to sign up. We'll be back next week
with our final encore of the summer, and then the
new season of Heavyweight begins September eighteenth, inst
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