My school has, um -- they decided to hold this like competition about this small paper figure called a nisse, N I S S E, which I think is pertaining to some sort of Christmas or holiday tradition from a country around the world. Cool, that's great, but I wasn't particularly interested in, in partaking in this activity. I do like fun things sometimes but just this day I wasn't feeling it, so I didn't know what was going on. And we have a teacher who works with kids who speak English as a second language. This teacher themselves, they also speak English as a second language. So there was a point -- and here's the rules of the game. Basically you have a, a paper figurine that you have in your pocket called a nisse and if another teacher asks you if you have a nisse throughout the day, you have to give them the nisse. And then by the end of the day, whoever has a nisse in their pocket wins a prize. That's what I was not partaking in on this particular day. And because I was not in the know of how this thing worked, this ESL teacher who speaks English as a second language, pretty thick accent, she asked me -- she stopped me in the hallway and she was like, "Do you have a nisse?" and -- I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make her sound Italian. “Do you have a nisse?” She asked me if I had a nisse and, um, I instantly was like, "Oh, were you like visiting another school? I've heard there's someone with my last name over there," which she was very confused by and I was also confused. Like why are you asking me? Why were you at that other school? I heard there was someone with my unusual last name. And then she repeated, like, "No, do you have a -- do you have a nisse?" And I was like, "Well, yeah... I have, like, nephews and nieces. Sure. I'd -- like, did you meet one of them, or..?" And then, you know, eventually she's able to say ”I, I read the poster down the hallway and it talked about how today there's this competition,” and finally I was able to get it and we figured it out. Crisis averted. No, I did not have a nisse…

When I was a kid, we had one bathroom upstairs for the bedrooms and a half bathroom downstairs that didn't have a shower or a tub, and the bathroom upstairs was the one of course you used at night when you went to bed. And one night as we were getting ready to go to bed, my dad was the last one in the bathroom and I could hear -- you could hear him banging and doing things in there. And finally he comes and he slams the door and he says, "There's a big moth in there. I'm gonna get it before I go to sleep." This was back in the summer before we had air conditioning and all that kind of stuff. So my dad is in the bathroom. You can hear him slapping the towels, and slapping the walls trying to get this, this moth. So he finally gets it. He cleans it off the wall. He throws it -- you know, with a piece of toilet paper -- and he throws it in the toilet and flushes. He comes out and he goes, "I think I got it" and he goes, "Oh, I forgot to go to the bathroom." So he goes back in there. And evidently when he lifts the seat the ma- -- moth comes flying back out at him. The moth was not dead. And he is chasing that moth again. I don't know -- I, I laughed until I cried.

My first shared bathroom I ever used was down in West Virginia. I was 12 years old and my parents had taken the family down there to hang out with family members. And my aunt and uncle lived up a holler in, in West Virginia, and they had no running water. They had a pump at the sink that pumped cold water. They would have to heat their water. And of course they had an outhouse. And me being a city slicker girl never saw an outhouse, let alone used one. And being that that's all they had and I had to pee, I had to use the, the outhouse. So I went in there, and it was dark and dingy, and up in the holler in West Virginia, there's little -- I can't remember what they call them, but they're little lizards. And I'm sitting there with my pants around my ankles trying my best to pee and not cry. And I looked up at the corner and there was a, a lizard sticking his tongue out at me and I screamed. I'm crying. I ran out of the outhouse with my pants around my ankles, everybody looking at me. My mom came running. "What in the world?" She’s laughing at me. My dad's laughing at me. My mom helped me pull up my pants, which were now wet because I had peed all the way on them. Oh, it was just a nightmare trying to use that outhouse the very first time. Nobody had warned me about the lizards. I don't think it would have mattered had they warned me or not. I would have still ran out of the bathroom. I found out that another uncle who lived up the next holler had a bathroom. So I would hold it until we went to my other uncle's house and I would use his toilet. First time using a shared bathroom was not a success.