Episode 2: Phoenix in July

you listen to episode one, Welcome back, smarty Pants. You made it. I'll do my little disclaimer as I start the music. Bed Oh, that's a fun one. Who wrote it? You'll find out at the end. At the time of this recording, I haven't picked one yet, But that's just the magic of production, isn't it? Um? Okay? This is a true story told from my perspective, based on notes and writings and interviews that I've done over the past year plus in this organization, and all of the names

have been changed. And with that, let's get the moving forward in time page tourney sound effect going, because we're going back to July four and it is still day one of the mensa annual gathering. So people at the annual gathering generally came here to do one of two things. Go to boring talks about nothing during the day, or get blackout drunk at night. And I decide I'm here,

I'm going to try to do both. And trying to find a lunch table to sit at on the first day of the a g is like as terrible and traumatizing as freshman year in high school. And I play it just as safe as I did back then, and I choose a table called pet lovers. Pet lovers be mean to me, right right. I meet a couple of very nice women over the advertised corn chowder and caesar salad. Gross. I meet a grandmother in a celestial silk shirt who

talks about her granddaughter's interest in science. I mean a single woman with a cat. I mean mother who is deeply invested in what she can't repeat enough are extremely gifted Sons. Sure someone should start a band called the Extremely Gifted Sons. The food, as mentions are repeating in

hushed tones throughout this weekend, is very bad. But I'm trying to make conversation, and so I turned to the mother, who is extremely gifted son is like staring her down from across the room, and I say, you know, it's funny. Did you know that mensa means stupid in Spanish? And she looks at me incredulously, like I've just thrown the caesar salad up into my hand and baby birded it back into my own muff And she says, no, it doesn't.

And the grandmother in the celestial silk is like laughing into her lemonade, and she says, it means table in Latin, but also it means stupid. As So I look across the cafeteria, which is affectionately called hospitality in this same room will eventually have an open bar that is open well into the night, and I try to figure out

who's here, who am I dealing with? And while yes, the vast majority of the gathering and the organization is old and white, there was more diversity in gender and race and political thought in the younger section of Mensa than I had expected. There's by no means parody in the organization. But I will say I found myself to be initially hated and reviled by a fairly wide array of people with a wide variety of hug dots. This

is important. The mention hug dot system is one of the only truly ingenious concepts that I came across at the annual gathering. Is how it works. Using a colored dot stuck to your name tag. A menicin is asked upon registration to select a color based on what they would like to worthlessly indicate is their level of physical comfort with strangers. So green dot means all hugs welcome, unhinged, yellow means ask before hugging the norm, red means no

hugs at all, and blue means I'm single. And aside from the fact that it's open season on single people under this system, I do like it. My social anxiety has gotta hand it to him. It's a damn good system, the hug dot system. Even though I think single people should be able to choose whether people look them or not. I was like, what the blue one just says fun? Like does that mean fuck me? I don't understand, But I'm into the system and I choose a yellow dot

because I'm game. I want to be here. But what's more important to navigating the weekend than the hug dots are the ribbons that attending medicines hang beneath their name tags, and some people have a row of ribbons that extend over a foot long. I only have one. It's a bright yellow ribbon that says new member beside my yellow hugg dot. But most of the people who approached me over the weekend are wearing a red ribbon that has labeled Hosier, and this indicates that they are an active

member of the Firehouse group, just as a reminder. American MENSA Firehouse is an unmoderated, closed mental sponsored Facebook group that has a pretty storied history of targeting, bullying, and harassing people they disagree with. Coincidentally, it is also the most active area in all of MENSA. Some additions to the ribbon that as Hosier are ribbons that say things like Firehouse, boobs and bacon, and the occasional one that

just says perverse. There's also a designated Firehouse table in the cafeteria, which is labeled with a cartoon of an owl with its head on fire. Some people use their ribbons to announce where they're from or or their preferred pronouns, but you'll find most ribbons have the comedic limitations of a clearance rack at Spencer's gift in the mid two thousands, and as the day goes on, I find myself growing increasingly paranoid of my interactions with people who have the

hoser red ribbons. I go to a different talk, and as a lecturer wearing a Bazinga shirt discusses the future of artificial intelligence, I'm scanning the audience for red ribbons. And while I sit through a discussion about the various ways to use your cute children at business meetings to persuade sales. What I'm looking through the audience for red ribbons.

And as I sit in the debate room watching civil, if occasionally alarming discussions about hot button issues where the winner is weirdly voted on by having the best speaker's face against the wall as if there's a firing squad, I am scanning the room for red ribbons. In the debate room, I hear a wide variety of arguments about race, climate change, and religion, some of which I agree with, as some of which is some of the most regressive scary shit I've heard in a while. I go to

a talk called Television humor evolution or devolution. Very old college professors regaled a packed room with some of the most incredible misinformation that I have to share with you. It's not relevant to the podcast, but I would have to let you know what these people said because it doesn't make any sense and it made me laugh. Throwing some goofy music. Okay, television humor evolution or devolution, Okay,

here's one of my favorite ones. For the edginess of vulgarity of South Park is all the more shocking because the lines are spoken by quote unquote children. Why quote unquote. Seth McFarland is known for playing Cartman and many others. He is not on the show. We have to ask ourselves. Is n C I G S a comedy as well? And then a couple of sides later that lab technician she's goffe and that's a light mooteeth. She's very, very gone.

With Shakespearean comedies, the women can only be uppity in the first act and by the last act they've been tamed. There's also this like long meandering argument that Charlie Sheen was removed from Two and a Half Men for quote unquote sexual problems. But then one of the professors was like, well, his character on the show also had sexual problems, so the show wasn't funny. After he left, there was one slide that just said www dot Everybody Loves ray dot com,

which you should check it out. It's a really good Like Angel Fire fans site for Everybody Loves Raymond, Animated sitcoms automatically create distance. This is why Family Guy two thousand and twelve is allowed to be so vulgar as the stories are told about the dysfunctional Griffons. Okay, ending tangent, but I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

So this talk is followed by the equally punishing oh no, we gotta do different goofy music mensa joke Off, whose moderator explains that humor is to quote disarmed others unquote, as well as to reflect quote shared experience where we are in our development and sexual selection parentheses. Women sell like men that show wit unquote the most mensa ship

I've ever heard in my life. But the joke off basically functions as an open mic and since are welcome to the front of the room to perform in categories like old people jokes, light bulb jokes, jokes about professions, and political jokes, a topic that everyone in the room agrees as best to not even attempt. There are a number of speakers who throughout the weekend are noticeably jarred by the political divisions in the room and the joke off moderator. I hate that I have to say joke off.

The joke off moderator looks genuinely surprised when his kind of low hanging fruit Trump University joke gets a couple of groans from the audience, and he says, really, and another member just shouts out, don't boil the moon, and others are kind of muttering in agreement, and so the moderator shrugs and is a little confused, but he says

we'll move on. And by the time the final debate room I go to that day closes, which is on reproductive rights that featured an intense, anxiety inducing spar between a liberal woman and an extremely pro life teenager, it's already past eleven at night. And two who I will remind you is the first friend I make at the MENSA Annual Convention and the second most blocked member of American MENSA Firehouse, me being the first. Thank you so much.

And two and I ran into each other again at the final debate, and he knows exactly where all the parties are on the fourth and fifth floor of the hotel. It is time to go to the parties now. Because it's MENSA. The party system is also needlessly complicated. All of the parties that I go to on this night are advertised within the Men's Arising Annual Gathering pamphlet that we're given on our way into the Sheraton on the first day, and most are divided by s I G

s or special interest groups. So there's the Boomer Suite, which is next to the Gay s I G Suite, which is across from the gen X Sweet, which is across from the gen Y Sweet, and that's where I'll spend most of my time. And why MENSA does not recognize the term millennials is unclear to me. They call

it gen y whatever. There's also a Firehouse Suite, and that's the only party I hear of happening on the fifth war And that makes sense because there's two thousand members of the Firehouse Group and their membership comprises a pretty large amount of people who are in attendance at the annual gathering. But at first two and I go to the gen Wy Sweet and and it's honestly pretty fine. A woman I met in a hotel room under very confusing circumstances that I will explain to you in a

future episode. She recognizes me and she gives me a big hog and she and her husband appear to be the organizers of the suite and they're actually from my area. So she's quick to introduce me to all the other youngish medicines, and they're all pretty welcoming and curious as I'm nervously compulsively refilling my cup with the cheap KEG

beer that's there. And there is this feeling that I'm like retroactively attending every party I didn't get invited to when I was a teenager, and no way to source this, but it doesn't seem like I'm the only one that feels that way. And it's at this party that I realized just how many people associate controversy with me, because at all times I have to wear a badge with my full name on it, which sucks. At the party, I'm approached by multiple people who cautiously ask me, how's

your a G going? Is it different than you expected, how I'm enjoying myself. What maybe decided to come if I was going to be writing about the experience. And I get pretty good at answering this question on my first night, which is lucky because I will have to answer it several hundred times in the days to come. And it's here that I kind of give the reflective reply that I take with me through the rest of the annual gathering, which is some variation on what people

told me. I wasn't giving mensa a chance in my pieces, so I took so and so up on the invitation to come, and here I am. Hi. The organizer's husband comes up to me and asks me how it's going, before mentioning we have a mutual friend. He's very friendly, and I'm later informed that he's had me blocked online for months. Someone else comes up to me and says, shit, love this. And I don't know this guy right now, but he's really going to dominate the toga party tomorrow night.

One man in particular, who holds a high position in American medicine. Who am going to call? Joey corners me near the cooler keg where I am still nervously drinking and Joey is a very gregarious and kind of intense guy, so, like many other people I meet, he asked me the standard line of conscious questioning, and I give my standard cautious answer, and he's repeating that regurgitative defense of the

Firehouse group, which is say it with me. They're the nicest people in real life, nothing like they are in line. So this conversation continues for about twenty minutes of intense eye contact until Two finds me in the dark shuffle of the gen Y suite and says, dude, what was Joey talking to you about? For so long? I was getting worried I have to yell in his ear to be heard, And I say, I don't know. He asked me about why I'm here and how nice the Firehouse

people are in real life. I have no idea who he is, and Two just starts laughing. Joey was one of the guys leading the charge against you in Firehouse. He works for MENSA. He knows you don't know who he is, okay, And like, no, I'm not okay. And this happens multiple both times in my time and MENSA. Someone is very nice to my face, and I later find out that they have said horrible things online and

have blocked me for months. It is a crazy making thing, and I'm starting to feel a little disoriented and dizzy, and I'm a little drunk, and I lose track of two as he goes over to flirt with someone on the other side of the party. And around this point I decide I'm going to leave. There's no way I'm going to go up to the firehouse suite this late in the night, and the combination of shitty cafeteria food and for anxiety beers in rapid succession is just making

me feel awful. So I go to the bathroom. I take a couple of notes, and I text my boyfriend to let him know that I'm okay, because he wanted to be at the MENSA Annual Gathering. But it's not a couple's retreat. It's the MENSA Annual Gathering, bitch, and I feel positive that going any less than alone would result in extreme backlash. I leave the bathroom and a few how's your age goings Later, I emerged from the gen Y Sweet into the hallway where people are sort

of oscillating between board games and drunken conversations. And unfortunately for me, and I don't even make it to the elevator before someone else stops me. This is a guy in his forties and he approaches me with a smile as well as blocking my exit. At this point, it's

past midnight and it's still somehow ninety degrees out. He says, I'm familiar with your work, and I start to brace myself for what I think is this inevitable direct confrontation until I look down at his name tag no red ribbon, and then he kind of laughs a little bit and says, no, no, I mean I like it. And it's not until I hear myself like exhale that I realized I look scared. And this is a fact that is corroborated by several members of Firehouse and the group after the event is over.

I look scared, and I say really, and he says yeah, there's a whole hold on and it's becoming clear to me that I'm not going to be able to leave anytime soon. And he beckons over a few other people who are closer to my age and says, this is Jamie. She came. The others are laughing and drinking their beer, and one gives me a high five. One of the guys says, Oh, we've been waiting for something like that to happen. It's been years of them doing all that.

Are you going up to firehouse? And even hearing it just makes me tense up a little bit. There's a few red ribbon guys near the elevators and they're about to head upstairs, and I say, I don't think tonight. But the guys who like my articles are kind of pushing it, and they say, oh, we'll come up with you. It'll be fine, you'll be safe. I'm kind of thinking, like, no,

I've seen a horror movie before. But the moment he says that, I know that I'm going to go because I promised myself that I would give them medicines a chance, and I wasn't going to take a seven hour greyhound bus trip to not do that. I mean, and of course this is just my perspective. I'm sure my best friend would tell you that I'm addicted to putting myself in harm's away for reasons that I should speak to

a therapist about. But the point is that I closed the uber app and I opt in to the firehouse hang and there's still one lingering red ribbon hoser near the elevator. When the four so people and I finally get to the elevator to go the opposite way that I was planning, I'm going to call this guy Patrick, and he stops me very gently and says, hey, are you are the guys in with cuts them off and says not to bother us because we're going up to firehouse.

Patrick is visibly uncomfortable at this news, and I stumble over my words, half drunkenly, trying to assure him that I'm not going to, you know, go up there and cause a scene. And he raises his eyebrows and he thinks about that for a second and says it's alliance, then proceed with caution. And people in horror movies don't usually get quite this many warnings. That would just be

bad writing. But I'm feeling a little pressure to go up and I've already sort of steeled myself to do it, so I say okay, thank you, and the few people and with seem a little annoyed, and Patrick shrugs and says, I don't think you've been barred from it, but you know, I'm just saying it's alliance to and I'm feeling a little defensive, and I say, well, I feel like the way I entered the organization was in such a bizarre way, and and I'm launching into what feels like prepared statements

after only twelve out of my planned sixty hours day is over. The screenshots is what got people. But it's upstairs. So we go up to the party slightly drunken, disorganized, and for your sake, I sincerely hope that you never know the feeling of walking into a living, breathing, hostile

comments section. And it's at this point, listener, that I have to take you out of this compelling fourth of July narrative to take you back in time a little bit, because we really should talk about the screenshots that Patrick is referring to and the continued argument for why the denizens of Firehouse choose not to forgive me. For forgiveness

I never really requested, so page turn effect. Instead of telling you what the American meant a Firehouse secret Facebook group is, I will let them tell you what it is instead. Via and I wish I were kidding. A short animation that a member of the group had personally commissioned in order to dunk on me. It was captioned quote, I think Jamie Left could benefit from this, but alas she's dead to me unquote honestly high drama Shakespearean I love it. This is what the animated video states, American

Mensa Firehouse. Many Benson's had ventured into the firehouse. They expected mind numbingly academic conversations imagine unicorns romping through meadows. Instead, they discovered that Menson's are well opinionated, rude and rough curmudgeons, but they are also kind, thoughtful, and generous. Conversations offended, some, excited others, and in the end we all have the same false inshore comings as everyone else. With one difference. We were quicker, video and buddier. I wouldn't trade the

group for any other. Oh and boobs always boobs, Oh and boobs always boobs. My introduction to this group, as it pertains to me, was by receiving a notification that I had been tagged in a post that contained the link to the story I had written about getting into mensa, which, and I can't say it enough, was called good news. They let dumb sluts into mensa now the Slaton question. Being myself, it was made immediately clear to me that they did not care for this dumb slut joke I

made at my own expense. I'd like to share some of the assorted replies that had already been written by the time I was tagged. They are I agree that she's a dumb cunt oh slut who's too dumb to tweeze her eyebrows if she joined this group to cause trouble for MENSA block her anyone else sent her nudes. Yet where is national at a time like this that she won't part dissipate in our boom thread and probably

does not even like bacon. Again, I can't stress enough menicines are not very funny, and aside from my initial vetting of some right wing memes, this was the first that I had seen much of anything in the group, and after receiving the warnings about Firehouse, I had combed through some of the posts in the group to confirm what I had been told. The prominent political leanings described, and sure enough, what I think are the hallmarks of

far right groups were all there. From the bad photo shops of Alexandria Acasio Cortez, bad faith arguments about bathroom rights and race, the occasional feminism is cancer and just general owning the Libs. And like the annual gathering, the group is majority white and skewing older, and there is a fair amount of disagreement and discussion among members in

the comments on more hot button American issues. Also president the group where some inside jokes, updates about members lives, requests for advice in certain areas of their lives, and generally ranging from people in their thirties to people in their late sixties, which is you hate to say it, the dreaded parents on Facebook demographic. So screenshot these insulting replies about my article and I post them to Twitter without replying to the Facebook thread and without blocking the

names out. So I didn't think at that time, and I still struggle with the idea that people who are directly insulting and harassing another person warrants a censure of their names. And I honestly wasn't thinking about it that hard at the time I posted it. Because here was this group that I had been explicitly warrant was toxic and liked to go after members without prompting going after me without prompting. And this is a confusing, kind of difficult thing to talk about because would it have been

more ethical to block those names out? Absolutely, and to any medicine who is listening to this, I would do it differently if you were calling me a dumb cunt today, I really would. And I don't know if that is personal growth or refusal to engage, and I don't care which I know. I would block out the names and the few comments, including the boob thread, which we'll get to that I I posted without centering the names. That wasn't fair of me, that wasn't any of my fucking business.

And I took down the tweets that included names that weren't directly harassing me. The comments directed at me, we're about par for the course of online harassment I've received in the past in many a comments section, but the context for it was very different, because this was online harassment from people who were supposed to be some of the smartest people in the world, and most of them were at least in their thirties, just hurling j V

insults at a stranger in a secret Facebook group. And then, as promised, there was the bootbread which is a pretty cool of MENSA famous effort dating back to where a member posted, I want to see some boobs help me out, ladies, hashtag boop thread. What followed this comment was twelve hundred pictures of various members boobs, which has later moved over to a second thread that had five hundred more boob replies.

And I don't know what else to say about the Boobgreat other than I think it's the best part of the group as long as you're posting your own boobs. I shouldn't have outed the boob thread. I should have been more thoughtful about that. And I apologize to the book thread, and I will continue to apologize to the Bootgreat. I am sorry to the boob thread. I reply to a few of the comments to let members know that I've seen what they've been writing, and at this point

I'm kind of still joking about everything. At one point, I write hello, thank you for reading the piece, and a special shout out to all the olds and the comments, calling me ugly have a great day, everyone, and one user replies, welcome to Firehouse. It doesn't get better. Then comes the strange death threat that to this day, Firehouse

members insist was intended as a joke. I did not block out the user's name when posting on Twitter, but in everything I've written since I have it reads as followers, Hello, Jamie Loftus. You've met the mild mannered organ repairment of MENSA. Now you have met our criminal element. There are people here who can really hurt you. In your world, that means posting Twitter rents where you're a racist, or fake reviews,

it means something different here. This is serious. We have men here who have killed, We have those who have served time, one who did the unmentionable and fugitive felons. There was a woman here who pissed a lot of us off a few years ago, and now she's dead. Yeah, you're welcome here. All dues, paid members are but that's all.

No one is looking out for your safety. And could this have been a strange joke, sure, But after multiple warnings about the group and a feel for its attitude on a lot of subjects, I didn't feel that I could take this as a joke in good faith. So I posted it to Twitter without the name redacted, and woke up the next morning to find that my Twitter account had been banned for quote violating our rules against

posting violent threats unquote. So just to walk you through the nightmare that is social media, a band had been made on my account for posting a threat made against me the men since we're getting very tricky. So there's a popular assertion that people, specifically women, are quick to accuse someone of being whiny or overly sensitive when threatened with violence online, whether that's as a joke or not.

And as often as these arguments come up, they're difficult for me to understand based on the empirical evidence that people follow through on threats like this with with relative frequency. There has been a disturbing increase in the likelihood of people taking threats, even ones made ironically or with coded terms,

offline and into the real world. Whether we're talking about any of the mass shootings that were directly promised and foreshadowed on online forums, or racial and religious hate crimes encouraged and carried out like at christ Church in New Zealand, or the still active gamer Gate harassment campaigns that cause some women to go into hiding, or the increase in

real life consequences of cyberstalking and cyber bullying. There are a lot of reasons and examples to treat a threat made in a private forum as something to be taken seriously, and based on what I've seen, and based on a lot of the examples I just provided, the idea of free speech is a frequently invoked substitute for dangerous or

threatening speech. And Firehouse, While I am not implying that they are criminals, I am implying that the low rumblings of this exact model were at this time present in that group. Okay, So upon logging into Firehouse that morning to see where the conversation had gone overnight, I found that I could not see much in the group at all. And even though I had no Twitter account, if you searched my name on Twitter, hashtag would pop up called

hashtag mensa responds. Here were some of the hashtag mensa response. Jamie Loftus has been suspended for attacking our membership without cause. She'll be back hoping for more publicity. Will be ready hashtag ments of response and attached to this tweet was a picture and a quotation from Joseph Grobel's Yes That Joseph group the Nazi. One Twitter member commented to me directly in spite of my suspension. I admire your energy and dedication gee, to have met all medicines in such

a short amount of time. So to recap after writing a satirical piece calling myself a dump slut and kind of riffing on the idea of what I thought of MENSA member was members of the secret MENSA Facebook group mass insulted then mass blocked me when I shared their insults on my Twitter viewed this sharing of threats made towards me as a sinister doxing and sabotage of the sanctity of an unmoderated group, and in fact, the fact that my Twitter account was suspended became a commonly cited

piece of evidence that I had in fact done wrong by not censoring these names, even though while some would argue it's unethical, it is not illegal. Even though the service reinstated my account and admitted that it was their error that I had been banned, and given the trend of how Twitter suspensions were, my account was most likely flagged because the same tweet was reported multiple times by

you tell Me. Upon my account being reinstated, I removed the reference to the MENSA group threat because fair point, that's not my business and leave all the insults and threats up. And that was important to be because to me it was that sweet refrain. Again. Sure, they called you ugly and stupid and threatened you unprompted, and they will react harshly if you attached their name to such a comment, but you really just have to get to know them. Okay, we're going to jump back into the future.

We're going to July, day two of my time at the MENSA Annual Gathering. Bring not a bit too fine a point on it, but I am the Taylor Swift of being absolutely hated at the Sheridan in Phoenix. I'm very good, and so when I wake up, I'm very, very hungover. And I listened back to the audio note that I recorded upon getting back to my Airbnb the previous night, which is just a long, blubbering tangent of

what had happened throughout the rest of the night. And I'm saying things like they wanted to own the libs, and I let them own the lips, very pathetic, laughed

at my own jokes, then started crying again. And so yes, on night one, I had let MENSA make me cry, at least for an hour, and I called my mom to talk about it, and she says, I think you should stay as I'm pouring over my notes from the previous night, calculating exactly how long I could stay in my bed at the Airbnb before going back the mile and a half of degree hell weather that lay between me and the Sheraton, and I tell her I cried in the game room for forty five minutes last night,

confirming this on the MENSA station area I had bought at their ill advised on site gift shop, which sold everything from office applies to truly hideous T shirts. Some of the graphic to sign let me share a fight club bar of soap with Mensa carved into the tale Deadpool caricature with a throbbing brain labeled brain Pool, the organization's name in the Marvel funt the World of Warcraft fund, and a comic book hero named Mr Manson. My mom says, he cried to who. I looked back down at my

notes for the answer, and that is Tall Guy. Tall Guy was with me in the Firehouse suite the previous night as well, which was a lucky find in the gen Y suite because he was just as confused as why they weren't calling it millennial as I was. Coincidentally, he lives a few miles away from where I do in California, and he's kind of a tech bro turned dad who now dabbles in improv and is very nice to me in a moment that he doesn't realize that

I really need someone to be nice to me. When he saw me last night, he said he dressed perfectly for the luaw because the theme was luow is pointing to my tied eye shirt and my pink shorts, and then he said unless that's how normally dressed, which case I apologize, and he's at the Firehouse party to the fifth floor of the Sheraton that night was lined with Firehouse members, some of whom appeared to vaguely recognize me, and others who were too deep in conversation to care.

The group of people I'd come up with entered the open Suite, which was as dark as any other party we've been to that night, except weirdly for the gen X suite, who apparently value iridescent lighting, which was really nice. But I can't see in this room that is later confirmed in photos is a table of drinks, a cardboard cut out of Donald Trump and about twenty people whose

faces I can't make out. Tall guy is either vaguely intrigued by why everyone is so interested in someone as poorly dressed as me, or is a little worried after I expressed some of the anxiety I felt in the elevator up and so he kind of hangs near by me when I'm stopped within ten seconds of entering the room. The person stopping me in question is a hosier in his forties with a column of ribbons attached to his lanyard, a type of person that there is a limitless supply

of at this convention. I'll be honest, I know you are. We're having the same conversation I've had several times this night already, but this time we're in the Lions ten. There's a lot of people who would say, don't talk to Jamie and she thinks we're loser, dumbasses and all

of that. But my position is going to be based on our interaction now, and even he will end up containing more multitudes than I can possibly handle at this moment, because yes, he will ask me in the hallway the next day if I was secretly videotaping the entire party, but he also appears to be dating the woman who expressed the most pro choice opinions in the reproductive rights debate I went to that night. Who knows this guy?

And I have a bizarre but civil conversation about my status in firehouse for about half hour, and I spend most of my time explaining that my intention was never to hurt anyone in the group, but to do what I thought was pretty clear satire, and he explained that that wasn't how most of the people in the room felt. Tall Guy was standing beside me throughout most of it, learning about this schism in real time, and right when it looked like I would actually get to talk to

some people, I started to get a little exasperated. But we hear each other out, and tall Guy is looking kind of amused, and he looks down to me and

is like, what did you even do? And I'm getting worked up and I'm like nothing, and I feel my brain started kind of splinter because the man I'm speaking with remains respectful and continues to explain to me what has already been explained to me by other men that night that I come in pre judging medicines and the screenshots, and that being hateful online next to your own name didn't mean you were that way in real life. And

I have no issue with him. But I have heard this already, and we're in the middle of rehashing this again when the people standing a few feet away with their backs to me and what I later understand to be protest, start to kind of stir a little bit, and one of them breaks away from the pack. This is a guy who's maybe in his twenties with a short haircut, and he's the first firehouse member to not ask me how my ag is going. With wide eyes and clenched teeth, he just he opts to just cut

straight to yelling. You don't want to drop that phone, huh? He asks me, and he's reaching out to jostle it out of my hand. Or you wouldn't want to drop that phone, huh. He storms across the room to ask the same thing of the handful of other people who walked upstairs with me, turns his name tag around so no one can identif by him, and starts accusing people that I have just met a videotaping the party on

my behalf. The beers that I had drank downstairs. I am really starting to feel and the man I've been talking to for a half hour is pretty apologetic and says he doesn't know the person who tried to take my phone, and that he'd been getting a strange feeling about that guy the entire night, and that he was in the service, which doesn't really seem like a fair characterization,

but go off. And he says to me, your safety isn't a question, and I'm pretty close to panicking, but I'm saying I know, I know you feel myself kind of starting to cry through the conversation, and tall Guy asks me if I want to leave, and I nod and I say yes and and try to hide the fact that my eyes are full, and he clears a path for us, and we leave, and the few people we came with stay there, and I learned the next day that they were yelled at by the same guy

who tried to take my phone. Tall Guy takes me downstairs and we spend the next hour at the first floor games room that stays open extra light, and I start by sobbing through explaining why the night had gone the way it had, and Tall Guy was patient with me to a degree that baffles me to this moment, and he listens to everything I said through my tears and phlegm and everything, and he asks why are you

doing this? Where are you getting out of this? And my answers, from what I can remember, are pretty indecisive, because in this moment, I don't really know why I am here, aside from the fact that I bought the ticket five months ago after meeting a senior Firehouse member in person for the first time, and I felt like she had presented me with this challenge, and maybe she was right, and maybe I had nothing to be nervous about. But less than a day into this grand idiot experiment,

I really wish I weren't here. I didn't feel like I was in mensa. I felt like I was the mensa, the stupid lady who never should have accepted a dare from a sentient comments section. But I cry my way through this crisis with Tall Guys guidance, and eventually I say I need to call an uber. And this makes me feel so silly now out, But I did have this paranoid flash through my head that maybe Tall Guy had been sent by Firehouse to spy on me, and this was how bad my state of mind was getting.

And tall guy was confused and said, you're not staying at the hotel and I'm still crying, and I'm like, I'm not paid enough for that because I'm not being paid to be here. I'm just hurting myself. So that's you know, Rittan and ground. It's not in the budget. So flash forward to the next morning. I'm recapping this for my mom and she says, you should stay. You said you get to know them so you'll see it through. Now.

I have found my mother to be terrible with this sort of advice of the time, but that's also sort of why I called her, because I know I should stay. I'm seven hundred dollars in the hole, I'm very hungover, I'm completely miserable and nervous and scared, but I know I am staying. And that's episode two of my year in mensa. I hope you're enjoying AUNT. If you are,

feel free to let people know. Thank you so much to Sadie Depueve for doing me incredible theme song, and thank you to the following people for lending your voice to the mentions. They are Caitlin Durante, iff You, Audi Way, Miles Gray, Anna Hosnie, Sophie Lichterman, Robert Evans, either Taylor Jacquies, Neil Daniel Goodman, and Maggie may Fish. My name is Jamie Loftus. You can find me on them wherever you want to. Really, we're halfway their baby. See you next time on my ear and mentum