CRINGE REPORT | A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a podcast appearance for Beet Red and the episode dropped today. It is titled “When they tell me to eat sh*t, I don’t nibble!” and I’m so sorry to tell you that yes, that title is a quote from yours truly.

Honestly, I felt the recording didn’t go very well. I did it ensconced in my bathroom for privacy and then because of sound stuff, couldn’t have the fan on, and the setting afternoon sun started streaming in and baking me and we don’t have AC anyway, and I was sweating SO much that my fingers were slippery.

Also, before we even started recording, I had all these technical challenges with my mic not working and my headphones not working and it was this whole thing. So by the time we actually began, I was a damp and flustered mess, despite being cool and prepared in advance, which threw me off, and I didn’t say what I had planned to say and went way off-book and just … performed very randomly, you know?

I feel sort of embarrassed at how it turned out, but is that maybe in-keeping-with and appropriate for a podcast that’s whole existence revolves around the telling of embarrassing stories? MAYBE!

The upside was getting to hang out with my web-friend Katie, who I have known for several years via our shared connection as “home design influencers”. Known online as @candycoloredhome, she has a platform like 50 times the size of mine, mind you. She is way more professional about it all.

Also positive: I got to “meet” Katie’s bestie co-host Mary Kate Schellhardt, an actress who was in some big movies as a kid, including What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Apollo 13, and Free Willy. She was really lovely and now we are mutuals.

Beet Red is a comedy podcast that is all about sharing cringeworthy and mortifying stories. There’s lots of poop accident tales and sex mishaps and that sort of thing. I tried to go a different way by telling mortifying tales about the ridiculous and stupid things I say so regularly and unwittingly as a very socially award neurodiverse person who didn’t know they were neurodiverse for a long time.

Oh, and the episode title is quoting me. I said that. And it gets worse because the person I said this choice line to is named Malcolm Johnston and he is the current EIC at Toronto Life and I said this to him when we worked together at what was then known as Post City Magazines, maybe in 2010 or so.

It’s 100% true and every time I think about it, even fifteen years later, I want to crawl into a hole and perish.