The first time it happened when I was twelve years old, getting in my after-school screen time, which I scheduled meticulously so as to catch Pokemon, Who’s Line is it Anyway, and Gilligan’s Island within my strict hour-and-a-half with the television (as you can see, I was a kid with eclectic taste). It was during a particularly high stakes battle between Picachu and a rock creature no one cared about that my mother- having no respect for my timetable- approached me with a bowl.

It was every two years that my mother and I would hop a fourteen-hour flight to visit my grandma in the south of France while my father—TJ—remained home in LA. Jet-lagged and nauseated, I’d wander grandma’s in the middle of the night like a vampire who happened to be nauseated and jet-lagged. I’d switch on her little TV with the stack of VHS tapes—the only place I’d ever had access to the old recorded footage of the time my father was a lion tamer.