You know the fuzzy, fond, warm, pick-your-adjective, circa 2014 memories everyone has of the 5-hour drives up to Incline Village? The ones where you and your friends all struggled for screen time to level up on Candy Crush on one fingerprint-covered, greasy iPad in the back, before spending the next two weeks in bliss snowboarding down Comstock (or, if you were feeling like a mogul daredevil, Backside) for the entire day? And also the ones when you went to some cabin to pretend Santa was real (even if you knew who the “real” Santa was after staying up all night as a 6 year-old and having an existential crisis)?

In an ideal universe, I could have had all that, except in reality I was a year younger than all the other kids my family went with, and I was a very pessimistic child (for a good reason). To the four kids of my dad’s college best friends, being merely one year older than someone else meant they were all 10x more emotionally mature than the younger one, so I was excluded from all their “big kid activities.”

I was banned from playing Egyptian War with them because, being only 6 as opposed to 7 meant a world of a difference in one’s ability to participate in card games. 

They would also tell me deep facts about life, such as how Santa isn’t real, and I would wail “don’t brrst my bubble!” Just kidding. That never happened. I just really needed another pun in here.

Also, they had all developed some type of weird elitist ego from living in their city while the weird little 6-year-old lived in Saratoga (ironic because they were living in a city with a 30-something crime rate index while I was out here with a 7.66% rate), so I was also on the outside geographically. Even though I don’t speak to any of them, I would have loved to rub it in their faces that half of them ended up moving to Saratoga! Some of them go to this school actually! I have classes with them! You can only imagine the face I made when I found out — it was pure joy.

The only good memory I have from that torturous 10-year period when I went to Tahoe every weekend from November through February was when I became friends with another girl who wasn’t part of the original little cult. I didn’t have to suffer alone anymore. After a few years, people outside of the original vacation group were invited to the Tahoe trips, and when I finally had a friend my age, we spent every waking minute together (not necessarily by choice, keep in mind we were both outsiders) doing socially and emotionally appropriate activities in the cabin.

Before meeting her, I had to spend hours on the slopes suffering through the hells of black diamond with snooty arrogant little ski-team brats who pushed me whenever possible and taunted me for crying after getting lost (it really was not that funny). But now, I had someone to build snowmen and play Hay Day with.

After I started hanging out with her, no one tried bullying us anymore because she had an older brother who was not 6, not 7, but 17 and was one of the original permed Kevin Nguyen’s, so none of the beefy second graders were willing to mess with him.

This girl could make herself slow-cooked braised pork, while I still struggled to understand microwave instructions. Every morning, she yelled at me for an hour about my inability to fry an egg, which was incredibly effective, because by the end of the two weeks I was flipping perfect sunny-side-up eggs like I had been doing it since I was born. Of course, we didn’t share any of these creations with anyone else in the cabin, because why give unpoisoned things to people you despise?

Anyway, the only thing that came out of my journey to Tahoe every winter is my ability to facilitate the chemical change of an egg. This story is really that simple — and sad.