Note: The Joys of Life is normally written by Grayson Schementi.

Rainbows are red. Violence isn’t cool. Hi, I’m Nathan Siskel, and I’m writing this column for Grayson today because he says he is under the weather. Just a few minutes ago I was judging a cockroach for eating stuff that comes out of bats. That sentence was an active product of Zach’s censorship. Anyway, there’s this cave and bats live on the top of it and cockroaches live on the bottom and the poop food falls down for the cockroaches as if from the heavens. Then they roll around in their food and eat it and roll around in it some more, like a child in the snow. BBC’s David Attenborough told me so. And while David’s voice soothed me, I found the image on the screen to be… disagreeable. But then I said to myself, “Nathan! What are you doing, judging this cockroach, a fellow resident of this beautiful Planet Earth!” I guess what I’m trying to say is that cockroaches don’t need any more hate for their lifestyle than they already get, even though they are marginally less aware of the situation than me. 

Slight pivot, sometimes I want to be a flower girl. Like at a wedding. But there’s one issue. I’m a boy. Which really shouldn’t be an issue, but it is. Hmm. I fear I’ve started this story in the middle of it, so let me go further back. I was born on a cold winter day and pronounced male by a nice doctor with all the best intentions. Growing up, I had a lot of fun. However, I occasionally felt that society’s constraints on me as a boy were, well, constraining, and made me self conscious of the kind of boy I wanted to be. And if I may be so presumptuous, I think you’ve felt that too, in one way or another. 

Moving along, when I was five years old I went to a wedding. Naturally, I had already developed a healthy love of flowers because honestly what’s not to love. But I had never considered all the possibilities of throwing flowers around, especially in churches. This wedding opened my eyes. Flowers are even better when they’re being flung at the feet of a woman who’s about to make a really big decision. 

Fast forward, I’m seventeen and watching youtube videos. THAT’S A LIE I was watching Tiktoks, this column is about shame and I refuse to have any! In this video, a man with many muscles was a flower girl, throwing flowers all around a church and everyone was LOLing and ROFLing it up in the comments. And here we’ve arrived at my dilemma. I wanted to be, as anyone who knows me would understand, my macho manly self while still being the flower girl! In other words, I don’t have the muscles necessary to make being a flower girl ironic, and THAT, dear children, is my issue. 

But why be ashamed of my waifish body and whimsical demeanor? Why let that decide whether or not I fling flowers at a dear friend’s feet as they walk the aisle towards the biggest gamble of their adult life? I DON’T KNOW WHY! PROBABLY A REASON THAT IS DUMB AND BAD! So, for the second time in this collumb (don’t correct it Zach, I’m leaving it), I refuse to be ashamed. I’ll take a lesson from those cockroaches, those proud poop rolling insects of the Blattodea family and I will hold my head tall, on its celery stalk of a neck, and lob little flowers all around a church in that name of GOD and MY OWN DIGNITY! Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings today and I hope you’ve learned something valuable about me, cockroaches, the institution of marriage, and maybe even yourself. Bye-bye and have a beautiful day. Rainbows.