Kindly Myers here. And today? Today was supposed to be simple—almost wholesome, reality-TV wholesome. I’m talking: big day, big excitement, and a meet and greet with the Thousand-Lb Sisters out in good ol’ BStown, Kentucky. Because listen, I love reality TV. I don’t just watch it—I live for it. So when I saw the whole thing going around online, the “My Bills Are Paid” tour with the Slayton sisters and their siblings, I was already hyped. Like, I was mentally planning what I’d say. I was picturing the photos. The little “OMG we did it” moment. But then I got in the car and reality hit me the second my group started talking. “Try being my size, Amy,” one of them said—like it was the most obvious problem in the world. And I shot back immediately. “You don’t know how it is. There’s stuff you can do. You want to be a big baby about everything.” And that’s when the whole energy turned into this friendly, petty debate—who’s more grown, who’s the “baby,” who pays their bills, who’s actually got life under control. It was goofy. It was bickering. But you could feel the anticipation underneath it, like we were all strung tight on a string, waiting for the moment to finally arrive. Before any of that though, we did what any self-respecting fan would do—we stopped for lunch at Olive Garden. Because apparently this is tradition. “It’s like tradition at this point,” someone said, like we weren’t in a real-life schedule crunch against the clock, like we weren’t about to get swallowed by a line stretching around a whole city. Then we started talking about the tour like it was a sacred event. Like it wasn’t just people standing around in public, it was history happening in real time. And immediately the conversation shifted to the kind of problem that only matters when you’re about to meet celebrities you’ve watched for years. “What’s going on with my hair though?” Yeah. My hair. Because sure—sure—we’re going to a meet and greet, but first, we need to get ready for the siblings. Then we started repeating this little joke people were saying about the show, about sugar and diet soda—how it “cancels out.” Like some kind of unofficial fan rule. One of them insisted that if you ate sugar and then drank diet soda afterward, it neutralized it. They even talked about how “mom told us when we were younger” and that it sounded true then. “I did when I was a kid,” one person said. I don’t know if it was science. I don’t know if it was superstition. But we were already in the kind of mindset where anything could be true if it meant the day would go our way. So we left lunch and walked up toward the line. And that’s where everything changed. Because the line wasn’t normal. It wasn’t “a little crowded.” It wasn’t “okay, you’ll wait a bit.” No. The line was five blocks long. Five blocks—like it was snaking around the city. Like we weren’t waiting for a photo—we were joining an event marathon. There was no end in sight. “We just got to get—” someone started, and the sentence died on the spot because the line kept going. I remember thinking, This is not what I pictured. We were still moving, but only by fractions—like the line was alive, slowly inching forward like it had its own agenda. We’d gain half a block and then pause. Gain a little more and then wait again. People passed by with that glazed look fans get when they’re trying not to spiral. Someone even made a comment about it being like a “status update”—because we were basically stuck in our own suspense story. At one point, the group realized the timing was brutal. We had about two hours before they shut it off—before the moment we were chasing became impossible. “If you’re still in line, it’s over.” Over. That word hung in the air like a threat. So we started doing fan math. We started bargaining with time. We started talking like we could outmaneuver reality with the right attitude. “Okay, so if I’ve got to take your Tesla—” someone said. Like we’d steal the entrance. Like we’d drive through the front of the building. Then another voice jumped in: “We’ll drive it through the front of the building.” And honestly? That could’ve been hilarious if it didn’t also sound desperate. We were still waiting. Still stuck. Still counting down.