I'm just posting this because, if I die, I don't want to be remembered as "She Who Perished After Posting a Fart Story".

It’s official: my head is currently hosting the Migraine To End All Migraines. I am entertaining myself (in between the whimper-inducing pulses of white-hot head pain) by trying to creatively verbalize exactly what this monster headache really feels like. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

It’s like a baby dinosaur (a mean, big-headed one, not one of those soft, plesiosaur sort of things that were like an ancient lizard precursor to Labrador retrievers) is hatching inside my head, and hammering insistently at one weakening, cracking, crumbling spot on my skull in its efforts to escape.

It’s like somebody bored into my brain with a core sampling drill, and then wrapped a leather belt around the core sample, and then started tightening it in time to the beat of “The Humpty Dance”. Also, the belt has pointy metal studs on it.

It’s like a chain gang member – a weak one who has been unhappily cursed with very little coordination, but an extremely determined will – is sledge-hammering a railroad tie against the spot just above my right eyebrow.

The last time I had a migraine this bad, I thought I was dying end eventually ended up in the hospital, alone, abandoned in a corner with a dried-out migraine-breaking IV in my arm because the admitting physician had forgotten I was there.

That was fun, but alas, I cannot replicate the experience because I no longer have health insurance.

Whimper.

This, too, shall pass.

I realize that I’m pretty much alone in the blogging world in that I failed -- failed! -- to write a “Thanksgiving” Post. Which I was planning on, but have been unable to do until now, because 1) I was at Brad’s parents’ house all week, and whatever, YOU try blogging under those circumstances, and 2) I have been debating whether or not I should write about the Thing that happened while I was there.

Because a Thing did happen, readers. A Very Important Thing. A Thing which, by virtue of its very occurrence, has catapulted my relationship into stratospheric levels of seriousness.

The Thing is….




…I farted.

(Oh, come on. What did you expect? This is so not an Ohmigod My Relationship AAAAAGHHH! blog. It could never be that kind of blog. I spend way too much time talking about cock.)

But this, though -- this farting -- it’s no small thing. Really.

I have a very, very fraught history with farting, dating way back. You know that episode of Sex & the City, when Charlotte is all embarrassed about being nude at the spa, and she points to another, more comfortable nude woman, and she’s all like, “I didn’t grow up in a Naked House! That woman, she grew up in a Naked House!”

Well, I grew up in a Flatulent House.

Lest you think that my home life was in some way uncouth, let me assure you that it wasn't. My parents are fine, upstanding people who raised us with great care. They are not gasbags. But when flatulence did occur in our house, at it sometimes does, it was a total non-event. Nobody gasped or tittered or insisted that the farter excuse himself. Nobody even looked up. It was as though nothing had happened.

So when I was eight years old, sitting in a 3rd Grade Computer Arts class with wrinkly old Mrs. Reeve and tapping eagerly at the keys of one of the oh-so-cutting-edge Apple IIG computers (Oregon Trail, anyone?), I didn’t get all freaked out when I had to pass gas. I just did it.

There was a shocked silence, and then one of the popular girls screamed, “Ewwww!”
The rest of the class erupted in shrieking laughter. Mrs. Reeve turned and glared at me over her glasses with the same look that one might use when observing something a dog had done on the floor.
“It is best,” she said, clipping each word with icy precision, “to ignore that.”

The girl who had screamed (and who am I kidding, I still remember that her name was Ashley Lemon) waited until Mrs. Reeve’s back was turned and then hissed at me, “You’re disgusting.”

I was aghast, utterly humiliated. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done; until that point, I’d had no idea that there was any sort of shame associated with farting. Hell, I didn’t even know that it was potentially humorous. My parents, with their Flatulent House, had forgotten to mention that you weren’t allowed to just rip one in public.

Of course, I was only eight. Of course, you’d expect that my faux pas would eventually be forgotten. But these private school girls -- these girls who were impeccably dressed in Banana Republic polo shirts and with designer knee socks wrapped around their impossibly slim legs -- these girls who never did anything wrong -- did not forget. (Seriously -- I was at that school for six years, and on the day before I left for good, Ashley Lemon stood up in the middle of lunch and shrieked, “Oh my God, what’s that smell? Ew, Kat faaaaaaaaaarted!” She was so nice.)

Like part of a vast, collective consciousness, the incident survived through the years and forever tarred me as She Who Had Farted In Computer Arts. It wasn‘t helpful that the oddly-monikered “Computer Arts“ lent itself so aptly to a certain unfortunate rhyme.

Given all this, it’s no surprise that two years later, when it happened in front of my high school boyfriend (the first time I’d ever farted in front of a boy), I was so mortified that I immediately burst into tears and ran out of the room.

*Dear high school boyfriend -- I know you’re reading this, and if you could please refrain from saying anything further about that incident in the comments, I’d be most grateful. Thank you.

And since then, I never, never passed gas in front of a guy I was dating. I simply wouldn't allow it. I watched what I ate specifically to minimize the chance of gas bloat. I sat stock-still in terror whenever I felt the contents of my guts shift in the slightest. And if I suspected flatulence was imminent, I would bolt from the room in a panic, lock myself in the bathroom (with the water running, of course, to mask any sounds), and then reemerge ten minutes later and lie, telling my confused boyfriend that I’d had to throw up. Because in Psycho Country, vomiting is somehow less repulsive than farting? Yeah. Issues. Further unhelpful: my college boyfriend was one of those obnoxious, “Girls don’t poop” guys who obsessively denies that the female sex is even capable of producing a Number Two.

(An aside: has anyone else noticed that it’s always those guys who are the most adamant about putting it in your butt? What’s going on there? Is their rejection of commonly accepted biological science born of initial fetishism of the female anus as an “In” hole? Or do they adopt the pro-ass stance after the fact? Someone really needs to study this.)

Anyway, I had a good streak (no pun intended! ha! Haha!… ew…) going -- it had been over ten years since I’d farted in front of a boyfriend. But rather than going unnoticed as a normal state of affairs, my non-farting had become one of Brad’s favorite topics of conversation.

“Maybe you need to fart,” was his default response every time I mentioned that I had a stomachache.
“I don’t,” I’d say. “Really.”
“Why don’t you ever fart?” he'd say, staring at me.
“I don’t know, I trained myself not to?"
"That's impossible."
"Damnit, I told you about what happened to me in Computer Arts! It really scarred me, okay?”
“I know,” he’d say, shaking his head, “but… I don’t know, it’s just… weird.”
“Would you like me to try to force one out?” I’d ask, exasperated.
“Can you?”
“No!”

But after a week below the Mason-Dixon Line -- eating unfamiliar food, staying at an unfamiliar house, coping with my nervousness over meeting Brad’s entire family by consuming massive quantities of alcohol -- my stomach was feeling just a touch volatile.

On Saturday morning, having gone to bed the previous night after imbibing something like three bottles of wine, I crawled out of bed and stumbled toward the kitchen. Returning with a cup of coffee, I crossed paths with Brad in the hall. He gave me an exuberant kiss.

“Hey!” he said.
“Hey,” I said, eyeing him. He was obviously tickled pink about something -- he was grinning like a maniac and bouncing up and down.
“Guess what?” he said.
“What?”
“You farted last night!”

I looked at him, trying to process.

“What, like, in my sleep?”
“Yeah!”
He grinned triumphantly at me.

I stared at him, waiting for the inevitable rush of hot, horrible shame.
Instead, I felt nothing. Except hungover.

“Okay,” I said. “Awesome.”
Brad cackled, kissed me again, and ambled away to get some coffee.
I watched him go, shaking my head and thinking, Men are fucking weird.


And, I mean, whatever. It’s not like it counts or anything -- I wasn’t even awake.

I didn't ask, but damnit, I'm still wondering.

Moments ago, I sat with Kevin and Adam (the other writers in our department) for a meeting with our manager. We’d finished discussing the business at hand and had moved on, as often happens, to a discussion of current events.

The manager said, “Did you guys hear about that Redskins player who died?”
“Oh yeah,” said Adam. “He got shot in a home invasion, right?”
“Home invasion, yeah,” said Kevin.
“What is up with ‘home invasion’?” said the manager. “When did they start using that?”
Kevin looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, “Isn’t it like the same thing as robbery, or a break-in? Why is everyone all of a sudden talking about ‘home invasion’ like it’s a different thing?”

Everyone looked around with furrowed brows. We hadn’t thought of this before.

“It’s only a robbery if you’re not home when it happens,” said Kevin, finally. “If they come in when you’re at home, then it’s called a home invasion.”
“No, that doesn’t make sense. Even if you’re not there, that’s still your home. They’re still invading your home,” said Adam.

Everyone fell silent again.

“So wait… what if they don’t break in, but they’re not supposed to be there?” said Kevin. “Is that a home invasion?”
“Yes,” said Adam.
“What if someone breaks into an apartment, is that a home invasion?” said the manager.
“Yes,” said Adam.
A related question had formed in my head, too.
I thought, If a pregnant woman has sex, is that a home invasion?

And then I thought, What? What the fuck kind of question is that?! What is wrong with you???

And then, Maybe only if it’s after the second trimester.

I must never forget to be thankful that I don't have Tourette's Syndrome.

I'll always have Paris

Brad and I went out two nights ago with Nick and Ada, the impossibly young/earnest neighbors who are fast becoming our BFFs. Once at the bar, we fell into the usual couples-getting-to-know-each-other routine – Nick and Brad stood at the bar and had a drinking contest, while Ada and I sat at a table and had a “Who used to be sluttier?” contest. (And yeah, I won. I always win. Three-plus years of serial dating in New York City have left me with stories that no 22 year-old could even hope to beat… and I suppose I should be embarrassed, but instead I just feel grateful that I’m still an overachiever at something.)

After fifteen minutes we’d stopped trying to out-slut each other, and started trading Most Embarrassing Moment Stories. The guys sat down just as Ada finished telling me about the time that she’d farted in the bed and then pretended that the smell was coming from a dead squirrel in one of their heating vents.

I knew it was time to bust out the big guns.

“Ok,” I said, “I have the world’s worst story.”

The World’s Worst Story

No, wait. I’m going to stop here, for a moment, and just admit the truth: this is not my story. Rather, it is the story of a friend of a friend. But it is a TRUE story, and it is so terrible, so unutterably poignant and gut-wrenching, that it loses nothing in the retelling.

And now, really, here it is...

The World’s Worst Story, For Real This Time

Emily was a typical 20something, single girl – living in a big city (Paris, in this case), working her way up the corporate ladder, and looking for love in the meantime. She was frustrated, as so many women have been before her, by her inability to connect with anyone. Date after date, she struggled to find the right guy, only to end up alone in her apartment with another bleak, solitary dawn approaching.

So she was thrilled when, during a night out with friends, she met Philip.

Philip was handsome, charming, and successful. He was also that rarest of big-city specimens, a genuinely nice guy. The two of them talked all night. He asked for her phone number, and then, he called the next day to ask her out on a proper date.

The night of their date, Philip picked her up at her apartment, and took her to dinner where, again, they spent hours talking. By the end of the evening, Emily felt she’d known him forever. Not only that, she could tell that he felt the same. And when he invited her back to his apartment, she didn’t hesitate; she went home with him, where they had ecstatic, mind-blowingly good sex and then fell asleep in each other’s arms.

The next morning, Emily woke to Philip – fully dressed in a wonderfully-tailored suit – kissing her gently on the cheek.

“You looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. He gazed adoringly at her while he told her that he had to go to work, but that she should sleep late, make herself comfortable, and leave whenever she liked—the door would simply lock behind her automatically, leaving her free to wake up at her leisure.

“Okay,” she said, and Philip kissed her goodbye and left, promising to call her that evening.

Alone in Philip’s apartment, Emily was giddy. She’d done it – she’d made a real connection, had had a wonderful first date with a beautiful man. He was perfect. Even his apartment was perfect, with mahogany furniture and luxuriant hardwood floors and a marble bathroom.

It was in the marble bathroom that Emily ran into trouble.

Of course, it’s never wise to do a Number Two in a stranger’s bathroom – particularly a stranger with whom you hope to have a romantic future. Too many things can go wrong.

In Emily’s case, the toilet wouldn’t flush.

She jiggled the handle, growing more panicky by the minute as the toilet remained un-flushed. A foray into the depths of the tank did nothing to alleviate the situation. Finally, knowing that desperate action was called for, Emily did the only thing she could think of: she got a plastic bag from the kitchen, retrieved the Number Two from the toilet, tied the bag shut, and put it by the front door next to her purse. She would bring the bag with her and deposit it in a public trash bin on the street. It was gross, yes, but it was the only way.

As she finished dressing and putting on her makeup, she even allowed herself to feel a tiny measure of triumph. Lesser women might have panicked, but not her – she’d gotten the job done, whatever it took. Problem solved. There was a bounce in her step as she fluffed her hair, picked up her purse, and cast a last look around the apartment before closing the door behind her.

You know what’s next, don’t you?

She left the shit.

Just inside the door; an unmistakable little accent in the foyer for him to discover upon his return.

Philip never called her again.

In a way, Emily was grateful.

* * *

Ada and Nick shrieked when I finished the story, as people always do, but then she leaned against his chest and looked up at him with adoring eyes.

“Nick, would you still love me if I left a plastic bag of shit in your apartment?” she said.

He looked down at her with such unrestrained, oozing love that I thought he might lick her face.

“Of course I would, honey,” he said.

I joined Facebook, and now I can never have children.

The other day, I finally broke down and got myself a Facebook account. I didn’t have a good reason for this – in spite of being a rampant narcissist who loves taking high-angle pictures of myself, I’m not hugely into the social networking thing. Actually, I really only did it because I wanted to stalk Brad’s ex-girlfriend (who was not even a girlfriend, more of a crush, but she is incredibly blonde and thin and cute and he talked so much about her before we got together that it makes me feel better to keep tabs on her, in the hope that one day I will check her page and she will be either 1) married and living in Antarctica, or 2) fat.)

But, once I was successfully logged in and friending all my former college classmates, I ended up getting drawn into the profile page of one of my freshman year BFFs (who I haven’t spoken to in over 5 years, granted). She and I used to sit around together and loudly proclaim that we would never get married, that we would prefer instead to enjoy a lifetime of casual sex and the ownership of several dozen cats, and then we would take turns slugging Arbor Mist straight from the bottle, and then we would vomit. It was a good life.

That same girl is now pregnant. Not just pregnant— insanely pregnant. Giddily pregnant. Her Facebook page is replete with daily fetus updates and a photo album documenting her rapidly-expanding baby bump, pictures in which she is uniformly smiling and giving a big ol’ thumbs-up to the camera. Has the world gone insane?

Apparently so. That same day, blogebrity Clink posted the following:

Whenever I have a pregnancy scare, my mind goes immediately to my lack of health insurance. And then to our lack of a two-bedroom apartment. And then to M’s lack of, I don’t know, a PAYCHECK.

We’re not ready.

Except, um, emotionally? I kind of am. Whenever I see a baby, my ovaries start doing a little dance. It’s kind of like a tribal dance, complete with steel drums. A get noticed dance. A WE’RE HERE! WE’RE OVARIES! START FUCKING PAYING ATTENTION! dance.

Based on this body of evidence, I have no choice but to conclude that the Baby Want Train is cutting a swathe of destruction through the ranks of my peers – a fact that is alarming already, in that “holy shit we’re getting older” sort of way. But I find it doubly frightening because I am utterly behind the curve. I have yet to experience the urge to reproduce; at the aforementioned ovarian tribal dance, my ovaries aren’t doing the foxtrot. Hell, they are not even there. My ovaries got dropped off in front of the dance hall, waited until their mom drove away, and then snuck off into the woods to smoke weed with a bunch of wayward testicles.

(Further reinforcement of my ovaries’ anti-dancing stance came later that week, when Jezebel posted a link to The Shape of a Mother (clickers beware, it’s very NSFW). Women who fear being pregnant should not be allowed to view this site. Seriously.)

That day, as I rode the subway home, I wondered if something might be wrong with me. When I walked into our apartment, Brad kissed me hello and helped me take off my coat.

“Hey, baby,” he said.
“Hey,” I replied. “So what do you want to do tonight?”
“Well,” he said, “I thought we could get knocked up.”
The world shrank to a tiny, pulsating point. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. “What?”
“You know, Knocked Up. The movie. Want to rent it?”
Maybe that isn't the best idea, I thought.
Then I thought, You're being ridiculous.
"Okay," I said.

Two hours later, curled up in front of the TV, I tried to share my phobic angst.
“So I saw this horrible website today,” I said. “It had pictures of what happens to your body after you have kids.”
“Uh-huh,” said Brad.
“And I’m never getting pregnant.”
He looked at me. “Isn’t the website in place to make women feel better about their bodies after they have kids?”
“Well yeah, but if you don’t have them yet, it just scares the shit out of you.”
“I see,” said Brad. The movie was nearing its end – Katherine Heigl was in the delivery room, in labor, screaming. If you’ve seen Knocked Up, you know what’s coming. (If not, you can probably guess.)
An image lit up the screen.
“Aaaaagghhh!!” said Brad.
“Oh my God,” I said, frozen in horror while my boyfriend buried his face in my shoulder. He looked up just in time to see a second shot of the same thing, and screamed again.
“AAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH! OH MY GODEWWWWWWWWW EW EW EW!”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
Brad’s voice was muffled by the pillow he’d pulled over his head. “How could they show that?! I’m not watching anymore!”

By the time the credits had rolled, Brad had recovered enough to snuggle with me and pronounce the movie to have been “cute”.
I had not.
The Facebook thing, the pregnancy website, the movie – they had all combined to create the sense that something was very, very wrong, a sort of tocophobic’s Perfect Storm.

I’ve since calmed down (except for the 30 minutes the next morning where I called my mother and rambled incoherently into the phone about how “I’m not ready to have kids and then be fat and ugly from age thirty for the rest of my life”... but we are not talking about that). But I still find myself wondering whether I’m a freak for having never felt that reproductive tug. I’ve never cooed over baby toys or baby clothes, and on the rare occasions when I’ve been handed an infant, I’ve never thought to myself, “I gotta get me one of these!” I didn’t even like playing with dolls as a kid.

People always tell you that your biological hard-wiring will kick in, that one day you’ll be suddenly swept up by the desperate, urgent desire for a fruited womb, and you’ll rush to get pregnant and never look back. I’m still waiting to be struck by the lightning bolt, but in the meantime, shouldn’t there be something? That sense of electricity in the air? A tiny indication that maternal instinct is running late, but on its way?

It’s ok, I know. There is no rush. I – and my dormant, disinterested ovaries – have plenty of time to work it out.

But if the “time to reproduce” alarm on my biological clock doesn’t go off in the next few years I am going to start adopting cats.

Popcorn; politics

A few weeks ago, when it was still warm, the residents of my building all sat out on the 3rd floor fire escape and socialized. It started out the way these things often do; one person stepped out to smoke, someone else followed with beer, and soon there were five of us: assembled, drinking, and talking about whatever.

It seemed innocuous enough, until we landed – somehow – on the subject of corn. Brad, picking up the conversational thread, said something like, “Oh yeah, at the movies? I’ll eat the SHIT out of some corn.”

Next to me, our neighbor Nick – the male half of a fresh-out-of-college, newly-engaged couple who like to hang out in their kitchen and do magnetic poetry together– gasped.

“Oh my God,” he said.
“What?” said Brad.
“Well, it’s just…corn is horrible,” he said.
“What?” I said, indignant. “No way, corn is delicious!”
“But they put it in everything,” said Nick. “I saw a documentary about it.”
Our other neighbor, Gene, started nodding. “Oh, yeah, yeah, me too. I saw that. There’s corn in everything you eat.”
“You mean corn syrup,” I said.
“No,” said Nick, wide-eyed, “CORN.”
“Yeah, man, corn,” said Gene. “They put it in everything. They grind it up.”
Brad said, “Okay, like what? What do they put it in?”
“Everything!” said Nick with heartbreaking earnestness. “They even put it in ground beef!”
“They do not put corn in ground beef,” said Brad.
“Yes they do.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Oh, wait – you mean that they feed corn to the cows, right?” I said, trying to defuse the situation.
“No,” Gene insisted. “They grind it up and put it in the meat.”
“So you’re saying that, at the slaughterhouse, when they’re making ground beef, they throw corn directly into the grinder,” said Brad.
“Yes!” said Gene.
“And when I buy ground beef in the supermarket, they’ve added corn into the meat before it’s packaged.”
“Yes!”
“That,” said Brad, “Is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“No, it’s true!” said Nick, pounding a fist against the side of our building. “You can read about it on the internet!”

One year out from the 2008 election, everything has become political – to the point where it’s beginning to eclipse common sense. And that’s bad. My poor neighbor wasn’t even completely off-base – most cows are corn-fed these days, and high fructose corn syrup is added to so many foods that it’s impossible to even keep track of them all. But nobody – as is evident from even the briefest of internet research – is standing over a grinder somewhere in Iowa and hurling handfuls of corn into the meat.

Anyway, just consider the above story as a preface to this urgent plea: Dear fellow 20somethings (and particularly my fellow lefties), be advised that ill-researched hysteria and conspiracy theories aren’t helping the cause. For the love of God, if you are going to argue an issue? Know your shit. You're making the rest of us look bad.

Bladder chatter?

The other night, while watching TV, I happened to catch the latest commercial for the overactive bladder medication Detrol. You've probably seen it – this woman tiptoes up to a public bathroom and sort of embarrassedly slips through the door, and then the Universal Skirted Lady Symbol on the door is all like, "Enough is enough! I'm going in!", because it's deeply concerned about Miss Urge-to-Pee, and it wants to have a really honest heart-to-heart chat about overactive bladder and the benefits of Detrol, and so it leaps off the door and runs into the bathroom after her.

I have now seen this commercial three times, and every time, I can’t help but think, What the fuck.

My quibble with it is not the obviously ridiculous reaction of the Pee Woman (who for some reason does not flee in panic from the over-large, two-dimensional icon that has just stalked her into the bathroom), but rather with the conversation that she then has with The Lady Symbol. Because she's all like, "It's not even the 'going' that bothers me – it's worrying that everyone will know!"

That is such a crock of shit.

This is where I have to get all heart-to-heart with you, readers, and confess that I have a sort of overactive bladder thing myself. It started a couple years ago (when I almost peed on the floor by the photocopy machine at work) and has been recurring at odd and problematic times ever since. It sucks. Also, being currently without health insurance, my treatment options are pretty much limited to “Kegel up and run for the bathroom”.

So, there. I said it. I have to pee ALL THE TIME. Partly, I know, it's because I drink enough Diet Coke to fill an oil tanker every week, but the rest of it is just bladderish nuisance. But the thing is, I don’t really worry about whether “everyone will know”. Because in the scheme of problems caused by overactive bladder, whether or not people know about it falls way the fuck below, oh, I don't know, wondering whether today is the day that you'll actually piss your pants in public.

That, my friends, is the lovely reality of a non-cooperative bladder: that you can be sitting at your desk, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, your supposedly-reliable urinary system sphincter will set off an internal alarm. Except instead of a "T minus 10 seconds" thing, you only have 3 seconds, and even then, sometimes you get a little Preview of Coming Attractions in which you will feel the unmistakable sensation of a few, preliminary drops just kinda squeezing themselves out. Fun, right? But, more importantly, it leaves very little time or energy to worry about the potential judgment of coworkers who see you leaping up from your desk and bolting for the bathroom several times a day, because of the much more pressing concern that your pants not become saturated with pee.

So enough B.S., Detrol. If you want to own the market, then you need to change your tune. My suggestion: Instead of the Lady Symbol sitting down Miss Urge-to-Pee for a heart-to-heart chat, have a bunch of ninjas come crashing out of the ceiling above her office, throw the medication at her, and yell “Detrol, bitch! Because you don’t wanna pee on your pantyhose!”

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pee.

Babbo-ween.

Last night, instead of dressing up as slutty archetypes and drunkenly storming the streets of New York, Brad and I eschewed Halloween tradition and had dinner at Babbo.

Note: Lest you think that I’m part of the obnoxious, high-salaried, table-service-at-G-Spa set who make a habit of eating at the city’s most expensive restaurants, let me assure you that my man and I are, in fact, flat broke and only found ourselves at Mr. Batali’s pasta haven because I won a gift certificate to said haven. Also, please send us money.

Babbo is near-impossible to get reservations at, so we’d happily agreed to a seating time of 10:45pm. On Halloween. In the West Village. Which is insane, yes, but when you’re young and impoverished and you suddenly have $250 to blow on dinner, you don’t want to wait around for a civilized dining time – you’re in a giant, excited rush to just get there and EAT. And so, giddy and giggling like a couple of pre-prom high school girls (understandable for me, less so for him), we got decked out in actual adult clothes and hopped the subway, telling each other that eating dinner at 11pm was really just very European.

When we got off the subway in Manhattan, the area between Union and Washington Squares was in complete chaos. We spilled onto the street just behind a tangle of costumed Brooklynites who were all wearing silver lame spandex leggings and robot masks, plowing into the milling crowd. The parade had just finished. On every street corner, people were shouting or howling or attempting to pull off each other’s wings/wigs/masks. Cars honked furiously. Women in lingerie-inspired outfits wobbled and weaved through the street like escapees from the movie set for “City of Lost Hookers”.

“This is awful,” said Brad.
“Everything will be fine once we get to Babbo,” I said reassuringly. “Babbo will keep us safe.” Hey, if you can’t trust Mario Batali’s brainchild to keep the crazy away, who can you trust?

After a solid twenty minutes of dodging and feinting through the Halloween crowds (and richocheting, pinball-like, off the mostly-exposed breasts of approximately 4 million women), we slipped through the front door of Babbo. Looking around, it was clear that the Crazy had not infiltrated the hallowed confines of Babbo. Sure, there was a girl at the bar wearing a pair of devil horns… but that was it. And they weren’t bad, as devil horns go. They were tiny, demure little devil horns. You hardly noticed them, really. As we sipped some wine and waited for our table to be ready, we started to relax.

“This is nice,” said Brad.

90 minutes, three courses, and several glasses of wine later, I had to agree. We were seated cozily along the wall, drinking espresso and watching as other diners finished their meals and tottered out of the restaurant in expensively-cut jackets. I was full, happy, sleepy, and a little drunk.

Across the dining room, another 20something, indie-styled couple looked like they felt the same way. They were both tired, clearly – it was practically 1:00 AM – the Girl was yawning, and the Guy seemed to be fighting a valiant battle against his drooping eyelids. I snuggled into the crook of Brad’s arm, watching them, and thought what a lovely holiday Halloween could be, even if one didn’t dress up. Especially if one didn’t dress up! Here we were, in a wonderful, classy establishment, surrounded by smiling waiters and good food and wonderful, classy, Italian-cuisine-loving people. We were safe, and warm, and the madness outside could go on all night, but it would never touch us. Not here. Not at Babbo.

Across the dining room, Indie Couple Guy yawned and blinked sleepily. He rubbed his eyes. He propped his head up with his hand.

And then he threw up.
On the floor.
Indie Guy threw up. On the floor. AT BABBO.


I would write more about this – about the astonishing, vibrant orange color of the vomit, or about the inconceivable patience of the waitstaff when they saw the vomit, or about how Brad turned to me half an hour later and said, “You know, completely apart from how gross that was, what a waste of food!” – but I can’t. I’m too busy mourning my lost innocence.