pink india ink

Cheezus saves.

2012-01-24T14:30:00.002+01:00

Now that I'm living elsewhere after all that time in New York, I sometimes feel like I'm only just discovering things about adult life, in general, that everyone else has known forever. Things like the fact that people would rather drive five minutes than walk for ten. And that they do weird things in their cars during highway rush hour -- like, orifice-picking, nipple-scratching things -- even though they must be aware on some level that everyone see them. And that heating oil is apparently the most rare and expensive substance on the planet. And that outside of the cramped honeycomb of the city, household appliances are terrifyingly large and make conspiratorial noises in the night.
And then, of course, there's the part where, if you have a yard, one corner must at all times be designated as a shrine to the Gods of Junk Food and must always contain one or more highly processed, preservative-laden, brightly-packaged items in order to appease the angry and volatile deities of all things cheez-with-a-Z.

...Or at least, I assume there's a Cheez Shrine Rule written into our local ordinances? Because this is the state of things: at any given time, in the northwest corner of our little pocket yard, there is a half-eaten bag of Cheetos. Or a partially gnawed Slim Jim. Or -- once -- an un-drunk, unopened bottle of Arizona Raspberry Iced Tea with its safety seal still in place. (The nostalgic urge for a taste memory of middle school was overwhelming, but I mustered all my self-control and left it alone just in case it was a test of faith sent by the Cheez God.)

These items appear sometime during the night, or possibly the early morning, and stay for awhile -- untouched by anyone, I assume they are all also terrified of retribution at the hands of Cheezus -- and then ultimately vanish as mysteriously as they appeared. And since this is apparently just a Thing That Is Done out here in not-New-York, I've been rolling with it (albeit keeping an eye out, because if this isn't a gifts-for-the-oracle kind of situation, then some school-aged kid on our street must have one serious hole in his backpack.)

But today, it has all officially gone too far. Because when I walked out the door this morning, there it was.

DUN.

DUN!

DUUUUUUUUUUN!!!!

Let me be clear: it's not that someone flouted the rules of the junk food shrine by leaving an empty Kit Kat wrapper in the yard.

It's that I am the God of Kit Kats, and SOMEONE HAS EATEN THAT WHICH IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.

Butterface

2012-01-09T22:23:00.000+01:00

You know you're in trouble when you jolt awake, drenched in terror sweat, at 5:30am on the first day of 2012 -- not with exuberant joy at the arrival of the new year, not even with a hangover headache, but with the following thought rolling through your brain, marquee-style, in a high-volume wail:

OH MY GOD WHY DID I EAT SO MUCH BUTTER.

Let me be clear: I don't usually kick myself over butter. I adorn my popcorn with it; I smear my bread with it; I melt it into a golden pool in a cast-iron skillet and fry up my eggs with glee. I am not, in general, a guilty butter-eater. But on New Year's Day, I woke up with an acute, raging case of Butter Eater's Regret -- because on New Year's Eve, capping off a month of perhaps not the most controlled eating of my life, I had exceeded even my own, laissez-faire ethics in butter-related matters when I made a pot of pasta, and just before pouring it into a bowl, carelessly tossed a sizable pat of Land'o'Lakes in to melt beneath it.

A sizable pat which was now in my head, in snapshot form, dawdling in all its obscene enormity under the scrolling WHY WHY WHY WHY marquee like a creamy golden guilt bomb.

All of which is to say, I hope you'll all understand that when, unable to exorcise that image from my mind and swiftly succumbing to overwhelming feelings of failure and fatness, I went on the internet and allowed Gwyneth Paltrow to tell me what to do.

...Look, I was in a dark place, okay?! A DARK PLACE FULL OF BUTTER AND SADNESS.

And so, I:

a) googled juice cleanse recipes
b) clicked my way down a rabbit-hole to one of old Gwynnie's vanity-project GOOP newsletters from god-knows-when
c) lost my entire fucking mind, and then
d) went to Whole Foods, where I purchased protein powder and almond milk and wheatgrass supplements and a head of broccoli that cost seven dollars.

It's the seven-dollar broccoli that let me know I've really and truly lost it.

But even as I hauled vegetables, powders, mysterious substances and peculiar oils into the kitchen and stuffed them into the fridge, I really, honestly, thought that this was a good idea. After all, people do detoxes all the time! And they seem fine! And Gwyneth Paltrow is so thin!

So I went for it.

I mean, I am going for it.

And it's not that I've decided that it's not a good idea. It's not even that I'm not enjoying myself; the recipes are easy (albeit time-consuming), the food tastes good, and my lunch was so pretty that it deserved to have its picture taken. So while I'm still not sure I'll make it, and while I'll probably be back three days from now to confess a butter relapse, and while there are certain elements of this plan which I will under no circumstances put into action (castor oil, Gwyneth? CASTOR OIL?), I'd say that things are moving along quite nicely.

But, uh, speaking of things moving along nicely? I'm just gonna go ahead and answer the questions I know you're asking -- which is to say, yes, that's how it works. Yes, this cleanse is the equivalent of rinsing out your intestinal tract with an industrial-strength fire hose. And no, Gwyneth Paltrow probably hasn't taken a solid dump since sometime in 2006.

(But if this sounds like fun to you and you want to follow along, be my guest.)

And so, let's not-look back.

2011-12-28T02:05:00.003+01:00

Because even when I've been absent for months, failing to perform the obligatory year-end wrap-up would be more abandonment than I feel comfy with.

And it goes without saying: 2011 has been significant. It brought the end of eight lovely years in New York. An answer, finally, to the question of what I want to be when I grow up. A book, with a title and a jacket and a life all its own. A new home, one step closer to the kind that I'd like to have permanently, where I can hang up my coat, and sit in a sunny corner, and look out on a sort-of backyard when my brain wants a pause. The humbling, terrifying realization of just what a tenuous, precious thing it is to be healthy.

All in all: changes, lessons, trying new things. I've even taken up yoga -- as in real, actual exercise, despite all previous evidence that any attempt at formal exertion would be punished with the humiliating exposure of private body parts! And y'know what? It's actually kind of fantastic.

...Although, okay, I'm still not quite there with the whole impenetrable zen thing; I cannot, for instance, keep myself from laughing when the instructor says, "And then, ease yourself back into downard-facing dog", and the meditative silence of the room is suddenly punctuated by a prolonged burst of flatulence.

But anyway. The point: this has also been a year of not-posting, and I'm sorry. I've tried and failed any number of times to write about my new home in Connecticut; the reason it's so hard, I think, is that I know we won't be staying. As settled-in as we are here, with our closets and our grill and our very first Christmas tree, it's only a layover on the way to who-knows-what, and so I'm not paying attention the way that I should. And sometime -- maybe even by this time next year -- we'll be picking up again, packing our lives into boxes for transport to the next thing. Whatever it is. And I don't know that, either; I'm not driving this train.

And y'know what? That's actually kind of fantastic, too.

And so, there will be no year-end summary. Right this minute, I'm too busy wondering about what's coming to look back on what already was, especially when what already was was mostly a lot of waiting. And if I want to dwell on the past, I think I'd rather be doing it on behalf of other people -- the ones who submitted the heartbreaking photos and stories to this NYT slideshow of 2011's lost loved ones. Which, more than anything I could offer, is a fitting note to end on.

Especially if, perhaps, you need some reminding about the things that matter after briefly losing your shit at your own loved ones after they totally incinerated a leg of lamb on Christmas Day.

Not that I have ever done that!
Happy New Year!

Gentlemen, start your engines

2011-10-26T18:11:00.002+02:00

Publishing a book -- as I've found out repeatedly over the past year -- involves a lot of waiting. Waiting to make the deal; waiting for emailed revisions; waiting for a package of neatly-stacked pages that you nearly maul the mailman in your excitement to receive and which you leave scattered around your living room long after line edits are done, just to have real, tangible evidence that yes, this is actually happening.

But when it comes to bringing home the really-realness of it all, you can't beat this...

...Or this.

With apologies for redundancy, of course, since if you follow me anywhere else on the internet you've already seen this. (Or if you passed within a 20-yard radius of my person on the day when I got the go-ahead to debut the jacket, in which case I probably grabbed you by the throat and demanded that you view it. Because mind-blowing excitement.)

And there you have it: a real, actual book available for real, actual pre-order on Amazon, and proof-positive that I have not, in fact, just been fucking with you (or myself) about the whole "novelist' thing.

And now that I've said that, a note: sometime before May 2012, I'm going to begin streamlining my online presence and launch an official site dedicated to my YA work (and most likely including a blog that, among other things, includes somewhat fewer posts about indecent exposure. Because, y'know, teenagers have parents and parents get upset about f-bombs and wieners.) I don't know yet what that'll mean for Pink India Ink -- maybe it'll continue to just exist in its infrequently-updated form, or maybe I'll find a way to fold it in -- but any creative suggestions (or polite reminders about forgotten, embarrassing content that's lurking back in the archives and would humiliate me if discovered by a larger population) are welcome.

Above all, thanks for being here, for reading, and for sticking around despite the long silences.

The 8 Stages of Hiring a Housekeeper

2011-09-15T19:43:00.001+02:00

GUILT
Stare at the Craigslist listings for cleaning services for hours before calling one. Wonder if using a cleaning service is inherently classist. Dial and hang up twice. Wonder what is the matter with you that you can't keep an apartment clean by yourself. Wonder if this constitutes failure as a wife. Wonder if wondering this makes you a bad feminist. Wonder what's worse: being a bad feminist or being a classist asshole. Dial again and speak to the cleaning lady. She is polite and all business. She also has a Spanish accent. Wonder if this makes you a racist as well. Make an appointment anyway.

WORRY
Worry that the cleaning lady will be appalled at the state of your apartment. Worry that she'll demand more money. Worry that she'll run screaming out the door and tell all her friends that, in all her years of cleaning, she had never seen a toilet that disgusting. Worry that your apartment is not filthy enough and that she will accuse you of wasting her time. Resist the urge to clean before she arrives.

DENIAL
At the last minute, throw a pile of dirty laundry in the closet.

EMBARRASSMENT
"I'm sorry, I didn't think you would open that closet."

PARANOIA
Shut yourself into another room with the dog. Worry every time the cleaning ladies speak to each other that they are saying mean things about you. Worry that they are laughing at you. Worry that worrying about this makes you a racist. Worry that they hate the dog. Worry that they think the dog is a racist. Listen to the sound of doors opening and closing. The cleaning ladies know all your secrets. Vow to learn Spanish.

AWE
The cleaning ladies are gone. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. Wander from room to room with your mouth open. Feel guilty that you didn't wash your feet first. Feel guilty that you ever doubted them. Email husband a series of delighted exclamation points. Cry openly at the beauty of the golden light as it gleams off the toilet seat. Vow never to use the toilet again. Admire the small, neat piles into which your personal items have been sorted. Note the presence of at least one highly embarrassing item in each pile. Remind yourself to explain next time that you don't usually leave airplane-travel-sized bottles of vodka under the bed. Wonder if they saw the soy sauce stains on the sheets. Drink bottle of airplane vodka. Cry some more.

CATASTROPHE
Much later, open the fridge to retrieve a beer. Something is strange. The beer is in alphabetical order. The cleaning ladies have organized the refrigerator. THE CLEANING LADIES HAVE ORGANIZED THE REFRIGERATOR. Scream out loud. Wonder if this is going to happen every week. Wonder why nobody warned you. Wonder how long that avocado has been in there. Wait, it was that Memorial Day cookout. Oh God, it's been there since May. It has been there since May and they saw it and they touched it. They touched your avocado of shame, and you must live with that.

ACCEPTANCE
Schedule biweekly appointments. Throw away the avocado. Drink alphabetized beer. Life is so lovely.

This shit is bananas

2011-08-04T00:16:00.005+02:00

It started with a pile of dog turds. (All the best stories do, don't they?)

In the morning, from time to time, I bring Hurley the Golden Retriever into our little side yard for some exercise. And on these mornings, from time to time, Hurley the Golden Retriever will conclude our little workout session by doing some rear-end business on the lawn. And this is, of course, fine -- because, y'know, it's our lawn and our dog and our right, as Americans, to pick up the shit at our convenience.

So, when a pile of shit first seemed to move from the corner of our lawn to the bottom of our porch stairs, I thought that I must be mistaken. Even though I could have sworn that the deuce-dropping took place elsewhere, in a spot over by the yardline, where the grass gives way to the gravel drive that runs behind our house. Even though, at the time, I'd thought to myself that yes, I needed to find a plastic bag, but that in the meantime, the poop wouldn't be in anyone's way.

Yes, I thought, I must just be imagining things. Because, in my naivete, it just didn't seem possible that any irritated neighbor -- no matter how peculiar or passive-aggressive -- would not only not bother to just ask us to direct the dog elsewhere, but go directly to the balls-out strategy of surreptitiously moving a pile of shit onto their neighbor's porch.

That is, until it happened again.

In the morning, Hurley retired to the corner of the lawn for some discreet pooping. And in the afternoon, the pile of turds had inexplicably made its way over to our porch.

Which means that one of our neighbors is, in fact, picking up the dog shit and moving it twenty feet to our doorstep just to fuck with us.

"Wait a second," Brad said. "Are you telling me this has happened before? Why didn't you mention it?"
"I thought I was imagining things!" I said. "I mean, what kind of person actually carries a pile of somebody else's dog's shit from one location to another just to make a point?"

What kind of person, indeed. The answer, of course, is the kind of person who lives somewhere behind us! Although we have no idea who it is. And I know, I know: this could all be avoided by just scooping the poop right away, thus depriving this proximate weirdo of the chance to transport it across the lawn. But on the other hand, I feel that this situation has kind of escalated beyond the point of easy resolution. I mean, really, once someone is secretly depositing shit on your porch, the time for measured response has passed. And instead, I am currently considering one or more of the following actions:

- Leaving the shit on their porch.
- Leaving the shit on their porch in a paper bag and setting it on fire.
- Sculpting the shit into a bust of Hitler, shellacking it, and presenting it to them in a wrapped giftbox with a ribbon on it.
- Putting the shit back in its original location, along with a tiny suitcase and passport.
- Dressing the shit up in striped scarf and beanie and leaving it on the passenger seat of their car with a "Where's Waldo?" greeting card.

Of course, all of these responses would probably just escalate an already-volatile situation. And nobody wants that.

Which is why, instead of playing hot potato with the shitpile, I plan to just let Hurley take another dump at the corner of the yard, lie in wait by the back door until the shit-moving neighbor tries to pull this little stunt again, and then stepping calmly out of the house for a conversation about how we might resolve this little conflict like a pair of motherfucking adults.

Or I might just kick him in the face.

Days of our hives

2011-06-30T17:55:00.004+02:00

Exactly one month ago, I was on a ferry between the Outer Banks of North Carolina and mainland Wilmington when my collarbone started to itch.

Sunburn, I thought.

But by the time our plane landed at La Guardia, the itching had spread -- across my chest, and down my arms, and onto my scalp and neck and ears. Fingers of raised, red irritation had begun to appear on my ankles and wrists. Worse, both Brad and the middle-aged stranger at the end of our row had both started to peer at my face in a disconcerting way.

The stranger was also a nurse.
"Honey," she said. "Are you allergic to anything?"

That was the beginning. I like to imagine what happened next from Brad's point of view: returning home, ordering pizza, and ultimately falling asleep next to a wife who was slightly splotchy, itchy and drowsy but otherwise none the worse for wear...

...and waking up to a lurching, swollen, unrecognizable creature who looked like an escaped extra from "Killer Bees 2: The Bumblebee Wrath".

I was stumbling around in the hallway with both my eyes swollen shut when he came out of the bathroom.

"I think I need to go to the hospital," I said.
Brad's reply, I believe, was, "GAAAAH!"

And so began the Days of Our Hives.

There is not much to be said about the Days of Our Hives. Except, you know, I had hives! I was given drugs! I came to the end of one round of steroids, only to somehow re-trigger a new allergic reaction! I was given more drugs!

The hives were always moving around, making a slow migration from one part to the next. On one day, they covered every inch of my torso with the exception of my right boob. The next, they crept in from the sides of my face until I appeared to be wearing a lucha libre mask made out of Rash. GORGEOUS. I scratched my legs and arms until the blood vessels burst and my skin was on fire, which was still less agonizing than the itching. I also enjoyed long naps in the afternoon, an inability to focus, and spontaneous crying jags during which I tearfully informed Brad that if this was going to be my life from now on, I was counting on him to murder me.

I also went to doctors. The best thing about an allergic reaction is how everyone wants to remind you that you are the one that caused it.

"What did you eat?" they ask. "Shellfish? Peanuts? Did you use a new shampoo? What did you drink? What did you touch?"

And then: "What do you mean, you don't know?"

Here's a fun exercise: Go on vacation to a location that requires a minimum of 8 hours of travel. Come back. Wait two days. Now try to remember everything you consumed or came into contact with in the past 72 hours.

If you can do this, congratulations.
If you can do this with a drug-addled brain and a full-body rash, fuck you. Liar.

...But that's all over now.
And since I'm sick of talking about hives, I'll leave you with this, instead. We're settling in to the new apartment, and our pretty new bedroom wasn't such a bad place to be an invalid.

Although it looks much, much better without a weeping, rash-covered woman sprawled on top of the duvet.

Scenes from an interstate move

2011-05-13T22:28:00.003+02:00

I. Resentment

The movers arrived at 7:57am on Saturday morning -- three men in their twenties, a team leader plus two helper-outers, one built like an underweight teenager and another stocky fellow who looked permanently confused.

Fifteen minutes before, I had turned to Brad -- un-drunk coffee in one hand, a roll of packing tape in the other -- and said, “Before the moving guys show up, I just want to say that I had to do all the fucking packing in advance of this move and I am extremely goddamn pissed about it.”

“I know,” said Brad. “Sorry.”

I had packed eighty-five percent of our lives with careful organization -- neatly wrapped, padded, and organized by room, subdivided into categories like “Media” and “Games” and “Dishes” and “Tools”. The last fifteen percent, though, was a free-for-all. Boxes began to disappear down the stairs; we assembled new ones in their place and hurled our remaining belongings in with random abandon. A pair of pliers on top of a curling iron on top of a faded photo of Brad’s grandparents, wrapped in a sweater that I thought I’d lost eighteen months ago but that had instead somehow wedged itself between our sofa cushions, undiscovered until one of the moving men went to disassemble the furniture.

Hurley ran madly back and forth from one end of the apartment to the other, weaving between everyone’s legs and trying to convince the new arrivals to ignore the boxes in favor of scratching his belly.

“Your dog is bothering us,” a mover said.
“I’ll take him outside,” Brad said.

Fifteen minutes later, the team leader -- a dark-haired, swaggering twenty-something with a pitted face and a Slavic accent -- looked out our back window and began wildly gesticulating and yelling in my direction.

“What?” I said, sure that some combination of sleep deprivation plus language barrier plus lingering resentment over my packing responsibilities was causing me to hallucinate. “What did you say?”

II. Catastrophe

I sprinted twice around the local park before I found Brad, wandering aimlessly back through the northside entrance with Hurley prancing next to him.

“Hello,” I said. “You need to come back now.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, among other things, the building is on fire.”

III. But Here We Are

In Brooklyn, two brief blocks took me to the entrance of Greenpoint's McGolrick Park -- manicured and landscaped and constantly in bloom, with perfectly-placed sycamore trees soaring gracefully skyward on either side of pathways that were never free of people.

Now, two blocks -- or what I think is two blocks, an educated guess without a grid to guide me -- takes me to a meandering trail that winds its way through the woods and around a hillock along the Norwalk River. No, really: a hillock. There are shrubs and a handful of flowering trees, but mostly just a mess of vines tangling uphill on the inland side; on the other, there is dark, slow-moving water dotted here and in the distance with slender sculls. It’s no rural hideaway, and the sounds there are equal parts birdsong plus the uninterrupted whoosh of traffic on the nearby interstate, but I like it. I’ve seen jays and cardinals; newly-hatched robins; slender brown rabbits and big, burly woodchucks that look like fat and furry old men.

IV. Wildlife
The rabbits are not afraid of me, or of the dog. They let us get close, wait until the last moment, then disappear in a flash of brown fur and white tail. If you blink, you'll miss it.

The woodchucks, on the other hand, panic and hurl themselves noisily into the brush the second I step around a corner.

They do this with such frantic, ungainly terror that I can only assume I have caught them masturbating.

Vacancies

2011-04-08T00:36:00.005+02:00

Fun fact: if you are a married lady, and if you have a blog, and if you abandon said blog for prolonged periods of time somewhere in the vicinity of your 29th birthday and/or two-year wedding anniversary, there is just nothing for it:

EVERYONE will think you are pregnant.

Which is to say, after a certain amount of time without posting, each day of silence brings the increasing awareness that you guys (or whatever's left of you) are lingering out there, wondering about the silence, and speculating as to the state of my uterus. (Which is VACANT, by the way, so let's not have any nonsense.)

At which point, in my more logical moments, I decide that perhaps the thing to do is just wait it out -- until the reasonable time for a bun-in-the-oven announcement has passed, and it's starting to get a little weird, and the speculation amongst my remaining readers evolves from wondering whether I might be pregnant to wondering whether I might be dead.

Maybe next time.

In the interim, though, many exciting things have been happening -- not a one of which has to do with baby-making. For instance:

- I created an entire race of modern, mythical beasts.
- I did this, and it kind of went viral.
- I completed my first manuscript revision.
- AHEM. I completed my first manuscript revision!!! Cake for everyone!!!!!
- I was interviewed on MTV! (Dot com.) (By myself.) (It was silly. BUT STILL.)

And while all this was happening, so has this:

We're moving.

It feels weird to say (write) that in public. I also can't say it the other way -- the way where I say, out loud, that we're leaving New York -- without getting throat-punched by a host of extremely strong emotions, including the peculiar sense that ending my eight-year residency in the city somehow constitutes a terrible failure. Seriously, it just hurts. Even though I've gotten everything I could have possibly wanted -- the best and most incredible friends, a husband I adore, a career I wouldn't have dared hope for even in my wildest dreams -- from my time in New York.

Even though when I moved here, I never intended to stay even half as long as I did.

Even though I felt something scamper over my foot as I exited my apartment this morning, and looked down to see a rat that was roughly the size of a collie.

Despite all that, saying goodbye to Brooklyn -- even when our new place is, practically speaking, just as accessible to Manhattan proper as the one we live in now -- feels sort of like giving up.

But on the upside, we will have closets. Multiple closets. Which I have taken to repeating to myself as a sort of calming mantra whenever the impending move (not to mention the vast amount of shit we have accumulated over the course of four years in our little walkup) begins to feel too overwhelming. "Multiple closets. Multiple closets. FOR GOD'S SAKE, BREATHE! Think of the closets!"

When things get really dire, I think specifically of the linen closet -- the existence of which, moreso than the others, truly blows my mind. Can you imagine? A home, a comforting and intimate enclave, just for our sheets to live!

It is almost too much to bear.

Today, I walked around to the stores in our neighborhood in search of boxes, the first tiny step away from this place, and toward a new life on the coast of Connecticut. When the guy at our local bodega -- who has, for the past four years, been gamely and unsuccessfully trying to teach me to speak Spanish -- said that he'd miss us, I briefly considered crying.

Fortunately, I was interrupted.

"You're moving off the block?" asked one of the regulars, a heavyset guy with shaggy hair who I know by sight but not by name. "Where are you going?"

"Norwalk," I said.

"I've got cousins there!" he said. "Nice town, real nice town. I bet the rent is cheaper."

"Definitely," I said. "And our new place is huge. It's got closets!"

He nodded and grinned.
"Yeah, that's important. I understand," he said.

And then he winked at me.
And pointed to my stomach.
And then winked again.

You know what?

I give up.

Snippets of terror

2011-03-04T23:55:00.003+01:00

I just spent 30 minutes convinced that I was dying, after being interrupted mid-way through an article by the sudden appearance of a massive blind spot in my peripheral vision. Reading was impossible; walking, disconcerting; a look in the mirror yielded the panic-inducing impression that half my jaw had completely disappeared. When I reached for the bathroom light switch, it seemed to wink out of existence; I missed it completely and swiped my hand over blank wall an inch to the right.

Looking back, I am amazed that I managed to wait a full half-hour before calling my dad in a total fucking panic.

"Is it a brown spot?" asked, after listening to my minute-long, rapid-fire gibbering conviction that I was about to go blind and die.

"No!" I wailed. "It's kind of... shimmery, I guess! And I CAN'T SEE MY FAAAAACE!"

I am also amazed that my dad -- despite the incredible unhelpfulness of my repeated hysterical shrieking about aneurysms -- managed to diagnose me within two minutes. Seriously, the man deserves an award. Maybe several.

The verdict: ocular migraine.

On the upside, I am not about to go blind and die.
On the downside, I am about to get hit with the mother of all pukey headaches.

On the upside, I am not about to go blind and die. If this sort of full-body relief is what hypochondriacs feel after every self-diagnosed freakout that turns out to be nothing, I definitely get the appeal.

Insanity Diet

2011-02-09T22:36:00.006+01:00

Last week, Brad bought a book and announced that he was going to commence something called a "slow carb" diet -- a month-long get-fit-quickish plan to lose a bit of the marital blissweight he's gained since we tied the knot. This is happening just in time for a March trip to somewhere warm and beachy where shirts will not be worn -- location as yet undetermined, but it (the vacation) is desperately needed. (And it should also help with THE SAD.)

The Book recommends measuring weight loss in inches and taking "before" photos of your previously-pudgy self to serve as a motivator when the going gets tough. And tough it is, since there's also a strict eating plan: six days per week of naught but protein, vegetables, and legumes. (On the seventh day, the dieter is required to binge on carbohydrates in order to prevent ketosis. And also, insanity.)

Brad asked if I could modify our daily dinners to accommodate his diet. No problem; I'm too lazy to make separate meals, anyway.

He also threw away all the carbs in the household. Too much temptation.

At which point I realized that unless I want to hide secret stashes of Cheez-Its all over our apartment, I, too, am on the Insanity Diet. By default.

Which is fine, really. Not that I expect to see results, weightwise (I'm at my sustainable skinniest these days), but a few weeks scale-back on the refined sugar and processed starches can't hurt, and it's good to support one's husband regardless.

Yes?

Yes.

And so the Insanity Diet also became that cliche of all cliches, the Couple Diet. Meal plans were made; waists were measured; Brad made a vow to "get serious about chickpeas".

But you guys. You guys. Just because I'm doing all that, it doesn't mean I was okay with this.

Scene: Our apartment, Saturday night. We're getting ready for an evening out; I am scrutinizing the state of my skinny jeans.

Me: Ugh, this isn't working today. I feel like my thighs look like a pair of giant hams encased in denim.

Brad: Maybe this is a good day to take your "before" pictures!

Me: (Five-minutes of silence wherein I open and close my mouth like a goldfish and then stomp out of the room.)

Maybe this is a good day to take your before pictures?

MAYBE THIS IS A GOOD DAY TO TAKE YOUR BEFORE PICTURES?!!!

Asojdfouvhiohio;vjioGRj'oafklvkjoijaovnlknbjknspo'gJOobknkjblj;fgzn;ojiovd.

....Well, okay. Obviously, these things happen; obviously, men sometimes say really, really stupid shit to their wives. But -- but! -- here's the takeaway:

Consider that my husband not only did not reassure me as to the un-ham-like-ness of my thighs; and not only implicitly confirmed that my thighs did, in fact, look like hams; but also suggested that they looked so much like hams that a photo of them in their current hammy state would be a spectacular motivator for the weight loss plan I do not even need to goddamn be on in the first place.

And then, consider that despite said suggestion, I did not kill him.

Which is to say: clearly, the reason that I don't need the Insanity Diet is that my self-control is off the motherfucking charts.

Ode to the SAD

2011-01-13T13:30:00.008+01:00

Oh, HEY THERE.

Ordinarily, I'd come back after a month-long hiatus with apologies galore for my absence. I don't like to neglect the blog. But this time around, I'm bypassing the apologies and going straight to Get Used To It -- because my non-appearance here will probably be the norm for at least another couple months.

I'd parlay this off on my being busy, which I am, but in the interest of being transparent... yeah.

I'm having a hard time.

This winter has brought on not just the usual slush, but the recurrence of this really awesome condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a special sort of clinical depression that only comes around in the winter. Or you might know it by its acronym, "SAD", which really belongs on a list of Abbreviations That Seemed Like A Great Idea At The Time But Are, In Fact, Really Stupid.

"OOOOOOOH!" the psychiatrists who first discovered this probably shouted. "We'll call it Seasonal Affective Disorder, and then, we can shorten it to SAD! Which is exactly how you feel when you have it! It's genius!" -- And never realizing, in their excitement, that you can't go around saying, "I have SAD" without giving the impression that you are not clinically depressed, but rather mentally deficient.

But anyway. Instead of doing anything remotely blog-worthy -- or even leaving the house -- I've spent the past two months indulging in such fun and interesting activities as Lying In Bed Feeling Hopeless, Not Showering For Days At A Time, and Spontaneously Crying For No Reason.

Sexy, right? Yeeeeeeah.

Also sexy: the preferred treatment for Seasonal Affective Disorder, which doesn't involve any actual medication, but rather a) a bright lightbulb, which you b) sit in front of and stare at for four hours a day.

"I'm sorry, did you say four hours a day?" I said.
"It boosts your mood by mimicking exposure to the sun," said my doctor.
"But it's a lightbulb."
"Yes."
"You want me to sit in front of a lightbulb for four hours a day."
"Yep."

The wikipedia entry for Seasonal Affective Disorder includes a note that says, "One study has shown that up to 69% of patients find lightbox treatment inconvenient."

I can't imagine why.

So, I won't be investing in a specialized lightbulb this winter. Not just because I have no place to put it and no time to stare at it, but because this whole setup would put me way too close on the spectrum of Crazy to those people who watch electronic snow on their televisions because they think that it contains messages from aliens.

Anyway, it's fine. The world seems like a cold, horrible, hopeless place right now, but intellectually, at least, I know that it won't last. Spring will come, the days will get longer, the snow will melt, and the SAD will leave me alone and go torment some poor bastard in the southern hemisphere.

And in the meantime... bourbon.
Lots and lots of bourbon.

Lo, how a lemon e'er swinging.

2010-12-08T21:10:00.006+01:00

This year, unlike others, has found me struggling somewhat to get into the Christmas spirit.

Partly, it's work. When it rains, it pours. Extra assignments for SparkLife, regular rotation on MTV.com, random copywriting jobs that I can't turn down for fear that I won't be offered another one. And looming over all of it, THE BOOK. Oh, fuck, the book. My editorial letter has arrived, a 10-page monster detailing all the many, major things I need to change between now and next spring, when the manuscript is due in near-final condition.

Partly, it's New York -- which, despite my nearly eight-year residency here, just doesn't feel quite right anymore. The city is pretty at Christmastime, but I'll always be country at heart, and I'm ready for a life that's not so paved or populous. I ache for a rural farmhouse, three acres and a long driveway, and the smell of woodsmoke in the air. Fireplaces and flurries, a landscape full of leaf-stripped trees, with branches that puncture the sky like blackly bony fingers. I want to look out a window and see nobody, or listen at night and hear nothing -- no breaking glass, no raised voices, and definitely no middle-of-the-night noise parties courtesy of the group of gentlemen across the street who start drinking at nine o'clock in the morning and seem not to have jobs and yet somehow, strangely, have been able to purchase several very large, very loud motorcycles.

I'd like to stand alone on my porch in the deepening twilight, stringing tiny white lights under the eaves and watching while the world turns violet.

And partly, it's that when I went to unfold our little white Christmas tree from its corner storage space -- hoping to put it on a tabletop and let its twinkling cheer dissolve my December blues -- I discovered that Vivian had peed on it.

I mean, all over it.

So today, looking for a way to stop feeling so vaguely seasonal-affective and start feeling more eggnog-and-gingerbread, I decided to pull out an old-school holiday tradition from my own youth -- one in which, at my mother's direction, we would poke a bunch of holes in various oranges and then stick cloves into them.

My mom says that it's called a "pomander", and that it makes things smell nice. (And they... do. Although I can't help noticing that they also look like a really cute foodie representation of Pinhead from "Hellraiser".)

Of course, since this was a spur-of-the-moment pomander, I didn't actually have an orange. But I had a lemon, and I had the cloves, and by God, I had the initiative. And so, despite having several other things to do, I went ahead and spent my morning duly impaling the fruit and then shoving cloves into its hide, while Pinhead the Lemon oozed and squirted and generally misbehaved all over my hands.

Still, I persevered. And finally, bleeding from under my fingernail (courtesy of an accidental clove stab) and with skin still smelling of citrus, I wrapped Pinhead the Lemon in a length of ribbon and hung him from our kitchen doorway.

The effect was, shall we say, not as I'd hoped.

And now I have to explain to Brad why I have decorated our apartment with -- let's be honest, now -- what appears for all intents and purposes to be a sad, small, hairy little lemon testicle wearing a loincloth made of ribbons.

But on the upside, I have not stopped laughing at it all day.

I'd rather have a head wreck history, than... oh, f**k it.

2010-12-04T02:41:00.004+01:00

Every 28 days, like clockwork, I get what is known as a "menstrual migraine". It's exactly what it sounds like, and it is decidedly not fun. A throbbing, pulsing headache that wraps my skull from front to back -- with a couple vise-like fingers on my neck, for good measure -- that makes me nauseous, weak, and sensitive to light, sound and smell. It lasts, unabated, for at least three days. And it hurts.

It hurts a lot.

If this condition had a slogan, I imagine it would be something like:
MENSTRUAL MIGRAINE! WHEN BLEEDING COPIOUSLY FROM YOUR VAGINA JUST ISN'T ENOUGH!!!

Sometimes, when the throbbing start to affect my vision, I get scared and call Brad at work to alert him that I may or may not be dying, and to say that if he comes home to discover my lifeless corpse lying on the bed, would he please do the favor of putting some pants on my body before he calls the police.

Advil helps, but only to take the edge off; it is nothing like a solution. There is no choice but to endure. And cry, occasionally.

Anyway, as I was lying here -- incapacitated by headache, hemorrhaging from my ladyplaces, tossing back Advil like candy, and sipping from a tumbler of Johnny Black because I might be bedbound and in my underwear, but I'll be damned if I let my stupid period ruin all my fun -- I started to wish that it were physically possible to just remove everything that hurts.

Temporarily, I mean.

A sort of interim hysterheaderectomy, wherein I could take off the offending bits and just put them somewhere else -- like the refrigerator, or maybe in a storage unit out in New Jersey -- and retrieve them later, when they'd decided to behave.

And then I realized that there's a reason why they tell you not to mix Advil with scotch.

Asscattery; or, If I Have To Deal With This, Then You Have To Read About It

2010-11-15T15:03:00.002+01:00

Last Sunday, I stepped out of the shower and nearly collided with Brad. He was standing stock-still in the kitchen doorway, his back to me, staring fixedly at something in the next room. Even from behind, he looked deeply disturbed.

"Um," he said.
"Yes?" I said.
"Well," said Brad, "the cat just sprayed blood out of her butt and onto the living room wall."

Which is to say: can I read my husband's body language, or what?

And also: EWWW OHMYGOD WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE.

The good news, as a quick Google search revealed, is that bloody butt-spray is not the cause for dire concern when it's coming from a cat that it would be if it came out of, say, your grandmother. (Unless your grandmother was a cat, in which case your problems are much worse than mine, and not only that, you can't even read this.) Apparently, Vivian had managed to get herself some sort of a UTI and was trying to signal us, by spraying butt-blood on our wall, that she needed medical assistance.

Well, awesome.

The problem is, this is only a marginal departure from the way that Vivian normally behaves. Yes, that's right: when it comes to the, y'know, process of elimination, our cat prefers to think (hurrr) outside the box. Which is bad enough as it is, what with having to constantly smell my shoes before I put them on just to make sure that they're not full of cat pee, but becomes extra-embarrassing when we take her to yet another vet who just can't believe that we actually live like this.

"So, there's blood in the urine?" said the fresh-faced and perky veterinary assistants, as we sat in the waiting room.
"Yes," I said.
"And has she been displaying any other symptoms? Loss of appetite, crying? Or how about urinating outside the box?"
"Well, yeah," I said, "but she does that all the time."

Fresh-Faced and Perky stared at me.

"All the time?"
"Yes."

More staring.

"Like, ALL the time?"
"Yep."
"Have you tried--"
"Yes."
"But--"
"No, really. Whatever it is, we've tried it."

And it's true, we have. Nothing works. Which means that at this point, we had no choice but to adopt "If you love someone, you must accept them as they are" as a motto applicable to pet ownership as well as human relationships, and to take vague, macabre comfort in the fact that Vivian will eventually stop peeing on everything we own... when she's dead.

And also, to be vigilant about checking ourselves for any evidence of Vivian's bad habit before we go out in public. In some ways, it's even become a bizarre form of marital bonding. Some couples ask each other, "Does my hair look okay?" or "Does this tie go with this shirt?"; we say, "Hey, do I smell like cat pee?"

The appearance of the vet yielded a repeat of the above conversation (the vet, directing his full attention to the cat, clucked disapprovingly and said, "That's not a crowd-pleaser, Viv!"), along with the information that Vivian had not only a pee-related problem, but also fleas and dental disease -- the latter of which isn't all that surprising, because devoted as I am to my pets, I draw the line at brushing the teeth of anyone who's just going to turn around afterward and devote a good fifteen minutes to licking her anus. Like, I'll take the cat's dental hygiene seriously when she does, okay.

Brad, on the other hand, was mortified. As we walked out with our thoroughly-demoralized pet and a plan to scrub our living room wall -- and, if possible, our memories -- with bleach, he worried that Vivan's UTI, unbrushed teeth and flea-bitten hide all added up to the impression that we were terrible, negligent pet owners.

To which I responded by pointing out that the last people to own Vivian were going to kill her, so no matter how you look at it, we're doing a hell of a lot better than they did.

Although, as I smell my shoes every morning and walk through the living room with my eyes closed, it's not like I can't kind of understand why they wanted to.

pretty things for nerds

2010-10-30T18:57:00.006+02:00

For the past two weeks, I've been working on a series of deco-style silhouettes depicting classic literary characters. And today, I proofed the first four. Eligible bachelors from good books make such fashionable subjects.

If you want one, or if you know someone who might, or if you think they're hideous but want to give me your money anyway, they're available for purchase.

Excerpts from my correspondence, presented without commentary

2010-10-20T21:33:00.003+02:00

1. An email from my mom, to me.

Ow!!! I just got stung twice by bumblebees while working in the garden behind the little house! They actually pursued me as I ran screaming away up the lawn! I thought I could trust those big cute bumbly guys not to sting. I've been betrayed!! This is what comes of thinking that fat=harmless. I'll never feel the same about bumblebees ever again, the big bullies. They'll be sorry.

love, mom

2. An email from me, to Brad.

You fucking ate the last Hostess cupcake and left the fucking empty box in the cupboard so it looked like there were still cupcakes in there when there weren't any fucking cupcakes! what the fuck. I have spent the past three days thinking about eating a cupcake and deciding not to because I wanted to save it for a time when I actually really, really wanted it, and then I really, REALLY wanted it, and I go to eat it, and it turns out that there are no cupcakes. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW WRONG THIS IS I AM DIVORCING YOU IF YOU EVER DO THIS AGAIN.

3. An email exchange with my editor.

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 4:58 PM, [redacted] wrote:
for some reason, it's so hard to stop sexting assholes like this guy.

On 10/13/10 5:08 PM, "Kat" wrote:
she should send him a picture of a huge, erect penis.

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 5:09 PM, [redacted] wrote:
or her dog wearing a wet t-shirt.

On 10/13/10 5:10 PM, "Kat" wrote:
forget the dog. GO BIG OR GO HOME.

4. A gchat with my brother.

Noah: i was thinking about halloween costumes and how people would totally wear the ones that were related to current events, like a bed bug
and then i was thinking about which costumes a college kid would wear and how my school had a scabies outbreak at one point
me: seriously? YUCK
Noah: yeah, it was gross. but the important point is that after that happened, a scabies costume would have been absolutely hilarious
that's totally something i would wear if my university was in the midst of a scabies outbreak
me: me too!
Noah: yeah
me: i was just thinking how easy it would be to dress up as a penis for halloween
you'd just need to spray-paint a bike helmet pink
and wear a flesh-colored bathrobe
Noah: yeah
maybe paint some blue veins on it
me: um
Noah: or even give yourself a piercing!
that would be hilarious
go as a prince albert

[7 minutes pass]

Noah: i wish i could have a pet moose.

Insomniuhhhhhhh

2010-10-07T19:00:00.006+02:00

Up until recently, I'd always thought that insomnia was a sexy sort of affliction.

I blame this on the fact that I know too many sexy insomniacs -- like Hannah Miet, for instance, who is always popping up on Twitter around four o'clock in the morning, sharing some incredibly witty and well-read observation or posting a link to a profoundly intellectual think-piece on a site I've never even heard of, leading me to believe that not being able to sleep goes hand in hand with being incredibly, unstoppably smart. (And also, with having great tits.) Insomniacs seemed like a vast population of brilliant, unquiet minds, so busy thinking and creating and rapid-firing their neurons that they just couldn't turn off that churning intelligence long enough to fall asleep.

As it turns out, the only insomniacs like that are like that anyway; they're fascinating people who can't sleep, not people made fascinating by sleeplessness.

I know this, because I can't sleep. And it hasn't made me smarter or more interesting at all. As far as I can tell, the only effects are dull, unshiny hair and a zombie-like feeling that not even the biggest caffeine jolt can cure. If I hold very still, I can actually feel the skin on my face sagging toward the floor.

Although I've dabbled in not-sleeping in just about every possible way -- barring spending the entire night wide awake, which thankfully hasn't happened yet (and hopefully never will) -- my specialty seems to be the middle-of-the-night interlude. It is the worst kind of insomnia. I hate it much more than the can't-fall-asleep sort, which at least lets me continue whatever I stopped doing in order to go to bed, and I also hate it much more than the awake-too-early sort, which at least offers the option of starting my day. When I wake up at four, I can almost pretend it was a lucky break. Such an early start! I'm going to be so productive!

When it's 4:00 a.m. and I've been awake since 1:30, it doesn't feel like an opportunity.

My particular sort of insomnia is anxiety-related, supposedly, but it hasn't been kind enough to let me know what I'm anxious about. The stuff that wakes me up is a mess of unproductive nothing. My brain goes off like a firecracker around two o'clock in the morning, and no matter how tightly I keep my eyes shut, my thoughts are up and running and rattling around too loudly to be ignored. And unlike the other insomniacs I know -- those fascinating, sleepless people -- the wee-hour workings of my mind are pretty much the opposite of brilliant:

THOUGHTS FROM MY BRAIN: A HALF-HOUR SAMPLING

2:37am: What was that movie where Jude Law played a robot jigolo?
2:38am: Oh right, A.I.
2:40am: That wasn't a very good movie.
2:45am: I wonder what Haley Joel Osment is doing right now.
2:47am: I wonder if robot jigolos will exist in my lifetime.
2:48am: I wonder what their penises would look like.
2:49am: I wonder what Jude Law's robot penis would look like!
2:52am: Would it be erect all the time?
2:54am: It would be more realistic if it started off flaccid, then got erect.
2:55am: But technologically, that would be difficult.
2:56am: Is there such a thing as a penis bone?
3:00am: If Brad and I were going to have a threesome with a robot, I would want it to look like Jude Law.
3:02am: Brad would probably think that was gay.
3:03am: So maybe it should look like it isn't necessarily male or female, just sort of androgynous.
3:05am: Maybe it could look like a spider!
3:05:12am: What?
3:05:25am: What the fuck is wrong with you? A robot sex spider? Are you fucking kidding me? Who would ever want to have sex with something that looked like a spider?
3:06 - 3:15am: [chorus of "Apologize" by One Republic on loop repeat]
3:16am: FOR FUCK'S SAKE, NO, I DO NOT THINK THAT SPIDERS NEED THEIR OWN SEX ROBOTS.

So, dear readers, here's hoping that I manage to get some sleep soon.
For all our sakes.

"Cara poked you with an olive branch on Facebook."

2010-09-22T03:40:00.008+02:00

A couple weeks ago, I woke up to an unexpected Facebook message. It was from a girl named Cara -- a former BFF, one I'd spent a lot of time with back in the early 1990s, but who I hadn't seen or spoken to since save for one awkward run-in at my hometown bar last Christmas.

Hearing from her was a surprise.
The message was an even bigger one.

"I never got to say this because of how things ended between us," it said, "and I'm not sure this is even why, but: I'm sorry if I hurt you by talking to Alina about you making out with Tom Fanning in my room. At that age, I wasn't thinking about how hurtful that can be to have your friends talking behind your back, especially about chastity-related topics."

Of course, this type of message -- in and of itself -- isn't exactly uncommon. Thanks to Facebook, the internet is now flooded with stories from bullied teenagers who grew up to receive just this sort of "I'm sorry" from the mean girl who ruined their lives. (Not, I should add, that Cara ruined my life. But the aforementioned incident did really, reeeeeally hurt my feelings, for reasons I will explain in just a second.)

And I know what you're thinking -- that this was a very adult and perfectly legitimate thing to say to the teenage whore who destroyed your friendship by not only making out with a boy, but defiling your childhood bedroom in the process.

And if that teenage whore had any fucking decency, she'd respond with an apology of her own for the horrible, scandalous crime that she perpetrated.

The problem is, I wasn't sorry.
And also, I wasn't a whore.

Because here's the thing: as described, this whole event sounds like a horrific betrayal of the bonds of girly friendship. You're probably thinking that sure, it was wrong of her to talk about me behind my back, but it was waaaay wronger of me to get busy with a dude in her bedroom. I bet that you've even conjured a mental image of me as a young teenager, surreptitiously sneaking upstairs to not only engage in a nasty, disgusting makeout, but to do it on my friend's bed.

Shameful!

Which, of course, is why this message pissed me off. Because what actually happened was this: I was 13, he was 15, we were both attendees at a Halloween party, and my parents were on their way to pick me up. And when I went upstairs to get my coat from Cara's bedroom, he snuck up after me, pushed me gently against the door-frame, and kissed me.

For about three seconds.
I mean, for the love of God, it wasn't even with TONGUE.

And as exciting as it was at the time -- it was the first time that a boy had ever spontaneously kissed me -- it definitely didn't make up for the withering glare that I got from Cara as I exited her house. Or for the ensuing freeze-out by my girlfriends, who took this incident, along with my general willingness to kiss boys, as evidence that I was a wanton slut who couldn't be trusted.

Although that probably would have happened anyway, since I'd pretty much been boy-crazy from birth while my friends were the least-hormonal group of adolescents ever to walk the earth, and our conversations were starting to go like this:

Them: You're, like, obsessed with boys. It's weird.
Me: Whatever, it's not like I get why you guys are so into horses, either.

(Note: I now realize that "being into horses" is a sort of teenage girl's gateway drug to "being into dudes". Which within the confines of this metaphor would make me that person who walks into a party, waves away the bong, and just dives headlong into a pile of cocaine.)

Of course, that was fifteen years ago. And as much as it sucked at the time, it's not like I've thought about it at all since, say, 1996. But now, faced with this message, I couldn't help thinking of my 13 year-old self -- lurking back there in the past, feeling hurt and confused, and eventually learning that her friends had spent a whole slumber party weekend talking about what a whore she was.

And so, on her behalf, I did not apologize.
Instead, I thanked her for writing, and then I added this:

"I don't think it's any mystery why we all grew apart -- from what I remember, I was in the thick of the teenage boy-crazies and you guys weren't similarly afflicted. I'm sure I was unbelievably irritating to you, and for my part... well, you know, obviously it was hard not to notice that you all thought I was an attention-seeking slut."

(And then, in an attempt to not seem bitter, I added a "not that this really matters, seeing as we're all almost 30", and told her that she should feel free to look me up if she was ever in New York.)

Of course, she hasn't written back, and since it's been a few weeks, I'm guessing she's not going to. And maybe that's my fault. Maybe I should have just sucked it up, given her the return apology she was probably looking for, and been more of a grownup about it.

But I'm not gonna lie: standing up for myself, even if it was a version of myself that hasn't existed for more than a decade, felt pretty goddamn good.

And it's not like we would have been friends again, anyway.

I'm pretty sure she's still really into horses.

Rash decisions.

2010-09-13T23:12:00.003+02:00

The rash has faded.
The residual trauma has not.

When another couple days passed without any improvement, I threw on my largest pair of sunglasses and went to the dermatologist. Not because the sunglasses did anything to cover the raging rash, which was plastered all over my chin and neck like a beard made out of Awful, but because they covered enough of the top part of my face that I was pretty sure I wouldn't be recognized if I happened to pass someone I knew on the street.

Or, worse, recognized later in life as "that girl who was walking around covered in pustules."

As previously noted, there just aren't that many places you can go when you're sporting a faceful of Throbbing Red Pustules of Death. At a distance of a few yards, people just look at you with a mixture of pity and horrified fixation while they try to figure out what the hell is wrong with you; at a distance of ten feet or less, people glare at you for having the nerve to leave the house while covered in spots. On the subway, I kept having to fight the urge to shout at my fellow passengers, "I'm SORRY! If it were not absolutely necessary, I swear that I would not be out in public!"

I have also never been more grateful that I don't have a job that requires me to leave the house.

Needless to say, after my prior experience, I was headed to the dermatologist in search of some serious doctoring. The only thing worse than waking up covered in mysterious pustules is seeing a doctor who not only has no idea what they are, and not only has never heard of the thing you think they are, but doesn't even attempt to figure it out. I mean, fuck. Isn't there something in the Hippocratic Oath about this? First, do no harm; second, do not shrug dumbly at patients who present with facial pustules? Between the rash itself and my doctor's total cluelessness about it, after a few days, I was basically convinced that I was going to look like this forever -- or if not, at least emerge from the experience horribly scarred -- and was on an hourly schedule of a) crying, or b) freaking out and calling my mom, after which I would, c) cry some more.

And so I ended up in the very swank office of a very swank dermatologist -- who will be hereafter known as Dr. Dermy Hotness, because daaaaaaaamn -- which is one of the places you can safely go while covered in the Throbbing Red Pustules of Death, and where I waited anxiously for someone to identify the rash for what it was, and also possibly to offer me some ice cream and a hug and tell me that everything was going to be okay.

Instead, Dr. Dermy Hotness swooped in, introduced himself, and said, "Hot tub folliculitis? Hmm... no, no. I think what you've got is insect bites. Spiders, maybe."

Because apparently, the third part of the Hippocratic Oath involves a total willingness to believe that the average human being loves to walk around obliviously wearing a beard made out of spiders.

"Are you sure about that?" I said.
"Well, the thing is," said the doctor, "we usually see hot tub folliculitis on other parts of the body."
"I have it on other parts," I said, hopefully pointing to some spots on my shoulders, hips, and thighs. Dr. Dermy Hotness gave me a pleasant but tight-lipped smile. He wasn't buying it.

It was time to pull out the big guns.

I leaned forward and hissed, "I have it on my ass."

Dr. Dermy Hotness perked up.
"You do?"
"Yes."
"Well, I should probably take a look at that," he said.
"I was really hoping to avoid this," I said.

Of course, I know what you're thinking. So what if the hot dermatologist had to look at your ass pustules? And so what if he took scrapings of them with a scalpel? And so what if he had to scrape, like, TEN OF THEM because none of them were oozy enough to get a sample? It's not like anyone else would ever know about it!

And to you I say, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Because once this particular wrinkle had been uncovered (not that my ass is wrinkled, oh GOD, could this get any worse?!), there was no re-covering it. The horrible fact of my butt rash hung in the air for the rest of the appointment, as the word "buttocks" was bandied about far more than could have possibly been necessary.

"So, about those spots on your BUTTOCKS," said Dr. Dermy Hotness. "We've got the scrapings from your BUTTOCKS, and we'll send them out for analysis -- Lisa, you've got those BUTTOCKS samples, right? From the BUTTOCKS? -- Right, and in the meantime, you'll want to take this BUTTOCKS cream for the BUTTOCKS, which you can also use on your face, but you can definitely use it on your BUTTOCKS. And if your BUTTOCKS don't improve, please BUTTOCKS us and we'll BUTTOCKS your BUTTOCKS with BUTTOCKS. Have a nice BUTTOCKS!"

And then he handed me a prescription for some steroid cream, which read -- you guessed it -- "Apply twice a day to BUTTOCKS and face."

Of course, that's all in the past now. The pustules are gone, the redness has faded, and as unpleasant as the whole experience was, at least I don't have any scars.

Which is probably more than I can say for any fellow pharmacy shoppers who happened to be nearby when I presented my evidently pustule-covered self at the pickup window, and the pharmacist -- who had never previously given any indication of being a sadistic bastard -- handed me a tube of cream and shouted, "This one is for your BUTTOCKS! And also, your FACE!"

Sorry, guys. If it had not been absolutely necessary, I swear I would not have been out in public.

In which I put the "hot" in "hot tub".

2010-08-31T23:13:00.004+02:00

This weekend, Brad and I were lucky enough to spend some time out in the Hamptons with a few dear friends, a hot tub, and fridge full of grillable meats. We sat on the beach, we lazed by the pool, we ate at least ten different kinds of animal, and it was lovely.

Not so lovely, however, was waking up yesterday to discover that I had returned from the Hamptons not just with a terrific tan, but also with a new friend.

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Hot Tub Rash.

Note: The above is a WebMD photo, not a picture of my actual skin, because even I have some limits, goddamnit.

Apparently, hot tubs are more than just a bubbly recreational plaything that serve as the preferred hookup location for Jersey Shore residents and Bachelor contestants alike; they are readymade incubators for a very special bacteria, a bacteria that wants nothing more than to attach itself to your epidermis and chew on it until it looks like it belongs to a 17 year-old boy with a raging case of cystic acne.

Which is to say, guess what I look like right now.

Of course, it took me awhile to get to this point. At first, I had no fucking clue what was going on, which led me to spend the morning doing google image searches for "red spots all over body", which is not an activity I would recommend to anyone who wants to maintain a firm grip on his appetite, and which also led me to freak out when I decided that the thing my spots most resembled was not hives, and not bug bites, but boils.

Boils!

Dear readers, if you ever want to feel really bad about yourself, I cannot recommend enough deciding that you might have boils -- which not only means learning that the preferred treatment method is a technique called "lancing and draining", otherwise known as "stabbing the boil with a pointy stick", but also reading a series of painfully gentle suggestions that you avoid future boils by "attempting to practice good hygiene."

Because basically, if you've got boils, it's because you're a filthy motherfucker who doesn't bathe. No wonder they want to stab you.

Fortunately, a few more tumbles down the google-search rabbit hole led me to the truth: I don't have boils. I do, however, have Hot Tub Rash, which is not exactly better. Especially since, even though it's apparently insanely freaking common, there's no treatment for it.

"Don't worry!" the websites say, as you desperately scroll to the subheader marked Treatment. "In most cases, hot tub rash will clear on its own within 7-10 days."

Yes, that's right kids, only seven to ten days! That's great, right? I mean, you weren't doing anything this weekend anyway, were you?

Of course, that didn't stop me from going to the doctor -- which is really the only place you can go when your entire face is covered in something that looks like nuclear chickenpox. And of course, the doctor had never heard of hot tub rash and was convinced that there was some other explanation.

Doctor: You haven't had any changes to your diet?
Me: No.
Doctor: Allergies?
Me: No.
Doctor: Spider bites?
Me: I'm not the most observant person in the world, but I think even I would have noticed if at some point this weekend my entire body was covered in spiders.
Doctor: It could have been one big spider.
Me: Fuck spiders! HOW MUCH LONGER AM I GOING TO LOOK LIKE THIS?!
Doctor: I'll give you some Cipro.

And she did.

But still, chances are that I'll be confined to my apartment for the next week and a half while my skin does its best impression of a pizza. Which is great, really, because not only have I always wanted to spend my wedding anniversary covered in nuclear pustules, but because it'll give me ample time to participate in my new favorite activity of lying on the floor, in the fetal position, in a puddle made up of equal parts cortisone cream and my own tears.

Also, if anyone knows of any good movies currently available on Netflix instant, now would be an excellent time to share.

Chop chop

2010-08-22T14:53:00.006+02:00

Normally I'd preface this post with some kind of story. A nice big chunk of text, fun and full of words, so that you would feel that I'd given this blog the full weight of my writerly efforts, and I would be able to tell myself that I haven't turned into the world's most boring human being. (Which I totally have.)

Normally, there would be background info. Like, maybe I would remind you guys about the horrible things that happened the last time I went to a salon.

Or maybe I'd tell you about the time I was watching "Rosemary's Baby" and, despite the fact that there were a bunch of people having naked, nasty devilsex right in front of me, all I could think about was how adorable Mia Farrow's hair looked.

Or maybe I'd show you a Kat-through-the-years pictorial to illustrate that -- apart from a brief and regrettable blonde phase during college -- I am such a style-related sissypants that I've pretty much had the same haircut since 1989, and it was high time to stop dicking around.

But in this case, there's kind of no point. Because no matter what I say, this is one of those times when no amount of elegant verbiage can make the point better than this....

...followed by this.

Yep, that's right: IT'S ALL GONE. And this week, Locks of Love will be receiving an envelope containing sixteen inches of my hair. (Sixteen inches of love, y'all -- because size does matter.)

Which I am telling you not because I want you to think I'm a wonderful person, but because I'm hoping it'll distract you from my ham-fisted attempt to skew opinion in favor of the new haircut by posting a "before" shot that makes me look like the bastard child of Jack Nicholson's Joker and the demonic television-dwelling ghost from The Ring.

It didn't work, did it.

Tour de Brooklyn, Tour de France.

2010-08-09T18:42:00.010+02:00

On Friday afternoon, after a day spent pecking at my keyboard in a lethargic, pajama-clad funk, I finally mustered the energy to pull on a skirt and ride my bike to the grocery store in order to get dinner ingredients. The store was blessedly cool, I was supremely hungry, and before long I'd loaded up an awful lot of stuff: pound of crabmeat, various vegetables, several pints of blackberries, a big new bottle of olive oil, and an assortment of items in cans.

In short, a bit too much stuff for a basket-less bike to accomodate. Wobbling away with the unwieldy bounty -- it weighed at least twenty pounds -- slung lumpily onto my back, I felt top-heavy and disturbingly off-balance. (I have no idea if Quasimodo ever wanted a bike during his tenure at Notre Dame -- between all the lust and death and ringing of bells, Victor Hugo never mentioned whether his misshapen protagonist had a secret, secondary yearning for a Peugeot -- but if he gave it a try and then decided against it, I think I understand why.)

And then, right when the straps of the bag were starting to bruise and the bike was wheezing along and I had decided that it might be better to just get off and walk it, my shoelace suddenly came untied, caught in the pedal, and yanked my whole center over hard to one side.

WELL.
I want you to know right now that I did not tip over.
Again, I did not. Tip. Over.

Instead, I executed the most brilliant grocery-laden cycling save in the history of Brooklyn, and possibly the world:

Needless to say, I was pretty effing pleased with myself. And even moreso when, after successfully tucking my shoelaces in without so much as hitting the brakes, I heard the sound of applause coming from the sidewalk, looked up, and discovered that a group of production guys from one of the nearby film stages had been watching the whole exercise, and were now giving me a standing ovation.

Hell yes, I thought, grinning from ear to ear. How great is that? How GREAT? Is THAT?! How often does a person manage to unsnag their shoelaces from a bicycle apparatus, while in motion, while carrying twenty-five pounds of groceries in a sack, and actually have an entire horde of dudely dudes witness the awesomeness? How! Great! Is! That!

WELL.
Understandably, I thought it was VERY GREAT INDEED.

I thought it was so great, in fact, that I made it almost all the way home before the thrill wore off enough for me to realize that the round of applause probably had very little to do with sincere appreciation for my impeccable awesomeness.

And a lot to do with the fact that, with one ankle propped up on the crossbar, there is very little question that they all had a multi-second-long, totally unobstructed, super premium view of my crotch.

A series of semi-significant events, Part II

2010-07-27T21:07:00.008+02:00

July 7th: Brooklyn.
With just a scant week-and-a-bit remaining before Brad returned to the working world, the two of us commenced a sort of half-assed stay-cation in Brooklyn. In the morning, I would hurriedly bang out the day's advice column; in the afternoon, we wandered out of our apartment in search of adventure.

Sometimes, we found it.

Above: A ride at Coney Island.

Not pictured: My husband and I, a.k.a. two purported adults, clinging to each other in terror after foolishly opting to get into a "swingy" car on the landmark Wonder Wheel.

Also not pictured: The look on the face of the ride operator who turned to us and said, "Do you guys want to swing?", after which I guffawed so loudly that it scared a pigeon into flight. Suffice to say that I did not know it was possible for a person to roll his eyes so completely without actually removing them from his head and tossing them down the street.

But more often, it was just too goddamned hot for adventure, and so we would turn around to run back inside before our butts could turn into fleshy sweat swamps, and then we would watch old episodes of LOST and eat potato chips until one or both of us fell asleep.

Until, finally, it was time to get on a plane.

July 14th: Raleigh.
Because we had already visited my parents during Brad's hiatus from work, it was only fair that we also visit his for an equal period of time. Unfortunately, said visit involved a) getting on a plane, at b) La Guardia, which is c) an airport which seems to have achieved a special designation on the space-time continuum as "That Place Where Nothing Will Ever Go Right, and Also, Where You Will Inevitably End Up Drunk Before Noon." Our flight was delayed by several hours, during which I got tipsy at the airport bar and (unsuccessfully) attempted to photograph a bottle of rum which I swear was called "IOCANE".

Above: A close approximation of the face I made when Brad tried to tell me that what I thought was the letters "IO" was actually the number "10". Also, I am not sure I believe him -- even typed out here, they look almost totally the same. Inconceivable!

Fortunately, the delayed flight meant that we were able to meet my in-laws upon landing and proceed immediately to a sprawling restaurant full of steaks, where all the light fixtures were made out of animal parts and dinner was eaten under the watchful eyes of several stuffed heads.

Above: "I use antlers in all of my deeeeeee-co-rating!"

July 15th: Winston-Salem
My in-laws live on a farm in a rural area that borders the city of Winston-Salem, and this is where we spent the following day.

The most noteworthy part of this visit was probably the moment when, while playing scrabble and drinking wine with Brad's parents, a determined horsefly catapulted his giant, buzzing body over the bustline of my strapless sundress and lodged himself in my cleavage, where he proceeded to bite the crap out of my boobs. Yes, this is noteworthy. You cannot possibly imagine the minute angles, complex flight arc, and pure jolt of random bad luck which had to all coexist within the same split-second in order to make it possible for a horsefly -- which is an indescribably stupid creature even by insect standards -- to find its way into the scant indentation of my motherfucking A cups. I've played it over in my head since then and I'm pretty sure that the little bastard actually broke at least TEN UNBREAKABLE LAWS OF PHYSICS.

Also noteworthy: Despite the immense pain of being repeatedly bitten on the tit by a physics-defying horsefly, I somehow managed to stand up, walk three steps, and face AWAY from my father-in-law before yanking my dress down around my waist while screaming extremely loudly.

Not pictured: Any of that, and for good goddamn reason.

July 16th: Kiawah.
The morning of July 16th, we rented a car and drove the 300 miles from Winston to Kiawah Island in South Carolina, where a group of Brad's friends had gathered to celebrate the wedding of a friend who'd gotten married overseas this spring. We stopped only once to pee... and of course, to purchase a six-pack of SMIRNOFF ICE.

Scene: A grocery checkout counter just outside of Charleston.
Teenage Checkout Girl: (brandishing Ice) Can I see some I.D. for this?
Me: (handing over license) Sure.
Other Guy In Line: Hahaha! That's funny, because you two look like you're exactly the same age!
Justifiably Enraged Teenage Checkout Girl: Um, she's more than ten years older than me. And I'm not even old enough to drink.
Impossibly Dense Guy: HA HA HA! That's even FUNNIER!
Me: If it makes you feel any better, a horsefly nearly chewed off my right boob yesterday.

Above: Beautiful Kiawah, as seen from the seat of the dorkiest bike in the world.
Not pictured: The dorkiest bike in the world.

Above: Icing in silhouette.

Above: Brad and I, looking (if I do say so myself) like a pair of daaaaamn fine party-going specimens.

Not pictured: Anything else, because that is the end. Also, because I am tired and need to go put on deodorant.

And that just about catches us up, y'all. Thank you, and goodnight. And I promise, my next post will not be a whole month coming.

At least, I really, really hope not.

A series of semi-significant events, Part I

2010-07-19T14:40:00.013+02:00

Oh, hi there.

So let me just say right now, before anybody starts making speculative suggestions about the reasons behind my long absence from blogging and/or the title of this post, that I am not pregnant. Not. Pregnant.

Okay? Okay.

Also, I apologize in advance for what is bound to be a disjointed and boring bit of updatery. Please bear with me, as it is very hot and I have had a headache for five days. That said, this has been quite the month, and so I've broken it down -- as I like to do with my more long-winded posts -- into a two-part series.

(Or maybe three, depending on whether or not I still have a headache tomorrow.)

(I hate my head.)

Ready? Here we go!

June 20th: In which Brad gets a new job.
Brad, as you may have guessed due to the oh-so-subtle hint dropped in the previous line, has gotten a new job. More specifically, he has been hired into the ranks of suit-wearing finance folk and left just this morning for his first day of work.

However, because this blog is not about him, I'll just say that a) this news was so exciting and wonderful that it very nearly caused me to give spontaneous birth to a litter of kittens, and b) it threw our whole household into complete chaos. Prior plans for a lazy summer went up in flames, replaced by an impromptu two-week crammer of a vacation during the gap between Brad's last day at Old Job and his first day at New Job. It began on the morning of July 4th and lasted up until last night, when we stumbled into our obscenely hot apartment and noted, with alarm, the unmistakable aroma of a forgotten trash bag on the kitchen floor.

Whoops.

July 2nd: In which we travel north.
Prior plans for a cute fourth up north became an extended five-day stay at my family's house upstate. My brother came, too.

On the first day, we iced him.

Scene: Brad, Brother Noah, and I return from the local driving range and pull into the driveway. We are covered with mosquito bites and Brad is bleeding from an unfortunate encounter with a fickle lawn chair (which was the subject of immediate retaliation and which is probably still lying in pieces out near route 9W.) Noah opens the trunk of the car to retrieve his golf clubs and discovers... a Smirnoff ice.
Brad: You've been ICED!
Me: Whooooooo! Bros icing bros!
Noah: (looking confusedly from us to the Ice and back) What?
Brad: C'mon, dude. You got iced, fair and square. Quit stalling.
Noah: I have no idea what you're talking about.
Me: (getting impatient) Yes you do! You've been ICED! Now take a knee and drink that!
Noah: (even more confused) What? Why? I have to... wait, what???

(pause)

Brad: You have no idea what "icing" is, do you.
Noah: No.
Me: How can that be possible? You're like the ultimate BRO! If anyone knows about icing, it should be you!
Noah: Uh... you guys do know that I've been out of college for more than a year, right?

(pause)

Brad: Well, shit.

(pause)

Noah: Oh for the love of... alright, give it to me.

And there was much rejoicing.

There were also dogs...

...and sailing...

...and the world's best treehouse...

...and a miraculous feast...

July 4th: And then, there was MORE icing.

Scene: Brad and Noah return from a supermarket run. They are giggling like fiends. Brad produces this from behind his back.

Brad: You've been ICED!
My dad: Kat, you don't have to do this.
Me: YES I DO.

Which is to say, I tried...

...but was forced to abandon the whole thing when it became clear that my choices were to a) continue drinking, and vomit, or b) stop drinking, and allow my shame to be tempered with relief at not having vomited.

And then, there was this:

July 5th: A mystery with a quick, albeit disturbing, resolution.

Me: Where'd that Smirnoff Ice go?
My mom: Oh, your father drank it.
Me: What? Did someone... you know, ice him?
My mom: No. He just... drank it.

* * * * *

And so concludes Part I. Come back later this week for a ferris wheel, a plane trip, porch-sitting for a spell, and, yes, still more icing.

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

2010-06-17T04:50:00.004+02:00

In order for you to fully understand the ramifications of this story, I need to tell you about Barry.

Barry is our down-the-street neighbor. But more than that, he's a local fixture -- as integral to the character of the neighborhood as the bodega-cum-underground-gambling-den on the corner, the smell of baking bread that wafts down the street in the early morning, the constant undercurrent whoosh of traffic from the nearby BQE, or the group of Polish-speaking alcoholics in our local park (who, in addition to character, also provide the neighborhood with an endless supply of empty Smirnoff bottles and the rare but inimitable pleasure of seeing a middle-aged man lying in the bushes with no pants on.)

Barry has lived in Greenpoint for approximately 300 years. He has spindly legs, a pendulous gut, and a sparse, unruly beard that he shaves once per year. (For two to three weeks after this annual event, we inevitably walk past him on the street without recognizing him at least once.) His profession is a mystery; together, Brad and I have worked out that he's some sort of super for a building on our block, but he spends most of his time hanging out in the park with his two dogs -- a musclebound pair of chow-chow mixes named Zeus and Mysterio, who love Barry more than life itself and follow him wherever he goes. But the two things you most need to know about Barry are as follows:

1. Barry is old school. He calls me "young lady", apologizes for cursing in front of me, and tells raunchy, obscenely detailed, hilarious stories about catching people having sex on the sidewalk outside our building... but only to Brad, and always with the explanation that he "didn't want to say anything in front of your wife."

2. Barry is everywhere. I see him almost every day, sometimes multiple times per day. Basically, Barry is an unavoidable part of life in my neighborhood.

Not that I wanted to avoid him.
Before.

And so, on a hot, breezy afternoon last week, I took Hurley out for a walk... and ran into Barry on the way to the park.

At first, it was a typical exchange. We said our hellos and chatted briefly about the weather (humid) and the stray cat situation in the alley behind our respective buildings (catty), and then Barry stepped off the sidewalk and into the space between two cars -- holding Mysterio, who doesn't like other dogs -- so that we could pass by. I thanked him, and continued down the sidewalk...

... until, several seconds and about five yards later, a sudden stray gust of wind came rushing down the street, richocheted off a recessed doorway, and blew my skirt clear up to my ribcage.

It happened so quickly that I had no recourse -- no time to plunge my hands onto my crotch, Marilyn Monroe-style; no time to even flail hysterically in the direction of my hemline before it rose up even with my eyeballs -- and then it was over. And I was alone, clutching the dog's leash in one hand and my now-deflated skirt in the other. Alone, and reeling from the unforgettable sensation of having just had my entire ass -- both cheeks in totality, my brain helpfully reminded me, because I was wearing a thong -- waving about in the open air.

Alone... except that, of course, I wasn't alone. Because behind me, right where I'd left him only moments before, was Barry.

Just keep walking, my brain advised. He was probably still between those cars, he probably had his back turned, he was probably distracted by his dog, it's okay!

Still clutching my skirt, I took a few tentative steps toward the park.

That's good, said my brain, as I quickened my pace and the pounding rush of humiliation stopped beating quite so insistently at my temples. That's good. You're good. Barry did not just see your ass.

I kept walking.

And even if he did, my brain continued, he would never say anything. He's old school, remember? He'd just pretend like it never happened! So just keep on walking, and don't worry, because Barry will never, ever, ever mention this agai--

"Young lady!" came a voice from behind me. "I saw that!"

I turned around.
Down the street, right where I'd left him, stood Barry -- lips stretched into a lunatic grin under his beard, finger extended and ecstatically pointing.

Pointing at my ass.

My brain, temporarily muted by the shock of what had just happened, suddenly sprang back to life and began screaming, NOOOOOOOOO!

I turned and ran into the park. My brain continued to scream. Ten minutes later, Barry and his dogs entered the park and walked in the opposite direction. I pretended not to see them.

That was three days ago.

It's not that I'm looking for a solution, here. There is nothing I can do about this. Despite desperately wanting to avoid him, Barry remains an unavoidable part of our neighborhood, and we can't afford to move.

It's just this: Barry is old-school. And if Barry's censored and restrained reaction to seeing my entire ass is to let me know, in no uncertain terms, that he saw my entire ass, I'm left wondering what the unrestrained, not-in-the-presence-of-a-lady version of this story will involve.

More likely than not, he's probably in the park right now, telling everyone that we had sex.

Saved by the skin of my teeth

2010-06-10T21:20:00.006+02:00

This morning, Brad and I headed up to Columbus Circle for back-to-back husband-and-wife appointments with the dentist.

Yeah, I know. Waaaaaay too much togetherness, right? I have no idea if other couples go and get their teeth cleaned together -- I'm guessing most don't, if only because schedules don't allow for it -- but I have to admit that it's the sort of thing which, if someone had mentioned it to me a few years ago, I would have probably responded to by laughing derisively and then pretending to vomit in my purse.

So, consider this my mea culpa: as it turns out, it's actually kind of nice to do this thing -- since we would have to do it anyway -- with each other. And our dentist, an incredibly charming and avuncular guy who won my heart at our first visit when he told me that it's totally okay not to floss, seems to get a kick out of us showing up together.

Today's visit was no big deal -- no cavities for either of us, a basic cleaning for me, and for Brad, just a few minor cosmetic adjustments to his front teeth (the goal being to upgrade his status from that of "a very handsome man" to "The Most Handsome Man in New York Unless James McAvoy Happens to Be Visiting".) I went first, then sat in the waiting room and skimmed through a World Cup preview article while Brad took his turn.

About ten minutes had passed, when I heard Dr. S. take a break from what had been an uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness monologue about golfing (because when your customers spend most of their visit with a spit-sucking tube and various scraping implements in their mouths, singlehandedly keeping up the conversation is a very important skill) and say, "Is Kat still here?"

I called back, "Yes?"
"Come here, let's see what you think!"

In the exam room, Brad turned in his chair and grinned at me.
"So," said the dentist, "as you can see, I've just done some temporary bonding here and here, to see how you guys like it."
"Okay," I said.
"And by 'you guys'," he continued, "I mean Kat, because I know it's the wife who makes the decisions about this sort of thing."
Everyone laughed.
"Sounds good," said Brad.

The dentist nodded.
"So, I'll do this for today, and then you can go home and decide whether it looks good. And if you change your mind, or you want something else. we can adjust it. Like, if after a week you feel like it's not long enough..."

Brad snorted.

"...or if you're saying, 'You know, I think it could be a little bigger', we can..."

I snorted, then started giggling. Brad laughed harder and mouthed the words long enough at me behind the dentist's back. I began to wheeze.
Dr. S. stopped talking and stared at us.

"I'm sorry," gasped Brad.
"It's just," I giggled.
The dentist held up his hands. "No, no! It's fine. Whatever you have going on in your personal lives, I don't need to know about it."

Which is probably a good thing, because what I had been about to say -- and what, given the context, would have resulted in a horrific misunderstanding that would put an immediate, embarrassing end to our marital-bonding-via-dentist-visit -- was:

"It's just that we're like a couple of twelve year-old boys."

Because even after the hurried explanation that oh no, I just meant that we have shared sense of humor, I wouldn't have blamed the dentist if he never wanted to have anything to do with either of our mouths ever again.

On a scale of one to CRAZY...

2010-06-08T23:38:00.004+02:00

Longtime readers might remember the day, now a few years back, when I bought a bathroom scale from KMart that soon became my new favorite toy. Why, you ask, would a KMart bathroom scale be such a source of entertainment?

Because I'm a weirdo who weighs herself multiple times per day, that's why.

I aint ashamed!

And the fact that I now spend every single day home alone in my apartment has not exactly dampered my enthusiasm for scale-based experiments such as "How much does this cat weigh?" and "How many pounds is my leg?" and "How long does it take after eating asparagus for pee to start smelling funny?"

Okay, that last one doesn't actually require the scale. But you get the idea. And anyway, that's not the point.

The point is, I don't have a scale anymore.
I have two scales.

See, sometime last year -- probably around the same time that my dissatisfaction with my job became so extreme that I began to drink beer at lunch, by default, just to get through the day -- I became convinced that I was gaining weight. Why? Hey, shut up! I don't need to explain myself to you! Which is to say, I can't explain it at all except to say that depression makes you feel both fat AND crazy. So, while I (of course) still continued to weigh myself everyday like the neurotic chub-fearing loon that I am, I was also (of course) simultaneously sure that I was getting bigger, at which point I concluded (of course!) that the problem was not an obvious unchecked psychosis on my part, but rather that the scale must be broken.

"I'm going to buy a new scale," I told Brad.
"This one seems fine to me," he said.
"Noooo, it's broken."
"How do you figure?"
"I just know. It's obviously weighing things a few pounds lighter than they really are."
"Does that even matter?"
"Of course it matters! If I don't know what I actually weigh, it's like... cheating."
Brad eyed me.
"Well, I haven't noticed it," he said.
"Oh yeah?" I retorted, and then, possessed by what I was sure was unassailable and inarguable logic, "MAYBE YOU'RE GETTING FAT, TOO."

By now, I'm sure, you can probably guess where I'm going with this. Because I did buy a new scale, and I set it up right beside the original scale, and then I weighed myself on both of them in order to prove once and for all that I was, in fact, fatter, and not just buckling under the immense weight of hating my job with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns.

And lo and behold, there was a discrepancy. Because according to the new scale, I was...

...one pound...

...lighter.

What the hell.

"So you'll throw away the old scale now?" said Brad.

Of course, I can't do that.
Because that would be cheating.

But instead of continuing in this vein -- not least because I'm sure that my parents have long since stopped reading this post and are now having an argument over which of their respective DNA codes is responsible for their daughter having turned out to be completely batshit insane -- I'm just handing it over to you, readers. Which scale would you keep? I will bow to your wisdom.

Just don't try to suggest anything crazy like getting rid of both of them. I've still got experiments to do.

Indecent Attention Deficit Disorder

2010-05-25T17:18:00.007+02:00

Today in News That Will Surprise Nobody Who Has Ever Met Me: I am easily distracted.

I don't know whether it's just an obnoxious personal quirk or (more likely) raging, untreated ADD, but focusing on the task at hand has always eluded me, unless of course the task at hand is eating ice cream, in which case my concentration is unassailable.

But hey, see what just happened there? It's like that. My brain is like a highly impressionable child in a room full of toys, able to maintain a sustained focus just long enough to embark on some really big project -- say, an awesome monochromatic crayon drawing of a hamburger wearing a dress -- before suddenly realizing mid-stroke that ooooooooooooooh, is that something shiny?! Chase it! Chase the shiny thing! Chase the shiny shiny shiny HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES.

(This metaphor is actually extra-appropriate since as a child, I would frequently be left alone in a clean room to play with a single toy... only to be discovered five minutes later, playing with said toy, but also sitting in the center of a toy maelstrom consisting of every other object in the room which I had pulled off the shelf, played with briefly, and then discarded in favor of something more interesting.)

As an adult, obviously, this problem manifests itself in somewhat different ways.

Today, for instance, I was midway through a freelance article when I noticed an old lipstick on my bedside table and decided to try it on.

Applying the lipstick using my glossy laptop screen as a mirror, I noticed that my hair was looking pretty grimy and decided to take a shower.

Removing my clothes, I noticed that the floor underneath my bare feet was covered in dog hair and dirt and decided to do some vacuuming.

Pulling the vacuum cleaner out, I saw a pair of sunglasses I'd been searching for poking out from under the couch.

Vacuuming the apartment with the sunglasses perched on my head, I noticed that a stray nail had popped up in the doorway between the bedroom and living room.

Leaving the vacuum where it was, I went to get the hammer.

And hammering the nail back into place, I heard a bunch of noise out back and went to investigate...

...which is how I came to be standing in my window and staring down into the crowded schoolyard behind my apartment -- covered in filth, holding a hammer, and wearing nothing but a pair of sunglasses and some lipstick.

Which I'm sure the police will completely understand.

Assuming I can concentrate long enough to get dressed before they show up.

Bridesmaidery.

2010-05-20T22:57:00.003+02:00

This weekend, I am going to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of a very, very dear childhood friend. It's my first time bridesmaiding.

As you may have guessed from the fact that I just attempted to use "bridesmaid" as a verb, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Somehow, nobody has noticed yet. I like to think that it's because I've carefully strategized during the planning process in order to make sure I'm only assigned tasks which play to my strengths. Doilies and china and pastel party favors? Not exactly my oeuvre.

Getting people drunk?
Yes! That one!

So most of my efforts thus far have gone to the bachelorette party, the primary planning of which involved asking myself where I would like to go on a Saturday night, and then just insisting that everybody bend to my will. (The other part of this plan involved force-feeding vodka tonics to anyone who disagreed with the plans. Because people can't argue with you about the orchestration of the evening when they don't remember anything after 7pm.)

Fortunately, the bride is an understanding sort of girl. Last night, we did a trial run of her makeup for the wedding (one of those items on the list of "Random things I used to be interested in and can now do fairly well"), and the deep brown shadow I'd used to define her eyes -- which always looked natural and subtle on me -- was so harsh against her china-white skin that she came out looking less like a vision of soon-to-be-wedded beauty, and more like a tranny dressed as a geisha dressed as a zombie.

"Oh, it's lovely," she said. "But I think I'd like to try something a little less... dramatic?"
"You can just tell me that I've made you look like a brain-eating Japanese drag queen."
"Oh, no, it's not that."

Understanding, and so polite.

But now we're down to the wire, and must as I'd like to, I can't delegate myself the sole responsibility of running around the reception forcing cocktails down people's throats. ("God damn it, Great-Aunt Mildred, drink this mojito! CHUG it, you haggard octogenarian whore!") So, this is it. I will fall in, I will walk the aisle, and I will do this in precisely the same way that all the other 'maids do it -- by standing alongside the beautiful bride in a (surprisingly flattering!) teal dress, with a daisy in hand, smiling beatifically, and successfully resisting the urge to have a nuptial-ruining accident by silently, stealthily repeating to myself, "I will not get naked and set myself on fire. I will not get naked and set myself on fire. I will not get naked and set myself on fire."

That is what bridesmaids do, right?
Right. This is going to be awesome.

And by the way...

2010-05-12T17:26:00.005+02:00

Shameless self-promotion alert! If you've stopped by the blog over the past few weeks only to be annoyed at the lack of new material, don't forget that I can always be found elsewhere online. I write every day at SparkNotes, regularly at Crushable, and occasionally at MTV.com. One day, I'll get it together enough to keep an updated sidebar link to my work; in the meantime...

On Crushable, my new bi-weekly advice column dealt with a surprise Facebook de-friending.

I also wrote a servicey piece on why you (and you!) ought to take a naked photo or two before you die...

...right after I told a bunch of teenagers that the D.A.R.E. program is full of crap and instructed them on dealing with grammar rage.

Oh, and remember that idiot graduation speaker who informed you that the previous four years were "the best of your life"? He's a filthy liar.

And if you don't mind quantity over quality, feel free to follow my more-frequent updates on Twitter and Tumblr, where I like to post random links, discuss recipes, and occasionally make jokes about having sex with panda bears.

Bet you're interested now.

I don't know what I want to do, and so I'm doing everything.

2010-05-10T21:02:00.005+02:00

If writing is my one-and-only, then for the past three weeks, I've been having a torrid affair. I'm not even trying to hide it; once a week at midday, with my column filed and schedule safely cleared, I throw on sweats, skip out of the apartment, and travel to midtown west for an hour or so of silk-swaddled, airborne acrobatics that leave my muscles singing in the rain.

You've probably seen aerial silks performers at the circus or Cirque-de-something-or-other, lithe and lean and suspended by nothing but pure brute strength and artfully-wrapped fabric around a hip or ankle.

Suffice to say that my version of the practice isn't quite so elegant. Or airborne. I lack the upper-body strength to hold myself up and get tied in, and so instead, there's a lot of sweating, grunting, and giggling about my insufficiently-muscled noodle-arms from just a few feet above the floor -- all while the more-experienced class members look down on me (no literally, down, because they are fifteen feet in the air) and roll their eyes while simultaneously rocketing themselves skyward using only one toe.

(Note: Enjoy it while it lasts, you smugly superior twats. Because one day, I'm going to be better at this -- and then, I will gaily ascend the silk, gracefully brace my ankle in a perfectly-executed foot lock, and use my remaining foot to kick you in the teeth.)

Still, despite my novice status, I'm in love. Partly, it's that when you start from rock bottom, there's nowhere to go but up -- and every extra inch stretched or new move learned feels like a coup. So much of adulthood involves savoring the small victories; the leaps-and-bounds accomplishment of learning something completely new is exhilarating. But more than that, it's the rediscovery of an old friend in my body, which used to do a lot more than just carry me from place to place. I stopped taking ballet seriously around the time that puberty assigned me a pair of child-bearing hips, stopped dancing altogether when the absence of free-and-easy college classes made it too inconvenient. But the extensions and long lines, the feel of bare feet on marley flooring, and the old dream of a life in motion... it's still there, if a little dusty.

Seven years ago, I briefly debated attending circus school post-college in lieu of a job-job; a lovely gentleman from the admissions office called me to chat, and asked what I was considering as a specialization.

"Contortion," I said.
"That's totally doable," he said, sounding genuinely thrilled, and then asked, "How's your pain threshold?"

I didn't end up at circus school, of course, but I've since thought, many times, that more prospective employers should ask that question.

Now, I feel like I'm looking back through time at my 21 year-old self and waving. Hello, I haven't forgotten you!

And don't worry -- I know it looks bad right now, but we're going to get that split back.

Now I'm just being catty.

2010-04-26T18:08:00.006+02:00

So, as it turns out, all it took for the nausea to subside was to sit down at my computer and complain for ten minutes. I should have figured that catharsis would come easy, especially since caring about the lurking behavior of the person in question requires a level of energy that I just can't sustain... which is to say, I do not care. Not really. Even if I did entertain the brief urge to write a really unpleasant finger-pointing diatribe in which I exact my revenge and render the details of the whole sordid mess instantly and eternally findable by anyone with a working internet connection by repeatedly using the offender's full name.

That'll just be my private cackle for a rainy day. Or my ace in the hole. If you get my meaning.

But anyway, enough dwelling, because there are more important things going on here.

If you've been following my spastic posting on Tumblr, you may have noticed that a cat seemed suddenly to have appeared in my apartment, where there was no cat before.

Magic cat! Yes! Our apartment is now be-catted, but more importantly, my existence has been re-catted. Vivian Leigh, who long-time readers might remember from my early days of blogging, is back in the fold. And while she's been here for a couple months now, I haven't written about it, because it's taken this long for my rage over the situation to subside to the point where I can actually talk about it without turning into a heaving She-Hulk and busting out of the house -- and out of my underpants -- on a frothing quest for vengeance against those who sought to wrong my cat.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Pausing for a quick confirmation that my underthings are intact and I don't have any renegade veins popping out of my biceps...

Yeah, okay. We're good.

Vivian had been re-homed back when Brad and I moved in together, after we reluctantly concluded that she and the dog could not occupy the same space without tearing each other's faces off. (This is mostly the dog's fault. Okay, completely the dog's fault. And it's totally unfair that the sins of the golden retriever shall be visited upon the cat.) Shortly before we signed the lease, on my 25th birthday, my parents came down to the city for dinner -- and when they left, they took Vivian with them.

At which point I spent most of the evening of my 25th birthday crying uncontrollably, occasionally pausing between sobs to wail that I had abandoned Vivian Leigh and what if she was all alone and wondering why she didn't have a home anymore OH MY GOD. This went on for hours. (Our neighbors likely thought that I was having a seriously over-the-top reaction to Gone With the Wind.)

Of course, within a few weeks things worked out pretty well: Viv found a new home with a family friend, and I even got to see her occasionally when I went to visit my parents. And for three years, all was good, the knowledge that my cat was happy and well cared-for draping itself like a soft blanket of eternal comfort over my lingering guilt at having given her up.

And then, a couple months ago, a tiny hole appeared in the blanket -- in the form of the news that the family housing Viv needed to find a new home for her. Thinking I might be able to help, I asked to be kept in the loop...

...only to have the blanket rudely ripped off and shredded into tiny bits by knife-wielding samurai when my mother called a week later and told me she'd happened to run into a member of said family at the grocery store, and the following conversation had ensued.

Mom: Oh, have you found a home for Vivian?
Worst Person Who Ever Lived: We asked a couple people, but nobody wanted her... so we're putting her to sleep tomorrow.

Um, what? Let's pause here and heat up a snack, shall we? I'm thinking I'll have a nice big bowl of WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE.

Because really, you guys, I know it was great of this family to take my cat when I couldn't keep her... but she's still.
My.
CAT.

And common courtesy dictates that you do not kill another person's cat without at least checking to see whether that person might want the goddamn cat back.

MOTHERFUCKING GEEEEEEEZ.

A lot of screaming and a couple hundred miles later, Vivian was safely removed from the home of the people who wanted to murder her and back where she belonged.

Which, just in case I haven't been totally clear, is with people who don't want to fucking murder her.

This haughty bitch doesn't have the faintest idea how close she came to eating her last bowl of Friskies.

Ew, ew, ew.

2010-04-25T18:27:00.003+02:00

Whenever people talk about the nature of blogging, invariably, the idea of a "window" comes up. It's a pretty decent comparison: Life as a house, the information we share on the internet as an opening in the wall. It's a controlled glimpse, and as long as you don't place the window in, say, your bathroom, you don't really mind much about the general public hanging around outside and peering in.

But the problem, to really drag out this extended metaphor, is that the not-so-general public can also peer in -- including friends from elementary school, and grandparents, and (and this is the kicker) outsiders who used to be anything but. Frenemies, exes, and others who used to live inside the House of Your Life but who you finally evicted a number of years ago because they pissed on the toilet seat and set fire to your cat.

Which is to say, people you'd hoped to thoroughly shut out will, years later, still keep tabs on you via your blog.

And by "you", I mean "me".

And by "people", I mean... well, no, I'm not naming names, but ugh.

Until last week, I'd forgotten this could even be a concern -- the way a person forgets about a wart once it's been frozen off. And while I've specifically angled my own inter-window so as not to display anything I consider private -- despite the profanity and personal anecdotes, there's nothing here I feel weird about showing to the world -- I'm thoroughly icked out by this one lousy individual, who is (figuratively) hanging around, looking in, and waving at me through the window even though I am (figuratively) calling the police, because it is (LITERALLY) extremely fucking creepy and weird.

And as it turns out, it doesn't do much for the whole "wanting to write" thing.

I'll be back when the nausea subsides.

Bits and parts.

2010-04-14T20:26:00.003+02:00

Dear readers,
Thank you so, so much for your kind comments on the last post. There really aren't words to describe my excitement right now (or, I mean, there are, but they all sound like "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!") and though I rarely get mushy about blogging -- since nobody wants to come onto the internet and find themselves suddenly covered in the wet sticky mass of a complete stranger's FEELINGS -- I do feel unbelievably lucky to have had you all along for the ride. This week, I read back through my archives -- another thing I rarely do -- and felt a surge of emotional ohmygod when I realized that the thing I'd most hoped for when I wrote this post just under three years ago was finally, incredibly, a reality. At the time, a large part of me fully expected that this would never, ever work out, and I would end up starving and desperate and attempting to sell my body to make ends meet only to find that nobody wants a hooker with webbed toes and A-cup bongos.

So this is not just a thrill of the first degree, but also an incredible relief.

And now -- NOW! -- I can answer a handful of questions.

The book is a YA novel, as in Young Adult, and will likely be aimed at older teenagers. (Of course, as previously demonstrated by the success of the Twilight series, that doesn't mean grownups can't read it.)

It will be published by Dutton Young Readers, a division of the behemoth Penguin Group, in Spring of 2012.

Unless they change it.

Which I hope they don't; I am already seething with impatience.

I'm not going to talk about the plot until I've got an official flap-copy blurb to share, but very generally speaking, it's about a tragedy in a small town and contains several hefty doses of sex, death, and intrigue.

So, there you have it.

Oh, and one more thing. Not that this has anything to do with the subject at hand, but...

Yesterday I had my yearly gyno appointment, and while I was lying there, I noticed a box on a high shelf in the examining room that was labeled, "Spare parts".

I assume it was full of vaginas.

[insert unintelligible squealing here]

2010-04-09T21:43:00.002+02:00

I should sit on this, but I just can't.

Could you?

No.

Because remember that big thing of which we do not speak?

We are speaking about it.

Specifically, we are speaking about a novel. Printed and hardbound and carrying my name. Coming within the next couple years to a bookstore near you.

Details when I have them, dear readers. In the meantime, I'll be running circles around my apartment, double-fisting a pair of brimming, bubbling champagne flutes, and screaming at the top of my mothereffing lungs.

The miracle of subtle marketing.

2010-04-07T22:38:00.007+02:00

A long time ago, probably in the late 1970s, some not-so-bright douchebag decided that my neighborhood would be a really great place to erect a ton of billboards. I'm guessing that his decision was predicated on the fact that this part of Brooklyn is bisected by a major highway and home to a fair number of industrial docks, making it a daily pass-through point for thousands of susceptible people in desperate need of... well, whatever they like to sell on billboards these days.

And I'm guessing that it was in the late 1970s, because that seems to be the last time that anybody actually bought ad space on any of them.

Seriously, these things are OLD. If they're not hanging in tatters or faded by the sun to the point of unreadability, they're advertising something so hilariously outdated that it's probably not available anywhere, much less in the rapidly-changing landscape that is New York City. My favorite is the one for a gentleman's club -- so old that by now, all the girls pictured have probably traded in their pasties and pole dancing for geriatric shoes, midday bingo and occasional cackling swipes at the pool-boy's taut young buttocks.

Or rather, that was my favorite.

Because today, as I emerged from the local liquor store, this marvel of strategic marketing caught my eye.

Admittedly, this might be some smart advertising. This street is a thoroughfare for trucks -- and therefore, truck drivers, who may be more likely than most to drive around with their eyes peeled for a giant sign that says, "GOT HEMORRHOIDS?". Because after a lifetime of eating greasy roadside fare on the run, it's probably only a matter of time until you blow your asshole clean out.

Or so I would imagine.

But the real beauty of this sign isn't just in what it's selling, but how. I can just picture the design process.

Client: (looks at sign) Wow. This is great, Donald. It really is. Just great.
Designer: Thanks.
Client: It's just...
Designer: What?
Client: I just think we could sell it more.
Designer: Well, you know, it's very direct -- hemorrhoids, proctology clinic, the phone number...
Client: Yes... but still, it's like something's missing.
Designer: What do you mean?
Client: Well, look, Donald. I just don't think people will know that we're talking about butts. You know? We need something more, some pizazz, something that says...
Designer: Something that says, "butts"?
Client: Yeah. BUTTS. I want everyone to look at this sign, and no matter who they are, I want them to come away knowing -- we're talking about butts.
Designer: Well, I did have this one idea.

Ladies and gentlemen, let it be known: they are talking about butts.
And now, so are we.

Facebombed.

2010-04-05T02:32:00.006+02:00

Without the daily refuge of an office job to offer me a little bit of social distraction -- even if only in the form of a cubicle neighbor who spends her lunch hour screeching un-ignorably about the who, what, and where-did-he-put-it of her latest hookup -- I am now spending an embarrassing amount of time on Facebook. It's a problem only compounded by the fact that I recently established an official profile for my alter-ego and now have to check the site multiple times per day in order to field her unending stream of friend requests, messages, and a hilarious newsfeed consisting of the meandering inside-jokey and hyperactive inner thoughts of 600 fourteen year-old girls.

Yeah, you heard me. SIX HUNDRED. That advice-giving trollop out-friended me on her second goddamn day of online existence.

I don't even want to think about the number of hours I've lost to Facebook -- tumbling down rabbit holes into the photo albums of friends-of-friends, or wall-stalking people back to last fall in order to find out exactly when they broke up with whatshisface, or giddily discovering that one of my high school's resident mean girls now looks like a potato. Sometimes I interact, but mostly, I just lurk.

Some comfort comes from the sneaking suspicion that at least some of these people are doing the same thing to me. But it's also a total blast, in that a lot of my former coworkers, classmates, and third-degree acquaintances have shed pretty much all evidence of their earlier college-common personas and are now leading seriously incredible lives.

The girlfriend I once bikini-wrestled in a kiddie pool full of chocolate pudding? Now a successful archaeologist with an adorable daughter.

The oft-drunk, odd wanderer from my freshman dorm? Now a bona fide Maine lobsterman with his very own boat.

The beautiful, lanky blond neighbor who wooed me with quoted passages from On the Road? Now a Catholic priest. (Which is equal parts incredible, weirdly sexy, and deeply disappointing. Probably because I have seen Quills too many times. Or because the gentleman in question had certain tools that just won't get the sort of use they deserve in the service of the Lord, if y'knowwhatimsayin. But I digress.)

But while many of my friends are very interesting Facebook spy-fodder, the voyeurism also always seemed really harmless in that I'd never come across anything that gave me pause. I'd never found myself worried for anyone's mental health or well-being; everyone, regardless of where and how and with whom they've lived over the past several years, seems to be doing so well.

Or at least, that was the case until I clicked my way into the photo album of a college friend who recently passed the bar exam, and found myself re- and re- and re-visiting a series of images while staring with deep concern at the screen, and thinking, "Oh. Oh nooooooo."

Because, and I don't think I can overstate this, something is really wrong here.

Am I overreacting? I don't think so. But you tell me, guys. You tell me, because I am going to show you the pictures in question.

Yes, I am.

Don't lecture me about privacy; you know you want to see them.

And this is some scary shit.

And frankly, I don't think the subject of these photos cares much about it one way or another.

Because...

I don't know what terrifies me most: the fact that my friend seems to have no compunction about shoving a camera in the face of a possibly-rabid possum, or the demon possum itself, or the inclusion of this photo series in an otherwise-innocuous album consisting of bar shots and closeups of burgers like some sort of photo-stalker's terrorbomb.

But if there's a lesson to be taken away from this, I'm guessing it's something about not being Facebook friends with lawyers.

A screeching halt.

2010-03-25T16:36:00.006+01:00

For the record, I did not wake up two weeks ago and think to myself, "Hey, what if I posted a cryptic, vignette-y piece about a totally ancient dysfunctional relationship from my early twenties, and then just disappeared for awhile? ...Yeah, that's what I'll do! It'll be fun!"

What actually happened is that I found, as the time since my last post stretched from a few days to several to more than a week, was that there was just nothing to report. And not only that, but my inner monologue -- which often supplies my daily life with narrative bits and bobs that serve as the basis for posts -- had just sort of shut itself up. The steady stream of ready words had slowed to a trickle. Inside my head, things had gotten awfully quiet. And the days continued to pass.

...And then last week, I got an email from my 80-something year-old grandmother. It said "Happy birthday!"

And then it said, "I've been reading your blog!"

On the plus side, this certainly shook things up. The gears wrenched into motion, the floodgates opened, and my inner monologue sprang back into action and began shouting out words at a furious rate.

Unfortunately, all of those words were "AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHFUCKNOOOAAAGH."

Because shit. Can I even say that now? (On that topic, can I even say "shit"?!) I mean, you guys. My grandmother. Reading this blog -- you know, the one with the word "penis" in the title header and an entire series of posts about an in-window masturbator?

Yeah, THAT BLOG.

My mother, who knows just how to really bring home the terror when it comes to this sort of thing, told me, "You know, this means that she read your post about fornication."

Yep. It sure does! My dear, sweet grandmother! And not only that, grandma is probably reading this post, too. Talk about an elephant in the room.

...Not that I'm calling my grandmother an elephant! That is totally not what I meant! OH MY GOD THIS JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE.

So before I embarrass myself any further, I'm just going to leave it at this:

Hi, Grandma! Welcome. I hope you enjoy the blog. I'm sorry about the state of the place; if I'd known you were coming by, I never would have left all these expletives and dick jokes lying around.

And now if you'll all excuse me, I have to go find out whether it is, in fact, actually possible to die of embarrassment.

(For the record, I'm kind of hoping that the answer is yes.)

A meeting.

2010-03-12T00:31:00.005+01:00

A warning:
This is an experimental departure from my usual fare. I'll probably delete it.
In the meantime, please be kind.

Update: Okay, it stays.

* * *

"You wanted me to tell her," he says, and I nearly spit out my beer.

* * *

We never really connect, only reconnect. Our relationship has always been marked by long absences. In the first year I knew him, back when every meeting meant a tangle of sheets and grappling hands and eventual exhaustion before the sun had even so much as begun to dip below the horizon, we saw each other only half a dozen times. Now, sometimes a year will pass between chats, or sometimes we'll play long games of text-tag and missed messages that eventually peter out, or we make vague plans only to cancel on each other.

And then, eventually, a day. A date. A restaurant and his bony frame in the doorway, cutting away a dark slice of midday sun.

I used to be fascinated by how little space he took up. He was bird-thin, fine-boned, and then he would fold up. He disappeared into corners. He sat cross-legged on chairs, like a child. Today, when I sat down across from him and watched him turn from me to look at the menu, there was gray in his hair.

* * *

"What did you do?"

I have a bandaid on my middle finger. Just across the way and up the road apiece from my wedding ring. Years ago, I would have extended the wounded digit across the table and let him touch it, and I would have made a bigger deal about how it had met its bloody fate under my own teeth.

But that was the problem, then. With us. With me.

I tell the truth today: that I was watching a rerun of Law & Order, that I got nervous about what was going to happen in the final courtroom scene, and that before I even realized it I'd eaten off my entire cuticle.

It's funny to me -- it is me, it's just the sort of thing I'd do -- but lines appear on his face, and he says, "Noooo."
And then, "You can do better than that."

And that was the problem.

* * *

I'm not better than that. I could be, in fits and starts. I was twenty-three years old, and every thirty-one days I could put on my best and brightest, giving him one day per month with the esoteric, intellectual, literary version of myself.

It's easy to believe that someone is extraordinary, when you've never seen her be ordinary.

We would intertwine our same-sized hands over tables while our smug salads wilted and the wine got warm, and he'd say something about Don DeLillo, and I'd smile and nod with the knowledge that he wouldn't be there tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, to see me reading a Wikipedia page with a beer in one hand and a box of Cheez-Its in the other. That by the time we next met, the subject would have changed.

That he had no idea how much I hate frisee.

That he didn't know me, even when he began to claim that he loved me.

It made me wonder about his girlfriend, the one he lived with. He would leave her behind to be with me, and I thought that she must have been something -- to hold his interest, day in, day out, at home. In their home.

I thought she must have been exhausted.

* * *

Now, we meet every once in awhile. We reconnect, somewhere between my happy prattling about my husband and his bits-and-pieces summarizing of a new girlfriend. ("She has red hair," he says, and then, "She climbed Kilimanjaro," as though one is a natural extension of other.)

"Did you ever meet my friend Mike?" he says.
I laugh, the way I always do when he asks me a question as though I'm a real ex-girlfriend, and not The Other Woman From Way-Back-When.

"Of course not," I say.
He looks confused.
"You don't introduce a girl to your friends when she's your dirty little secret."

There's a pause. A cry; I realize that there are babies in this bar. Two of them, tiny things with downy hair and heads that loll and coo against their mothers' shoulders. The sunlight presses hazily against the tabletops and their little eyes close tight.

"You wanted me to tell her," he says, and I nearly spit out my beer. I shake my head.
"No way."
"You did."
"Well, I didn't."

I take another drink.

"I'm sorry I didn't introduce you to my friends."

And another. There's foam in the glass. Spit, mostly.

"I didn't want to meet your friends."

He doesn't believe me, I don't think. I don't know.
I don't care.

My drink is gone, and so am I, and I don't think I'll see him again.

Legally boned.

2010-03-05T03:55:00.005+01:00

I've only just realized this, and it disturbs me: Sometime in early August of 2008, I fornicated for what may have been the last time in my life.

Oh, did I mention that I was going to write about sex? Ha, whoops! Well, now you know!

But yeah, that happened. My last fornication passed unseen, unknown, like a silent ship in the night... or, I mean, not silent -- it was probably, you know, lots of grunting and zoo noises, but... well. That doesn't matter. What matters is that married persons, by definition, don't fornicate.

Nope, that's specifically for the unmarried. Once you've put a ring on it, you're just straight-up legal to throw it in there, and there's nothing anyone could do to stop you -- or would! You're allowed, even encouraged, to have sex! This is the apparent boon of marriage: that Jesus, conservative old people, and the Congress of the United States of America are all one-hundred percent on board with whatever it is you do behind closed doors and between the sheets. (Provided you don't try to put it anywhere untoward, of course, if you know what I'm saying. I can't speak for Jesus, but last I heard, they particularly disliked that sort of thing in Texas.)

Having watched ~~every single motherloving last one~~ the occasional episode of "Engaged and Underage", I know that the implicit permission to have sex is seen by some as a major incentive to get married. Those lust-hungry young couples who haven't quite closed the door on puberty yet, fleeing from their wedding reception with glee at finally being able to Get Busy with the Permission of God. Sometimes I watch these shows and cackle to myself, because they have NO IDEA what they're in for.

But here? Well, no. It's not like that. The fact that Jesus and his dad and my grandma are all totes cool with the bang-bang -- this does not make me want to leap into the sack.

There's the general lack of cachet of the whole thing, first off. Because c'mon -- what would you rather do? "Fornicate", or have "marital intercourse"? One of these things sounds awesome, like the sort of activity that might take place in a bar bathroom or an elevator, or under the buffet table at your friend's wedding with a cocktail napkin stuffed in your mouth to muffle the screams (what? No I didn't!), and the other sounds like an SAT word, one of the ones where you were too bored to remember the definition but you're pretty sure it has to do with small engine repair.

Dull.

But worse, I think, is that marital sex is totally de-naughtified. When even the Bible is all, "Hey, you, with the ring! Take your pants off!", the exciting sense that you're getting away with something is just... pffft. I'm starting to understand those previously-vanilla couples who show up on latenight HBO specials about sex parties or Vegas brothels, who turn to the camera and giggle, "We never used to do anything like this! But now, look! A dildo!"

Not that there are any problems over here, or anything -- if you were hoping I was going to be all, "So what I'm saying is, our sex life sucks", then I am sorry to disappoint you. (Also, what the hell. Why would you hope that?)

But I am distressed to realize that my last fornication for the foreseeable future passed without so much as a fare-thee-well, or a party hat, or anything.

...Or, I mean, there may have been a party hat. I drink a lot.

All over the place.

2010-03-03T02:38:00.003+01:00

Today, I can be found here and here. A new column pubbed here last week. I filled out the staff questionnaire here. More freelance work is simmering in my head or just finished, held in the hands of editors and waiting to be served.

I'm starting to feel strangely settled, here in my apartment with no job -- no real job, anyway -- and the endless clicking of the keys, and the funny sensation of a narrative untangling itself in my head. I've started to recognize the different voices that echo in there. They're all me, but in versions. There's the typoed tumble that spills forth when I'm hurried; the shallow, stilted, plodding dryness when I haven't had enough to eat; the jittery delete-and-write-and-delete-and-write just after coffee; the slushy effusiveness and made-up words that pour out after I've had a beer at lunch. It's funny the way people will sometimes look at me when they ask what I do and I say, as though I'm not sure myself, "I'm a writer?"

I am?

I haven't lost that question mark at the end; I drown in words all day long, but when I step away from the keyboard and the sun goes down, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I try to explain about how it works right now, the unsureness of it. I'm waiting. I'm writing while I wait to find out whether or not I'm really a writer. Earlier today, I came across this photo of Roger Ebert (who you should be following on Twitter, if you're not, and whose story you should read about here, if you haven't); he's holding a newspaper, and the caption explains about writers and how they like to see their words made physical, because it feels permanent.

I don't know if "permanent" is the word I'd use. I'm dimly aware that this blog will exist forever, pretty much -- barring an apocalyptic event that wipes out the whole internet, or a decision on my part to delete it. (No, no, don't worry. I'll never.) But there is that unfinished feeling that online, it's all ether. Print might not feel permanent, but it's unequivocally real. It's there. The feel of paper, the smell of ink. It's got a life cycle all its own; your words come to life on the page, and later, they decay and disappear on the same. Sometimes it seems like writing online is so goddamn fetal, all these words floating unborn in the amnio.

Occasionally, I can see that someone has come here from their inbox -- Yahoo or Gmail or whatever -- and I know that something I wrote is being forwarded here and there, and it's like, wow. Vindication. Birth.

Congratulations, ma'am, it's a blog post.

A friend, a karaoke contest, a favor, PANAMA! ...Or something.

2010-02-25T22:56:00.003+01:00

Briefly:

I've been giving my word-love to you freely for years, readers, and today, I'd like you to do something for me. Or, rather, for a very dear friend of mine.

No, it's not a handjob. (It might have been, but my friend doesn't have a peen. Lucky you!)

So, please, if you would:
1. Click here.
2. Enter the confirmation word in the box on the left-hand side.
3. Click "VOTE".

It takes less than 5 seconds, you don't have to enter any personal information, and you need never think about it again. Unless you feel like voting repeatedly -- you can do it once per day.

In this manner, you will not only seat my vocally gifted pal Kate in a life-changing karaoke competition, but you will also (and I know you'll like this) assist in unseating a truly hideous individual who does not deserve to sing in public. So if you're not motivated by altruism and good thoughts, perhaps you will be motivated by your raging bitchery. Yes? Alright!

Now go on, clickity click click CLICK.

Thinking out loud.

2010-02-23T22:56:00.003+01:00

Early this morning, I phoned the local pharmacy for a refill on my birth control pills. This is not news, obviously -- I do it every month, and every month, I am informed by the automated talking voice that my prescription will be refilled, no questions asked. It's totally no big deal.

(Random aside: It is no big deal except for the fact that the tone of the automated talking voice is, like, super-condescending. Always. And particularly for something that was pre-recorded, absent of context, by some totally unaffiliated voice-over actor. I picture the woman standing in her little booth, speaking a series of key phrases into the microphone, only to have Rite Aid's director of marketing crash through the door and scream, "NO, Tammy! For the last time, I want you to bitch it up, all right? We're RITE AID, for chrissakes! These medication-gobbling plebes need to know that we're doing them a fucking favor!")

Other than that, though, refilling prescriptions is an unremarkable chore. Right? Right! But NOT TODAY. This time, I picked up my phone twenty minutes later to discover a missed call and voicemail from the pharmacist, asking me to call back right away.

Because unexpected contact from a medical professional is never a good sign, I started freaking out before I'd even finished listening to the message. Call him back right away? Why? What was going on?!

(At this point, the part of my brain that likes to entertain itself by suggesting that I abduct the disabled and call my mother-in-law a whore suddenly sprang to life and shrieked, Holy shit! They won't refill your prescription because something is horribly wrong with you! You probably have HERPES!)

Trying to ignore my irrational, screeching other self, I dialed the number and pressed "2" to speak to the pharmacist. He picked up immediately.

"Hi," I said. "I'm returning a call from you--"
ASK HIM IF YOU HAVE HERPES! my brain yelled.
"Oh, of course," said the pharmacist, who sounded pleasant and young and totally unaware of The Crazy that was threatening to bubble over on the other end of the line. "I wanted to let you know, the generic version of your pill has been temporarily taken off the market. It's a patent dispute or something."
"Oh,"I said. Inside my head, The Crazy slunk away into a corner and grumbled to itself.
He continued, "So, your copay is going to be quite a bit higher than it was."
"How much higher?" I said.
"Forty dollars."
"What?!"
"I'm sorry," he said. "I know it's kind of a lot."
"Ugh," I groaned, "that's ridiculous."
"I know, I'm sorry," he said again.
And then, with a hopeful-and-helpful lilt in his voice, he added, "Maybe you should go see your doctor this week, and ask to be put on something with an available generic?"

"I could do that..."
I was thinking out loud now, weighing the options while I did the math in my head. It was a thirty-dollar difference, not insubstantial, particularly on a monthly basis, and it would be so helpful to have the money, and it really might be worth it, except--
"--shit, there's no way I can get an appointment this week and then I'd have to go, like, five days without sex."

From the phone came a small, chokey sound -- the sort of thing that happens when someone is attempting to stifle a sneeze, or a laugh.

Or a scream.

At which point I realized that the biggest problem with thinking out loud is that it is, by definition, OUT LOUD.

"Oh my God," I said, also out loud. "I can't believe I said that. That was so inappropriate, I am so--"
"Heh," said the pharmacist. "That was funny."
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay."
"Uh... I'll just come pick up the pills," I said.
"See you later," he said.

And I did.

See him later, I mean. As I passed by him on my way out the door, he winked at me over the condom display.

It was actually kind of hot.

Your health, guv'mint.

2010-02-18T21:14:00.006+01:00

Sometimes, I wonder about the people who really reeeeally want us to have a public, government-run healthcare system. Not about their intelligence or motives -- it is, in theory, a really great idea that would do tremendous good for everyone who lives here. But I wonder whether they have ever spent much time dealing with the government on a personal level. Whether they have ever had to hinge their lives, or livelihood, on the gaseous churnings of its bureacratic gut.

Basically, I wonder whether they have ever been unemployed. Because I am. And when I talk to the government, this is how our conversations go:

Government: Did you work last week, including self-employment?
Me: Including self-employment, yes.
Government: How many days did you work?
Me: Well, I worked for thirty minutes on Tuesday morning, and--
Government: That is a full day of work.
Me: Um, what?
Government: That counts as a full day of work. We can't pay you unemployment for that day, because you worked.
Me: Thirty minutes of work is a full day of work?
Government: To us it is.
Me: That's insane.
Government: That's the way it is.
Me: But... I only made fifteen dollars.
Government: Too bad. You worked.
Me: So what you're saying is, if I work for fifteen minutes and make one dollar, you'll penalize me like $100? For working?
Government: We don't see it that way.
Me: Because fifteen minutes of work equals a full day of work.
Government: Yes.
Me: Can I come work there?
Government: No.
Me: Assholes.
Government: What?
Me: Nothing.
Government: So, you worked last week.
Me: For thirty minut--
Government: Where did you work?
Me: Um, in my bedroom?
Government: THAT IS NOT ALLOWED.
Me: What? No, I'm not a hooker or anything, I just worked from home.
Government: Home?
Me: Self-employment?
Government: Right!
Me: Right!
Government: Where was your self employed?
Me: [sound of face slamming into keyboard]
Government: WE ARE GOING TO REVOKE YOUR BENEFITS.
Me: No! Wait! I'll cooperate.
Government: That's better. Now. Where were you employed?
Me: [deep breath] Okay, so here's the thing: because I have an internet connection, I can work from--
Government: NO!
Me: No, it's okay, if you'll just--
Government: Stop dicking around and tell me where you worked!
Me: IN MY APARTMENT!
Government: What was your supervisor's name at this job?
Me: Are you kidding?
Government: What was your job title?
Me: Okay, seriously, stop.
Government: Why did you quit this job?
Me: I didn't qu--
Government: Give us the contact information of your supervisor.
Me: I didn't have--
Government: NOW!
Me: Okay, okay, geez! It's Kat...
Government: Thank you... hey, wait a minute, that's your name!
Me: You guys last updated this system sometime in the 1970s, didn't you.
Government: ...Maybe.

Look, I know they're trying. And it's not any one person's fault that the system itself behaves like a learning-disabled nine year-old with an anger management problem. But government? As long as you can't comprehend the concept of "self-employment", I am definitely not going to put you in charge of anything so important as, say, my pancreas.

Tidbittery.

2010-02-05T02:40:00.002+01:00

The slowdown in posting over the past few weeks has not been without cause, dear readers, although I'm sorry for it. As it turns out, even though that big thing of which we do not speak is out of my hair and still unsettled, there are so many other things to write. I have bills to pay. And I'm trying to make a go of it, like a real writer writer, with nothing but a laptop and a brain full of rattling words.

By the next time we meet, I might even have gone so far as to cultivate all the necessary, writerly accoutrements: a week-old layer of unwashed grime, a floor littered with crumpled pages, a desktop scatter of pencils that have been worn down to nubs. I might even be wearing a beret.

But in the meantime, if you've been hanging around here, twiddling your thumbs and feeling annoyed at the unpopulated space -- and maybe even missing the vulgar anecdotes or the extravagant swearing or just the look of lines and lines of text, unfurling across the screen -- please come and see me in one of my other homes on the internet:

- After penning an urban exploration feature for Wend magazine in 2008, I'm now writing an ambassador blog for their website. My personal New York, dispatched in bits and pieces, with photographs. I like this project because it's different from my usual, and also because it forces me to leave the house from time to time.

- I am still writing for SparkNotes, a lot.

- And starting today, I can also be found making occasional contributions to MTV's Hollywood Crush, which is much less important than it sounds but which nevertheless has my inner 14 year-old fangirl practically peeing in her pants.

There, that should hold you.

And if none of the above interests you, then please come and see me and several other lovely writers in the heaving flesh, at tomorrow's blogger meetup in Brooklyn. Because beer. You like it.

Hurley, Burly.

2010-02-03T14:56:00.006+01:00

One of my favorite things about my current apartment, as has been well-documented in previous posts, is its proximity to our neighborhood park. Neighborhood Park is a lovely, lovely place, with triangle-shaped expanses of grass, a well-kept garden, and paths lined with mottled sycamore trees that reach gracefully up to scrape the sky. But even better than Neighborhood Park's prettiness is its convenience -- a stone's throw from my place, with a perfect half-mile perimeter for dog walking, and, best of all, a sign at the front gate informing all who enter that dogs are permitted to be off-leash between the hours of 9:00pm and 9:00am.

I am not exaggerating when I say that Neighborhood Park's allowance for freewheeling dogs has saved my life. Because I need to exhaust my dog, you guys -- exhaust him, or be faced with an entire workday punctuated by whining and sniffing and the unnerving realization, every ten minutes or so, that I am being panted on. Hot dog breath is an inspiration-killer, and I can't get anything done unless Hurley the Golden Retriever has been run ragged. And now, by the grace of the Neighborhood Park, what once required hours of stiff-legged walking in the frigid cold can be accomplished in less than twenty minutes with an empty lawn and a tennis ball. (Because, you know, golden retriever.)

At this point, it's become a routine: Hurley and I arrive at the park around 7:30, we walk once around the perimeter, and then we pop into the triangular patch of grass at the south-east corner for ball-playing time. I throw, the dog retrieves, occasional passersby will stop to watch my glorious, floppy-eared friend as he charges back and forth across the lawn. The gardener and several other park employees know us both by name, and it's all very fun and friendly and Brooklyn cute.

So I didn't think anything of it when yesterday, near the end of ball-playing time, a burly man in a parks uniform came striding down the path toward me.

"Hey!" he called.
"Hello," I said.
"Let me ask you something," he shouted, stopping about fifteen feet in front of me. His voice was a tough-guy caricature, turning "let me" into "lemme" and "ask" into "ax".

"Sure!" I chirped, thinking, Ten to one he's got a bet with his friend over there that Lassie was a golden retriever.

Burly gestured toward the opposite corner of the park. "There's a dog run right over there," he sneered.

I looked in the direction of the dog run, and then back at Burly, and it was at this point that a small voice piped up in my brain to suggest that perhaps this wasn't a friendly visit after all. Because friendly people do not usually have conversations by shouting at you from a distance, and also, because Burly's face was contorted beneath his green ribbed skullcap into an expression of pinched pissed-off-itude.

"So what makes you so special," he shouted, puffing up his chest and glaring at me, "that you don't have to have your dog in the dog run like everyone else?"

I blinked, and suddenly felt like I was back in second grade -- tiny, trembling, and being informed by a looming adult that I had been a Very Bad Girl. I tried to smile disarmingly.

"Um... it's before nine o'clock," I said, and tried to point back toward the entrance sign. "The sign says--"
"DESIGNATED AREAS ONLY!" Burly shouted. I stared back, desperately trying to remember the exact wording of the sign, and realizing at the same time that even if I was right, the frothing oaf in front of me was probably not going to care. I took a deep breath.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know," I said, still smiling and keeping my voice as mild as possible. Do not provoke the beast, my brain whimpered. Maybe he'll go away.

But Burly Meaniepants, Park Avenger, was having none of it. He made an exaggerated show of smacking his forehead and rolling his eyes, then shouted, "Well, maybe you should ASK QUESTIONS, huh?!"

Now convinced that I was dealing with someone seriously unhinged, I took a step backward and kept smiling.
"Okay!" I chirped.
Burly turned to walk away, then turned back and pointed furiously at the lawn. "You wanna know where your tax dollars are going?" he yelled. "Right there!"

I looked at the lawn -- which was looking rather the worse for wear, but which Burly seemed to think was the exclusive fault of my dog, which is just ridiculous. I took another step back, still smiling.
"Okay!" I said again.

Burly threw his hands in the air and made a big show of walking away in a huff.

I clipped the leash onto Hurley's collar and sped away in the opposite direction. But as I passed out of the park gate, I stopped -- there was the sign, and on it, a clearly-written line that said:

Dogs must be leashed at all times, except in designated areas, between the hours of 9:00am and 9:00pm.

I'd been right, not that it mattered.

* * *

Except that thirty minutes later, inside my apartment, I was pissed. Who the fuck does that guy think he is? I fumed. Not only was he WRONG, he was TOTALLY RUDE. Why should he get away with that?

At which point, with my blood boiling and fury fogging my brain, I threw my coat on and charged back out the door and toward the park, intent on finding Burly Meaniepants and giving him a piece of my mind.

He was, of course, not there.
I briefly considered going home. But then:

"Excuse me," I said, coming up behind a moustached parks employee who was clearing fallen branches from the garden. "I'm looking for a man who was here earlier, around eight o'clock? Big guy, sort of burly, wearing a green beanie hat?"
Moustache looked wearily at me. "You know his name?"
"No," I said. "But he was... um, burly?"
"Was he black?" asked Moustache.
"No," I said, and then added, "he was mean."

Moustache scratched his head. "It could have been John," he muttered. And then, "Can I help you with something?"

I recounted the morning's exchange, finishing by pointing out the sign.
"The sign might be wrong," said Moustache.
My stomach sank. "Oh," I said.
"You know what? The parks director for this district is here. You should talk to him."
"Okay," I said, reluctantly shuffling after him, ready to be upbraided again for permitting the unpardonable sin of off-leash dog exercising, and also possibly blamed for all damage done to the park over the past ten years, because why not.

So, imagine my relief when the absolutely charming, polite, AND handsome parks director listened to my story and said, "Of course you can have your dog off-leash before nine! That guy was WRONG!"

Vindication!

* * *

An hour later, I recounted the full story to my mother -- including the part where the lovely, well-coiffed, nice-smelling parks director promised to deal with Burly Meaniepants, and then shook my hand and said, "You have fun with your dog out there, okay? Tell him to enjoy it. Tell your dog to ENJOY IT!"

"Ha!" she crowed. "But you didn't see that mean guy again, huh?"
"No," I said.
"That's too bad," she said. "I mean, it's great how this worked out, but it would be really great if you got to rub his face in it."
"I know," I said, "but I doubt I'll see him again."

...Except that this morning, as Hurley and I rounded the final turn of our perimeter walk, a man stepped out in front of me. Tall, broad-shouldered, grizzled, and wearing a green ribbed skullcap.

Burly Meaniepants.

He didn't recognize me.
"Nice dog," he said, as I stopped in front of him.
I grinned.

And then I said, "You were really freaking rude to me yesterday."

Burly's smile seemed to slide from his face and dribble along his collar before disappearing completely.

"Uh," he said. "When?"
"I was exercising my dog," I said, pointing to the lawn. "And you gave me a really hard time about it."
"Oh," he said. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that a small crowd of parks employees had gathered to watch the exchange.
"And just so you know," I said, still smiling, "I spoke to Neil, and dogs are allowed to be off-leash in this park before nine o'clock."
"Well," said Burly, "I just found that out yesterday. Every park is different, you know."
"Uh-huh," I said. "Except you were wrong, and you were rude, and it was completely unnecessary."

(Note: If any of you have been harboring any lingering doubts about what a very, very special kind of asshole Burly Meaniepants is, this next bit should clear things up nicely.)

"You know," he said, his voice growing hard and his eyes flicking briefly to the eavesdropping audience before focusing back on me, "I serve two-hundred thousand people in this district, okay? And, like, fifty percent of them break the rules, so it's not my problem if..."
I raised my eyebrows.
"I mean, if I was rude, uh, I apologize," he scoffed in way that was distinctly unapologetic.
"Thank you for apologizing," I said.

(Note: If any of you are still unsure about Burly Meaniepants' status as a Very Special Asshole, then keep reading, because that should have been the end of it, and yet, Burly wasn't done.)

"But you know," he continued, puffing out his chest and glaring at me, "like I said, I see a lot of riff-raff. And if you don't believe me, you can just take my job for a day and see how you like it," and he was really getting going now, his voice getting louder, and he extended one meaty finger in my direction before snapping, "because I see two hundred thousand people--"

And then it happened.

"Yes," I said sweetly, still smiling, cutting him off in mid-stream. "And I'm sure you're nasty to every single one of them."

Have you ever had a moment like this? One in which, by virtue of a brief rip in the space-time continuum and also, possibly, by the grace of God himself, your mouth opens and your voice comes out and the words you put together make up the most perfect situational comeback EVER? Because oh, it was glorious. And it will probably never happen again.

Burly's mouth dropped open. One of the other parks employees snickered. I turned on my heel with a flourish, practically shaking at the serendipity of the whole thing.

"Let's go, Hurley," I said. Hurley gamely dropped the stick he'd been chewing and trotted along with me.
Behind me, Burly recovered and shouted, "Hey, wait a sec! Hey, come back here!"

I turned around.
"No!" I said.

And then, because I am extremely mature, I also shouted, "You're a JERK!"

...Oh, I'm sorry, were you looking for a climactic finish? Well, okay.
AND THEN I STABBED HIM.

The end.

Night terrors.

2010-01-28T00:33:00.005+01:00

An impromptu trip to see my family this week found me sleeping in my childhood bedroom, alone, for the past two nights. And when I say "sleeping", I mean "staring wide-eyed into the dark and trying desperately not to pee in my jammies".

This is not an unfamiliar sensation. Many things have changed in my parents' house since I was a child, but this -- the strategic placement of terrifying objects in spots where they ought not to be -- remains the same. I appreciate the sense of continuity, if not the constant goosebumps and sense of impending doom. Oh, yes, darling, you can go home again... IF YOU DARE.

I should be used to it by now. The house is old, and it creaks, and there are cold corners and long hallways and high-ceilinged rooms that swallow everything in darkness. It's all run-of-the-mill and not that frightening, until you factor in the other Various Scary Things that have become part of the landscape over the years -- the carved bust of a long-dead relative staring with sightless eyes from the corner of the living room, the odd Halloween mask dropped jauntily over the head of the newel post, paintings of flowers that have creepy faces in the center of the blossoms. (Yes, they do.)

This is my mother's doing. Mostly. Okay, I admit: some of it, like the empty-eyed bust, is genuine heirloom-whatever, and we have it, and so it has to be displayed no matter how scary it is. But there are other things, other things, for which there is no such excuse. Items that have been purchased, intentionally, and I can't even begin to imagine where; somewhere, there must be an untravelled store aisle marked "Things That Will Make People Scream and/or Pee". When I was seven, my mom brought home a life-sized Raggedy Ann Doll with oily glass eyes and a frozen smile. She put it in my room. She put it in a chair facing the bed, you guys, so that its black, empty stare would be the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. Incredibly, she was never arrested for child abuse.

When people say, "Wow, I've never known someone who was almost thirty and still scared of the dark!", I tell them about Raggedy Ann. And then I shudder.

Anyway, twenty years later, Mom hasn't lost her touch. Raggedy Ann is long-gone, of course, but there's always something to serve the same purpose. Like, say, this.

The perfect addition to your boudoir decor, dear readers. By day, a dressmaker's dummy; by night, a shadowy, humanoid form, lurking in the corner behind the door, so that your guests can periodically wake up and discover that there's somebody in the roooooooooooom.

Mom, I know you're reading this, and I know I was all, "Oh, it's fine. Fine. I'm not bothered by it at all," but I lied, okay. Please get it out of there. For the love of God, you do not even MAKE DRESSES.

Pheromoan.

2010-01-18T22:48:00.002+01:00

Back in my early twenties, before Brad had entered the picture and when all I really wanted to do was a) drink copious amounts of brown liquor and b) make out with everything in pants, a friend and I were discussing the challenges of the New York dating scene.

“You know,” she said, “it's not even that I can't make a relationship work – it's that I can't freaking meet anyone. In bars, on the street, in the subway... it's like no matter what I do nobody ever even tries to talk to me. You know what I mean?”

“Um,” I said.

Because while I definitely had my share of dating disasters – from bad first dates to terrible relationships to the time that I accidentally menstruated on an architect – the “meeting people” part was never really a problem. Neighborhood boys would chat me up while we waited in line for hangover bagels; friends of friends would ask for my number at parties; men in suits would drop business cards into my purse with a wink, mouthing, “Call me!”. I'd step on the train at 14th Street, and get off at Houston having traded digits with the guy sharing my subway pole. And once, in a moment which pretty much made my entire decade, a Hugh Jackman look-alike strode up to my table at a Thai restaurant, grinned, and actually dropped a note with his number on it next to my water glass.

And lest anyone think I'm using this as a precursor to claiming that I am, in fact, the hottest woman in New York (because really, at best, I might rank as “kinda cute”), my friend quickly put her finger on the truth of the matter.

“Well,” she said, “you're very... approachable.”

Which is a nicer way of saying that when I am out in public, I ooze a sort of friendly chemical-based Eau de Slut, which creeps up behind the backs of male strangers and taps them on the shoulder and shouts, in an oozy-chemical sort of way, “Hey, you see that girl over there? If you talk to her, she'll totally have sex with you!”

As a single person, oozing Eau de Slut had obvious and myriad benefits.
As a married person, it... doesn't.
And I can't stop oozing.

Not that this is happening all the time, okay, because it isn't, and I'm also not pretending that I don't sometimes like the attention, because... duh.

But too often, added to the fact that I rarely interact with other people anymore, and also the fact that my flirt-detecting skills are totally atrophied from disuse (“Wait a minute... is this guy talking to me, or is he TALKING to me?”), the result of any male approach is an increasingly awkward conversation that ends with me realizing too late that, oh fuck, we are TALKING, at which point I frantically attempt to defuse the entire situation by suddenly shouting, mid-conversation: “By the way! In case you are hitting on me, I am married!”

I also sometimes hold up my left hand, rings out, as supporting evidence, which is so obnoxious that I kind of can't believe nobody has torn my arm off in retaliation.

I need a better method, here.

I mean, apart turning to my friends at random intervals throughout the night and saying, “Hey, do I look like I want to have sex with you? No? Okay.”

Because I am already doing that.

Questions and answers

2010-01-06T18:53:00.002+01:00

Since the last post, countless readers have absolutely made my day with congratulations and sweet compliments about the book -- which is really incredible, considering that none of you have read it. (Careful, you guys! It might really suck, and then we'll all feel like idiots!)

But I've also gotten a lot of questions about it. The three most popular:

- What's it about?
- Who's the intended audience?
- Will it be published? When?!

And the answers to these questions are as follows:

- It's complicated.
- I'm not sure.
- I don't know, and I don't know.

And so, not to be coy, but at the moment it's best that we all forget I ever said anything about this, at least for the foreseeable future. I'm not good at being patient, and I'm not good at letting things unfold on their own, and now I have to do both. AT THE SAME TIME. It's out of my hands.

And right now, there is nothing to report.

And if I allow myself to wonder about the potential outcomes of this thing -- this thing that has been burning a hole in my brain and pouring from my fingertips in fits and starts and huge, vomitous chunks for the past three years -- I will drive myself utterly fucking insane. People keep telling me that I should just be happy to have finished it; that the completion is an accomplishment, all by itself.

Not to me, it isn't. Nope. The choices are as follows: Publication, or self-made nutcase. And if this thing doesn't reach its logical conclusion in the form of a purchase-able object on Amazon dot com, you can rest assured that the latter will come to pass. They'll find me running through a nearby park wearing nothing but mismatched underwear and an aviator's hat, singing the lyrics to "Louie, Louie", and trying to lick the sternums of passing senior citizens.

And I don't even know "Louie, Louie".

So, let us pretend for now that I haven't written a damn thing.
Because if and when there is news, trust me, you will not be able to shut me up.

BUT.

There is this other question -- a question that crops up occasionally, and which never fails to amuse me -- that I can answer. So, here you go. To all the people who have asked if I was, am, or have ever been the writer behind The Company Bitch:

No.

Also, I love you.

Oh, those naughty aughties.

2009-12-31T22:11:00.004+01:00

My primary activity this afternoon, apart from napping and noshing on Papa John's cheese sticks -- which, by the way, seem to contain some form of highly addictive crack, and should probably give rise to some deprivation-based New Year's resolution in which I promise to stop eating them only to suffer a midnight breakdown involving the nearest PJ franchise and a handgun, except that I never make New Year's resolutions, so nevermind -- has been watching the New Year's Eve posts roll in.

General consensus in blogland and elsewhere seems to be that this year was a lousy one, full of overseas terrorism and nasty white supremacists and economic doldrums and waaaaay too many Kanye West-related memes. Indeed, one of my favorite bloggers (and occasional drinking companion) is sending off 2009 with a staunch, one-fingered, and not undeserved "Fuck You". (Go give her some love, will you? She's had a rough year.)

For my part, though, the year has been a winning combination of hideous, hilarious, and heart-warming... and, because I still have a couple hours before I'm due for pizza and champagne with some dear friends, I've put together a linky look back at my favorite moments from January through right-now.

In 2009...

I assembled a bookcase.
I tried not to think about having sex with high school students.
Through a stroke of luck that I still can't fully fathom, I landed the most wonderful writing gig in the world.
I got catcalled... and then, I got angry at Assgobbler Von Cheesecrotch. Despite being a bit dense, he was a pretty good sport about it.
Our rodent problem came to an unnerving conclusion.
I parlayed my freelance, contract position into a full-time copywriting job. I came to regret it.
A lot.
But I was still rather cheesed at being laid off.
I made a friend.
The husband and I celebrated a marriage milestone, went someplace we'd always wanted to go, and vomited on the patio. (Okay, that last one was just me. And it was still awesome.)
And, of course, I wrote my heart out.

It hasn't all been fabulous, but it's certainly been interesting -- for me, anyway, and hopefully for you. And although I'm a little bit poor, a little bit uncertain about what the next year will bring professionally, and more than a little afraid to take a vacation ever again, I'm still happy to lump it all in and give the past twelve months a sloppy, champagne-tinged kiss on the mouth as we ring in 2010.

Happy New Year! (You sexy motherfuckers.)

Word vomit.

2009-12-22T04:11:00.003+01:00

"For the love of fuck," you are probably thinking. "This bitch has been unemployed for two months, and she's not even writing here twice a week! What a loser! And also, her tits are small!"

And readers -- dear, dear readers -- you would be nearly correct. Because I am a small-titted loser.

You'd be wrong about the writing, though.

Since losing my job, I have been writing every day. All day. I've never been so busy, or exhausted. Every morning, I wake up with words rattling around in my skull. They come loose overnight, leftovers from unremembered dreams or unmade phone calls or unsent letters, and they fall on the floor of my mind like objects detaching themselves from the walls during an earthquake.

And then I wake up, and there they are. Words are my all-day, these days.

So, I have a routine. In the morning, I walk the dog and buy a cup of coffee from the bodega across the street, and I think about those words while the dog sniffs the sidewalk and the coffee stays too hot inside its styrofoam container. Adjectives and metaphors and god-knows-what, all coming down the chute.

What, you don't have a word chute? I have a word chute.

I think of clever openings, grab-em pitch lines. I think of conclusion quips. I think of ways to describe the styrofoam, which squeaks and gives under my fingernails and breaks like it wants to bite me. It's not surprising, I guess, that it refuses to biodegrade. Styrofoam: refusing to unmake itself since 1940.

This is my morning. Coffee takes forty minutes. I never actually finish it, because around minute twenty, I lose myself in work and forget that it's there. At minute thirty-nine, I pick up the cup and take a sip and make a noise like a cat, like a cat dying, because the coffee has gone cold.

Morning-to-noon: I sit at my computer and write flippant-yet-heartfelt advice to teenagers with adorable problems. "Talk to your parents." "She's a bad friend." "Just tell him; he already knows, anyway." The fact that I get paid to do this is both a delight and a continuous shock.

And in the afternoon, in hours that seem to evaporate in a storm of words and the click-click-click of the keyboard, I... also write. I write non-stop. Words are falling around my ears so fast that I can't type to keep up. Sometimes I forget to eat, and sometimes I forget to move, and then Brad comes home and wants to know why I'm sitting in the dark with my eyes sinking back in my head and my stomach making sounds like a barnyard animal.

And when I sit back down and log in here, beer in hand, thinking that I ought to deposit something in my little corner of the internet -- even if it's the literary equivalent of walking into the room and taking a dump on the carpet -- things just feel dry. There are words rattling around, sure, but they're things like "egg sandwich" and "wicket" and "fleep". Is fleep a word? No, it's not. And I'd better just quit, and go to bed.

But come the dawn of 2010, I'll be back. Not because I'm making a resolution to blog more, but because I've been writing a novel.

And although something could still happen to stop me, if all goes according to plan, I am going to finish it.

This week.

Oh, relief.
(If you feel like giving me a golf clap, I urge you to indulge yourself and do so.)

And a merry, merry Christmas to all of you -- you sexy motherfuckers.

A post without a point.

2009-12-14T16:15:00.003+01:00

Hearing people talk about their dreams is possibly the dullest thing in the world. I know this, and that's why you must trust me when I say that I'm sorry, but I think somebody has been lacing my pillowcases with osmotic LSD.

This is not "slightly peculiar". Not "a little weird". Not average-wackness from which you wake just enough to think, "Huh, that was odd", before falling immediately back to sleep -- nope, not what we're dealing with, here. This is a whole other kind of weird, the kind where you jolt awake, sweating, clawing the wall, and then lie in bed for hours trying desperately to remember whether you watched Mulholland Drive or ate pickles mixed with peyote before going to sleep, because if not, what the hell.

I dreamed that I was a substitute teacher in Victorian England, and one of the girls in my class of rag-clad moppets informed me that she spent every afternoon making out with her female classmates in the janitorial closet.

I dreamed that Walter Bishop, from the television show FRINGE, was sending me contagious biological agents in the mail, causing the federal government to arrest me and throw me in a prison where I had to go to the bathroom in front of everyone.

I dreamed that I freaked out an express elevator, and somebody filmed the entire thing and put it on YouTube, causing me to gain nationwide notoriety. I even remember the video itself in great detail: it was set to a vaguely Pink Floyd-ish soundtrack and titled "Elevator Hot Howl".

God, I'm tired.

Squeeze. Pass it on.

2009-12-07T03:01:00.004+01:00

Ever since Brad and I coupled up and began dividing holiday time between our respective families, my Thanksgiving Experience has undergone a bit of a shift. It's like this: what was once a joyful, delightful celebration marked by mass pie consumption and near-constant drunkenness, has now become a joyful, delightful celebration marked by mass pie consumption and near-constant drunkenness... in which I am periodically paralyzed by the fear that, due to my decidedly un-Southern upbringing, I will blow it with my husband's family by committing some sort of terrible, unforgivable, crude Northern faux pas.

In my worst nightmares, said faux-pas results not only in complete humiliation, but also immediate expulsion from the family.

"Get out, you Yankee whore!" my in-laws scream, in the imagined aftermath of my imagined offense. "And give us back our surname!"

Chances are, this will never happen . Not because I'm incapable of doing something really stupid as a guest at someone else's home -- trust me, I am more than capable -- but because Brad's family is so nice that they would almost certainly forgive whatever I'd done. With the exception of, say, setting their house on fire. Or at least, setting their house on fire ON PURPOSE.

But that doesn't stop me from worrying about it. And that goes double when I find myself in unfamiliar territory with regards to family traditional activities -- when it becomes obvious that Something Important Is Happening, but I don't quite know what, and all I can do is surreptitiously watch Brad for social cues while praying that my intrusive brain will stop distracting me with ridiculous thoughts like Hey, what if you shouted "PENIS!" right now?

So, when we were sitting down to dinner on the day before Thanksgiving, and my father-in-law suddenly motioned to everyone to hold hands and bow their heads, I joined hands with Brad on the right and my brother-in-law on the left... and immediately started worrying. (Ah, secular upbringing: Great in every way, except for the lingering awkwardness and uncontrollable urge to giggle when people are saying grace.) Half-listening to my father-in-law's speech, I eyed my fellow family members for cues as to what we were doing -- Should I look more serious? Bow my head? Apologize to my brother-in-law for the sweaty palms? -- and then suddenly, on my righthand side, Brad squeezed my hand.

In its hyper-observant and nervous state, my brain responded by freaking out.

What was that? He never squeezes your hand during grace! What's going on?

Sweating, I looked around again. I was running out of time to figure it out. Were other people squeezing? Was I supposed to DO something?

And then, at the height of my confusion... he did it again.

Holy shit!, my brain screamed. It's got to be some sort of family ritual!

And then, a rush of familiarity: it clicked. Of course! They were passing it -- passing the squeeze! Each person pressing the hand of the family member to their left, thus sending a little bolt of love around the circle. Thanksgiving! Family! Comfort and joy! It made perfect sense.

Sighing with relief, and not wanting to be responsible for breaking the cycle, I immediately gave my brother-in-law's hand an affectionate squeeze.

At which point my logical brain, which had been quietly standing to the side in order to perform a non-panicked analysis of the squeeze, looked up from the corner and said, What the HELL did you just do?

Gripped with the sudden, inescapable sensation that I had been a bit too hasty in my hand-squeezing, I tried to calm myself by watching the movement make its way around the rest of the circle.

Look, I thought, staring at my brother-in-law's other hand. There's gonna be a squeeze over there. Wait for it!

I waited.
Nothing happened.

You asshole, my brain said, as my cheeks started to get red of their own accord. Passing the squeeze? Are you serious? That's something you do in high school drama club, not while saying grace! You just squeezed your brother-in-law's hand like some kind of surreptitious flirty person! What is WRONG with you?!

But while the potential fallout of this squeeze-passing misunderstanding -- "Uh, Brad? Your wife was hitting on me." -- could have been the game-changer that resulted in both intense personal embarrassment and possible eviction from the family, it was Thanksgiving. A time to forgive, a time for extra-special family closeness, and a time, if there ever was one, to do your extended family members a humiliation-saving solid.

Which is why this post is dedicated to my 6-month-old niece -- who, just as I was in the midst of immediately and intensely regretting the squeeze, did me the immense favor of distracting my brother-in-law by throwing up all over him.

The resolution of this possibly-mortifying situation has left me blissfully free to forget all about the squeezing incident. It's over, it's done with, and I can absolutely devote my full attention to other, more important things.

Like the box of tampons I accidentally spilled all over my in-laws kitchen floor.

Boredom and border collies.

2009-12-02T14:48:00.005+01:00

As touched upon during last year's period of unemployment, spending quality time with Hurley the Golden Retriever is one of the funner parts of being home all day. The dog, for his part, is ecstatic about the whole thing -- for the first week, he kept looking up at me with ears perked and tongue lolling crazily from the side of his mouth, like, "You're still here? You're here all day?! You're here all day every day??? OH MY GOD YES!"

But, and this is probably more important, Hurley is the one thing that consistently gets me out of the house each day. Because, y'know, he needs to pee... and I need to interact with other human beings, lest I completely lose the ability to act like a normal, functional adult. (Yes, this actually happens. QUICKLY. The other day, after a week or so of spending my days completely by myself, I ran into an old friend on the street and realized midway through our conversation that I was talking at approximately 1,000 miles per hour.)

So early yesterday, I took the dog for his usual walk, allowing strangers to stop and pet him, chatting about the weather, wandering up and down the streets of my neighborhood. We met a group of little kids on their way to school. We crossed the street just in front of a moving truck and waved to the man behind the wheel. We stopped to say hello to Hurley's biggest fan, a woman known to me only as The Crossing Guard with the 80s Bangs.

A half-hour later, we were on our way back to the apartment when I suddenly heard a voice to the left of me calling, "Excuse me! Excuse me, miss?"

I turned to look -- it was the driver of the moving truck, pulled up to the side of the road, smiling and waving out the window.

"Miss! Excuse me!"
I stopped next to the truck. "Yes?"
"What sort of dog is that?"
"This?" I said, pointing at Hurley. "This is a golden retriever."
"Yeah, okay!" the guy said, nodding. I turned to go, but he pointed at the dog.
"Hang on," he said. "So Lassie was a golden retriever too, right?"

I thought for a minute.
"Er... no. Lassie was a collie."

From inside the truck, there came a sudden shriek of man-laughter. Another guy appeared in the window, shaking with mirth and pointing derisively at his friend, and shouted, "I knew it! I knew it!"

"Dammit," moaned the driver, looking totally disappointed.
The other guy, still cackling, gave me a double thumbs-up.
"Haha!" he shouted. "I just won lunch!"

And maybe it's just because the bar is set sort of low these days, but this totally made my week. Partly, it's because I rarely get to talk to people anymore. But mostly, it's because the time difference between when I waved to the guy in the moving truck vs. when he stopped to ask me about the dog means that he and his burly friend had been arguing.
About Lassie.
For twenty-five minutes.

For the last time, I am NOT stealing that dog.

2009-11-20T14:38:00.007+01:00

A few nights ago, while in the midst of a conversation with somebody who I did not know nearly well enough to bring this up, I made an attempt to explain what's recently been going wrong with my brain.

It went something like this.
“So it's like this,” I said, waving my beer around the way people do when they're really making sense. “Sometimes I think about hijacking people in wheelchairs.”

I know exactly the face you are making right now, readers, because the person I was talking to made the exact same one. Okay, lesson learned! Clearly, the wheelchairs were a bad place to start. But let me try this again:

One of the side effects of hanging out with myself all day is that the inside of my head has turned into a sort of echo chamber for weird, wacky, un-say-able things that (I assume) would normally be drowned out by daily interaction with other human beings. It seems like other people – coworkers, fellow commuters, the coffee cart guy – serve as a reset button for my obnoxious, intrusive brainchatter. A reset button that I don't have anymore; instead, I have a bored brain which now likes to entertain itself by a) identifying the single most horrible thing I could do in any given situation, and then b) reminding me about said horrible thing relentlessly, at increasing volume, until I really just want to find the nearest shovel and smack myself in the face with it.

As far as I can tell, this is how it works.

I am standing around, minding my own business.
My brain, independently and of its own accord, notices that there's something I could do in this situation to get myself killed, arrested, or ostracized from society.
“HEY!” says Brain. “What if you did this horrible thing I just thought of!”
“What?! That's horrible!” I reply. “I would never do that!”
But Brain is relentless. “But you COULD!” it shouts. “Just think about it! Just think about it until you're so freaked out that you have no choice but to run into the streets naked, wearing a clown mask, and steal the nearest dog!”
“I WOULD NEVER DO THAT EITHER!” I scream (sometimes out loud), and then go find a bottle of bourbon, which I drink until I pass out.

So, if I am standing on a rooftop, a mountain, or the side of the Grand Canyon, my brain will start gleefully shouting, “HEY! What if you JUMPED?!” The fact that I don't want to die is immaterial. Brain doesn't care. Brain is all, “But you COULD! Just sayin!”, as I see myself pitching forward into space, screaming through a brief and terrifying free fall, and then splatting (or, in the case of the Grand Canyon, exploding into very small bits) on the pavement.

If I'm hanging out with my mother-in-law, my brain will occasionally pipe up with, “Hey, what if you called her a whore?!”
“What?” I say. “Shut up! She's not a whore, she's lovely! I would never say anything like that to my mother-in-law!”
“I know, right?!” says Brain. “Everyone would get soooooo mad at you! Can you imagine! Can you imagine?!”

And occasionally, yes, my brain will note the presence of a gentleman in a wheelchair and suddenly fill my head with the image of me, grabbing ahold of the handles, and pushing it away down the street at high speed shouting, “Wheeeeee! Isn't this fun!”, while the hapless veteran I've just hijacked shouts, “Oh my God, somebody call the police!”

Me: I'm not doing that.
Brain: Hey, whatever, dude! I'm just sayin'!

Fortunately, I have the internet – where the wikipedia entry for “Intrusive Thoughts” describes all this to a tee and mentions that it's a universal human experience (although it doesn't specifically mention wheelchair hijacking or clown suits, so I can't be completely sure.) But Christ, universal or not, it is getting really annoying. And Brain, if you're reading this...

SHUT UP.

More girlfriends can only be a good thing.

2009-11-12T16:11:00.003+01:00

One of the interesting things about working with social media is how much it can really blur the lines between the personal and the professional. Take me, for instance: I never thought I'd find myself in a position to do much of anything with this blog beside telling stories about wangs, but lo, it turns out that the internet changes everything.

So, two things about this post:

1. Full disclosure: This event is being run by a client. I'm helping her get the word out.
2. I am sincerely hoping that some of you will assist me in getting the word out by alerting your readers, be it on your blog, or on Twitter, or on Facebook, or by tattooing the relevant information on your butt and hiring someone to drive you around town on a float festooned with balloons and streamers with your pants off.

And now, the details:

On November 19th, GirlfriendCircles.com is hosting an NYC "speed-friending" event at Sweet Revenge in the West Village. This is for women only. (Sorry, guys. We get speed-friending; you get to pee standing up. Sounds fair to me.)

If you've ever moved to a new city, worked in a male-dominated industry, or for some other reason found yourself living sans a group of super-cool women to hang out with, you know what a good idea this is. The premise is simple: $15 buys you an evening of wine, cupcakes, and a roomful of potential BFFs who are looking to make new friends. The rest of it works just like speed-dating (quick meetings with individual women during which you snap-judge your compatibility), except that none of the participants will eventually try to have sex with you. Which is nice.

Tickets are available at a discount for the next day ONLY. So, if you -- or your readers -- live in New York City and are interested in meeting and mingling with a group of cool ladyfolk next week, please do the following:

1. Visit the event page for a ticket. (As previously mentioned, we're all being offered an early sign-up discount right now -- score!)
2. Tell people about it via Twitter, Facebook, your blog, your butt.
3. Alert me to your illustrious internet activities in whatever way you see fit.

That's it!
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

...Oh, one more thing: I sort of forgot to mention this, but I... um... joined Twitter. So if you want to follow me, you can do it here.

She's cheer captain, and I'm... on the floor next to that static ab-work bench, crying.

2009-11-09T19:34:00.005+01:00

Longtime readers might remember this post from last year, in which I recounted a series of unfortunate events that ultimately resulted in a decision to never, ever engage in formal exercise again. (For those disinclined to click through, suffice to say that my left boob was involved, as was half the hipster population of Williamsburg.) This decision made sense at the time; when your daily commute involves three miles of walking, it's easy to be all, Gym? HA! Why should I go to one, when French people don't?!

But then, I got a job. A job that required daily commute by car, to the most unwalkable place on the planet. A job so soul-sucking that I had no choice but to spend every lunch break comforting myself with bagels! And in the absence of regular exercise --and in the presence of my undeniably enlargened ass -- I began to reconsider the whole "gym" thing. I actually reconsidered myself all the way into the parking lot of a local fitness center, armed with $200 worth of signup money, ready to fork it all over for the privilege of giving up Bagel Time in favor of spending my lunch break sweating on an elliptical machine.

I reconsidered, until the point at which I saw people exiting the fitness center -- frowning, unhappy, clammy-looking people in ill-fitting gym wear -- and plodding joylessly to their cars whilst shrieking at each other with Long Island accents.

At which point I reconsidered myself over to a nearby TJ Maxx, where I successfully eradicated the horror of what I had just witnessed by spending my signup money on several pairs of really cute boots.

And that was that.
Until I got laid off, after which one of my first rational thoughts was: Well, maybe I can take this as an opportunity to lose those couple-of-ass-pounds I seem to have acquired during the past year!

(Admittedly: I have no idea whether such a thing is possible. I'm sure I'm not the only person around here who has a 10-pound-ish range of weights that I can see on the scale and think, "Yeah, I'm okay with that"; however, I do wonder if I'm the only one for whom 7 of the 10 acceptable pounds correspond to a number I have never weighed. Those bottom seven are aspirational weights that I might, MIGHT, have seen on the scale sometime before my 7th grade growth spurt. But dammit, a girl has to have dreams!)

And that is why, when my little brother said, "Hey, do you want to come to the gym with me tonight?", I thought about it for a second and said, "Yeah, okay."

Yeah. Okay.

I'd like to say that this ended up being a rebirth of sorts, in which I discovered that I was wrong all this time -- that I love the gym, and its sleek machines, and its burly occupants, and its saturated walls that positively resonate with the sound of free-weight grunting and the heavy scent of MAN MUSK. But instead, this happened:

1. My toes fell asleep on the elliptical machine.

2. And then some random dude came through the door and caught me right in the middle of trying to belt the words to "You Belong With Me" while running on the elliptical machine. (Note: This is more difficult than it sounds.)

3. And then I completely abandoned the embarrassing and toe-deadening elliptical machine in favor of the Slanted Bench That You Lie On To Do Crunches, only to find, when I tried to get up from said bench, that I had gotten stuck in it.

4. And then I fell on the floor and hurt myself.

Yeah.
NO.

I suppose I might attempt the gym again, someday -- for instance, if I become wealthy enough to afford a personal trainer and/or state-of-the-art bionic body parts. But right now, I'm anticipating a winter full of a lot of walking.

On the downside, it will be very cold.

On the upside, I do have several pairs of really cute boots.

In which I have a lot of time on my hands.

2009-11-07T17:41:00.002+01:00

One of the most overwhelming things about being unexpectedly jobless is the sheer volume of unscheduled time that's suddenly dumped in your lap. Readers, if you've ever been laid off, you know what I'm talking about. It turns out that the job you've been going to every day isn't just a source of income; it's the foundation from which you build your day-to-day, and when you take it away, everything else crumbles. The metronome stops ticking. When there's nowhere to go, every step feels purposeless. You wake up, you walk your dog, you buy a coffee, and then, realizing that there is no "and then", you go back to your apartment and stare at the wall and wonder why you got out of bed in the first place.

Yep, that's how it goes.
The first time around, I mean. This time, however -- because I am, apparently, so unlucky and/or generally untalented that I've managed to lose my job twice in the span of a year -- I knew exactly what was coming. And so, with the help of my brother, who is also currently feeling the sting of our loveless and impenetrable economy, I have taken it upon myself to fill the void with VERY IMPORTANT PROJECTS that require GREAT INTELLECTUAL STRENGTH AND STAMINA.

Like, say, gluing googly eyes onto Doritos and using them to make a video.

Yes, we did.

This blog is on 24-hour hiatus for the following epic event.

2009-11-04T15:52:00.004+01:00

If you happen to see this handsome son of a bitch walking around today, wish him a happy 31st. And then slap his ass, 'cause he likes it.

Briefly

2009-11-03T01:04:00.002+01:00

Today, in an effort to feel like a functional and productive human being, I decided to do all the things that functional and productive human beings do. I got up early, bought a coffee, and walked the dog.

Then, I worked until noon.

Then, I took a shower. I got dressed, threw on some shoes and a jacket, and went to the grocery store. I bought an apple and some cheese.

And then I came back, and made myself some lunch.

"Ho!" I said to myself. "Look at all I have accomplished today! I am, dare I say, productive!"

And then I took off my pants.

Because really.

A movie review, of sorts.

2009-10-29T00:41:00.002+01:00

After spending several days with my parents, one of the things I've found most remarkable is how much I really, really like going out with my family. If you were ever a fourteen year-old girl, I'm sure you understand the weirdness, here: to my fourteen year-old self, the possibility that I might actually enjoy an evening out with my family -- that such an activity would ever have any result apart from total humiliation and the fervent wish for swift death --was so impossibly far-fetched that it would have come after "Alien Abduction" on the list of Things I Might Expect To Happen In The Next Twenty Years.

Well, I was wrong.

And so, in addition to having spent the past several days at my parents' place, I have been having a lot of fun hanging with my family -- including an outing earlier this week to see Paranormal Activity with my mom, my dad, and my brother.

And I liked it.

I liked it, that is, until I attempted to go to bed several hours after returning home from the theater, at which point I discovered that I was still scared out of my goddamn mind.

It's my fault, really. I should have guessed. I should have known that Paranormal Activity would, of course, be endowed with the same magical properties as The Blair Witch Project (another movie that scared me so badly that I had to sleep with the lights on for a week).

And it is. Oh boy, is it EVER.

There's no gore, no (visible) monster, no clear resolution in which Jack Nicholson chops his way through the bathroom door or a midget in wacky glasses comes and opens up a ghost-clearing portal in somebody's closet -- just endless tension and loooooong silences and half-seen things that encourage you, the viewer, to envision the Paranormal Entity as most horrible thing your imagination can conjure up on short notice.

Which, if you're me, is pretty goddamn horrible, and not only that, it is probably totally IN YOUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW.

So, for the past several days, my nighttime routine has gone something like this:

12:30 - 1:00am: Lie awake in bed, listening intently to the noises of the house. Jump and scream whenever a cat meows or a door creaks.
1:00 - 1:15am: Attempt to distract myself from meowing and creaking by reading old favorite books like "The Phantom Tollbooth".
1:16am: Suddenly realize how creepy "The Phantom Tollbooth" really is.
1:17 - 1:25am: Attempt to distract myself by thinking about Disney movies.
1:26am: Realize how creepy Disney movies really are.
1:27am: Give up.
1:28am: Turn off the light and attempt to go to sleep.
1:30am: Become convinced that there's a demon in the room.
1:31am: Get really scared.
1:32am: Want to turn on the light, but I'm too afraid to take my arm out from under the covers.
1:35am: Sack up and reach for the light.
1:36am: Fumble for the switch.
1:37am: Get totally freaked out and yank arm back under the covers.
1:38am: Panic.
1:42am: Reach for the light again. Turn the light on.
1:43am: Realize that the light only helps a little bit, because in the movie, the demon was totally messing with them even when the lights were on.
1:44 - 2:00am: Scream very quietly.
2:01am: Get out of bed; exit room in search of cat.
2:05am: Locate cat.
2:06am: Bring cat back to bed. Reason that if a demon is in the room, the cat will try to run away.
2:07am: Relax; cat is purring.
2:08am: Climb into bed. Turn off light.
2:09 - 2:15am: Pet cat.
2:16am: Fall asleep while petting cat.
2:20am: Jolt awake with realization that cat is meowing urgently by the door.
2:21am: THERE IS TOTALLY A DEMON IN HERE.
2:22am: Turn light on.
2:23 - 2:30am: Scream.
2:31am: Let cat out.
2:32 - 2:45am: Scream.
2:46am - 3:30am: Pass out from exhaustion.
3:30am: Repeat above until sunrise.

So basically. if you don't mind never being able to sleep again, I highly recommend that you see Paranormal Activity.

Also, I am now accepting donations of sleeping pills.

A postcard from Coxsackie

2009-10-26T23:32:00.007+01:00

Since losing my job is, apparently, a yearly tradition around here, I have chosen to make the best of it in the aftermath -- by taking part in the now-also-apparently-yearly tradition of bailing on adult life entirely, heading upstate, and mooching off my parents for a few days. Yes, you heard it here first: The "Flee Your Problems" approach to unemployment makes the entire ordeal feel less like failure and more like an impromptu vacation. Albeit a vacation in which you are somewhat depressed, listless, and unable to buy anything. I went to WalMart two days ago, purchased a five-pair-pack of necessary socks, and realized as I threw them on the checkout conveyer that my far-too-brief period of respite from relentless worry about money had just come to a very, very unwelcome end.

At this point, I also briefly considered weeping. But I didn't. Because losing your job is one thing, but losing your job and then crying about it in a WalMart is quite another.

But cheap socks and superstores aside, I will say this: If I had to pick a time of year at which I'd like to lose my job and be left with nothing to do but traipse through the woods...

...or around my hometown neighborhood...

...or through the backyard...

...this would be it. Isn't it pretty?

So, this is my life for the next few days, while I figure things out. I sit on the couch with the dog, I contemplate my future from afar, I eat all the cheese in my mom's fridge, and the sudden loss of my professional livelihood doesn't seem so bad.

If only the dog would stop farting.

Ow, my scrotum of destiny.

2009-10-21T22:11:00.006+02:00

Last week, as I was sitting at my desk and staring out at the dismal landscape of eastern Queens, I found myself fretting over this blog. After years of posting with semi-regularity -- years in which I almost never suffered for a lack of subject material -- I suddenly found that the well had run dry. Life had become staid. My marriage, my dog, my job -- none were providing me with anything approaching a blog-worthy event, and not only that, the vast majority of our office had gone off for an extended stay in China, leaving me with not even the possibility of a maddening encounter with Fuckface Ravioli to supply a few cheap laughs.

Damnit, I thought to myself, if only something interesting would happen!

So I only have myself to blame, really, for the fact that Fuckface Ravioli returned from China yesterday and immediately called me into his office.

"Soooo," he said, folding his hands in front of him gravely, "as you know, I spent a couple weeks in China with Company Honchos Number One and Two."

"Right," I said.

"Aaaaand," he continued, "the company is having some trouble, and Company Honchos Number One and Two have decided to make a few cutbacks."

"I see," I said.

Fuckface Ravioli looked like he was about to cry.
"And they, er, want to eliminate your position."

At this point, my response was more like a series of grunts than actual words.

"I'm sorry!" Fuckface Ravioli said. "I'm doing everything I can to get them to reconsider! I really like working with you! And this place is just so--"

"Excuse me," I said. "Sorry, but they want to eliminate the position? So that would be happening..."

"Oh," said Fuckface Ravioli, and this time, I started to think he might actually cry. "Yeah, that would be... um, on Friday."

At which point, I realized that:

1. Considering that he's been fighting to keep me employed, I should probably stop calling this guy Fuckface Ravioli.
2. Wistfully wishing that something "interesting" would happen to you is the same basic equivalent as begging Fate to bite you in the scrotum.
3. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

Also:
"God damnit!" I shouted, as I collapsed back into my desk chair several minutes later. "Am I going to just lose my job every time I take a vacation from now on?!"

So, yeah, that happened. (As always, anyone who needs a writer, or knows someone who does, is welcome to email me. That little link in the sidebar will take you to a [newly-updated!] website with samples of my work.) Meanwhile, I'd continue in this vein, but I have more important things to do. Like, say, drinking all the beer in my fridge and shouting a lot.

Elsewhere and over there.

2009-10-16T19:42:00.002+02:00

As most of you are probably aware, I have been freelancing for Barnes & Noble's SparkNotes site since the beginning of this year. It is, by far, my favorite writing gig of all time, and I post there three to four times a week about high school-related topics like prom, the SAT, staying awake in class, etc.

But on Fridays -- and this is where things get really exciting-- I get to change it up a bit... when I put on my advice-giving helmet and dole out hard-earned wisdom to bewildered, befuddled, and otherwise angst-ridden teenagers as the infinitely wise guru of all things, Auntie SparkNotes.

And oh my GOD it is SO FUN.

Anyway, I don't often devote blog posts specifically to my work over on SparkNotes (although there is a permalink to my posts in the sidebar, if you ever feel like visiting), but today... well, today, I wrote something that I like so much, I just had to share it with the wider world.

Off with you.

On any given Sunday, anything can happen.

2009-10-11T23:48:00.007+02:00

Back in my dating days, men-of-a-certain-type would always tell me I was an awesome catch after learning that I am, quote, into sports. Which I am. I like playing sports, I like talking about sports, I like watching sports on TV, and I have even been guilty of memorizing bizarre sports trivia for the purpose of spontaneously repeating it at cocktail parties.

"Hey!" I will suddenly shout after three Manhattans and to no one in particular, "Did you guys know that Tim Raines is the only player in history to hit back-to-back home runs on his birthday?!"

But for all the credit I might get for having known the infield fly rule at age seven, I also have a confession to make:

Football, that acme of the American sporting landscape, has always made me go a bit cross-eyed.

This is mostly the fault of my upbringing, courtesy of parents who were highly invested in baseball and soccer but who mostly watched the Superbowl for the commercials (oh God, there's that east-coast liberal elitism everyone is always talking about!). I also blame it on my high school, whose team was so unwatchably terrible that the administration eventually decided it wasn't worth the embarrassment and shut down the football program altogether, and my college, which didn't even have a football field, let alone a group of burly be-spandexed dudes to run around on it.

But regardless of the cause, this guilt is mine: I managed to reach my mid-twenties without any idea of how football actually works.

I have since tried to remedy this, but it's been a slow process punctuated by frequent periods of confusion and occasional abject mortification, because something about watching a game in which I have no goddamn idea what is going on makes me completely fucking crazy.

My early attempts to to learn went something like this:

A helpful friend and I sit down to watch a football game on TV.

Helpful friend: Football is actually very easy to understand.
Me: Okay.
Helpful friend: See, right now, Denver is on offense.
Me: (staring intently at screen) Okay.

Play begins.

Me: (increasing confusion punctuated by flailing and pointing) Wait, what? Where's the football? Does that one man actually touch the other man's balls? Who's that guy? Why is that man running? Does he have the football? Does that guy have the football? Which team is Denver? WHERE IS THE FOOTBALL I CANNOT SEE THE FOOTBALL.

Helpful friend: ...I think we should watch something else.

In this way, I did eventually learn enough about basic play to make my questions more specific ("Why do all football players have such shapely butts?" "Why did the referee just hurl a towel onto the field?" "WHERE IS THE FOOTBALL?") until finally, finally -- like, as of last week -- I had reached a point wherein I could watch a game with a reasonable comprehension of what-the-hell was going on (and without spouting questions like some sort of interrogatory robot with a circuit-board malfunction.)

And all of this was a very good thing. Because this weekend, I attended my very first college football game ever, along with Brad and all of his friends.

Friends who went to a college with a football team.

Friends who can therefore watch a game without intermittently shrieking that WHERE IS THE FOOTBALL I CANNOT SEE THE FOOTBALL.

I was semi-anxious that I might make an ass of myself due to my lack of general football knowledge, but at the half, things were going pretty well -- I had only accidentally cheered for the wrong team once (and only because both teams were wearing the same colors! which would confuse anybody!), and my one outburst had been a totally-acceptable shout of, "But what does that MEAN?!" after the defense got called off-sides. (Response from the guy in front of me: "Don't worry about it.")

And so it was that I came to be standing with an acquaintance of Brad's, drinking deliciously cold beer in the lovely autumnal sunshine, and feeling quite pleased with myself.

"This is fun!" I said.
"Yeah! And I can't believe Brad got married!" said the acquaintance.
"Yeah!" I said, because if there is any other response to that particular remark, I do not know what it is.
"Did you guys meet in college?" he asked.
"No, in the city," I said.
"Where did you go to school?"
I told him.
"Oh," he said, "so did you guys have a football team?"
"No," I replied, "in fact, this is my very first college football game ever!"
"Really! You've never been to a college football game before?" he said.
"Nope," I said. "
"It's great, isn't it?" he said. "Isn't it awesome?"

And then he threw up all over himself.

College football: Yes, it really is awesome.

The Do-Over: An Odyssey in Seven Parts

2009-10-01T22:44:00.019+02:00

Oh, hello.

Yes, I’m back -- but you guys, it was a close decision. In fact, when Sunday rolled around and it was time to pack my bags for the return trip, I was about one beer away from renting an island apartment, sending a “smell ya later!” email to my place of employment, changing my name to Drunkface Vacationpants, and living out the rest of my days from beneath a pile of feta cheese.

However, as reluctant homecomings go, one in which I trade Aegean Island Paradise for Autumn in New York really isn’t so bad. In the meantime, though, I’ll be attempting to recap the most exciting, interesting, and otherwise blog-worthy points of our trip in prose and pictures.

Here we go!

The Do-Over Honeymoon: Eight days of stone stairs, sweet sun, and wine and beer and cats.

Part I: Leaving Here

Here’s where I confess that, all evidence to the contrary, I hate traveling. Oh sure, I like being in other places. But the “traveling” part? The rush to the airport, and the dehumanizing line-shuffle, and the liquids-in-three-ounce-containers, and the ten hours of sitting captive behind some man who is dressed quite elegantly but who is nevertheless emitting farts so foul that it seems like they might actually bring down the plane?

Yeah. That part, I could do without.

But on the day we left, things were going so smoothly that I was feeling cautiously optimistic – our baggage was checked, our boarding passes were in hand, and no beefy TSA official had materialized at the security checkpoint and demanded to search our orifices for explosives. And as we boarded the plane and settled into our seats, I was ready to sing the praises of the entire airline industry… and then, of course, came the following announcement from the overhead speakers.

“Uh, folks,” said the pilot, who was clearly trying to sound authoritative but whose voice carried distinct overtones of I-have-no-idea-what-the-fuck-is-going-on, “We’re gonna ask you to, er, deplane. Yes, everybody off the plane, please.”

Thirty minutes of mass confusion later, everyone was ushered back onto the plane with the explanation that “there was an equipment problem” but “a test confirmed that things were fine”, which is not exactly a comforting turn of phrase given that people cheat on tests and ohmygodwearegoingto DIEEE.

Part II: Getting There

Surprise: We didn’t die.

Also: While I am sure that people did fart on the plane, I never smelled it. Luck!

After a ten-hour flight to Athens and a 45-minute hop to the Cyclades, we finally arrived in Oia. I’ll let it speak for itself.

Heaven. No, I mean it. HEAVEN. Look at this place. Could it be any more adorably Mediterranean?

We rented a traditional apartment in the village, which is built into a hillside overlooking the caldera and the long eastward curve of Santorini. I spent most of my time out here, on the private veranda, pretending to be Esther Williams.

An interesting fact: Traditional architecture in Oia places the bathroom outside the living quarters, such that one must get up, exit the room, and walk across the pitch-black porch and up a small staircase in order to have a midnight pee.

Another interesting fact: For reasons unknown, it is strictly verboten to actually throw toilet paper into the toilets in Oia. Instead, they give you a trash can. Yes, a trash can.

Part III: Free Cats for Everyone

On our first night, we were joined by a surprise guest. Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to Stavros Beercan, The Vacation Cat.

Stavros showed up on our veranda looking for love, and we were only too happy to adore him with all the delirious enthusiasm of a pair of drunk sorority girls. After several hours of petting and purring and cheese-feeding, we said goodnight and went to bed, where we laughed about what a one-night whore he was. We did not expect to see him again.

But he was there when we woke up.

And the day after that.

Ultimately, Stavros spent the better part of every day sitting on our veranda, and also showed up on our last morning to say goodbye. I miss him.

Part IV: The Long Walk

A winding staircase built into the hillside at the western end of the island leads down to the Oia harbor. In a tavern on the waterfront, we sat down to have lunch and watch the boats. Our waiter was very charming – which is how he convinced us that what we really, really needed to do that day was EAT A FIVE-POUND, FRESHLY-CAUGHT GROUPER.

This is the hideous aftermath of that decision.

Why, you ask, are my hands covered with fish in this picture? Because just when we thought we’d finally put away the last of it, our waiter sauntered past and cast a skeptical glance at the plate.

“What?” I wheezed, clutching my stomach. “Didn’t we do a good job?”

The waiter raised his eyebrows, gestured at the fish carcass, and said, “Well, if you were Greek, you would have eaten those other parts.”

“Oh yeah?!” I said, and then, not wanting to commit the hideous sin of UNGREEK fish-eating, tore open the fish head with my bare hands and ATE IT.

As it turns out, fish cheeks are the best part.

One grouper, ten anchovies, and three beers later, it was time to climb back up.

There are 528 steps in that staircase. We know this because, just as we started the arduous climb back up, a cheerfully malevolent Englishman clapped Brad jovially on the shoulder and said, “Just 528 steps to go! Ha, ha!”

Ha, ha.

Stopping halfway to pant.

The view from up top.
When we finally got up here, Brad said, “Now let’s take a cab back down to the bottom and harass that English dude when he starts to climb up.”

Part V: Literary Binge

Private veranda + Aegean breeze + hours of afternoon downtime = Reading heaven. I finished five books during this trip – Lolita, The Alienist, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the new Dan Brown book, and My Sister’s Keeper. (Recommended: all but the last, which was so much poorly-developed and manipulative shittery that I would have chucked it out the window, had I not been on a plane at the time. Ugh.)

Part VI: Downfall

If you’ve been feeling jealous over having been stuck at your desk for the past week while I was off jet-setting and climbing stairs and mauling fish faces, this is where you breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Well, at least I didn’t spend my Friday night throwing up every half-hour until the sun came up!”

Yeeeeah.

The paella I had ordered didn’t taste quite right, but our waitress kept looking worriedly at my untouched plate and asking me whether everything was okay, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. So I ate it.

Two hours later, I was sweating, feverish, and puking every twenty minutes. I threw up in the sink. I threw up in the trash can. I threw up into the storm drain on our veranda when it turned out that the outdoor bathroom was just too damn far away. In between throwing up, I hallucinated that a large, flesh-colored Fisher Price Person was standing at the foot of my bed and staring at me.

I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.

Suffice to say: The only thing worse than getting food poisoning is getting food poisoning on vacation in a place where the bathroom is outside the house, and furthermore, where the soiled evidence of your spewing misery cannot even be flushed down the damned toilet.

And also that I have seen the Angel of Death, and he has plastic hair and no arms.

Part VII: Rejuvenation

One of food poisoning’s parting gifts is that, for the next 48 hours, you are reduced to a plodding, exhausted, easily-winded shell of your former self. I got sick on Friday, which meant that our planned Sunday activity – to hike the cliffside path from Oia to the larger town of Fira – had to be scrapped. Which is disappointing.

Bright side of the disappointment: Taking the opportunity to wander down a hidden path on the hillside below our apartment, and discovering that it leads to the sea. And so, 24 hours after the Worst Vacation Experience Ever, on the afternoon before we left, I skipped down a sinuous trail lined with crumbled reddish stone, kicked off my shoes, and plunged headlong into the Aegean.

The sensation of floating on the surface of an infinite, impossible depth is semi-unnerving – you wonder what else might be down there, and you feel a bit like bait – but not unnerving enough to stop swimming. Look at the blue.

And finally, here we are, tanned and freckled and watching the sunset on our last day:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Do-Over: Successfully completed.

THE END.

Let's try this again.

2009-09-18T13:24:00.005+02:00

Around this time last year, Brad and I were newly married and making the final preparations for a much-anticipated two-week honeymoon in Hawaii. And boy, were we excited! The plane tickets were purchased, the hotel was booked, our lust for Mai Tais (and, um, each other) was burning at an all-time high, and we were Ready to Go. And on the day before we left -- a day much like this one, a day where my bags were packed and my projects were wrapped up and a glorious vacation from all the stresses of work and wedding-planning and everyday responsibility was waiting on the horizon...

...I got fired.

Yeah.

I tried -- I really, really did -- not to let the unexpected turn of events ruin our trip, and it was still a lovely vacation, but... well, what can I say. As it turns out, it is just not possible to get sacked the day before your honeymoon and then blissfully ignore the looming spectre of imminent unemployment while you jet off to an island paradise for two weeks. (Well, perhaps it is possible for you. But for me, the highly unethical and spineless actions of my former employer ended up casting a distinct shadow of gloom over the entire thing. A shadow which all the mai tais in the world could not erase.)

And now, a year later, I have just one thing to say:

FUCK THAT. We are HAVING A DO-OVER.

In 48 hours, I will be here.

That is all.

See you BAMFs in October.

printing: Look at this haughty bitch.

2009-09-16T15:18:00.004+02:00

Apparently, getting inky is a really good way to recharge after a few weeks of way too much writing. So earlier this week, I carved and printed a small reduction lino-cut in 3 colors.

Post-upload annoyance: The the camera flash is reflecting off the black ink at center and making it look not-uniform.
Dammit.

This print is based on a photograph I found online and wanted to play with. As a college student (i.e. before Photoshop was readily available, and shit, I'm old), when I wanted to make designs based on photographs, I would: 1) adjust the contrast settings on images, 2) print them out in grayscale, and 3) use a few markers to block out areas until the full-spectrum image was reduced down to 3 or 4 colors.

Now, however, Photoshop has a "cutout" filter which does all that for me. I gave it a try for this print, just to see what I'd end up with, and it certainly made life easier.... BUT, it also felt a bit like cheating. Creating the plate and printing the image on paper is all done completely by hand, but does the fact that I'm getting technological help to create the initial design cheapen the whole process? (Seriously, I'm asking.)

Here's the haughty bitch in quadruplicate:

Also, if you're currently thinking to yourself, "Hey, I've always wanted a haughty bitch like that!" -- you can have one for a few bucks. (I've got nine of her.) She's a perfect addition to any bathroom wall, where she'll sneer at you while you pee.

Bow wow wow.

2009-09-14T02:57:00.004+02:00

Early Sunday morning, Brad and I dragged ourselves out of bed, stuffed a few bottles of water into a backpack, threw a leash on the dog, and piloted Eggo Beanrocket northward for a few hours of cliffside hiking in New Jersey. (Yes, that New Jersey. Who knew!) The route we took is known as the Alpine Loop, a lovely, long trail that winds along the Hudson and through the woods at the base of the Palisades. The hike is one of my close-by favorites -- it's a long walk, but the terrain is easy, the view is beautiful, and bushes full of fragrant flowers bloom on the path all summer long.

Given all this, you'd think it would be an ultra-popular destination for city people looking for some one-on-one time with nature, but weirdly, the loop is not particularly well-trafficked. I've spent whole mornings there without ever seeing another person, and even on a sunny-and seventy day like this one, we made our way into the woods and along the river shoreline for miles without seeing a soul. But when you do cross paths with other people -- and this is where things get slightly weirder -- they are almost always groups of elderly Koreans who appear to have bought their hiking ensembles directly off the mannequins at Land's End. (Note: It's not that I think elderly Koreans shouldn't be hiking, or even that they shouldn't be doing it in moisture-wicking, color-coordinated, khaki-and-canvas outfits in various tasteful shades of heather. It just leaves me wondering whether, given that the path's ratio of elderly Korean hikers to non-elderly, non-Korean hikers is about fifteen to one, we're missing something here. Like, say, a sign that says "Free beer and Cheetos for all elderly Korean hikers; the rest of you can fuck off." That would explain a lot.)

After a few miles of trekking and a short swim in the Hudson for Hurley, we turned around and made our way back toward the trailhead. The day had gotten gorgeous, and a fair number of people had started coming out to hike. We saw a couple families, one woodsy-looking man hiking solo, and of course, several groups of elderly Koreans (including one in which all the men were sporting blue-accented outerwear, and all the women, pink. Cute.) We had reached an intersection in the trail and were about to start on the switchback climb back to the top of the cliffs, when we saw a youngish guy with a sleek, brownish-orange dog coming toward us.

"Hello," we said, allowing the dogs to greet and sniff each other.
"Nice day for a hike," he said.
"It is!"
Reaching down to pat Hurley's head, the guy gestured down the trail. "Are there a lot of other people out today?"
"A few," I said. "And there were a couple of those big groups of elderly Koreans in matchy hiking-wear."
"Oh," said the guy, his look darkening.
"What?"
"They really don't like dogs," he said.
"Well, they like to eat them!" I said.

The guy blinked at me.
I blinked back.
Brad coughed a little.

They like to eat them?

Somewhere inside my head, the part of my brain assigned to keep me from just saying whatever pops into my head looked up from the beer it was drinking and said, They like to EAT THEM?! What the fuck? I left you alone for TWO SECONDS!

Both dogs looked vaguely offended.

I'd like to say that things got less awkward from here, but the guy just said ""Heh" -- I'm still not sure whether this was a chuckle or an expression of profound discomfort -- and then we parted ways.

Also, I'm not sure what it says about me that, having finished writing this, I really, really want a hot dog.

Briefly (or, About That Dress)

2009-09-10T21:09:00.003+02:00

Since my last post, my mother has been in touch with me several times to say that I really ought to post a better photo of my dress from Sunday night. She is recommending this as a kindness to the fashion-obsessed, but also as a kindness to her, because she did the alterations on it and she wants to brag.

I, of course, am just adding this to the pile of incontrovertible evidence that my mom is The Awesomest Shit Ever -- yes, she is, because how often does your mom email to tell you that you really should be posting more pictures of yourself on the internet? -- but given that I've heard from a couple of you wanting to know more about just what I'm wearing in the Roofied Photo, I'm also going to follow her advice. So!

Brad snapped this picture of me in the park, before we got on the subway (and also before my bangs were plastered to my forehead by a lovely combination of sweat and Brooklyn street grime, yaaaay metro system.) The dress was an $11 vintage flea-market find, so if you were one of the readers who was hoping to purchase it, I'm afraid you're out of luck. But if all you wanted was to feast your little eyeballs on an emerald confection of chiffon and pressed velvet... well, here you go.

Dressed up and drinking

2009-09-08T19:35:00.004+02:00

On September 6, 2008, Brad and I got married.
Which means that this Sunday, September 6th, was our first wedding anniversary.

Yaaaay!

The first year of marriage has been lovely, and it has gone by fast. And in honor of our reaching this little milestone, I was absolutely planning on a blog post -- a cute little essay about the ups and downs of Brad and Kat: Year One, beginning with a revisit of the wedding, and ending with some sort of whimsical yet poignant observation about the nature of marital love.

Yeeeep, that's what I was going to do.... until around nine o'clock last night, when a brief but highly memorable incident involving some recalcitrant beets and a contaminated box of pasta and one glass of vino too many caused one half of our marital team to end the evening in the fetal position on the floor of our very hot, very smoky, very purple-stained kitchen. weeping.

Weeping and covered in beet juice.

(In the interest of preserving ~~my dignity~~ a bit of mystery, I won't be telling you which one of us that was.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that one of us is too exhausted from sobbing amongst the beets to update his or her blog in any meaningful way right now.

But I know I have to give you something, so here: This is a picture from our anniversary eve in which my husband looks handsome as all get-out and I look like I've been roofied.

You're welcome.

There is no dignity in death.

2009-09-01T18:12:00.005+02:00

For two years now, our apartment has been the scene of an ongoing battle – an epic battle between good and evil, between primal instinct and evolved intelligence, between MAN and BEAST.

Which is to say, we have a mouse problem.

It started as soon as we moved in. It was impossible not to be immediately aware of the mice – not when they were fleeing across the kitchen floor every time we came through the door at night, not when the wee hours of the morning were punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chewing, not when I spent the entirety of our first weekend at home vacuuming up mountains of tiny turds that had accumulated behind the stove and inside the cabinets. (Despite all the trouble they’ve caused, I have to give our mice props; they are record-breakingly prolific poopers.)

“This is a problem,” said Brad.
“I’ll give you some poison,” said our landlord.

He did, and the mice went away.
For awhile.
Then they came back.

“Ugh!” said Brad, discovering a fresh sprinkling of turds scattered abundantly across one of our cutting boards. “We can’t LIVE like this!”

And so began the battle. Not just between man and beast, but also between husband and wife, as it turned out that Brad and I do not react with the same level of disgust to the idea (and evidence) of mice hanging out in our kitchen.

“THIS IS FUCKING DISGUSTING!” he would shout, furiously scouring a cast-iron pan which held the latest deposit of droppings.
“It’s gross,” I would reply.
“NO,” he said, “It’s not just ‘gross’, it’s FUCKING HORRIBLE.”
“Why are you shouting?”
“How can you NOT be shouting?!”
“Please stop shouting.”
“I will NOT stop shouting until you REACT APPROPRIATELY TO HOW HORRIBLE THIS IS!.”
“I WILL NOT SHOUT JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK I SHOULD BE SHOUTING!”

And so on.

For awhile, peace was restored to the apartment when several stray cats moved into our back alley. The mice promptly vanished from the premises, and at night, the air would be filled with the squalling sounds of fighting and feral cat sex... but to us, it was simply the Glorious Musical Accompaniment to a Mouseless Existence. From our fire escape, we would watch the big toms humping away atop their hapless ladycats, laughing like loons as we gleefully anticipated the birth of still more cats to kill still more of the horrible mice.

Several months later, one of our neighbors waved to us on the street.

“Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know,” he said. “I called animal control about those cats in the alley. They came and got ‘em all this afternoon.”
“Oh,” we said. “That was… proactive of you.”
“Hey, no problem!” said the neighbor.

After we were safely inside our apartment, Brad looked out the window at the cat-free landscape and said, savagely, “That fucker.”

The mice came back, of course.
I went to the store and purchased poison pellets, which we placed strategically around the apartment, only to find that the mice were wholly disinterested in eating them. The turds continued to appear. The marital strife re-began in earnest.

Another call to the landlord yielded a visit from his daughter, who showed up at the door with a plug-in device that claimed to repel mice via ultrasonic sound waves.
“Are you kidding?” we said.
“But I don’t want to kill them!” she said.

Gamely, we plugged in the ultrasonic mouse-repellent.
They pooped right next to it.

A week later, more poison appeared in the hallways, and the mice went away.

And then, approximately ten days before some friends were slated to be in our apartment for an evening of grown-up socializing, Brad suddenly froze in the middle of the room and said, “Shhhh!”

I listened.
And then, from a corner, beneath the radiator, came the sound… of chewing.
Not only had the mice returned, they were now out, eating our woodwork, in broad daylight.

“That’s it,” said Brad.
“Indeed,” I said.
And so we came to the mouse trap.

The problem, of course, is that mouse traps are tricky, or sticky, or just generally unpleasant to deal with. A traditional trap would pose a hazard to the dog; a glue trap meant disposing of a still-living-but-very-sticky rodent; and as for those oh-so-humane, “No Kill” traps… well, we were way beyond that.

But then, Brad discovered what appeared to be the Holy Grail of Mouse Traps, one of mankind’s most innovative developments: a fully-enclosed and reusable mousetrap that advertised itself as “safe for children and pets” and bragged openly about its clever design and discreet appearance. The package went so far as to claim that one need never even see the mouse – it would crawl through a hole into an expertly-constructed hidey-box, the trap would snap shut within, and the unsightly corpse would be safely enclosed inside an impenetrable wall of plastic. It was the ultimate in mousetrap design, efficient to a fault, a perfect little black box of death.

We bought two.

And then, after several false alarms and three days of obsessively glaring at the still-untripped trap whenever I passed it, this morning’s check revealed that we. Had. Done it!

Giddy with murderous glee, I reached for the trap. This is great, I thought, seizing hold of it and pulling it out of the corner, and I’m so glad I won’t have to see the dead mouse, that’s really good, I always feel bad when I see their poor little HOLYFUCKINGSHIT OHMYGOD.

Because what we have here, dear readers, is a rather unequivocal case of ITEM NOT AS DESCRIBED.

Seriously. Dude. DUDE.

I know I can’t speak for the whole world, here, and perhaps it’s just that we have exceptionally large mice (?), but if I had to describe the particulars of this mouse trap? “Discreet” is not, NOT, the word that comes to mind. I mean, at the risk of stating the obvious, I can see that mouse.

Not to mention that those stiff-and-splayed hindquarters sticking obscenely out of the Death Hole are infinitely grosser than anything I’ve ever seen in a traditional mouse trap. I can handle a dead mouse, y'all; this, on the other hand, looks less like a straight-up dead mouse and more like a piece of misplaced contemporary art from an exhibit titled “There Is No Dignity In Death”, which is being shown in an illegally-obtained warehouse space down by the Navy Yards and in which the featured work is a life-sized latex sculpture of somebody drowning in a toilet while wearing a clown costume.

Which, granted, sounds sort of interesting, but it is nevertheless not something I want hanging out in the corner of my living room.

But I digress.

Back to the good news: The mouse is dead. And I have reason to believe that he was a lone mouse, unaccompanied by fellow rodents, and therefore that the battle between man and beast has finally, finally come to an end.

But if this happens again, we are getting a fucking cat.

In which I only call you when I need a favor.

2009-09-01T02:47:00.003+02:00

I have just realized, amazingly, that the three-year anniversary of Pink India Ink has come and gone without so much as a hiccup. Three years! Can you stand it? My relationship with this blog is officially the longest of my entire life -- longer than my marriage, longer than my first relationship EVAR, longer even than my college romance with a highly unsuitable, but nevertheless entertaining fellow who recently provided me with a poignant reminder as to why one should not attempt to reestablish communication with old boyfriends unless one is willing to suffer the possibly-humiliating consequences.

And in all that time, dear readers, I have never asked you for anything... until now.

IT'S HANDJOB TIME.

Oh, wait, I'm sorry. My mistake. It is not, in fact, handjob time. It is, however, the first day of the semifinal, "wishlisting" round of Trazzler's NYCGO travel-writing contest, and I am a semifinalist.

And this is where you come in.

What sort of favor am I asking of you?

I need you to vote for me. I got past the first round on writing ability alone, but now, it's a popularity contest. The ten semifinalists with the most-loved trips on Trazzler will proceed to Round Three, and frankly, I would really like to go to round three. So, if you would like to help further my career/celebrate the 3-year anniversary of Pink India Ink/make me very, verrry happy, please do the following:

1. Click here to visit my trip page.
2. Click the green "wishlist" link at the top of the text.
3. When prompted, either a) sign in using your Facebook account and allow the (totally non-obnoxious) application to access your profile, or b) create an account via the (totally quick and easy) sign-up system.
4. Come over to my apartment and let me kiss you with gratitude.

What's that? You want an additional incentive?

Alright then. If, by some miracle of modern internetting, I actually win this contest? I will post a photo of MY BOOBS. And I will post it ON THIS BLOG. I am not kidding. (Credibility check: If you know me in real life, you know I am not kidding. Clearly, I consider my chances of winning to be slim at best. But I dare you to prove me wrong.)

Well, are you voting? Go vote. Vote vote vote. I'll even provide the link again:

VOTE!

Update: For those who expressed concern, I should add that a) there are 200 other people in this contest, b) my trip is in, like, 30th place and c) in light of the way I used to make money, I've got less anxiety about (and more material for) making good on such a promise than the average person.

printing: Snipsnip

2009-08-29T19:14:00.005+02:00

Saturday so far has been a forced-indoors rainy day, but being stuck inside did give me the opportunity to break out the ink again.

Since I'm designing a piece to go on the wall of Paige's salon, I've been spending a lot of time looking at hair-cutting tools for inspiration. Today I made and experimented with a new plate.

I never realized how much I like the shape of salon scissors. There's something very satisfying about the way they curve.

And in repetition, I think they look rather deco.

I wish I could stop smudging the paper, though.

The joys of cycling; the cult of parenthood; the release of expectoration.

2009-08-27T02:54:00.003+02:00

In my earliest memory, I am sitting on a pair of handlebars. It’s early evening; my father has just come home from one of his long bike rides; my mother and I have walked out, as we sometimes do, to meet him at the end of the street; and he has lifted me up to sit, like a figurehead, in this perfect perch for a one-block thrill ride. It’s not the most vivid recollection -- I don’t really remember what the light looked like, or how the air smelled, or what I was wearing, or how our house looked in its regal spot at the end of the street. The memory is just this: I am moving, and also, I am screaming, because I have never in my short life experienced something as electrifying and exciting and fast as this.

Which is probably why, as much as I love Eggo Beanrocket (and we really are in love, me and Eggo, as I zoom from home to work each morning in a perpetual state of glee), my absolute favorite way to see the world is from a moving bike.

These days, though, I mostly sit on the seat.

I’ve been riding a fair amount this summer, choosing routes that take me along the waterfront of Brooklyn and Queens, or over the Williamsburg Bridge and around the eclectic perimeter of Manhattan. The problem is, I don’t like to turn around – once I’m out there, moving, the last thing I want is to make that awkward 180 just to go back the way I came. So I keep going, and then, suddenly, three hours have passed and my phone is ringing and Brad wants to know when I’m coming back.

“I’m not sure,” I say.
“What do you mean?” he says. “Where are you?”

At which point I realize that I’ve gotten myself fifteen miles away from home, and though this isn’t such a bad thing in and of itself, I’m always sort of aghast when I realize that I therefore have to ride fifteen miles back.

“Do you want to come pick me up?” I say to Brad.
He says, “I hope you’re kidding.”

Last weekend, by the time my phone rang, I had traveled all the way down to a waterfront park in Red Hook and was busy chatting with members of a non-profit group who had set up a lemonade stand. After promising to be home in a couple hours, I set off – sweating like a pig, cursing the heat, and wondering what kind of moron sets out on a bike ride at 10:00am on a day when the temperature is supposed to be in the nineties.

Fifteen minutes later, as I was standing in the blessedly cool shade in a crosswalk under I-278, a family of cyclists pulled up alongside me. They were two forty-ish parents and one little girl, maybe ten years old, all riding shiny new bikes and wearing impeccably clean helmets.

“Hello!” said the dad, whose yuppie bearing was severely compromised by the largest Burt Reynolds mustache I had ever seen. “Were you just at the Red Hook pool?”

“Er, no?” I said, thinking to myself, That’s weird. It’s not like I’m carrying a towel or wearing a—

Oh.

Because I was, in fact, wearing a bathing suit. Or rather, I was wearing a turquoise bathing suit top, which I had selected specifically because it looked super-cute with the white shorts-white tank top-yellow skimmers ensemble I’d put together for bike-riding (and if you think that wanting to look like Gidget makes me a less serious cyclist, you can go fuck yourself), and ALSO because bathing suits do not turn transparent or get pulled out of shape when they’re soaked with sweat. Which, after three hours of idle pedaling in the blazing sun, mine most definitely was.

“Oh,” I said, “I was just at the waterfront park over there.”

And then, because I really didn’t feel like explaining to Yuppie Burt Reynolds that a) I was fashionable, and b) the moisture he was seeing was not pool water, but rather, my own sweat, I added, “I was just getting some sun.”

“You shouldn’t do that!” someone said. I looked down and to my left, where the ten year-old was standing and looking at me with an expression so rehearsedly prim that I immediately wanted to pull her lips off.
“What’s that, honey?” I said, smiling in a not-particularly-friendly way.
“It’s bad for you!” she squeaked. “Always wear sunscreen and bring a bottle of water!”

Yuppie Burt Reynolds beamed at his daughter with vomitous pride, then looked at me and nodded curtly.

“Uh-huh,” I said, although what I really wanted to say was, “That’s quite the sanctimonious little shitface you have there, Burt,” and then I pedaled away, resplendent in my irritation and my sweaty, disgusting bathing suit.

What the hell? I thought, as I puffed my way toward Prospect Park. What species of insanity was that? Who were those people? Into what sort of godforsaken alternate reality have I slipped, where proselytizing children spew their oversimplified cult of health at nearly-thirty-year-old women while smug, mustachioed parents smile their approval?

And then, of course, I realized.
I was in Park Slope.
The holy grail of the entitled urban parent.
The land of a thousand double-wide strollers.
The place where dignified adulthood goes to die.

So I spit on the sidewalk.

The end.

* * *

Side note: The non-profit group I met at the park is called the Urban Divers, and they’re extremely cool. They travel the country to run recreational programs on city waterways, teach people about marine ecology, and generally get city dwellers to take an active role in caring for their rivers and coastlines. The day I saw them, they had set up a free catch-and-release fishing program, and the happiest little kid I have ever seen told me that he CAUGHT THREE FISH and THEY WERE FLOUNDERS. Check them out here.

The one where I make a new friend.

2009-08-19T23:26:00.010+02:00

So, this is where I make an embarrassing confession: For as long as I can remember, I have had serious anthropomorphism issues.

Hey, stop laughing.

This is a REAL PROBLEM and it is NOT FUNNY. I'm an anthropomorphoholic. As in, ever since childhood, I have compulsively assigned uniquely human characteristics, motivations, and behaviors to definitively non-human entities. And lest you think I’m talking about some odd-but-potentially-understandable thing, like believing that my dog is capable of remorse, I should mention right now that it’s a whole, whooole lot weirder than that.

Example: I have, in recent history, totally convinced myself that my clothes have feelings.

This is a sickness, and though I don’t know precisely when or how it started, I will say that I have a strong suspicion that watching The Brave Little Toaster one too many times had something to do with it. Evidence pointing to this as a likely explanation includes:

a) I definitely like toasters, a LOT, and

b) I have very clear memories of hysterically weeping multiple times during that movie, and particularly at the part where all the appliances get caught out in an electrical storm, and the blanket gets carried away by the wind and is (we fear) lost forever.

(And yes, of course, the blanket is eventually reunited with his friends... but before that happens it is freaking heart-wrenching, and any children of the 1980s who grew up watching this movie deserve automatic forgiveness for any security blanket-related development issues whatsoever. I mean, the blanket is named "Blanky". BLANKY! Geez, movie, are you trying to mess me up?)

The film still that launched a thousand abandonment complexes.

And now, twenty years later, here I am: an almost-thirty-year-old woman who chats with kitchen appliances, treats the sofa with respect, and can't bear to get rid of old t-shirts because it might make the shirts feel bad.

I've been fighting this thing for years now, usually by avoiding actions that might provoke the beast. Which is to say that I never get rid of things. Not even when they're broken or ugly or otherwise obsolete. Does anyone remember these IKEA commercials from a few years back?

Funny, right?
WRONG! Because that, right there, is what I've struggled against for my entire life. Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to even search for that on YouTube without breaking down in tears?

Poor little lamp.

Fortunately for me, a generally impoverished adulthood has given me a perfect excuse to avoid the painful process of replacing... well, anything. That oscillating fan that doesn't oscillate and is held together with twist ties? Hey, I have a financial incentive to keep it around! It's not that I've secretly named it "Fanny" and think its little fan face is charming, sweet, and full of trust. I'm just frugal. It's a good thing.

The problem, of course, is that I'm married now -- and as it turns out, husbands are a) unlikely to see any good reason not to spend $15 on a new fan, and b) even less likely to understand when they try to carry the old fan out to the curb only to have you snatch it from their hands, screaming "Fanny! NOOOOOO!", and then flee with it into the bathroom in order to stroke its shiny surfaces and apologize for being such a fickle, fan-replacing bitch.

And similarly, when the government invents a program that would allow you to replace your current car -- which, though it runs well enough, admittedly gets about 16 miles to the gallon, and does not have air conditioning or interior lights, and makes a very loud noise all the time, and activates the "Check Engine" light whenever you tap the brakes, and oh yeah, is missing a side-rear-view mirror because somebody stole it -- husbands, as it turns out, will not support the idea of passing on that opportunity because it might hurt the feelings of your Jeep Cherokee.

Imagine that.

But at last, today, I believe I've found the answer to my problem. (And no, it's not to just stop anthropomorphizing my belongings. As if such a thing were even possible.) Namely, that when it comes time to replace an item that you've lived with and loved, an item whose feelings you care about, an item that has been meaningful to you in myriad ways...

It helps when the replacement item is so adorable that you wish you could knit it a little sweater and give it lots of hugs, and then give it a really fun name like Eggo Beanrocket.

Which I did.

Coming soon: The exciting road adventures of Eggo Beanrocket!

D as in "duh".

2009-08-15T16:30:00.005+02:00

As email becomes the de facto mode of communication, the amount of time that I spend on the phone with customer service people has started to dwindle. Between online insurance quotes, automatic bill pay, and the ability to instant message with people from the bank, actually talking to someone is getting to be a real rarity, isn't it? This is it; the digital future is coming, and you cannot stop it.

I don't think anyone would disagree that this development is a good thing -- after all, fewer conversations with the not-always-entirely-pleasant strangers who work at the customer call-in center can only be good for a person's general mental health. But it does mean that certain... well, peculiarities of business-by-phone are eventually going to be left behind. Things like the endless pushing of buttons to navigate the call-in menu, the frustration of eventually connecting with someone who is obviously following a call script and doesn't even seem to be listening to what you're saying, and, of course, the agonizing reading and reading-back of alphanumeric confirmation codes by nasal-voiced customer service people. "That's F as in Fred, Three, Five, S as in Sam..."

This is what I was thinking about as I sat on the phone with a customer service rep at Geico on Saturday morning, waiting for a confirmation code and musing on the (inevitable?) eventuality of all call center reps being replaced by robots. (Consumer interest note: In the case of Geico, that would actually be too bad -- I've talked to a LOT of their service reps over the past couple years, and they are always ridiculously nice and pleasantly Southern and happy to let you mail in your payment a couple days late when it turns out that you accidentally spent part of it on a late-night pizza binge. So consider this a recommendation. Geico is the tits.)

After a few seconds of hold music, the rep came back on the line.

"Okay," said Geico Lady. Her voice had a sort of perky, lilting drawl, and I wondered where she was from; Georgia, maybe.
"Do you have a pen?" she asked.
"Yep," I replied.
"I'm going to read this number back to you."
"Okay."
"Okay, here's what I've got." She cleared her throat. "A as in apple, Four, Six, T as in Tom, J as in Jews, Seven, B as in..."

Of course, I had stopped paying attention at this point.
J as in Jews?, my brain was shouting. J as in JEWS?!! That is so inappropriate! Holy shit! Say something! SAAAAY SOMETHING!

"Uh, excuse me," I said. "Did you say, 'J as in Jews'?"
"Yep, J as in Jews!" said Geico Lady.

Except it wasn't quite "Jews". It was more like "Jewss", or "Jewce", or...
Oh, said my brain, sounding considerably calmer. JUICE. J as in juice, because people pronounce that ü sound a tad differently below the Mason-Dixon Line, and also, because you are an idiot.

"Right," I said. "Okay."
"Can I help you with anything else today?"
"Nope."
"Alright," said the Geico Lady, still pleasant as ever. "Thank you for choosing Geico!"

Some of you might look at the above, perfectly-pleasant exchange and think that it's too bad that customer service by phone is going out of style, and hell, maybe it is... but all I can think is that somewhere in Georgia, they've got me on tape saying "J as in JEWS?"

And may she never learn the truth.

2009-08-14T17:20:00.002+02:00

(Redundancy alert: I've posted this to Tumblr, too.)

Every morning, I walk the dog around the perimeter path that surrounds the sweet little park in my neighborhood. After two years, it’s become a very comforting routine — once around the park, dog business done, then home for breakfast — and it’s a beautiful time to be awake in Brooklyn. The streets are quiet, the light that filters through the sycamore canopy is soft, green, and lovely, and the only people out and about are fellow dog owners, elderly and early-rising Greenpoint lifers, and a raucous group of Polish-speaking gentlemen who spend their summer nights on the park’s benches before waking up to drink more vodka.

Every morning, as I round the northeastern bend of the perimeter path, I see a man and a woman sitting together on a bench. Their names are Franny and Sunny, and they’re best friends; each day, unless it is raining, they meet up to sit at this particular spot with cups of coffee, and sometimes a newspaper, and watch the neighborhood wake up.

And every morning, we have the following exchange:

I say, “Good morning!”

They say, “Good morning.”

And then Sunny, who adores animals, will wave at the dog and say, “Good morning, Curley!”

And then, we continue on our way.

There’s just one, minor problem: My dog’s name is not Curley.

We are well past the point at which I can reasonably try to fix this, right? I mean, we’ve got a routine going, Sunny and Franny and me. And I am not about to flout the carefully-cultivated rhythm of our daily exchange by suddenly stopping short and throwing out this potentially life-altering conversational curveball: “Oh, and by the way, you’ve been calling my dog by the wrong name since 2007.”

These people are in their seventies, for Pete’s sake. The shock could kill them.

Briefly

2009-08-13T21:11:00.003+02:00

I've decided to expand my operation to Tumblr, where I'll be posting bits and bobs that don't quite fit onto a long-format blog like this one. Find me there:

pinkindiaink

This is a sort of experiment, to see whether a) I like the platform, and b) it can be used as a tool to drive traffic back here. (Sure, call me a whore, but I need more freelance work and Tumblr is like a big, echo-y cave full of media people.) Also, at the moment, it's an experiment which is making me feel extremely old and out-of-touch, so we'll see how long it lasts. Here's hoping.

But in the meantime: If you, dear reader, are a Tumblr (Tumblr-er?), please feel free to follow me -- and do let me know, so I can follow you.

Rediscovery.

2009-08-10T04:36:00.006+02:00

Six weeks ago, my brother-in-law and his wife welcomed a new baby (and the very first Brad's-side-of-the-fam grandchild. Now there's a race we were never going to win.) We found out early on that it was a girl, but the child's name remained a big secret up until it was inked in on her birth certificate, and then, the announcement:

Harper.

So, in the weeks before our first visit to meet the newest member of the family, I made this.

What you're seeing: Six linoleum relief monoprints.

I think I've mentioned before that I studied art in college; unfortunately, the nature of printmaking combined with the constraints of New York life made it one passion that was just too hard and time-consuming to pursue (at least for a lazy person like me). This is the first thing I've produced in nearly six years, and I'm embarrassed to admit how much I'd forgotten about how to do this. The behavior of ink, the feel of the linoleum, the painstaking minutia of registration, the way the paper curls as it dries... have you ever returned to something you used to be skilled at -- playing a musical instrument comes to mind -- after a long hiatus? It's half remembering, half re-learning, because it feels familiar but not exactly the same. You make rookie mistakes but feel the sting of your missteps like a veteran. I cut myself more than once.

But it's finished now, and although it's not perfect, and I'd love to spend hours more trying to make it perfect, and there are stray traces of ink where I wasn't quite careful enough (which has always driven me crazy but which I've never been able to avoid) I'm sort of... ecstatic.

So, we may be seeing some more of this. (You know, in addition to the usual kerfuffle and cussing and stories about wangs.) Indulge me, would you?

And if there's something you used to do -- something you used to love, but that got pushed to the fringes by the daily crush of adulthood -- consider this some emphatic urging to pick it back up. Now. Do it now.

The Cape, The Cod, The Legend.

2009-08-07T15:23:00.004+02:00

Just over two weeks ago, I received what can only be called The Most Amazing Email Of The Summer. It was from this divine lady, and it contained a surprise invitation – to join her and a collected group of five other awesome humans for a weekend in beautiful, breezy Cape Cod.

“So,” I said to Brad, “one of my blogging friends just invited us to Cape Cod for the weekend.”
“Have you guys ever actually met?” said Brad.
“No.”
“Have you ever met any of the other people who are going?”
“No.”
“Do you know any of these people in any other way than via the internet?”
“Noooo.”
“Well,” said Brad, folding his arms and giving me a serious look. “Obviously, we should go.”

I was delighted, I was thrilled, and then, of course, I found myself wondering:

What sort of person would open her family’s summer home to a pair of total frackin’ strangers on the basis of naught but a few blog posts and several months’ worth of Facebook friendship?

And the answer, of course, is: A person who is very, very drunk.

Ha, ha! Just kidding! (…I think!) Actually, the answer is, the same sort of person who would accept said invitation on the basis of naught but a few blog posts and several months’ worth of Facebook friendship.

... Yes, hello there.

The drive took nearly eight hours due to horrendous traffic, violent thunderstorms, and the roughly-an-hour we spent driving around and around and around one of those sassy little New England roundabouts, shouting at each other and trying to figure out which exit to take.

But once we were there…

Behold! The Cod!

Upon arrival, there were cocktails and clam rolls, and then additional cocktails. Given my 2:00am decision to pour a bunch of vermouth over ice and drink it, followed by my 2:30am non-decision (really, I had no choice) to throw up, I’m actually glad that nobody took a picture. Here, look at this hydrangea instead.

Six hours and a cured hangover later, we were having FUN. We gathered on the beach…

…and around an island.

Foods were placed on top of other foods, and still other foods were placed on top of those, until nobody knew where the brie ended and the basil began.

There was a greekfeast prepared by TKTC’s musician manfriend, who looks like a Viking and cooks like a pro.

There was a bromance of epic proportions.

And, of course, there was seersucker. OH MY GOD WAS THERE EVER SEERSUCKER.

*Most photos borrowed from the flickr of our darling hostess.

And all I can say is, if TKTC ever suggests that you spend the weekend in the company of herself, her boyfriend, and their multitalented/amusing/daaaamn good-looking friends, you should agree immediately and without question lest you miss out on the most fun you’ll have all summer long.

The end.

Five days of civic duty

2009-08-04T16:36:00.003+02:00

My scintillating tour through the inner workings of The Law is complete, and after a week’s worth of arguments and direct examinations and sustained objections to the phrasing of this-and-that question, this is what I have to say about our criminal justice system:

I could TOTALLY commit crimes and get away with it.

Seriously, do you have any idea how much evidence it takes to prove somebody’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? A lot. Which is great, really – because of course, the law is specifically set up to allow for the least possible likelihood of an innocent person being wrongly convicted, and that means that those who are probably-but-not-evidently-guilty are bound to slip through the cracks. And while I’d learned about this concept in school, seeing it in action was fascinating in a way that contemplating it in the abstract just isn’t.

For those interested, here’s a rundown of the trial:

Day 1: The defendant is on trial for taking part in a mugging, at gunpoint, that occurred in 2005. (Cue confused looks from the jury; all of us are wondering why it’s taken so long, but as it turns out, you are not allowed to raise your hand and ask questions in court. Unless you need to go to the bathroom.)

(Cue worry that, if permitted a bathroom visit, the court record will reflect that you took a really long time in there.)

The People charge that the defendant served as a lookout/blocked the victim from escaping while his pal -- who is conspicuously absent from these proceedings -- did the robbing.

Day 2: The victim, who was mugged while visiting the scene of a murder for his job as a crime reporter (irony!), testifies about being robbed of his cell phone, ID, and about $20 in cash by two young men. There’s one of those straight-from-Law-and-Order moments:

“Do you see one of those men here today?”
“Yes, he’s sitting right there.”
“Let the record show that the witness has identified the defendant.”

We learn that the victim identified the defendant in a lineup about six months after the incident occurred. We also learn that the victim spoke to whomever was in possession of the stolen cell phone a couple of times in the weeks following the mugging, but every time things start to get interesting, the defense attorney objects and everyone leaves the room to… well, we have no idea. Perhaps they are playing hopscotch.

Day 3: Cross-examination! The defense attorney is an excellent public speaker and delivers his questions much more smoothly than the prosecutors, but he’s also wearing a diamond earring, which makes him look less like a well-mannered orator and more like an uncontrollable sleaze. He casts some doubts upon how good of a look the victim really got of the men robbing him (“Wouldn’t you say that you focused your attention on the man with the gun, and not on the lookout?”), but not enough. So far, the prosecution has it…

Until the detective on the case takes the stand and admits to having “misplaced” pretty much all the documentation related to the case. DUDE. We also see a picture of the lineup in question, which is, undeniably, pretty bad.

(Approximation of the lineup.)

We hear testimony from the NYPD officers who responded to the scene of the crime (more misplaced records!), from a police record-keeper who explains that 911 calls are automatically deleted after six months (and more!), and from a Sprint representative whose entire job, apparently, is to travel the country and testify in court about phone records (a.k.a. the only evidence in the entire case which isn’t lost somewhere). Unfortunately, none of this is as interesting as the outfit of one of the prosecuting attorneys, who is a) wearing a full-on seersucker suit, and b) has an enormous stain on his pants.

And then, out of nowhere, the People are like "We rest." (Cue entire jury looking at each other, all, Wait, that’s it? What the hell?)

Day 4: The defense calls an expert witness whose testimony is undoubtedly the most annoying of the trial; she’s one of these people who says “Sure!” before answering every question, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense to do so.

“Can you tell the jury about your academic background?”
“Sure! Blah blah masters degree blah blah PhD blah academic review.”
“And where do you currently work?”
“Sure! Blah blah blah laboratory.”
“And what was the outcome of that study?”
“Sure! Blah blah blaaaaah.”

She also explains that, in situations involving a weapon, crime victims may focus on the lethal object and not on the faces of those involved (i.e. making eyewitness identification a crapshoot at best.) So chew on that, jury.

And the defense rests.

We hear closing arguments, pointed reminders about presumption of innocence and the burden of proof, and instruction from the judge about The Law as it applies to this case. The jurors adjourn to deliberate.

At least, that’s what they say – I’m an alternate and am not allowed to accompany them, so for all I know, they’re having a party in there.

Day 5: The other alternate is called in to deliberate and I spend the entire day sitting in a room all by myself. Court officers periodically come by and say, “Oh, are you all alone?!” before locking me into the room again, until 4:00, when somebody suddenly ushers me out of the room and informs me that the entire trial is over. I didn’t get to see the verdict! I’m pissed.

The Verdict was: Not guilty. (Duh. Cue general consensus among jurors that the defendant Totally Did It, but the burden of proof wasn’t met. This is also the point at which I decide that I could Totally Commit Crimes without fear of conviction.)

-Fin.

Voir dire and bad knickers.

2009-07-27T23:53:00.004+02:00

For those of you wondering about the long lags between posts this month, this one's for you: I am popping up right now to tell you that I am currently on jury duty... which means that a great many interesting things are happening to me on a daily basis, but I am forbidden from writing about them, lest I compromise the integrity of the Law. (This is per specific instructions from the judge, who is such a singularly awesome woman that I would rather die than disappoint her.)

I can say, however, that the process of jury selection is one of the most interesting things I've ever witnessed (ooh! legal pun!) and/or participated in. It went something like this:

8:30am: Arrive at courthouse amid throng of prospective jurors.

8:31am: Get in security line in between annoyed-looking huffy guy with laptop and elderly Asian couple who do not speak English and react to any attempts at conversation with blinking confusion and polite smiles.

8:33am: Engage in good-natured debate with court cops about whether or not they should x-ray my cup of coffee.

8:35am: Be seated in enormous, cold room full of bored prospective jurors.

8:36 - 9:05am: Boredom.

9:06am: An officially-dressed man appears at the front of the room.

9:07am: Officially-dressed man ignores questions from prospective jurors as to how long we will be sitting there.

9:08am: Officially-dressed man darkens the lights, activates some sort of presentation, and leaves after a prolonged sneer.

9:09am: Presentation is a juror orientation video.

9:10am: "In ancient times, an accused criminal went through trial by ordeal!" Threatening theme music gives way to a scene in which twenty people appear by a lake, dressed in what is probably supposed to be period clothing but which looks like dirty rags.

9:11am: Closeup of Ancient People's faces, which are all inexplicably covered in filth.

9:12am: The Ancient People bring forth an accused criminal, tie his hands and feet, and hurl him bodily into the lake.

9:13am: Voiceover: "Fortunately, we now know that this is not a reliable means of determining guilt!"

9:15 - 9:30am: Juror orientation video explains via interviews with many Famous Legal People that being a juror is Very Important. Video was likely made circa 1980 as most interviewees are now dead. Also, everyone is sporting suits with mammoth shoulderpads.

9:31am: Lights come on; another official person appears at the front of the room.

9:32am: First-round exemptions from jury duty. The elderly Asian couple dutifully toddles out of the room when they call for people who don't speak English.

9:33 - 10:30am: Boredom.

10:31am: Remaining prospective jurors assemble. Elderly Asian couple have inexplicably been returned to the jury pool.

10:35am: Roll call.

10:40am: Second roll call.

10:45am: Roll call again. One woman is missing, and she's in big trouble.

10:45am: Also, the roll call guy keeps mispronouncing my name.

10:46 - 11:00am: Jurors are shuffled from one room, to an elevator, to another room.

11:01am: Realize with dawning horror that I am wearing really uncomfortable underwear.

11:02 - 11:15am: Boredom and uncomfortable underwear.

11:15am: Jurors are shuffled into a courtroom and my underwear is uncomfortable.

11:15 - 11:30am: Jurors are given an introductory lecture about jury service and my underwear is uncomfortable.

11:31am: First batch of jurors are selected for questioning and my underwear is uncomfortable.

11:31am - 12:00pm: Jurors answer questions including "Are you close to anyone who works in law enforcement?" and "Have you or your family members ever been the victim of a crime?" Several people are obviously trying to ensure their non-selection by saying things like, "I don't believe in evidence" or "It's not about witness testimony, it's about knowing in your heart that he's guilty!"

12:01pm: Underwear discomfort has reached crisis levels. Also, I have become convinced that not only am I wearing some really bad underwear, but that everybody knows.

12:02pm: Break for lunch.

12:05pm: Salad.

12:30pm: Enter Macy's.

12:31pm: Buy better underwear.

12:32pm: Inform checkout girl that if she is ever called for jury duty, underwear selection is of paramount importance.

12:35pm: Put on new underwear. Feel that nothing can possibly go wrong now.

1:30pm: Prospective jurors shuffle back into courtroom and my underwear is awesome.

1:31pm: New group of potential jurors is seated; questioning begins anew.

1:32 - 2:30pm: Question-and-answer session is unbelievably dry and dull. One of the other potential jurors in the gallery takes out a book and receives an immediate smackdown courtesy of the court officer. Vow that, if questioned, I will somehow being levity to the proceedings.

2:45pm: New group of potential jurors is seated, including me.

2:46pm: Decide that I will answer the "Have you or your family members ever been the victim of a crime" question with a quip about my penis-exposing neighbor, thus achieving the aforementioned levity. (Also decide that this is perfectly appropriate, since the police were involved and indecent exposure/harassment is, in fact, against the law.)

2:50pm: The woman next to me is being questioned; it will be my turn next.

2:51pm: Woman next to me informs the judge that her brother was murdered.

2:52pm: Three weeks ago.

2:53pm: Feel like a chump of epic proportions.

2:54pm: Answer "Have you ever been the victim of a crime?" with a meek "No."

2:55 - 3:30pm: Answer remaining questions while continuing to feel like a chump.

3:31pm: Take small solace in comfortable underwear.

3:35pm: Take jury oath.

...and we've been in court ever since! And there you have it: Anatomy of a jury selection.

Meanwhile, I will be back after the conclusion of the trial (and a much-anticipated weekend away.)

Bagels and bafflement.

2009-07-22T03:52:00.005+02:00

If (like me) you have recently gotten married, you've probably had some ultra-awesome person mention to you that recently-married people tend to gain weight after the wedding is over. This statistic should come as no surprise -- in fact it makes a good deal of sense, considering that a) many people attempt to lose weight specifically for their weddings, b) the days immediately preceding the wedding are so busy that you don't have time to eat, thereby losing additional weight, and c) therefore, by the time the ceremony is over, your body has no doubt clued into the fact that it is starving to death and must be given lobster IMMEDIATELY.

But nobody looks at the statistics surrounding post-marital weight gain with anything approaching logic. Nooooo. Instead, the non-lobster-deprived hoi polloi are all too happy to point big fucking FAIL-fingers at you, accuse you of committing the cardinal married-person sin of Letting Yourself Go, and inform you that, given the unforgivable size of your ass, you will have nobody but yourself to blame when your recently-acquired husband starts staying late at the office to pork his nubile young secretary.

Well, finger-pointing lobster-eaters, the joke's on you, because Brad doesn't even HAVE a secretary.

And also, because it's extremely difficult not to go around drowning your sorrows in lobster when the lonely high point of your daily workday is lunch hour.

(And also, if I'm being honest, because thus far the three pounds I've gained since September seem to be residing exclusively in my boobs, which is odd, but not necessarily terrible, if you know what I'm saying.)

But lobster isn't readily available to me on a daily basis, and therefore, I must find comfort elsewhere: Bagels.

I can't explain the magic of bagels, but it is magic -- the crunch of the toasted outside, the squish of the bready innards, the familiar tang of cream cheese and the smoky, salty, expensive taste of lox. Made to order, these things provide an hour of grace in an otherwise mind-numbing day.

If you can get them, that is.

I've been eating bagels for many years now, and in that time, I've learned that bagel shop workers will seize on any opportunity to, how do you say, fuck up your bagel, which is not only irritating but also potentially life-ruining when the bagel is not just a bagel, but the only thing standing between you and irrevocable disgruntlement. And so, I've been forced to adopt the following bagel-ordering technique, which generally makes the bagel shop workers look at me like I might be insane, but which is proven effective at reducing instances of bagel fuck-uppery:

1) Order very loudly. This assures that not only will the bagel people hear my request, but also the surrounding customers, leaving me with witnesses in the event that I end up in an argument over whether or not I wanted the bagel toasted.

2) Syntax and enunciation. If I order a "wheat bagel with tomato, cream cheese, and lox", the comma placement fails to translate and I inevitably receive a wheat bagel with tomato cream cheese and lox, which is UNACCEPTABLE.

3) Watch 'em like a hawk. I am not above shrieking, "Stop! TOAST!" at the hapless bastard who tries to slather cream cheese on an un-crisped bagel.

Is this a tad over the top? Maybe... but considering the importance of the bagel in question, probably not. But that doesn't stop the bagel-shop workers from evil-eyeing me whenever I step up to the counter. One of them in particular, a fast-moving woman with toffee-colored skin and a tight black ponytail, always looks at me with narrowed eyes and seems to take offense at my loud and over-enunciated ordering style. We watch each other suspiciously over the countertop -- me, terrified that she'll fuck up my bagel; her, probably wanting sincerely to throw a vat of cream cheese at my head. (Not that I blame her.) But so far, neither of us has been able to penetrate the other's defenses. I cannot ruffle her; she cannot rattle me.

And then came yesterday. I ordered; I watched; I felt my pulse quicken as my made-to-order bagel was slipped into its paper wrapping and placed in a bag. The woman with the black ponytail looked up, and our eyes met, and in hers I saw the knowledge that, again, I had triumphed.

And then suddenly, she grabbed a knife and fork... and put them into the bag.

A knife and fork? For a bagel?! THE MIND REELS. Everything I have ever believed about bagel-eating has been a lie.

God, I need a lobster.