What Happens When You Turn Off The Television?

“I worry that our daughter watches too much television,” my husband said. We were clearing the dishes off the table after dinner and Story was using the fork she found on the floor as a microphone to sing the theme to Sesame Street.

My first feeling was defensive, my second was guilt.

“I know. I worry too. I turn it on in the morning while I make breakfast and clean the house, but then I want to check my email and do some writing and she’s playing so nicely in front of the tv." I stacked the plates together and put them next to the sink, sighed and lowered my head.

"I usually turn it off by 9 but then sometimes she wants to play with the iPad in the afternoon so it’s really only like ….” I had to think for a moment, “Three hours or so ... Oh my God! Three hours? Holy shit. I hadn’t even really thought about it. Oh my God. I’m a terrible mom. Remember when we said our daughter would never watch tv?”

“I know it’s hard,” he said and came around to hug me from behind. He says that, but he has no idea. I am my daughter’s main source of entertainment from the moment she wakes until the moment she goes to bed. We sing songs in front of the mirror, we blow bubbles on the playground, we do tea parties, we cut out stars and make them into holiday banners, we cook meals, we dance around front of the mirror in our underwear, we play dress up, we have screaming contests, we go grocery shopping, we do puzzles, we read books, we go to the library, we play monster, we make forts out of the bed sheets, we bake cookies, we go for walks, we make balloon animals, we make up songs. Sometimes I just run out of ideas, and sometimes I just want a moment for myself. I rationalize that I only let her watch educational programs, and that the three hour break from being my daughters full-time court jester is necessary to my sanity. But the truth is that Toy Story 2 is not educational, and teaching my daughter to play quietly on her own in her room would provide the same relief to my mental health.

“I’ll do better,” I said.

So today I woke up determined not to turn on the television. For the first fifteen minutes of the day, she cried every time I looked at her. Before 9:00 AM, we read Curious George, Goodnight Moon, Clickity Clack Moo, and the entire Biscuit series compilation. I could hear my email buzzing through on my phone but I didn't look at it. We made eggs together, ate breakfast in silence, and then we stared at each other making funny faces. Most days, I turn on the television for her while I take a shower. But today I covered the floor with her blocks and took a shower in fear of what I would find as I emerged.

I emerged to silence. The kind of silence that means she is into something that she shouldn’t be. I found her in her bathroom , the garbage turned over, a dirty q-tip hanging out of her ear and my laptop open and powered up on the floor with four keys picked off. I tried to clean it up while I heard her pulling over the breakfast dishes in the other room. I missed my morning ritual of coffee and facebook and blogs and it made me kinda cranky. I told myself that a television is not supposed to be a babysitter for my child.

We got out of the house ASAP and went to our babysitting commitment at the church down the street. The rest of the day was easy with a play date at the park, a picnic outside, a nap, bubbles in the courtyard and Daddy to the rescue by 7:00.

“I need a meeting,” I told him. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

I soaked up the car ride. I marinated in the spiritual conversation of the meeting and felt serene by the time I parked the car back in front of the house. I didn’t realize how hard a day without media would really be, how much pressure it would put on me to entertain. But the day was victorious. We did it. We made it an entire day without tv or the radio or an iPad. I told myself that like most of the true parenting moments thus far, it’s only hard for a few days and then it will get easier. I’m learning that the actual “parenting” part is usually not easy. I’m up for this challenge. I walked in the door feeling triumphant, and found my husband in front of the television with the baby on his lap watching “Baby Signing Time.”

He jumped a little when I swung open the door. "It's educational," he said,unable to erase the guilty expression from his face. I just shook my head. Tomorrow is another day. And we can start the challenge all over again.

Best Fourth of July Ever

Dear Story: Monday was your first participatory Fourth of July. I am all too aware that you will probably not remember this beautiful day so I wanted to write it all down to capture the memories.

We threw a picnic in the courtyard and invited all your playground friends. It was a sunny California day with a light breeze in the air. Shereen and Emann came over in the morning to help mommy cut out stars and sew them into a long chain to hang from the trees. Tal’s husband blew up thirty bright red and royal blue balloons and tied them together with a silver string to make a balloon chain. We covered the tables with blue and red tablecloths and covered the table with jam jars filled with red and blue straws, ribbons, American flags and silverware. The kids table had Fourth of July hats, leis and silver bowls full of fruit and candy.

Mommys friend Vanessa helped her spread blankets in the shade of the cherry blossom trees. Daddy put out our camping chairs to make a circle in the shade. Brian helped me fill the water guns and balloon bombs because daddy wanted no part of getting wet.

As the neighbors arrived, the tables filled with food. There was fresh coleslaw and homemade hummus, Doritos with corn salsa, warm chocolate chip cookies, watermelon, and fruit salad. Miles daddy started the grilling with ribs glazed in a cherry sauce. Shereen and Emann’s mom Hannan grilled a whole chicken. Tal’s husband made chicken and beef skewers and Mr. Matt grilled Argentinean skirt steaks. I threw our hot dogs, hamburgers, and ginger chicken into the line of marinating meat. Daddy says that every time he turned around you were eating something new.

You were dressed in a red, white and blue outfit from Nana and you held hands with Charlotte under the slide. You played with little Ms. Alma and Edan, Ori, Ido, Ronis, Cassidy and Miles, announcing each name with great clarity. “Alma,” you said, pointing at sweet Alma in her pretty pink bonnet.

“Did she just say Alma?” Alma’s mom asked daddy.

Ms. Heathers baby held hands with Ms. Vanessas baby and they squirmed together on a blanket in the shade. Mommy announced it was time for games and tied Roni and Shereen’s legs together with one of daddy’s socks. We did three legged races, wheelbarrow races, and water games. Hannan brought out buckets of water and sponges, daddy blew up the toddler pool and we tossed a few water balloons.

Then mommy brought out an angel food cake covered with Coolwhip and fresh strawberries from the Santa Monica market. We sang Happy Birthday America while the sun dipped in the sky and filled the courtyard with a golden glow. Story, you and Charlotte ate an entire bowl of hummus. You began with carefully dipping hummus chips, you ended with messy hands thrust into the bowl and then into your sticky mouths. You ate ribs and sausages and chicken, you sucked your first lollypop, you ate an entire bowl of strawberries, half a bowl of hummus, a piece of lasagna, three of Ms. Kate’s chocolate chip cookies, six Doritos and half a plate of curly red pasta.

When daddy put you in your swimsuit, you jumped in the frigid pool and started kicking and splashing and squealing. Daddy and “All y’all Mama’s” laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed, while you and the girls got in and out of the pool exchanging screams and throwing water onto the hot asphalt pavement.

As the dark ascended, we packed up the party, put on sweaters and met Judi, Chuck, Payton and Ella to walk over to the firework show. As we walked through the Culver City streets, the crowd began to swell. We formed a line and entered into a stadium pumping old school rock, the smell of Kettlecorn mixed with honeysuckle wafting in the evening breeze. Families in festive hats overflowed from beach blankets. You danced on the race track with Ella and Payton until sweat formed at the back of your neck. Between the sugar and the raucous laughter and dancing, I thought you would never sit still for the fireworks.

But then the music stopped and the lights dimmed and daddy lay down on the blanket and made a spot for mommy’s head on his chest under his arm and you laid your head down so sweetly next to mommy. You went completely quiet when the first shot rang out in the sky and you pressed your whole body against mine. We all lay on our backs looking up in the sky and you didn’t move once the entire show. I thought perhaps you had fallen asleep, but every time I poked my head up to look – your eyes were wide with amazement and wonder as you stare into a sky filled with exploding stars. Daddy squeezed me tight and I held you with all my strength, feeling your little heartbeat quicken as the show burst on. I tried to remember the first time I ever saw fireworks but it felt like so long ago.

We walked back in the crowd of happy neighbors and daddy and I let you fall asleep before we got home. I carried you into the house, your little limbs curled up against my chest, your head tucked under my chin. I buried my nose in your hair and you smelled like sunshine and sunscreen and strawberries and youth. I closed my eyes and tried to seal the smell in my cavern of memories. Perhaps you wont remember this perfect Fourth of July, but I will never forget.

Much love – Your mommy

When to Start Thinking About the Next Baby

There it was on the bottom of my monthly “What to expect” hospital newsletter, written in bold hyperlinked type, “Time to start thinking about the next baby.” Just reading the line made me gasp. At this point in the game I feel like I’ve passed a threshold, a pitstop on the hike, and you want me to think about going down to the bottom of the hill and starting again? Are you freakin crazy? Better women and moms than me have done it before. But really? By choice? Can’t I birth a three year old, or an eight year old? Do I really have to start over at the beginning with the sleepless nights and the breastfeeding and the oatmeal cereal and the reflux? It was fun the first time around, but I didn’t know what was coming next and how much more fun and exciting it all got. And now I do.

This morning, Story and I made scrambled eggs together. She pulled over a kitchen chair to the butcher block and helped me crack eggs on the side of the bowl. We heated the pan on high while we cracked four eggs and one yolk, we added a little half’n'half and gently beat the eggs. Then I held Story over the pan while she sprayed the butter. We poured the eggs into the skittle and she said, “Oooh” while it crackled. We used a curved spatula to keep the eggs moving and then we adjusted the heat to low and dragged the spatula through a few more times. Story said, “Cheese”, so we added a little cheese. And a little salt. And then we sliced a few strawberries and made up two plates. Story carried her own plate over to the table and we sat for breakfast. She used her fork and scooped the eggs towards her lips. And then she did something adorable that I will not soon forget. Just like Daddy does when the mac’n’cheese comes out of the microwave, she leaned over the forkful, and she blew.

“Hot,” She said, blowing on the eggs and then gingerly scooping them into her mouth. She cleaned her plate and I watched her with a heart overflowing with love.

My husband is afraid to have another child because he thinks he couldn’t possibly love another child as much as Ms. Story. But I have no worries about that. I believe the heart has no limit on how much it can love – it just expands to hold more. I have no doubt I would love another little baby with all my heart and soul. I worry more about losing the very precious freedom I’ve finally acquired as a mother of a growing toddler. You see, like my heart, my selfishness knows no bounds.

I worry more about how much longer it will take for me to get my waistline back, my breasts back, and my career back. I fear a new baby is the end of my dreams and my ability to make my mark on the world as a professional. Am I wrong?

A Typical Morning

Over on Dear Baby, Melissa is asking her guest writers to tell give you all about a day in their picture perfect life. Well, here’s mine:

7:05 am: “F#@kity, f#@k, f#@k, Story you are up two hours early this morning. Really?”

Since the weaning, she wakes up screaming, and today is no exception. I make my way across the dark room to her crib, tripping over the foot rest of the glider and chipping a tooth. She screams harder. I run my tongue over the rough tooth and try not to cry. It’s too early to be crying already. I pick myself up off the floor and reach into her crib.

“Shhh, shhhh, sweet girl,” but she is screaming and grabbing at my shirt.

“Want milk? Want milk. Want milk.” I try out my Happiest Toddler on the block technique to only louder screams and the addition of head butts. One hits me square in the nose and I let out a squeal and feel the tingle spread up my face.

I breathe and collect myself, “Story, No head butting mommy. We hug, we don’t head butt.

She is thrashing in my arms and I have no idea what to do with her precious little body so I lay her on the floor to finish her tantrum.

7:25 am: I fill a pink princess cup with cold milk and bring it to where she is on the floor. She stops crying immediately, removes the cup from my hand, giggles maniacally, says “Milk”, and begins to drink. I pick her up and carry her over to the couch where we both sit. Story loves to sit next to me on the couch and to show her approval of the situation, she leans her head on my arm. I rub my hands over her face to wipe away her tears. I drift a few fingers through her hair and give her head a little squeeze. She takes the milk out of her mouth and smiles.

“Mama. Mama.” When Story finishes her milk, she tosses her cup on the floor and skootches off the end of the couch to start playing with her toys.

8:00 am: Story follows me into the kitchen to help me cook breakfast. We pull out eggs and cheese from the fridge. I turn on the burner and crack the egg right into the skillet, whisking it lightly with a spatula to break up the yolk. I’m lazy.

I serve the scramble a little wet and sprinkle freshly grated cheese over the top with a pinch of salt. I slice a few strawberries and lay them on the plate to make it pretty.

While I am doing this, Story takes all the spices off the shelf and throws them on the floor. She pulls all the bowls from the cupboard and takes out each individual Kleenex and lays it on the floor.

8:15 am: Story sits in her high chair, eats eggs and drinks water while I clean up her mess.

It’s not even 9:00 AM and I’m already exhausted.

...to be continued

A Story About Poop

I swore it wouldn’t happen to me. I would never write about poop. So let’s just get this out of the way. This is a story about poop.

There I am in the checkout line at H&M on a gorgeous spring day. My little baby girl is wearing a spring romper and a pretty pink hat that makes her look like a tiny little cupcake that you want to eat immediately. I’m feeling fresh, wearing my first dress of the spring, my hair down around my face. I've a few cute infant onesies hanging from my stroller, and little baby girl starts grunting, I reach down and tickle her belly, her grunts turn to tears and her tears begin to crescendo into a deafening wail. My face beginning to pinken with embarrassment, I decide to bend over and pick her up. After all, I’m anxious to show off her cute spring outfit and impress the line with my highly nuanced mothering skills.

“There, there, little precious monkey. It’s okay.”

The man in front of me widens his eyes in horror. I catch his eye and he looks away, slapping his friend on the arm and gesturing towards me. His friend looks over and gives me the up and down, smiling. But then he stops at my arm and the smile fades and the eyes widen and the friend smirks as if to say, I told you it was worth a look. And that is when I realize that they are staring at a gob of yellow poop sliding out the leg of my little girls romper, down my arm and onto the floor of H&M on 18th and Walnut.

“Oh my God,” I exclaim to the crowd, only drawing more attention to the now wailing baby dripping with poop. “Oh my God.”

I stand in the line for a moment having no idea what to do. With one poopy arm wrapped around my child, I realize I can not put her back down in the stroller. So I take the second poopy arm, stained baby turd yellow, and I push the cart towards the back of the store.

This is when baby girl decides to kick up the screams and add some thrashing to challenge my already fragile one armed grip.

“Do you have a bathroom or a place I can change my baby,” I say to the nearest store employee. “It’s an emergency.”

The store clerk looks down at my arm and shakes his head in a ‘no’ motion. “Sorry, we don’t have a bathroom.”

I just stand there. Panicked.

“But you can use a fitting room,” He offers.

I lunge towards the fitting room, anxious to calm my poor screaming angel, and then he puts his foot out in front of me. “How many items do you have?”

I can barely hear him over her now piercing shrieks. She is doing one of those cries where her face turns purple and her mouth opens so wide that I can see her throat vibrating. With each sream she kicks her legs and more poop drips out onto the floor.

“I don’t know, just take it.” I say, gesturing to the items hanging from my cart.

“Because you can only bring in four items,” he says.

“Just take it. Take it all.” I say.

He removes the items from the cart and I push baby girl into the tiny fitting room. Now comes the dilemma. I have a dirty baby in one arm and the diaper bag is tucked under the seat of the stroller and needs two hands to be pulled out. In fact, I need to remove the car seat from the frame to remove the bag, and until I remove the bag I have nowhere to put my little angel. Shit.

Literally.

I place her back in her stroller, soiling her favorite blanket. Then I frantically remove the seat, get out the diaper bag, remove the changing pad and lay it on the floor, take her back out of the now poopy stroller and lay her on the changing pad. With my left hand lifting her legs, I use my right to open her diaper. The contents pour out onto the changing pad. I vomit a little in my mouth. I reach my dirty hand back into the diaper bag and can’t find the wipeys. My poop covered hand searches every pocket until at last I find them. There is one wipey left.

I grab two burp cloths and wrap the dirty diaper in one. I use the second to clean her up and she lowers her screams an octave. I hear someone in the changing room next to us.

“Jesus, what is that woman doing to that baby? Removing a limb?”

Baby girl pees on the changing pad before I get a chance to slide in the new diaper. I lift my knees so as to avoid the puddle. Too late. I find another burp cloth and wipe up the mess. I slide another diaper under her, close it up and then realize I have nothing to change her into and her romper is a mess. I wrap the dirty burp cloth over her dirty romper and I place her, the burp cloth, and the dirty blanket back into the stroller. She stops crying.

I wipe up the floor with the dirty diaper and then I turn and catch my 360 degree reflection in the mirror. My dress is covered in pee, my hair is disheveled and tangled, my arms, legs and lower right chin are covered in a mustard stained poop. There are no more wipeys.

I hang my head in shame and I leave the fitting room. The clerk is waiting for me outside the door.

“She has quite the lungs, your little one,” he says.

“Thanks.”

He looks at my hand, holding the dirty diaper parcel.

“Want me to take that?”

“It’s kinda gross. Are you sure you want this in your garbage can for the rest of the day?”

He looks at me, a smile playing across his lips.

“It’s okay. We are just about to do a shift change.”

I leave the store, anxious to get home, trying to avoid paths that may contain people I know, vowing never to go back that H&M ever again.

In the beginning ... (11 Days to Baby)

I knew after my first date with Gabe that this relationship would amount to something very special. He was the first man I had ever met that was capable of dramatic gestures. He had no fear about asking me out on our first date via a photo text of a cocktail napkin.

He was so smooth on that first date, not afraid of an awkward silence as we rode the subway to the bowling alley. He wasn’t gooey or weak when he went to great lengths to walk between me and the street. He was super cool and unemotional on that first date, but he made these grand gestures that won my heart. He quietly paid for the bowling game and drinks when he got up to use the bathroom. He brought quarters so we could play Deer Hunter in the arcade before we left. He reached ahead of me to open a door. He insisted on walking me home. He wouldn’t come inside my apartment or kiss me goodnight but made me close and lock the gate before he left. He was careful not to ask me out on a second date before he departed from the first. But I knew there would be a second date.

A few days later, I got another picture message on my phone. It was a number of bar accoutrements that spelled out “Do you like Jazz?”

I didn’t – but I was smitten by his efforts to dazzle me and agreed to meet up for some dinner and jazz. We ate at a restaurant in Northern Liberties that had a wall size print of a woman’s breast. He didn’t look at it once. I asked him questions and kept him talking. He paid the waiter and walked me over to this jazz club next door. It was cold and dark and smelled of urine and beer, but Gabe and I sat at the bar for several hours talking as the musicians played in the background. I asked him question after question, careful to keep it light but dig below the surface. I remember wondering if he was ever going to ask about me – and that is when I realized he was just a little bit nervous. He walked me home, this time he stepped into my doorway and kissed me sweetly goodnight. After I closed the gate, he kissed me quickly again through the bars, listened for the lock of the door and walked home. Again, he avoided any talk of date 3.

But by date three, I knew he liked me. That is how I knew he would appreciate the gesture when I sent him a photo of a scrabble board accepting his request to make him dinner.

I skipped to the bus in the mornings and smiled all week at work in anticipation of Thursday night. I picked out a special recipe to prepare for dinner, I cleaned the house, I dusted off the scrabble board, I used soft lighting and was just putting away the vacuum when the doorbell rang.

As I stepped towards the door, the vacuum fell out of my hand and scraped a good three inches of skin from the delicate edge of my ankle. I answered the door limping, a trail of blood spots on the wood floor behind me. There he stood, holding a tin of tea in his hands. He immediately knelt down and took my foot in his hand.

“You are hurt. Do you have Neosporin?” He asked.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Come in. I have food on the stove. Can I take your coat?”

“Really, let me help you with this.” He insisted.

“It’s fine.” I tried to convince him as the blood oozed onto the wood floors. “You brought tea?”

We both looked at the tin of tea in his hands.

“Well, I know you don’t drink. And you always order tea at the bar, so I brought you some tea.” He handed it to me.

“How about a band aid?” he sweetly asked.

“Okay. Fine.”

He helped me into the bathroom where I sat on the sink while he cleaned the wound. I was glad I had decided to shave my legs after all.

“No Neosporin?” He asked.

“Nope.” I answered, anxious to move past the embarrassment of my clumsiness.

He carefully washed the skin, covered the area with some tissue and tightly wrapped two bandaids over the gaping hole. His hands were so warm and just the feel of his fingers on my delicate ankle sent a rush of heat up my spine. His gentle touch had the same impact of his chivalrous insistence upon always walking between me and a moving car, it made me feel safe.

“You really should make sure you get something else on that before you go to bed.”

“I’ll be fine doctor.” I said, scooting off the edge of the bathroom sink and onto the floor.

I made an angel hair pasta with a home made sun dried tomato sauce tossed with jumbo shrimp and chopped arugula. We ate out of big pasta bowls and hovered over a scrabble board listening to Frank Sinatra on my XM radio. He impressed me with his eight letter words and elevated grasp of the English language. I relished the wrinkle of his brow as he gazed over his letters trying to find the perfect word to impress me. We laughed at each other, told funny stories and relaxed in the comfort of a warm home. He wasn’t afraid to challenge my spelling. He did the dishes before a knock came at the door.

When I answered the door, it was Gabe’s roommate passing by after work to pick him up. She had a tube of Neosporin in her hand and spoke with her thick Italian accent,

“Gabe asked me to bring this from the first aid kit at work.”

She handed me the tube and went back to sit in her car to wait for Gabe.

“Make sure you get some on that cut before you go to sleep.” He said. He kissed me goodnight in the doorway and held me in a tight embrace for what felt like many minutes. I felt my toes tingle, heat racing through my body with the increased pulse of my heart. He gently rubbed the side of his freshly shaven cheek against my forehead. He had shaved for me too.

“Goodnight,” was all he said and stepped out the front door where he waited for me to lock the gate and the door before he walked towards his roommates car.

I knew from that very first night that Gabe was going to be someone significant in my story. In just three dates, he had already done more to make me feel special than any other man I had ever dated. And I let him.

My First Paid Storytelling Gig - The Lincoln 200

Camp Fire Girls

When I was eight years old, my mother dressed my up in my big sisters Camp Fire Girl vest and sash and sent me down to the street to Mrs. Stutesman’s house to sell her one box of mint meltaways. It all started as I sat idly at the kitchen table, romancing the life of my older sister and her giggly girlfriends that bound around the house in bellbottom jeans, collared shirts and navy blue campfire vests with felt patterns ironed onto the back. At the last troop meeting, I crawled into the room and sat quietly at the back while a pretty lady with yellow hair presented sales tips for cookie season. I committed each tip to memory.

“Mom, why can’t I sell the Camp Fire cookies?” I asked her.

Mom was standing over the dishwasher, unloading last night’s dishes into the cabinets overhead. She didn’t bother to look up, “Because you aren’t a Camp Fire Girl and you aren’t old enough to be a Camp Fire Girl. When you are ready, you can join Blue Birds and when it’s time you can sell a million cookies. Okay?”

“I don’t want to be a blue turd.” That’s what my brother Erik called the little girls at school in the Navy bue skirts and short sleeved shirts that snapped up the front.

Mom sighed, she didn’t have much time for this conversation. She had six other children that would start coming into the kitchen any minute now, asking about dinner.

“Please mom. I just want to sell some cookies.”
Mom sighed. With one hand on her back and another putting a McDonalds Snoopy glass into the kitchen cabinet, she looked over at me.

“Why on earth would you want to sell those stupid things? Your father thinks we should just buy the case from your sister and keep her from asking our friends for money.”

“But mom, that’s not fair. All those other girls will be out their talking to people and telling them all about Camp Fire Girls and giving them yummy candies while Kay sits at home? That’s not fair. ”

Mom laughed and crossed the room to sit down next to me at the kitchen table. Back then, when mom was young, she smiled often and laughed from the belly, kicking back her head and making her breasts bounce up and down. She smelled like Jean Nate and cherry chapstick when she leaned over the table to brush the wispy blonde hairs from in front of my face.

“Well little Ms. Sunshine, you make a very interesting point. Do you want to tell someone all about Camp Fire Girls and eat yummy candies?”

I kicked myself off the chair and onto the floor so that she could understand the full force of my head nodding up and down, “Yes!”
Mom looked down at her watch. “Okay, well how about you bring one box over to Mrs. Stuetsman?”

I jumped in the air. “Okay, okay Mom. I’ll have to wear Kay’s sash though because I don’t have my own. And a Campfire Girl should always represent her sisters with pride.” I started up the stairs.

“And the vest too. Don’t forget the vest,” She called after me.

I skipped two stairs with each leap until I got to my sisters room and asked to borrow her vest. Kay barely looked up from her homework, “It’s on the floor in the corner. Don’t mess it up.”

I stood in the hall mirror, sash down to my knees, vest buttoned down below my hips, cardboard carton full of twenty-four boxes of cookies in my right hand, and a big Campfire smile across my face. Mom stood over me with a safety pin in her teeth while she tightened the sash around my waist. She put the pin in and cocked her head to the side to survey her work.

“We wouldn’t want it to fall off while you were walking.”

My heart was pounding blood through my body and I could feel the pulse in my fingertips. My cheeks turned red with anticipation and excitement.

“Hurry home my little Camp Fire Girl.” Mom waved at me as I bound down the front driveway and turned left towards Mrs. Stuetsman’s house.
Two hours later I arrived back home, a pocketful of cash and an empty cardboard cookie carrier.

After I visited Mrs. Stuetsman, I decided one more house wouldn’t hurt. With the money in my hand, I rationalized , “Just one more house and then I’ll go home.” But when the door opened and they leaned down to hear my sales pitch, I became the center of their world and I loved it. I smiled a toothless grin, they told me I was absolutely adorable and how could they resist. They asked me how much and I shrugged my shoulders. They gave me so much cash that it overflowed from my jeans with the cherry on the pocket. They invited me in to talk about Camp Fire Girls, open the cookies and let me have one. They patted me on the head when I left and told me I was a very good little saleswoman. And for two hours I was someone important, a Camp Fire Girl.

When I got home my mother was panicked. Then she saw the empty cardboard case and the pockets of cash and she suppressed her laughter. I had sold twenty-four boxes of Camp Fire cookies and earned my sister a new badge. After my Dad told me I was very naughty and should have done what I was told, my mother served me dinner and later tucked me into bed with a little kiss on the forehead.

“You are your mother’s daughter,” She said. And I didn’t know what it meant for many years. But I never forgot it.

Grand Slam 2008

Brotherly Love - Story Slam

Guess who won last nights story slam hosted by First Person Arts?

Go here to read the live blog.

The Stuff That Makes You Cringe

Hi, remember me? I know, I know, it's been a while. Love can be very distracting. But I'm back. So many newsworthy moment, so many world events that merited a snarky remark, so many Britney Spears debacles that passed without my commentary. You know you have been away a while, when Brangelina adopts a new baby and Paris is sentenced to prison in your absence.

I want you to know that I thought about all these historic passings, and I even tried to write about them. But something totally out of my control happened. The keyboard just lay there under my fingers unwilling to take the notes being dictated in their direction.

It's true! I suffered from three months of finger paralysis. I thought at first that my fingers were just cold. But rigorously rubbing the hands together did nothing for my troubles. Hot baths only made me sleepy. And you can't wear gloves while you type. I wept over the computer, refusing to believe my predicament. I dropped to my knees and prayed to my HP, "God, why have you forsaken my blog."

Nothing. Just more useless thinking. And we bloggers know - our thinking means nothing without the sound of fingers furiously tapping across our keyboards.

I went to the doctor and begged for a prescription to give me back even the use of my thumb on the space bar. He told me to drink a cup of coffee every four hours until 6:00 in the evening. I rushed to my URL every morning to see if it worked, but nothing new would be posted.

I was ready to give up, throw in the towel, accept my fate as a nobody corporate zombie and then, a miracle.

Last night Chuck Palahniuk read a story to me as I sat sweetly smiling in the front row of the Philly Free Library auditorium. I twirled my pearls and straightened my skirt and thought about how lovely my life was in every way. But then he looked me in the eye, staring down from a podium carved out of an old Maple tree and everything changed.

"Everybody has a story to tell. Other writers tell stories about the every day man, but what about the other guy. Who is going to tell his story? Who is going to shed the light on the dark parts of mankind. Even the sickest and most twisted stories have a message for us. And it's our mission to gather up our guts and go out and tell those sick and twisted stories."

He said a lot of other good stuff and he told a lot of really cool stories too. Then he tied it all together and the 500 strong crowd felt as if the three hour wait in the rain to hear him speak was all worth it.

That's right, 500 people waited in line for him to read some fan mail, tell a few short stories and answer questions about his craft. 500 people! To hear an author!! He ended the event by dispersing a large box of fake severed body parts through the crowd. Sitting in the front row, I had my pick of appendages but decided I needed none of the bloody limbs to remind me of the experience.

Now I'm not sure if it was Chuck, the warmth of an auditorium filled with 500 twisted readers, or the coffee wthat as finally kicking in, but when I got home I could feel my fingers starting to tingle a little. I laid them out over some blank pages in my journal this morning and they were able to grip a pen. I wrote a short piece about how much work I had waiting for me in the office and how I needed to get my ass to work and stop pussy footing around at the kitchen table. Miraculous! Amazing!! Chuck heals! Coffee cures!

I decided right then and there, that one day, I wanted to be one of those writers to inspire 500 people to wear wedding dresses and veils through the crowded streets of a bustling city in the hopes I would autograph their book. I have too many nasty stories to tell, too many dating horror tales to lament, too many pop culture casualties to report, to be letting my pen have a rest.

So, I better get cracking. Oh yeah, and today on CBSnews.com, I got a little reminder that it is the most painful stuff to write about that makes the biggest impression on others. Check it out (printed below).

The year was 1987, the boy's name was Rob, and 13-year-old Ingrid Wiese had some pressing concerns.

"He kisses weird," she wrote in her diary. "I just hope it doesn't stick and I don't end up kissing like that forever."

Twenty years later, Wiese hauled the diary out of storage and read it to a bar full of strangers just for laughs.

"Cringe readings," these exercises are called, and they are growing in popularity around the country.

Groups in New York and elsewhere convene to relive what most would rather forget: the depths of their teenage angst. Participants get up on stage with their ragged, old diaries and are instructed to read only material embarrassing enough to make them cringe.

It turns out that embarrassing is also funny. When Wiese appeared at the reading, held monthly at a Brooklyn bar, the room was packed beyond capacity. The 33-year-old fundraiser may have been cringing, but her audience was cheering.

"When most people hear about it they think, 'Oh, God, that would be just absolutely humiliating, I would never do that,' " said Blaise Kearsley, another reader. "But I think there's something so universal about your adolescent diaries and your poems and your school assignments. It's just stuff that everyone can relate to."

Indeed, as readers spoke about zits and boys, sex and death, they heard plenty of knowing laughter.

Perhaps only teenagers or former teenagers could follow this diary entry, written by a 14-year-old Kearsley in 1987:

"When we got to the dance, Erin was depressed because she likes John and he spent the whole night dancing with Ada. But Ada was upset because at the end of the dance John frenched her. And number one: she likes him but she doesn't know if she likes him in THAT WAY. And number two: John is good friends with Dan, her ex, and she knows that Dan will have something to say to John about this."

Ah, young love.

The Brooklyn event was started by a local administrative assistant, Sarah Brown, who in a momentary, drunken lapse started reading her old diaries to friends — and discovered they had finally become more funny than painful.

The monthly cringe reading has since landed Brown a book deal and a pilot for cable television's TLC, allowing the 29-year-old to quit her day job. Similar events are happening around the country in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Milwaukee and Seattle.

"When you're a teenager, everything is the same level of intensity," Brown said. "They read about boys, or girls, or their parents, or their friends, or school, or something serious like, you know, a divorce — but ... there's no change of tone."

While the readers try to keep it light, plenty of the material in their diaries is dark, heart-wrenching stuff.

"Why? Why do you think someone could really love you?" a now-grown Ingrid Wiese reads to the crowd.

"You're fat, out of shape, covered with zits. You can just feel how your body is GOING. Your arms, your wrists, your calves. You're insecure, immature, and" — she lowers her voice to a whisper — "your grades reflect your intelligence."

The 33-year-old Wiese says it's enough to make her wish she could somehow give that insecure girl a hug.

"I just want to go back and tell that kid so many things, but mostly that 'you're just all right the way you are,' " Wiese said after the reading.

These days, Wiese's emotions are less heightened, and she carries herself confidently as she walks from the stage. Still, some things never change.

"Of course!" she says when asked if she still obsesses over boys. "And I write all about it on my blog."

My Breasts

In the dressing room of the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital Breast Imaging center, I look carefully at what has become of my once beautiful breasts. Standing naked in front of the mirror, my clothes in a pile on the bench behind me, a paper robe in my hand, I stare at the sad sacks of sinewy flesh sagging towards the floor on a trail of stretch marks. They were once the objects of so many people’s affection.

When they were young, when they were mere buds of soft tissue, when they had only begun to shape my Little Miss Trouble T-shirt, they were soft and pink with nipples like Hershey kisses. The tear drop shape garnered a blooming thirteen year old more attention than any other girl at Charles Wright Academy. It was there that they made their debut on the first day of junior high.

I was the new girl in one of those private schools where everyone had known each other since first grade. For the first day of school, I selected to wear a loose navy blue tank top with wooden buttons down the front and a pair of my sister’s blue jeans that I outgrew in the 5th grade.

I stepped onto the bus, looked down at my shoes, pinched my shoulders up towards my ears, and gravitated towards the comfort of the back of the bus.

“Holy Shit!” said one of the boys.

“Check out the new girl,” said another.

“Hey new girl,” a boy with perfect teeth stepped in front of me. I recognized him as Trevor Moawad, the kid from pre-school that ate the Play-Dough.

“Can you touch your elbows behind your back?” he asked.

I smiled to take the edge off my nervousness, put my arms behind my back and tried to touch my elbows together. The boys let out a gasp, followed by the contagious spread of teen age giggles.

Now perhaps a different girl would have hung her head and sulked to the back of the bus in shame. But not this one. I had been noticed. A feat not easily obtained at home amongst my seven brothers and sisters. And I suddenly realized that I had something that made me special.

From that day forward I was known for my breasts. ‘Boobies’, ‘Tits’, ‘Ta-tas’, ‘Melons’, ‘Jugs’, ‘Cans’, ‘Knockers’, ‘Rack’, ‘Bazookas’, ‘Hooters”, ‘Balloons Bombs’, ‘Milkmakers’, ‘Funbags’, ‘Torpedoes’, ‘Bee-stings’, ‘Chesticles’, the boys of Charles Wright Academy kept me abreast of their ever changing size, shape and propensity to perkiness. As in, “my, my, Miss Ingrid, your teats are especially perky today.”


Language classes were used to discover new ways to describe their rapid change.

Spanish Class: grandes melones
French Class: gros jos
Italian Class: tettone
Pig-Latin: reast-bay

And the truth is, I loved it. I loved them. While the other girls developed thighs without dimples, lanky runner legs, silky thick long hair and other things that I would never have, I had them. My two best friends.

The hottest guy in school barely spoke to any of the girls in school, but quite regularly he would conduct bra checks on me by placing an arm around my shoulder and then “accidentally” rubbing a hand down my back to feel for a strap. I would laugh and swat him away and he would run off to brag to the other boys about his discovery. The other girls would gather around to ask if we were “going together”.

A bra didn’t seem necessary for my little pointy oil wells. In seventh grade, they really weren’t that big. It was only by comparison that they obtained legendary status. I finally had to ask my Mom for a hand-me-down from one of my sisters because Krysta Bandervics wore a bra, and she was the most popular girl in school. It wasn’t long until my sisters bras were no longer sufficient.

By senior year, the talk on campus was that I had gone somewhere to get them done. A rumor likely started by my B-cup older sister. By the time I finished high school, the little volcanoes had erupted into majestic mountains the like of Mount Kilimanjaro. Unable to keep up with the growth, my breasts quadrupled over bras that didn't fit and squeezed under sweaters no longer meant for certain shaped women. Whenever I tried to wear what was fashionable, it just ended up making me look like a straight up slut. V-neck Lacoste sweaters never looked so dirty.

That was the start of the awkward years. My breasts were stealing my identity, while I idled lazily along-side them unsure of my other redeeming qualities. I couldn’t understand why grown ups widened their eyes with while staring below my line of vision. I was overwhelmed with the number of senior boys that suddenly seemed interested in taking me out on Friday night.

“Whatever you do, don’t let anyone touch them. Once you let a boy touch them, they will be coming for miles around,” Dad warned my sister Kirsten in the car one day while we waited for mother in the Safeway parking lot.

Kirsten and I exchanged glances and laughed into our hands. This was the same man that would turn the Suburban around on our way to church to get a longer glance at a morning jogger bouncing by in her pink athletic top.

“Whoo-wee. Would you look at those things?” he would ask loudly over a car full of screaming kids.

“Oh Michael,” Mom would say, stifling a laugh and playfully punching him in the side.

“Don’t worry honey, she’s got nothing on you. Your mammaries are magnificent. Yours have the power to entertain me for a lifetime.”

My late teens were a confusing struggle between the guilty pleasure of male attention and the fear that I was suffocating under a sea of squishy flesh. But by my twenties, my breasts and I had called a truce. I stopped trying to beat them into a B-cup with endless work-outs and they agreed to drop down an inch and fight their way into cute Victoria Secret bra’s. A friendship took root.

By twenty-three my girls were mightier than your average chest. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bounce, capable of reducing men to boys with a few twists of the hip, once their power was mastered they were wicked weapons. Yes, the girls served me well in my twenties. They brought me through five years as a Budweiser girl and made a decade of cocktail waitressing tremendously lucrative.

As the girls grew in size, I grew in confidence. Like my sister Katryn and her romance novel long hair, my breasts were the key to my burgeoning femininity.

Staring at them today in the mirror, it is clear they have seen their glory days. Nipples decidedly larger than in their youth, girth gone like a balloon on its fourth day, and length. Well, should breasts really ever be discussed by their length?

“According to Cosmo, length can determine the need for a bra,” my Mom told my little sister Maiken one day while we stood in front of the mirror trying on our Christmas sweaters.”

“Just stick a pencil under your breast and if in one hop it doesn't fall, you need to start wearing a bra.”

Well back then you didn't want it to fall. Now six hops and I'm wondering if I'm going to need see a doctor to go in and extricate the pencil from the cavernous underside of my magnanimous mammary glands.

They seem to have the sag. I'm not quite sure when it happened. But they no longer stick up under my chin like the old days. They fall against my skin and into my armpits when I lie on my back. And recently, I noticed a strange ripple in the underside of my right breast. And a lump.

I started doing self exams after my mother called me last year to tell me she had Stage IV breast cancer and had elected to have a double mastectomy. I flew home to help my Dad clear out her bra drawers before she got home from the hospital.

“You know, I bought her most of those,” he told me, transfixed by the beautiful lace, the delicate embroidery, the satin and the tiny details in the fabric of my mothers now useless bras.

“They are just things Dad. They are not Mom.”

They call my name in the lobby. I decide it's time to stop analyzing the sag and start preparing to say goodbye to all the adventures ‘the girls’ have afforded me. I look one last time and decide that if they discover something wrong with my tests today, it will be a brilliant excuse to get a lift.

As I pass through the waiting room in my paper wrap gown, I think about how cute they will look when I have them reconstructed into cute little ski jump B's with dime size nipples.

Inside the pink room with the vanilla scented air spray, I let the nice woman with ice cold fingers put stickers with metal pin tips over my nipples and over the lump. I stand up and raise my right hand in the air while she adjusts a glass shelf so that my right breast comes to rest on it. She brings another glass plate down on top that flattens it out like a Sunday brunch flapjack. Once she has it situated, she steps behind a wall to take a picture. Thanks to advancements in digital technology, I can see the inside of my right breast immediately. It looks like little round air pockets.

She does the other breast and then she goes in for the lump. We do a few special angles of the lump area. I have to hold my arms over my head and this time she spreads me out over the glass with a smaller piece of top glass. We look at this picture and she points to something nearly indistinguishable to my untrained eye.

“Right there. I can see something.”

I breathe in and hold it.

“Probably just dense tissue, but that must be your lump. Let's see what the doctor says.”

I try to breathe out. I sit in the waiting room and wait for the lady who does the ultrasound.

She calls my name, and within moments they have me lying on my side with my arm up over my head, cold jelly smeared across my breast and a roller going over my skin in small movements.

“Just a second,” the technician says. She leaves me there in the dark, cold room. I lay in silence. A silent gap that widens with every minute it takes her to return.

But she doesn’t. Instead, another woman in a white lab coat enters and takes her place at the machine.

“I'm Dr. Chow, I'm going to just do a few more swipes here. Yes. Just as I thought.”

I swallow hard, suddenly deciding that breast cancer is not worth the reconstructive surgery. A montage of precious breast moments passes before my eyes like love story snippets woven together in a movie.

First bra, first boy, first tight sweater, first suck, first nibble, first turtleneck, first boyfriend, first silhouette, first balcony bra, first strapless gown, first time I saw a photo of my shape, first weight loss when everything but their size shrunk, first bikini, first tank top, first-and-last halfsie top.


First sag, first push-up bra, first realization that no matter the outfit I wore I could never really hide them, first wish they were smaller, first Wacoal old lady bra, first time I wore a one piece with support to the beach, first time I looked in the mirror and wanted them to look different, first consideration of a reduction.

All these moments blend together over the murmur of the machine and the pauses between Dr. Chow’s sentences.

“Yes, I want you to see this. Can you turn? See that?” she points at a mound of light yellow flesh on the screen.

“This is just dense breast tissue. It's nothing. Nothing to worry about now. Studies show that breast cancer risk is higher in women with dense breast tissue. But for today, you’re fine.”

“Nothing?” I say, leaping up from the table, feeling giddy and a little light.

"Nothing.”

“That's great.”

“Well of course, you want to keep on top of these things, you will want to come in every year and make it a routine. Likely, blah, blah, blah. Blah. Appointment. Blah, blah. Front desk. Blah,blah, next time.”

But I can't hear her anymore.

My breasts and I dress quickly, in case the doctor changes her mind and calls us back into the room with the discovery of something new. I escape the lobby quickly, careful to avoid the glances of the other women. Those women and their breasts still don’t know how much more time they will have together and I don’t want to interrupt the possibility of their last words.

Once outside, I wrap my arms around my chest and hug my beautiful, wonderful, delightful breasts. Like old friends, they may have lost the charm of newness, but they bring the comfort and warmth of a history of friendship. They are my cultured and experienced breasts, and I'm so very pleased that, for now, we have a lifetime left together. We stand up tall and sashay out into the sunshine.

Lumps

"You have a lump."

"A what?"

"A lump."

The Gynecologist has a toy poodle that she has dressed in plum colored scrubs and is cradling in one arm so the pooch can lick the outer rim of her gold wire frame glasses while she tells me this potentially life-altering news.

She places the dog on the floor next to her, pulls back my mocking paisley paper gown worn only for the veil of modesty, looks down her nose, and begins poking her fingers along the outside of my right breast .

"It's here, on the outer part of the breast."

She takes my left hand, still cold from the chill of the February morning, and guides my fingers until I feel something like a small pebble.

“It's rather pronounced. Could be a fibroid. But I'm going to ask you to get it looked at right away. Considering the family history.”

She sits down on a stool facing me, tells me to “scootch your bum to the end of the chair” and lean back.

I would be lost in useless thought about the cost of prosthetic bras, if precious wasn’t awkwardly licking at my toes while he rests on the Doctors shoulder.

“Oh my little precious. Oh my little sweetie. No Precious. Precious, no!”

Dear Lord, what was that dog doing while I lay with my feet in the air, my genitals exposed to the world, my heart racing at the thought of a life alone with my one boob in some nursing home for the constitutionally incapable of long term relationships.

“There is a good little baby.” And her words are muffled with wet doggy kisses and the remnants of my toe jam.

“All done here.”

She releases me from the prison of the metal foot clamps, pulls the rubber gloves off her bony fingers, opens the garbage lid with one clog and drops the gloves with little precision.

“So, about the lump. My Mom and my Grandma, they both had breast cancer.”

"Yes, you had mentioned that already. Another reason to not wait too long.”

For a minute, I wished I wasn’t single. I wished there was someone waiting for me at home that would take care of me, wouldn’t leave when I lost my hair and knew how beautiful my breasts were before the mastectomy.

My reckless revelry was banished by the Doctor’s high pitched shriek. “Precious. Put that down precious. Precious. I said no.”

Precious had found a finger of the wayward glove that only moments before had gone where no man had gone before. Or at least in a very long time. And precious was now cavorting around the exam room with Dr. Bony hands in quick pursuit.

I just want to put my clothes on, escape and find a place to cry. A bad week, bad news and now a bad headache coming on – but instead I am laughing.

The Doctor catches Precious and a charade ensues where precious pretends to limp to gain the Doctor’s sympathy.

“She is so dramatic. She just wants constant attention.”

The doctor sighs, rolls Precious onto her back and scratches her belly.

“I keep telling her that someday she will really be hurting and I wont be able to tell. Isn't that right my little faker. Oh yes Princess Dramatic, my 'lil Ms. Oscar worthy, Mommy doesn't have enough sympathy to fill your pity pot.”

I clear my throat. I really want to take off the paper smock and put back on my wool tights.

“Okay then. I’ll see you when your results come back. Good day.”

And she swoops up Precious and backs out of the room, firmly shutting the door behind her.

I decide not to cry.

I’ll go back to work. I’ll call a few friends. I’ll go on my date tonight. I’ll wait for the results before I determine the poetry I would like read at my funeral.

For now, it is just a lump.

Nicole Ritchie

She was ten. Her tiny little girl legs dangled from the kitchen chair, occasionally kicking me under her mom’s Formica table. She rested her body on her elbows, a spoon in one hand and the other hovering over her Lucky Charms. She picked out the Marshmallows and popped them into the air so she could catch them in her mouth.

She was twelve. We swam together on the swim team. Her body was rounding through the belly and she was already taller than the rest of us. Despite her changing body she was the quickest swimmer. And the quickest to make me laugh. She swirled around me in the cool blue water, her blonde curls bobbing, her head falling back when she laughed. She dripped with sarcasm, bundled in her towel, licking her fingers and dipping them into a box of dry lime jell-o, waiting for our next event. We swam the relay together. We passed the time wagging our green tongues talking about the boys we thought were cute and what we would wear on the first day of school.

She was sixteen. Mom told me she had seen her out jogging along Gravelly Lake Drive. Mom said she had lost weight, that she wasn’t a chubby little girl anymore, that she looked great.

“I don’t remember her ever being chubby mom.”

“Well, she was fuller. Chunky. She had big cheeks. She was 'rounded'. But she has really slimmed down. She runs a lot you know. She looks fantastic.”

She was seventeen. Her sister and I worked together at The Taco Shop. Her sister told me that she dominated the track team and set new records for Cross Country. Her sister said that she was training for the Olympics and making their mother quite proud. Her sister also confided to me that their was concern about how thin she was getting.

She was twenty. Mom told me she had heard that she was sent away to a clinic because she wasn’t gaining weight. She said she saw her out running along Steilacoom Blvd. and she had looked like a ghost. She couldn’t believe those little legs were able to carry her frail frame.

“It was like seeing a corpse run. You could see all her veins, the blood pumping through her thin skin. She’s really sick.”

She was twenty-three. I saw her for a moment. She was walking behind her mother in a crowd. My boyfriend squeezed my leg under the table and raised his eyes towards the sickly figure. I didn’t recognize her. There was no smile and no laughter. Her thin skin caved in around her cheek bones, aging her severely. She looked tired. Her skin was pale. Her once bouncy blond curls had thinned and you could see her scalp behind the hair pulled back in a small pony tail. She didn’t see me. She didn’t see my look of horror. She just walked by quietly with her head lowered. It was only an instant.

She was twenty-nine. It was in passing that Mom mentioned she had died.

“Oh yes. Did you hear? She died. It’s so sad really. With all of us watching what we eat and worried about getting fat, can you believe someone could starve themselves to death? How dreadful for her mother. I can’t imagine standing by and watching my daughter die that way. I know she tried everything to help her.”

She would have been thirty. I try not to comment on the way my friends look, their weight or their appearance. Not when they look good, not when they look thin. I try to tell them how happy I am to see them. I try to get them away, from the clubs and the gym and the pressured existence of Manhattan ambition. I try to laugh at their jokes, tell them how funny they are, engage their souls, connect. I don’t allow the gym clothes to hide the reality that my friend is becoming too thin. So thin that I need to reinforce through my actions that boys, and party dresses and the pursuit of glamour, adoration and the thinnes reserved for the naturally petite is not what will make us feel full. I try not to read those magazines. I try not to stand in front of the mirror too long.

I am thirty-three. When I pass by the news stand on the corner of 14th and 6th Ave, I see the little girls in their knee high socks on their way to school, standing on their tippy toes to catch a glimpse of the fashion magazines behind the counter. The magazines display glossy covers brandishing glamorous Hollywood starlets who are “dying to be thin”. I see their tiny wrists. I see their thinning hair. I see their sunken cheeks and protruding clavicles. I see her, tiny, little girl legs, dangling off the chair in her mother’s kitchen.

Dolly Parton

My mother has just had a double masectomy and Dad has returned from the hospital for forty five minutes to take a shower. He doesn't expect to find me and Tigersmiles in his closet emptying out Moms bra drawers into green glad bags.

"What are you doing?"

Tiersmiles and I look at eachother and stop what we are doing.

"We didn't think she would want to see them when she got home."

He sighs and shakes his head.

"Good idea. I was going to do it. But I haven't had a chance."

"It's okay. I think we have it under control."

Dad just can't seem to stop watching.

"Really, we got it. We didn't want you to have to do it."

He's staring at the pile of La Perla and Victoria Secret. His eyes trace the outline of the beautiful lace, the delicate embroidery, the tiny details.

"You know. I bought her most of those."

Tigersmiles and I exchange a glance.

"I thought you were going to take a shower. Are you hungry?"

He is still staring. "No."

"Where are you taking them? She might want those later."

"I'm not going to throw them away Dad. I'm just going to hide them. So she doesn't have to look at them."

"Okay."

And he turns slowly and goes to the bed. And he lies down.

White

It is the summer of 2001 and I am somewhere in the Sahara dessert in the back of an old jeep with four men named Mohammed and an Egyptian bodyguard named Hosnik. Hosnik was assigned to watch over me by a government, ever protective of their tourism industry. I’m not sure how much money the government charged my friends for my protective custody. But judging by Hosnik’s 1945 British uniform and 1920’s rusty pistol, I am guessing that they are not paying him much.

When I met the four Mohammeds in Karnak I was assigned a security force of eight. Three rode in an open jeep behind me, three in a van in front and two in the car with me, one on either side. Those guards wore bullet proof vests and carried semi-automatics. But their uniforms still fell off their bodies like tissue in some spots. And their boots were covered in tiny holes.

It all looked very official from afar. But we all knew it was a big show.

When I had to stop the caravan for a bathroom break, four guards entered the restroom before me, came out and signaled I could enter. I entered a room with three inches of standing water, rolled up the bottom of my jeans and waded into the room to hover ridiculously over the spot where the Turkish toilet was buried under brackish water in the back corner.

This was Egypt. I had learned to expect challenged plumbing.

Whilst pulling my drawstring pants back up over my falafel filled ass, I turned back to see two distinct holes that had been punched in the wall behind my Turkish toilet. Three men stood on the other side giggling at the full viewing access of my western sized ass.

Cursing at my useless security guards I shook my Tevas out onto the sand, got back in the car and continued in silence until the lunch camp. It was here that we left the six guards with their fancy guns and chest plates. Apparently terrorists don’t venture this far into the dessert.

But we did.

The next leg of our journey is by jeep. So here I am bouncing around in the back of the car and trying not to bump into Hosnik for fear his ancient pistol will shoot my knee cap off and we will be 100 miles from the nearest hospital. I had been suckered into buying the travelers insurance from STA, but I don’t recall it covering air lift.

Hosnik is happy. He smiles a lot and chat’s easily with the four Mohammeds. Two of the Mohameds never look at me, Grumpy Mohammed doesn't look at me or speak with me, but Friendly Mohammed is patient with my broken Arabic. He seems to mildly enjoy my company. Or at least he doesn’t carry the same bitterness for my whiteness, typical of so many of those we meet along our journey.

Last night, before we left the city, he watched me struggling with my Hejab. For as hard as I tried to cover my white blonde hair and farmer bronzed fingers, I couldn’t cover my Western origins. In this crowd, I would always be white. I would always be a foreigner. And I wanted nothing more than to blend.

When I walked into a room, the mood shifted, the conversation lowered to slow whispers, people left.

It was as if Friendly Mohammed knew that I so desperately wanted to assimilate. To be one of them. When the waitress approached my table with a $30 Shisha, Friendly Mohammed shooed her away. I didn’t dare smoke in front of the others. Even if we were in a tourist joint where all the women dressed in vintage belly dancing gear because that's what the Westerners wanted to see. I am a woman, and that would be inappropriate. Because I am white, they would probably let it go. But then I would be drawing attention to my differences. So I declined. Friendly Mohammed darted his eyes to the back door, inviting me to meet him out back.

I did.

Out back were the waiters, their ties loosened, hookahs dangling off their lips. He sat me down and paid one of the waiters a few coins from his change purse. One waiter moved aside and let me sit and Friendly Mohammed placed the hookah in my hand. Because he knew I wanted to experience something that was typical of the Egyptian life. But there was nothing typical about me sitting in my Hejab, surrounded by unamused waiters, smoking apple tobacco in a cloud of dust rising up behind a touristed shanty.

"Shukran." Thank you. And I shot Friendly Mohamed a thankful smile.

Now today, we arrive at an oasis as the sun is beginning to set a yellow glow over the horizon. Desert sunsets are like that. Yellow. The oasis is a small but thriving town and I immediately notice the warmth of the people. It is a warmth I didn’t feel in the city.

I notice wealth, clean buildings, streets without garbage, and clear water running into basins in the center of town. The children here smile wide, they wear crisp white shirts over burgundy school uniforms. The girls sport headbands and knee high socks. I wander down where all the children are gathering after school and one of the girls pulls off my head scarf. Someone squeals and they fall into little girl giggles, swarming to touch my white hair. I ask them if I can take a photo.

"Minfadlik." Please. But I don't have to ask again because most of the girls aren’t shy.

“Hello…What is your name…How old you are…Thank you.”

They ramble off every English word they know. The girl with the ponytail is shy and she doesn’t want her photo taken. But the other girls convince her I am harmless. They touch my hand to show her that I don’t bite.

"Ma ismok?" What is your name.

"Fajr." She smiles and let's me take the photo.

"Ma'assalama." Goodbye. And she turns to join the others

"Fi aman allah." And I wave at them as they throw dust behind their thin legs, running back to their homes for dinner.

I explore the city, happy to escape the chaos of Luxor and Cairo. The oasis is clean, people are nice, they have proper toilets. I can walk the market without developing a crowd of salesman following behind.

"You are American? Follow me. I have an Uncle who sells carpets. I can make you a great deal. Come with me."

In the oasis, no one seems to look at me with pained glances. Out here I am not someone to resent. I am just a friendly visitor with funny skin, light eyes and white hair. I am only one tourist, not part of a pack of hungry, greedy tourists trying to rob them of their culture and poison them with my Capitalism.

I wander back to the jeep and find Hosnik and the Mohammeds behind the local restaurant smoking Shisha. They stand up when I come around the corner and I realize that I have not rewrapped my hair since the playground. But at this point it feels useless. No matter how much I try to cover my hair, bleached white after a month at the Red sea, I can never cover up that I am a Westerner. I will never be able to assimilate; I can never slump down in a corner and observe the culture playing out before me like a local. I will always be a white foreigner and my physicality will always deny me from the Arab privilege.

The next morning, we take jeeps into the White Desert. I try to contain my amazement at the world transforming outside my window. The lonely desert is turning into the moon. Once the bottom of the ocean about a million years ago, the White Desert is miles of limestone formations sprouting up from the earth like life size mushrooms down Alice and Wonderlands Rabbit Hole. Everything is White. Some stone formations are the size of buildings. One looks like the profile of George Washington in one of those shadow etchings you get at Disneyland.

I am at home in the whiteness and it makes me giddy.

We light a fire. Grumpy Mohammed lays out our sleeping bags. Hosnik and I go into our nightly ritual of charades. This is how he plans to increase my Arabic vocabulary. But so far, we just act out funny sounding animals. And at this point, I figure I know the arabic word for 50 or so Northern African creatures. Tonight, his 6'3" lanky body is framed by the light of the campfire as he slumps over and morphs into the form of a camel.

“Yella, Yella,” I sqeal. And we all laugh because this is what they told me to say to the camels when we were trekking into the Valley of the Kings.

“Yella, Yella.”

The four Mohammeds repeat with chuckles.

Maybe it was the Shisha, or maybe the long day, but Hosnik is laughing so hard now that he is falling over. And now all the Mohameds are laughing at Hosnik. And now I am laughing at the four Mohammeds. And I fall backward onto the white rock behind me.

That’s when I hear it.

The sound of air coming out of a tire. A slow, smooth, hiss.

“Hissssss.”

And I look to my left. There it is. Staring me cold in the eye. A hands length from my nose.

A snake. A white snake. A hooded white viper snake.

No larger than the garden variety we would find when weeding the yard back home. But a snake in the desert is never a good thing. She is in strike mode, her body raised up about a foot from the coil of her tail. And we are miles away from a venom. I don’t recall seeing a kit in the back of the car.

I slowly begin to move my body to the left. I don’t break my stare. I speak quietly in a whisper that only Friendly Mohamed could hear over the raucous laughter.

“Snake.”

It comes out like a prayer.

And then everything happens fast. I have pulled away a few more feet from the snake and the snake strikes. Friendly Mohammed is on his feet and has somewhere found a large rock. Hosnik pulls out his rusty gun. Friendly Mohammed brings down the rock on the snakes head in a swift blow that instantly decapitates. Hosnik begins shooting at the sand around the headless body. The other Mohammeds scramble to avoid the bullets ricocheting off the rock. And I am still half laughing at ‘Yella,Yella’, trying not to wet myself with confused delayed emotional response.

But no one else laughs. They are all cautiously staring down at the sand.

“Pack up. White Vipers travel with mates. Where there is one, you will always find another.”

I get it. Every word. Everyone snaps into motion. I help Grumpy Mohammed pack up the sleeping bags and we move to the top of one of the white rocks. As we lay out the bags on the stoney surface of the white mountain, the mood begins to lighten. The Mohammeds are alive with chatter about the scene around the fire. They are re-enacting my fall against the rock and my cool response. I zip myself into my bag as Grumpy Mohammed shoots me an amused look. In the eye. He says something in Arabic, very quickly and all the Mohammeds laugh.

"Lil'asaf, anaa ataHaddathfaqaT qaliil min aläarabiyya." Unfortunately, I only speak a little Arabic.

"Haadhaa Hasan," That's all right, "Anaa afhamuk." I understand you.

And I feel like I’m sleeping on the surface of the moon.

When we wake up, we travel back to the base camp. When the jeep stops in front of the oasis, the Mohammeds all scatter and I am left alone in the big tent with all of the Bedouin. I try to tell them the story of the snake which makes them begin hooting and hollering and laughing and slapping their knees. And then one asks me what kind of snake. I shrug my shoulders because I don't know. There is no google in the desert.

So I put my index fingers up over my head and flare out my other fingers to show the hood and they laugh some more.

“It was white.”

And the room goes silent. And no one laughs.

“Very dangerous. Not many out this way. I’ve never heard of one in this part of the desert. You are very lucky. Those are the bad ones.”

Re-entry

I hadn’t seen Professor Johnson since grad school. But when a friend called me up needing advice on a conflict resolution program in the Middle East, I knew he would be the expert to consult.

I met him at the Starbucks across the street from my office and he was waiting very gentlemanly near the door without even a thought to join the line snaking in switchbacks towards the back door. Professor Johnson was not worried about getting coffee and he wasn't in a hurry. He was here to see me.

My momentary befuddlement about how to greet my old professor was swept away when he raised his arm and drew me in to a small hug and light kiss on the cheek. Tall, in his late 60’s, with a head of white hair and an honest friendly smile that stretched across his face with relaxed purity, he looked like the ice cream man from a Norman Rockwell painting.

I noted almost immediately that he now had two hearing aids, as opposed to the one he used to adjust during his lectures when his voice would begin to drop to an almost inaudible softness. You know how sometimes when someone lowers their voice; they duck their head like they are telling you a secret that they don’t want others to hear. Well Professor Johnson’s voice would lower, but like you had just turned down the volume on your favorite news program, his mannerisms and gesticulation would be unaffected. He would just keep on giving the news.

“So good to see you Ms. Jane. How have you been?”

And unlike so many people that ask you that question, he really wanted to know the answer. I could feel it.

We joined the Starbucks line. We found a table near the front door. I gave him the quick career run down. But there was something so genuine about him that I didn’t bother to throw in all the hyperbole and exaggeration that often accompany you telling someone from grad school how far you've made it in the real world. There is just something about his easy going and non-judgemental manner that instantly makes me feel safe. Safe, respected and appreciated.

I like that I can tell him the truth.

“And what about you? What’s this I hear about you working in Ramallah?”

With complete lack of ego, professor Johnson begins to tell me about his work negotiating with the PLO. He’s had an incredible career and an exciting life of meeting heads of state, living in the caves with Bedouins and helping resolve conflict amongst a nunnery in Iraq. It was his career path that first inspired me to study conflict resolution. I read his bio when I was selecting classes for my first year of grad school and I knew that one day I wanted mine to contain at least one of the stories I knew he could tell.

“Well, I asked you to meet with me because I thought you might be able to help my friend with a current project he is running in Gaza. He’s got Israeli and Palestinian kids playing basketball together to overcome their differences. He’s thinking about adding an educational element to the program and I think you could help him.”

I tell him a little about the program. And somehow he knows exactly what I’m avoiding trying to say are the weaknesses of the organization.

“Sounds like you might have a little trouble with re-entry. You can take these kids away from their communities and their parents and introduce them to kids that they learn to appreciate as being just like themselves. But when you send that child back home, he has to survive. And in order to survive, he has to assimilate. How do you get him to retain what he’s learned. How do you affect his re-entry into society?”

Then he looks me straight in the eye.

“What’s your attachment to this project Jane?”

And I know that he wants to know where I’m coming from before he answers so that he can only give me the information specific to help me solve my problem myself. That was how he would teach. I would wander into his office hours wanting answers and he would ask me questions. He would qualify my questions and try to help me figure out what I was really asking. Even if I didn’t know.

“Because when I heard this man speak, it inspired me. It reminded me of what we studied. What you taught me. And he’s making a difference. He’s doing it. What all of us talked about. He’s doing it.”

A smile spread across Professor Johnson’s face.

“Well that’s a good reason Jane. I think I can help.”

And we talked and he encouraged and offered consult and made me look at things in ways I never really thought to frame them. Or at least ways I hadn’t thought about in a long time. When we were all finished, I had established next steps and Professor Johnson wasn’t rushing to throw away his coffee cup or looking at his watch. He was really, truly listening to me. He was being of service.

“How did you get into this stuff?”

I asked him because I really wanted to know.

“That’s a good question. Let me tell you.”

And he told me about his brother-in-law being taken hostage by the Lebanese. He told me about moving to Cyprus and commuting illegally to Beirut for six dedicated years to negotiate with terrorist and arrange his brother-in-laws release. He told me about being passionate, being in the right place at the right time, letting things fall into place. And I could see that he loved what he did, and that his path had found him. He was combining what he was good at with the circumstances in his life.

And as if he knew that hearing all of this made me doubt my career path. He leaned across the table and gently encouraged me.

“I think you are going to do great things with your life and career.”

“Too bad you are not a fortune teller.”

“Jane. Look at all you have done with your life. All the different areas where you have gathered expertise. Those experiences are always applicable and can always be pulled forward. You just have to take the opportunities as they present themselves.”

He went on. But his voice dropped. I could see his lips moving and observe his tender and thoughtful expression as he carefully chose words that I couldn’t hear. But it didn't matter, I was lost for a moment in my own head.

I sort of felt this little sting in my eyes. The sting you get when you read Hallmark cards or watch the Lifetime movie of the week. I felt a little, well, emotional. In broad daylight, in the middle of my work week, on a lunch hour mere steps from my office, I actually felt something real.

Professor Johnson was demonstrating for me what it meant to make a difference in other peoples lives without ever having to fly to Bosnia and live in the middle of a war zone. Without even having other people understand exactly what you were trying to say.

“Thanks Professor.”

“You know, you don’t have to call me that anymore. The name is Bill.”

But we both knew, he was still my teacher.

The Massage

I've had a late night at work, it's raining and I'm procrastinating going to the gym. I decide to stop off at Body Co. on Connecticut and get a massage.

“Do you take walk-ins?”

“Sure. You want man or woman?”

“Whatever you have.”

G appears in the doorway. He is young, he is cute and he is Brazilian. Knowing my weakness for foreign men and accents, I wonder if it’s too late to trade in for a woman. Would that be rude? I mean, a massage is meant to be relaxing and I don’t want to be thinking about arching my back and sucking in my gut the entire time. I resolve to sleep during the massage.

I take off all my clothes down to my white hip hugger sheer panties and I get under the crisp cotton sheet. I flip over on my belly and place my face in that horrible little hole at the end of the table. He enters. He dims the lights. He puts on soothing music.

“Are there any areas where you need extra attention?”

Yes. My ass is very sore and I could do with an entire hour of ass rubbing.

“Um. My lower back?”

“Great.”

And he begins by pressing on my back through the sheet. By the time he pulls back the sheet to expose my back, I’m already feeling a little, well, damp.

“So you’re from Brazil.”

“Yes. “

“I hear the women there are beautiful.”

“Is true.”

And he kneads into my fleshy arms.

“Is it true what they say about plastic surgery in Brazil.”

“Depend. What they say.”

“Just that a lot of women get it.”

“Yes. Many women trying to look perfect. Many men too. The new thing is butt implants. But you no need one of those.”

I blush. But he can’t see my face.

“I maybe need some.”

“G. I can’t really see your ass at this moment, but I’m sure you are perfect just the way you are.

“No, I really need work out.”

“I guess I used to feel that way about myself once as well. I’m just happy that I’m finally at an age where I don’t care anymore.”

“You can never stop caring. You stop going to gym?”

“Well. I go to the gym. But I feel like I’ve accepted my body. You know? I can only change it so much.”

“I a personal trainer and you can always change your body. You just need to work harder. Watch diet. Go to gym more.”

“Yeah. But in the end, how much can you really change your body. In it’s natural state, it only really fluctuates by a few pounds here and there.”

“Nobody happy with their body. Can always make better.”

“I’m happy with my body.”

“Just like it is?”

“Just like it is.”

“You don’t think can get better with workout and diet.”

“I don’t think I will ever look like Cindy Crawford. No matter how hard I work out or what I restrict myself from eating.”

At this point, he has moved onto the most unflattering part of my body. He pulls the sheet back to reveal the backside of my leg and upper thigh. He lowers my sheer white panties and tucks the sheet into them.

“How old you are?”

“Um. 32.”

“Oh. That old? You look good for thirties.”

“Thanks”

Now he is caressing the inside of my thigh and I decide it is time to end the discussion. There is something too oddly intimate about inner thigh massage and discussions about age and beauty. Although I am not sure which makes me more uncomfortable.

After G has rubbed me down to my toes, he covers me back up with the towel, comes to the center of the table, holds up the towel and asks me to flip. I’ve had a massage before. Usually they tell you to turn away from them to protect your modesty. Usually they are not looking while you flip. He looks.

I flop over on my back and try to breathe through my nose. Hanging upside down always makes me a bit congested. He starts rubbing my shoulders, down my arms, over my thighs, down my knees and back on my toes.

As my time wears down, he comes around to the tip of the table and starts touching my face. Very slowly.

“You have a husband?”

“No.”

“A boyfriend?

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not really interested in one.”

“How come you no want boyfriend?”

“Boyfriends are boring.”

“Well, I done with that party life. I want a girlfriend. Clubs are boring.”

“I agree. Clubs are boring. But if you don’t have a girlfriend and you don’t like clubs then wont you make yourself go out and find new things to do?”

“Like what?”

“Like bowling or book readings or theater or museums.”

“Sound boring.”

“How can you say that?’

He finishes rubbing my face and I open one eye to realize that the room has become incredibly dark. But not dark enough for me to realize that G’s face is very close to mine.

I feel his breath on my eyelashes when he speaks.

“Boring because you have no body to see all those things with.”

And I think he might kiss me. But he doesn’t. He pulls his head away and pats my nose with the tip of his index finger.

“You have a beautiful nose.”

And he leaves the room. I lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling and thinking. Then I pop up off the table, get dressed and take myself out into the lobby.

G is sitting behind the counter with a cup of tea for me.

"Feel good?"

"Yeah. I feel great. Thanks."

I'm sure I have eyeliner making deep dark circles around my eyes. And hair sticking up in strange places.

I pay. I tip. And just as I am walking out the door, he comes around the counter and hands me his card.

"Have good night."

"You too."

I get outside and take the card out of my pocket. On the back he has scrawled his cell phone number. And suddenly, I feel so naked.

Crushed

It started with a crush. It ended in a dark and dank hotel room with full frontal male nudity, McDonalds French fries and an unrequited kiss.

I liked him for the right reasons. I thought when he talked he sounded healthy. Whenever I heard him at an Alanon meeting he seemed so ‘together’. I was patient. I didn’t stalk. It took me weeks before I even stood close to him in the hallway during the break. And I’m not shy. I could have marched right up to him the first day I heard him speak and entered his phone number into my blackberry. But I didn’t. I waited. I was patient.

Three months later, I announced at the meeting that I was moving to DC for a short while. And he bit. He finally talked to me. Not in front of me. To me. And I was hooked. Even before he opened his mouth to get my email, I was imagining what brilliant intelligent and healthy thing would come out.

“So. Um. Can I get your e-mail?

It was like poetry.

I gave it to him.

Two weeks later an e-mail arrived in my in box.

“Hi there. How are you?”

Wow. He liked me. He really liked me.

We sent a few e-mails back and forth. I ignored his propensity toward emoticons. I overlooked his over usage of monosyllabic words. I tried not to focus on his simplistic view of the world and instead I thought about how all the little hairs on my arms stood up when I saw his name in my inbox.

On a weekend visit to New York I invited him along to catch my sisters play. That was when he told me he didn’t like women who liked him. Something about issues with his mother. Something about describing all his ex girlfriends with derivatives of the word ‘hot’. As in ‘She was so hot”. Something about being 39 and never having had a serious relationship. I was disappointed. Slightly disturbed. But I ignored my feelings. He was perfect for me. I had been so patient. Surely he was the reward.

Last week he wrote to say he would be in DC for the weekend and would I like to hang out.

He joined me late Friday nigh at 18th street lounge and we spoke few words over the heads of our friends and the sound of the pumping bass. So I was pleased when I woke up the next morning to a text.

Want 2 go 2 Baltimore w.us tonight?

I should have known I was in for disaster from the start. Running late, I took a taxi from Dupont Circle to Union Station. But that is the wrong direction. I was supposed to go to Grosevnor not Glenmont. I turned back. An hour late and thirty dollars poorer, I met him and his friends on the train platform.

“We got a convertible. Is it okay with you if we drive with the top down?”

“Sure,” I said eyeing the dark sky and folding my perfectly coiffed blonde locks down the back of my shirt.

“No problem. It will be fun.”

We arrived an hour and a half later at a dank hotel in Baltimore. My hair was teased back in an uncomfortable mop behind my ears. The crush and I couldn’t talk much over the hum of the passing air and the pumping 80’s tune from the front seat. He took a lazy seat in the lobby while his friends began to assemble around him.

It was his friend Rick’s birthday and Ricks girlfriend Alice had booked the entire trip off a late night google expedition. It was clear she hadn’t done much searching before she booked the reservation. We were two blocks away from Po’ House Street. Which was one block away from Martin Luther King Parkway. Neither is a good sign that you are in the right hood.

The rooms had no windows and crisp polyester sheets. There were two rooms and twelve people. When I lay my bag over the foot of the bed I would be sharing with three strangers, I somehow knew the night was going to go terribly wrong.

The rowdy crew dropped their bags in the rooms and started drinking right away. I saw my crush on the other side of the room. He didn’t drink either, so surely we could bond over this. But I couldn’t really catch his eye. He was laid out in a chair with his right hand tucked into the top of his jeans. Funny, in all my fantasies of him, not one ever involved a vision of him with his hands down his pants.

The crew cabbed it to a ghetto crab shack where the crush's friends consumed sixteen pitchers of beer in the course of two hours. Conversation consisted of raunchy sex jokes, declarations of men’s gayness and a contest of who could say the grossest and most inappropriate comment to the waitress. Sometimes this sort of humor can be amusing, when played out amongst the witty. But in this crowd of dimwits with Britney Spears educations, it just sounded crass and tacky. “Country”, as Britney would state it. And she would surely emphasize this with air quotes.

The scene was dangerous for this recovering alcoholic. Suddenly, I was seventeen again, crowded around the keg with a red plastic cup making jokes that would make everyone look at me. How funny I thought I was, how much I would jockey for your attention by saying shocking and disgusting things. How disturbing it is to watch these buzzing idiots and realize how I must have sounded.

The posse moved onward to a piano bar called ‘Howling at the Moon’ and buckets of Long Island Iced Teas ensued. Shots, more buckets, beers to follow, and the groups buzz began to violently sway into a drunken slur. The class of the establishment was reflected by the patrons. I counted thirteen bachelorette parties, marked by women wearing white veils, 'suck for a Buck' t-shirts and sipping Coronas through penis straws.

To make the scene even more upsetting, my crush seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the scene. He looked everywhere, but at me. And this made me want to be noticed. What is it about that white trash world that makes you want to fit in, by showing off, showing a little more skin, or inflating your importance?

Crush smacked his friends when two barely 21 year old girls promoting a new liqueur approached the table in skin tight baby blue tank tops and white mini skirts that fell an inch below their asses.

“She’s so hot,” Crush said, referring to the bleach blonde.

Watching the crush salivate almost made me remind him that I was once a Budweiser girl, tied my shirt up to show off my ripped abs, wore white knee high boots, had hair that fell down to my back and sat on toothless men’s laps to take Polaroid photos.

But then I realized how ridiculous that was.

My crush’s friend Langdon took a neon straw out of his mouth long enough to respond.

“I’d like to stick my penis in her mouth.”

Langdon is so gross. But at least it was a reprieve from gay bashing.

“Dude. Talk to her.”

The girl passed and the crush looked timidly down at the floor. And I was thinking that maybe the crush was a good guy aftre all, just surrounded by very strange circumstances. I was reminded of my fantasy that he was smart and cool and perfect for me in every way.

“Is that your type?” I batted my eyelashes at the crush, ready to exchange witty banter and gain an ally in the center of all this insanity.

“She's every mans type,” he said, and looked up to stare after the girl in the hopes she would drop something, bend over to pick it up, and give the crush a flash of her perfectly round ass.

I was staring too. I was staring at myself, thirteen years ago. A young girl defined by the amount of attention she could garner, a group of friends thinking they were bonding over the selfish consumption of alcohol, offensive jokes that disrespected the intelligence and position of all those around them, and a woman desperately seeking attention from the one man in the room who wouldn’t give it to her. Yes, I was seventeen again.

“Yeah. Every man’s type, ” Langdon repeated.

No. I beg to differ. I knew first hand that this woman was not everyone’s type.

And in that moment I saw how far I had come. Since the drinking. Since the attention seeking. Since the lying and the stealing and low-cut tops. Since I had been that woman.

“You know what? I’m tired. I think I’m going to head out.”

And I left. Because now I know I have choices.

I found my way back to the hotel and I waited for what I knew would come next.

As if I needed another reminder of what an asshole I once was, three AM brought the sound of eleven drunken men and women to the outside of the hotel door. They screamed, they howled, they ran up and down the halls yelling obscenities. They were carrying six large bags of McDonalds French Fries. Langdon entered my room, took off all his clothes and left them in pile on the floor next to my bed so he could streak down the hallways being chased by hotel security.

The crush went to bed, leaving me to struggle with the drunkards on my own. Once I finally got them all to calm down, I lay my head back down on the pillow.

That’s when I heard the Langdon stir, lean over and try to kiss his best friend lying next to him.

“Dude. What the fuck are you doing?”

“Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

And I understood how he felt.