The Brazilian.

Speaking as an educated, privileged, self-important young member of the American upper-middle class, there was absolutely nothing in my upbringing that prepared me for the moment when a Bangladeshi professional politely instructed me to flip over onto my stomach and "spread my butt cheeks."

Let me explain.

I've recently become a member of that special class of ladies who make a monthly trek to Brazil.

Let me...explain again.

Brazil is a large country full of adult women with the hairless vajines of wee childbabies. These women strut around the beaches and streets with bare, shimmering, hairless clams, laughing and tossing their (head) hair. Men are attracted to these creatures because the hairlessness of their undercarriages matches the peerlessness of their beauty.

FURTHERMORE. You may have heard that Brazil is in South America. This is only partly true. In actuality, when the first baby laughed for the first time, Brazil broke into thousands of pieces, which drifted slowly back down to earth to become waxing salons scattered all over the world. These tiny Brazil-shards, as they are known, are run by Indian, Asian, and Eastern European women who excel in the arts of...well, let's call it gardening...in which the garden is my vagina and the gardener has a job that I don't care to do myself.

Oh and also yes, hello, I'm ending my thirteen month hiatus with a blog entry about the care and tending of human ladyparts. Welcome back to the conversation.

So what happens is this. You wake up in the morning knowing that the time has come and that today is a day you must go to Brazil. Well actually. Let me back-track for a moment. You wake up in the morning and you turn on your television and you open your magazines and you accidentally catch several moments of porn and you notice that all of a sudden all of the other ladies are living in a Brave New Ladyland. And you can try to go back to sleep or un-see it, but now that you know that you are ugly and terrible and a menace to your sex, only a coward would ignore the fact that there's really only one path available to you.

Fast-forward back to the present. You wake up in the morning. Today is the day. In fact, you've actually left it too long. You leave the house knowing that you are traveling to an establishment that will rip hair out of your skin. You get off the subway at 79th Street knowing that this is the stop nearest to the establishment that will rip hair out of your skin. You walk into City Brows knowing that this is the establishment that will rip hair out of your skin. YOU ARE COMPLICIT IN THIS.

You then make eye contact with several other patrons of this establishment (it is of course Rush Hour) who have already managed their situations on other days and are now here for less humiliating procedures like eyebrow or upper-lip threading. Make sure to maintain eye contact with as many of these people as possible as the employees of this establishment shout-ask you from the opposite side of the room what procedure you need today.

If you're like me, you'll then make a vague, magical-spell gesture over your basic genital region, and mouth the word, "Um?" You must know going into this that this won't work, however, you must do it anyway, as it will buy you enough time to get over to the front desk to discretely mumble, "Um, so, Brazilian?" while nodding and blushing furiously at a small Indian woman. This woman will then announce your intentions to her colleagues in her native language so as to spare you embarrassment while she determines who's available to perform said procedure. Luckily, though, the word "Brazilian" is the same in both languages -- it sounds a lot like BRAZILIAN -- so the rest of the room will be able to follow along.

Once she's found a taker, you get to go into a particle board cubicle, take off your shoes, then your pants, then your underoos. ("And my socks? Should I take off my socks? There's no reason to, I guess, but I feel silly with them on and no pants or shoes. Well I don't know. But then what if she comes back while I'm taking them off and I'm embarrassed? Oh fuck it I'm taking them off. Okay good. And my shirt? I hate wearing a shirt while I'm wearing no pants. What should I? I don't know...maybe I'll just take off everything -- wait WHAT am I doing. Be reasonable, woman, you've been in this room for thirty-seconds alone, you need to pull it together and not be naked when she comes back.)

So you sit on the tissue paper until she comes back, and this middle part is exactly how you think it would be. It's horrible and you hate it, and you wish you'd thought to take a couple shots before you came in here, but it's hair being ripped out of your body; that's a sensation you can predict. What you can't predict is when the focus turns to the bum-bum region. The ol' backdoor. The reacharound. The...well, the asshole. The hole in your butt. There comes a time during every woman's trip to Brazil where it's all eyes on you, chocolate starfish, and I don't know how I was expecting this to go down, but I'm being asked to flip on my stomach and literally spread 'em.

All I will say about that is:
You've been to the dentist, right?
Right.
So you remember how difficult it is to keep your mouth open while a dentist tries to hurt you in it, right?
Right. That's what I thought.

Bottom line (yup), I spend five minutes a month nose-to-tissue paper with my hands on my own butt cheeks, paying a lady to know me really well. (The same lady every time, I might point out -- because when someone gets really good at doing a thankless job like that, you want to reward them by allowing them to do it every month.)

And then after it's all done I go home and spend a long time looking at my diploma and burning my bras and wondering about my life.

What a lady.

Do something.

It's been so long since I updated this piece of machinery that it doesn't even show up in my internet history anymore. But it's 2011 now, bitches. Time to up the ante.

I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but what we do now that we're adults is we ascribe sentences to the year. Kind of like titles, you ask? Well, no. Directives, maybe? I like that word. Directives. Can we agree on that? Last year was the year of "You are enough." That means I went into last year feeling like I didn't deserve love, and came out feeling like I did. Boom. Year owned. What we doin' now.

Well. We doin' somethin'. Because 2011's directive is "Do something."

Because you know...if there's one thing I'm great at, it's surviving. Adapting to what I'm given. I can make the best of any circumstance. But we're in the future now. This is the 2000s. The century of creating your own jobs and making a name for yourself and stopping at nothing. Because ultimately, if I die tomorrow, I think the world at large isn't going to be as blown away by my witty Facebook photo captions and my impressive knowledge of The Jersey Shore as one might hope.

So here I am. Doing something. Writing something. I have insights. I am smarter than most human peoples. Now how about I stop feeling so superior and do something about it. How about that.

My interpretation.

Good job MIKA. On my way to work this morning you crawled into my earholes and looked in my brain and sang me a song about what you saw there. And it was called "My Interpretation". A song I've heard many times before but that fits just perfectly now.

You talk about life
And talk about death
And everything in between
Like it's nothing
And the words are easy.

You talk about me
And talk about you
And everything I do
Like it's something
That needs repeating.

I don't need an alibi
Or for you to realize
The things we left unsaid
Are only taking space up in our heads.

Make it my fault,
Win the game,
Point the finger,
Place the blame,
And curse me up and down
It doesn't matter now.

'Cause I don't care
If I never talk to you again.
This is not about emotion --
I don't need a reason
Not to care what you say
Or what happened in the end.
This is my interpretation
And it don't --
It don't make sense.

The first two weeks turn into ten
I hold my breath and wonder when it'll happen.
Does it really matter?

If half of what you said is true
And half of what I didn't do could be different,
Would it make it better?

If we forget the things we know,
Would we have somewhere to go?
The only way is down.
I can see that now.

'Cause I don't care
If I never talk to you again.
This is not about emotion --
I don't need a reason
Not to care what you say
Or what happened in the end.
This is my interpretation
And it don't --
It don't make sense.

It's really not such a sacrifice...

If I never talk to you again.
This is not about emotion --
I don't need a reason
Not to care what you say
Or what happened in the end.
This is my interpretation
And it don't --
It don't make sense.

And it don't have to make no sense to you at all
Cause it's my interpretation.

Odd irritations.

I really don't mind adults. Honestly. On the whole there are many other groups of people that I dislike more. Teenagers. Typical drama kids. People from New Jersey. Etcetera.

Let me stop for a moment and address the fact that I am, in theory, an adult. Okay, yes. I'm twenty-one. But...shut up. I'm talking about adult adults. Liiiike...let's say thirty-five to fifty-five is my age-range for the purposes of this entry. That age group represents to me this sort of distant, uninvolved group of people going about their lives with pretty much no input or disturbances from me. They have full-time jobs, they have health insurance, maybe they have children. They're perhaps the same age or a little younger than my and my friends' parents, or my professors at school, but, having just moved forward into this large and terrible world known as adulthood, myself, it's a group with which I was anticipating low interactions.

Enter Natalya. Natalya is the newest roommate in this massive sublet grundlefuck that I've become a part of. I use that word because, currently, no original member of the apartment lives here. Now it's just four ignorant subletters who don't know where the garbage goes, can't fit all our food in the overpacked refrigerator, and, because we haven't yet found a ladder, are unable to change the three overhead lights that have now gone out. But we're doing the best we can. Except Specimen Three. He is NOT doing the best he can. I know this because the sink is still full of dishes and my soul is still full of resentment.

But anyway. Natalya is Allyson's sublet, from home, I guess, and she's eighteen. Which I didn't even give a second thought when Allyson told me, except that she goes, "Don't freak out, but she's eighteen. But she's one of those old eighteen year olds. She totally doesn't seem eighteen! It should be totally fine. Don't even worry about it."

Hmmmm...

You should all know that sentences beginning with "Don't freak out, BUT..." are not sentences that should be directed at me. This is because I am an insane person. Not only am I perfectly capable of freaking out on my own, but I will in fact do it commonly even when it's entirely uncalled for. So when I'm told as a preemptive measure NOT to freak out, I become instantly suspicious. And...in essence...freak out. And there's logic behind this, too. If you're telling me NOT to do something, it obviously means that in some place in your mind you're worried that I might do it. Which theoretically makes my reaction justified. Hence the suspicion. (Also I'm crazy.) ANYWAY. I hear these words and am automatically suspicious of this totally-not-eighteen-seeming-eighteen year old about to come into my life.

So I meet her in passing one time last week when she was stopping in to pick up some stuff -- I guess she's been staying with her boyfriend for awhile because it's convenient, and didn't officially move in here until last night -- and she seems very nice, totally normal. Anyway, I'm sitting on the couch around eleven last night with Mark and Joel, who were over, and there's a commotion at the bottom of the stairs, and up clatter this girl and her mom. And I say hello to her, and her mom emerges from the stairwell behind her and surveys the room and introduces herself. I don't remember her name -- I'll call her Venya, I don't know why -- but I do remember that after I introduced myself she looked pointedly at Joel and Mark and said...and you all...live...here? And then after I explained who they were, she looked pointedly at our wineglasses instead. Because, yes, I can't wait 'til you turn your back and I can begin corrupting your daughter with Trader Joe's three buck chuck.

So far this is normalish behavior...she was getting her daughter moved in, wanted to see who we were, etcetera. The only thing odd about it was that it was a little late or whatever. So at this point Venya decides she wants to take a shower. Ooookay, fine with me. So she comes into the living room and says, "Are there any extra towels? My daughter only has one and I don't want to use it." Are there extra towels? I don't know? I mean I'd assume not...this isn't a guest house. Poor twenty-somethings live here. And they don't even LIVE here right now. I live here. And you're not getting my towel.

So I told her, "I'm sorry, no, I don't think so."
"No one has any extra towels...?"
"No...I'm sorry...I don't even live here. I'm subletting, too."
"Oh. Okay..." (Insert really doubtful look and an embarrassed wince. Embarrassment for ME, not for herself.)

Woman, if you think I'm about to walk in my room and hand you a towel that I use not only on my body but also to wipe up minor spills on my floor between washings, you have got another think coming.

I'm sorry, adult lady! We don't have a linen closet! We hardly even have a closet! A fact that I didn't feel bad about until you came adulting around here and scowling at the stains on the carpet. Stains I did not even make but suddenly feel obliged to apologize for!

So obviously, something about this woman being in the house really put me on edge and I don't know why. I mean, yeah, I guess I do know why. Because the life that we have here is one of common agreement -- this is just temporary. We stay out of each others' way, we don't have, like, sitdown dinner parties or a guest bedroom. Each of us has exactly what we need, and sometimes not even that. Forget about extra towels, m'lady: you're lucky we even have toilet paper.

And for some reason that I've not yet figured out, she didn't even LEAVE after her shower. She slept in that room somewhere. With her really-mature-for-eighteen daughter. And then this morning they had a nice mother-daughter chat at 8:00am in the living room separated from my bedroom by five feet and some flimsy French doors. Which of course woke me up, but I was able to lie in wait until they left. Thinking that she was gone for good.

BUT NO. She came BACK again tonight! And took another shower -- god knows what towels she used, but she didn't ask for mine -- and the two of them are now secreted back in that room again for the second night in a row! That's weird, right?

Oh! And before she disappears tonight, she goes to the shared pantry -- we each have a shelf -- and goes, "I guess there's not much food in the house." WELL NO. There wouldn't be, would there. Because food costs money...we don't have, like, extra heaps of fresh fruit and vegetables and big sides of fresh meat lying around. It was like she was getting ready to whip up a supper for herself and her daughter, and she was surprised that we didn't have the ingredients. Not many casseroles call for Easy Mac and peanut butter. (A fact I'm sure someone is hard at work on.)

It just really irked me that she was going through our things, judging our lifestyle. I felt like all of a sudden I had to answer to somebody -- explain why I had friends over, what I was watching, why I was having a glass of wine.

And the weird thing is, these probably weren't even things she was thinking -- I mean, she was definitely judging the living conditions, that much was obvious -- but I don't know this woman, what do I care? I shouldn't. It was just my weirdo reaction to having a foreign adult in my living space. A space that's partly appealing just because of how un-adult it is. If I don't have work, sometimes I hand around all day in my pajamas, yeah. And I'm re-reading Harry Potter, YEAH, and sometimes I leave my clothes on the floor of my room, YEAHHHHH.

Part of me wickedly hopes the toilet paper runs out, because I'm the one who's been refilling it and I'd love to see her reaction. That's from the same wicked part that wants her to come across a cockroach as well. Put things in a little perspective.

What an odd reaction to a perfectly innocuous woman.

Top chef.

I do not cook.

Wait. Let me correct that statement. I know how to cook eggs -- I cook a mean scrambled egg -- and I know how to make a sandwich. Beyond that, it was always easier just to watch my mom cook and stay out of the way. Because she is an absurdly good cook. I will use the word "absurdly" with no guilt, because that's what she is. And what's incredible about her gift is that it doesn't involve insane checking of recipes like some peoples'. It's all about pinches and hints and dollops and sprinkles.

She just has INSTINCTS. Cooking instincts. It's not really fair, ultimately. You can't learn it, they can't teach it; you just have it. And she just has it. And when someone just HAS something, it's not wise to spend your time trying to duplicate that. You notice it, you accept it, and you sit back on your well-upholstered chair and you consume their gift. You don't waste time trying to tailor your own gift. You. Eat. Her. Gift.

So fast forward to now. I can cook nothing. I've never attempted. What was the point? She could make it better. And I wouldn't want to cook in front of her anyway for fear of looking stupid. (Which I am, when it comes to cooking, let's be fair. I'm Captain Stupid.)

SO. My friend Mark and I go to the store yesterday and begin shopping for a night of cooking at my apartment. This should have seemed like an ill-formed idea, since neither of us could cook, but instead it felt like an adventure, and we were both very excited. So we purchased whole wheat penne, zucchini, an onion, a thingy of garlic (what do you call it? A clove? But isn't that just one?), spicy jalapeno chicken sausage, and marinara sauce with whole plum tomatoes in it.

Only to come home and discover that Specimen 3 -- friendly yet messy gay boy -- is comandeering the kitchen with his mess and will not be budged until an hour too late to start dinner. So we postpone. Until tonight.

Tonight dawns. Slightly before 8:00, which is the appointed hour, I casually look up how to cook zucchini. That seems to be enough prep for me. Mark arrives. I've begun chopping the zucchini and the onions. Mark pours two glasses of the Oregon wine he's somehow found. Sauvignon Blanc. Of course I'm enchanted. We continue cooking.

One whole zucchini and one whole onion chopped go into a pan and start sauteeing. You like my use of vocabulary there? Yeah -- sauteeing. It's a cooking word, don't worry about it. It means to...cook...in a certain way. Three cloves of finely minced garlic go in. Minced -- to chop very small-ly. Some fresh ground pepper and some salt. Nothing is yet on fire. How magical and delicious.

Through some miracle, the onions start to become translucent and the zucchini begins to soften. We start cooking three links of the spicy jalapeno chicken sausage and add the Classico basil sauce with whole plum tomatoes to the onion, garlic, and zucchini combination. We start the noodles cooking. There are good smells permeating the kitchen. Again, nothing is on fire. This makes me nervous.

We add the sausage to the sauce and taste it. It's not quite right, so I add a dollop of red wine. Look at me and the dollops, now. My mother's daughter.

I taste it again and it's better, but it's still not quite right and I don't know what to do about it. Out of nowhere, I get an instinct that we should add vinegar. Ew. This could be a terrible idea. We add in a swig of vinegar and taste it again.

Oh. Oh yes. Somehow it did exactly what I wanted it to. It added an edge to the sauce that I didn't even know how to add until I'd added it. How is that possible? I literally jumped up and down after I tasted it. Mark can confirm this.

And the sauce turned out IN-credible. It was really really good. I honestly can't even believe it worked out. Even Joel and Sam, who came by later with more wine, tasted the sauce and said it was delicious. It was my first foray into cooking and it was not only successful but also delicious.

I suspect foul play.

*Post-script: please inspect the photograph in the upper right corner of this blog entry for conformation that the author did indeed complete a meal. One can confirm that the meal was homemade by its presence in a pot.

My sedentary life.

After seeing a movie the other day, I found myself in the city with nothing to do with my friend Ariana.

Now, if you're like me, you already take issue with that statement. I was in the city, and I had nothing to do. And this is New York City, a place filled with more people, activities, restaurants, tourist spots, museums, parks, and theaters than anywhere I have ever been. There is no END of things to do.

HOWEVER. The thing about me is that number one I'm not good at finding that stuff out, and number two, even if I do hear about something or look something up online that looks awesome, I'm really bad at following through with it. I'm much more comfortable staying in my little rut and doing..."my own thing"...which usually entails me hanging out by myself wasting time reading or on Facebook or watching TV or a movie.

And I've always been that way. A lot of people I know, if they get a day off, they go and DO something. Like my friend Ross, for example. He had a day off the other day and went and took a hip hop class. By himself. With no experience. And he had an awesome time! But I would never do that -- either because I'm afraid to look stupid, or I'm lazy, or I just wouldn't have enough follow-through. Bottom line -- as much as I theoretically like doing new things, I typically don't like the feeling of doing new things, especially by myself, and especially especially in big groups of strangers. And what is New York City if not a HUGE group of strangers? Thus my usual paralysis.

But back to the story -- Ariana happens to be the exact opposite of me in regards to all this. She's done a lot of traveling, and knows what she likes, and, even better, knows a lot about the city. She's one of those people who goes on vacation and gets. her. money's worth. Our friend Louis was her roommate in London over January and he tells these stories of going to like, Kensington Gardens, and Ariana just being on a mission. She's a woman with a plan.

So anyway, we get out of the movie, and we're both feeling a little weird, and my inclination is to just go home and be with my dear friend Harry Potter and his Order of the Phoenix. But Ariana suggests that we go check out the High Line, which is an elevated freight line from the 1930s that the city has made into a park. So it's this elevated walking path, basically, and the plants they've chosen are all the flowers and grasses that would grow naturally in an abandoned area. It's right up next to the river, looking out over everything, with these beautiful flowers and grasses waving, and it was the perfect day for it -- a little bit cool and breezy, late in the day. It goes from Gansevoort Street all the way to 20th (and they're building more of it so one day it'll go all the way to 40th) and the views out over the river and back toward the city and even the Statue of Liberty were amazing. It was so nice to be up over the city and just walking for the experience of it, instead of to get somewhere. I do stuff like that so rarely.

And afterward we got sandwiches from Cosi and sat out on the waterfront watching people jog and bike and walk by. At sunset. With boats.

So I guess what I'm saying is I went on a date with Ariana. And I liked it.

Regina Spektor -- On the Radio.

This is how it works:
You’re young until you’re not.
You love until you don’t.
You try until you can’t.
You laugh until you cry,
You cry until you laugh.
And everyone must breathe until their dying breath.

Now this is how it works:
You peer inside yourself,
You take the things you like,
And try to love the things you took.
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some —
Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood.

And walking arm in arm,
You hope it don’t get hard.
But even if it does you’d just do it all again.

I hope it's still that simple when I get to it.