How (not) to write a book

2011-04-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

For Heather

Nearly every Turk I've met has asked me the same question. First they politely ask where I'm from, and once I explain where Baltimore is, and they understand, they ask how long I've been here, and I tell them, and then it comes. They lean back, look at me appraisingly, and say, "Why?" and then chuckle.
I mutter something about a horrible job market and having had friends here, but they don't understand why an AMERICAN would want to come to Istanbul.
I'm on the verge of getting a work permit here, which will give me access to all kinds of awesome health care. Free health care. I swear once I get it, I'm going to spend a solid week at the doctors office, just letting the pros take my blood and poke me. (It doesn't take a lot to make me happy.)
When I explain American Health Care to a Turkish person, they're genuinely (and may I say legitimately) baffled.
"Wait- your boss doesn't have to pay for your health care?"
"It's expensive for companies to pay for their employees health care. In my entire adulthood I only ever worked for one company that offered it. At the time, I was in my mid-twenties, and it cost me $80 a week."
"Wait- you had to pay?"
"Yes. It came out of my check."
"$80 a month?"
"A week."
The person looks at me like I'm speaking in tongues.
"The last time I applied for health insurance, I was denied," I say. "Pre-existing conditions."
The person I'm speaking to takes a step back.
"Pre-existing conditions?"
"I had pneumonia twice and I have an ovarian cyst. Denied."
The person looks at me like I'm speaking in tongues.
I go on to explain that I had pneumonia when I was uninsured. That the bill came to $27,000. That the hospital wouldn't work out a reasonable payment with me and I walked away from the debt, credit ruined, even beyond what I'd already done to my own poor credit rating on my own.
That story has a hallucinatory, dream-like quality here. Sometimes I find myself wondering if it went down like that, even though I know for a fact that it did and that all the paper-work is safely housed (thanks mom) in a storage facility in Baltimore.
"So the government doesn't pay for your health insurance?" the person might ask.
I shake my head ruefully.
"People are in the streets, protesting violently against the government providing health care."
They look at me like I've just told them I might look like a woman but I have three penises.
"WHY?"
Indeed.

On writers block

2010-11-23T03:03:00.000-08:00

Lou's advice through my months and months of writers block was pretty consistently:
"Oh, stop whining and just write. Don't even worry if it's good or not, just sit down and start writing."
I don't know about you but that never worked for me. On writers block days, (or in my case months) trying to write was just a pointless exercise in frustration. It just didn't work, period.
Lou called me in the middle of one of his first grad school papers to say he was totally stuck, and couldn't seem to continue, and did I have any advice?
"Oh bud, yeah. Print out what you have so far, and just start re-typing it. You'll catch mistakes you didn't catch the first time, and you'll jumpstart whatever part of your brain is in charge of writing. If that doesn't work write some long e-mails you've been meaning to write, or just write what happened to you yesterday. Anything to get your fingers used to typing and your brain to start thinking in paragraphs. If THAT doesn't work, give up for the night, cause nothing will. Go for a walk. Sleep on it."

I don't know why sometimes it's easy to write and sometimes it's so very hard. Iknow that I struggled over the same 20 pages for something like 6 months, and when I came here it was exactly like a switch got flipped in my brain. Suddenly it was very clear to me that writing this book would be very easy- the story already happened! All I have to do is write it down!- and suddenly, (knock on wood) it's easy, even enjoyable to write again.

How bout you guys? Any advice for/insights into writers block?

On Regaining My Sense of Humor

2010-11-21T01:56:00.001-08:00

I had dinner with Erin before I left for Istanbul. We split a bottle of wine and some small plates at Tapas Teatro, sitting outside on what was probably one of the last nice nights in Baltimore. Erin's writing a novel, and we were talking shop.
"I'm envious of my friend Brigid," I said.
"How so?"
"Well, she really, really enjoys writing. She's excited to do it, she thinks about it all the time. Her facebook posts are full of it. But the thing is, I was thinking about it, she's a genre writer, you know? Paranormal romance. So when she's done with work or whatever, she gets to go home and make up stories. And I was thinking how lovely that must be, how much I would love to go home and just make shit up. Because my big block is that when I come home from work, and I'm tired or whatever and I sit down at my computer, I have to try to convince myself to re-hash what was really one of the most unpleasant times of my life. It's a time of my life I feel very badly about, and that I have a lot of guilt about, and that I really don't like thinking about, much less writing about and trying to be funny about."
"But it is a funny story, Sarah. The characters are just- larger than life, and ridiculous and it's funny. You shouldn't feel bad. They were ridiculous, and they treated you badly."
"Oh, I know it. But that blog really was not meant for their eyes. It was an extension of me talking to my buds, it was me channeling how much I hated that job into a way to make my friends laugh. And I would just come home after work and write it and it just flowed. I was hopped up on righteous indignation and I saw absurdity everywhere and the blogs just kind of came out and it was fun. Now when i try to write I just feel dreadful that they saw it, that they read it. I know it's funny, intellectually, but it isn't funny to me anymore. And when I do sit down and get a chunk done, I know I'm going to have bad dreams for a week."
"You have to find a way to find it funny again," she said sympathetically.
"And the thing is, I can't get away from it," I said. "I was at a fund raiser the other night and there was this woman there, and we recognized each other but couldn't figure out from where. Well I finally placed it and I said, 'Oh my God I used to give you facials at Hair by Nelson!' and her face just kind of froze, and she just looked at me like I was this horrible person. So I KNOW they've been telling everyone who'll listen that they fired me for, like, murdering kittens or something. Because everyone I run into who used to be a client or whatever, has the same reaction."
"Of course they did," Erin said. "Because they're ridiculous, petty drama queens. So of course they made a huge, huge deal out of it."
"Yeah," I said. We sat there in silence a moment and then talked about something else.

I've been in Istanbul for ten days now. (If you aren't already, please follow my adventures at http://www.wasconstantinople.blogspot.com) I'm hopelessly out of my depth here, I'm constantly on the verge of getting lost, I'm thwarted every time I leave the apartment by the language barrier, but damn it, I never run into anyone that I ever blogged about here. I never walk into a restaurant only to realize after being seated that Nelson's pet client is sitting with her family across the restaurant, shooting dirty looks at me periodically. (That happened in September.) I never turn my head to the side and walk faster because I recognize the client whose life I supposedly ruined with my blog, the one who got me fired and threatened to sue, getting out of his jeep on the opposite side of the street. (June.)

I started over yesterday.

Chapter 1. Before i could turn the knob, the front door of Hair by Nelson whooshed open and Nelson stood on the step, the bell above him jangling...

As of press time, 3000 words in and if I do say so myself, it's pretty damned funny.

Gossip

2010-09-20T06:44:00.000-07:00

Those of you who read "Confessions of a Bikini Waxer" the first time around in the myspace blog: do you remember the character of the Bat-shit Crazy Nail-tech? She's called Janice in the book. As a refresher for those of you who read the original, and to catch the rest of you up to date, during her tenure at "Hair by Nelson," "Janice:"
1. Told the creepiest lie to get out of work, ever.
2. Called a client from the reception desk and screamed "Oh yeah? Well you're nothing but a fat white bitch!" into the phone. In front of other clients.
3. Crashed several cars, not all of them her own.
4. Had a possibly fictional surgery for a possibly fictional brain aneurysm.
5. Became hooked on pills.
6. Developed a habit of wandering around the salon in a loose, white lab coat, ill-fitting slippers, with her hair in a wrap.
7. Developed a cyst in her breast which she tried to pass off as a tumor, and...
8. In general drove away clients, crossed boundaries, and annoyed pestered and infuriated her co-workers until she was finally, months and months after she should have been, fired. At which point my faith in my bosses to protect their clients and employees from people as chaotic and disruptive as Janice was irrevocably shattered.

So that's Janice.
Afterwards she was hired by Red Door Salon in Cross Keys, (largely acknowledged as the worst Red Door Salon in the chain). Oh, and she was at one point way back in the seventies crowned Ms. Black Maryland. You need to know that for when you read this craigslist ad.

In the way that some people read the real estate section for leisure, and others read the obits, I read the wanted section. I follow the salons that have chronic staff problems with a not-particularly-nice relish. There was a salon in Bolton Hill that we'll call "Sasha's." For the better part of a year they were desperately trying to hire estheticians and massage therapists at ridiculously high commission rates. There are so many estheticians and massage therapists desperate for work right now, and the terms so good I knew something was wrong with the management. After six months or so a war started on craigslist: every time "Sasha's" advertised for staff a few people would post "Don't work for Sasha's!" right afer it and list their grievances. The posts got nastier and nastier until "Sasha's" finally gave up. I don't know where they source their staff now.
Later I befriended a massage therapist who used to work for them and she told me the whole long horror-story of their management policies, but that's another blog entirely.
So that's my hobby: identifying nightmare employers from their craigslist postings. And most of the time as I read it I find myself fantasizing about posting warnings in the manner of the disgruntled ex-employees of "Sasha's." A former employer of mine is looking for another esthetician after six months, and (sour grapes alert) I'm itching to post,
"Ladies. Do you really want to work for a woman, who, despite 20+ years' experience in high end spas, still thinks estheticians are called 'waxists?' Do you think that's a good foundation for clear communication and reasonable expectations?"
Other times I've known people who worked at salons, or have just flagged them in my mind as repeat offenders from the frequency or pattern of their posts.

This is the FIRST time in 10 years of classifieds-lurking that I have ever wanted to write a salon,
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! DON'T DO IT! TRUST ME, JUST DON'T!!!!"

More Sports Talk with Sarah

2010-09-10T15:17:00.000-07:00

I was in Annapolis a few weeks ago for my friend Angela'a wedding. I stayed in the same B&B as my dear pals Erin and Max, and the morning after the wedding the three of us were wandering around, waiting for news of whether anyone at all was up for the planned wedding brunch, when Max casually mentioned that he was having a tail-gating party at his house before the big Maryland/Navy game.
"I know sports aren't your thing," he said, "but it'll be a fun party. And, you know. You and Erin can gab."
"Fantastic!" I said. "Sounds like fun! I'm rooting for Navy!"
Max sighed, and said in a voice you might use for talking to a toddler mid-tantrum, "No, Sarah. You're rooting for Maryland."
"No way," I said. "Navy! All the way!"
"Maryland," he said, firmly.
"Navy! Navy! Navy!"
"Not in my house."
"You might as well get used to it, bud," I said blithely. "I'm rooting for Navy in your house."
"Then you're disinvited."
"Your wife is just going to re-invite me," I said. "Don't fight it Max! I'm going to be in your house rooting for Navy! Navy! Navy!"
And it escalated, as it will, until I ran into a souvenir shop and bought a bright pink, shrunken-style Navy tee shirt and pulled it on right then and there over my Lacoste brunch dress.
Later, when Max was out of earshot, I turned to Erin and said in a low voice, "Are we talking about football or basketball?"

The Real Housewives series on Bravo is pretty dreadful, really. I get a certain thrill out of watching it because all those women make me feel much better about myself. I may be thirty-one, single, and professionally adrift, but at least my values aren't that screwed up. My friendships may hit rocky patches, but thank the dear LORD that none of us ever talk about each other behind our backs- or to our faces!- that way.
I still catch it on tv, sometimes, but it's getting harder and harder for me to sit through a whole episode. When I worked in salons, I would devour whole marathons in one sitting. Real Housewives was a great equalizer- nearly everyone I ran into on a work-day watched it regularly, or had seen a few episodes, or hadn't but was curious about the whole phenomenon. I had very little in common, culturally, with anyone I ever worked with, and very few people who were my clients. But "Oh my God did you see Jill's freak-out on Bethany last week?" was almost always guaranteed to start a passionate conversation. It was fun.
"Tamara is such a mean girl!"
"Alex is such a pretentious stuck-up twit!"
"Alex is the only sane one!"
"I think Kelly's on pills. Seriously- her behavior is exactly that of someone with a pill problem."

I went to Max's tail gate party in my Navy tee-shirt, spouting things I'd learned in the past few weeks.
"Oh, I'm sorry. You think you can beat Navy's triple option offense? What were you last year? 2 and 10?"
Somehow, I got invited to take the extra ticket to the game anyway. So me and fifteen or so (mostly married) men (median age: 20 years my senior) went to Ravens stadium and I had more fun than I have a right to.
"Your defense is built like a sieve!"
"If that was an interception I'm your fucking aunt!"
"Who wrote your play book, David Foster Wallace?! Quit talking and start playing!"

Navy lost.

Last night I found myself sitting in a bar with Arthur, my friend Annie's husband. His eyes were glued to the teevee at the end of the bar.
"Who's playing?" I asked. He told me and I asked what he thought the outcome would be and we discussed that for a minute.
"I went to the Maryland/Navy game last week," I said.
"We lost, right?" he said. "But it was close?"
"It was real close," I said, "but yeah. Maryland won in the last quarter. I wasn't expecting them to beat the triple option"
"Why," he said drolly. "Cause no other team has a triple option?"
"No," I said. "But b/c Navy's particularly good at it. I didn't think Maryland could break it."
"Hmmm."
"Although I heard when Maryland was practicing for the game, Friedgan had them practice without a ball. They just practiced tackling."
"If it moves, squash it," he said. "Good strategy."
"Still," I said. "It was close. I think if Navy had decided to kick at the end, it would have been different."
Arthur nodded. We sipped our beers.

The only thing I really miss most about being an esthetician is the constant contact with people. I like chit-chat, and I sorely miss chit-chatting. I miss connecting with people I have very little in common with over a shared experience, a common interest in something fundamentally silly.
Sports fills that gap, that ache.
Watch out, world. Sarah Perrich, ex-esthetician/future author, is becoming a sports nut.

Oh, Honey. You don't have to read while I'm here!

2010-08-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

Last night I was sitting at the bar at The Diz, reading. I know it's a little obnoxious to read in a bar, but I was a little over half an hour early to meet a friend, and I'd been wanting to pick up my book again all day and hadn't had a chance.
There was a tail-end-of-middle-aged woman to my left drinking Pina Coladas with her husband. Suddenly she leaned over my shoulder and examined my page. I ignored her.
"Oh," she said loudly. "I was just wondering what you were reading."
"A Distant Mirror," I said. "It's a history book. 14th Century."
"Who's the author?" she asked eagerly.
"Tuchman," I said, and showed her the spine.
"I've never heard of her."
"She's a historian. An academic." I turned back to my book.
"Do you like Nora Roberts?" she asked.
"Ya know," I said, "I don't believe I've ever read anything by her."
"Oh, she's great!" and the woman proceded to rattle on about Ms. Robert's last mystery novel. I nodded, and returned to my book, angling my body slightly away from her.
"So are you a grad student at Hopkins?"
"No," I said without lifting my eyes from the page.
"Oh."
I re-read the last paragraph and the one before.
"So do you ever go into Hampden?"
"I live in Hampden," I said without looking up.
"Oh! Where?"
I said the name of my street.
"Oh. We live at the bottom of Elm."
"That's nice."
I looked back down at my book.
"Do you ever have lunch on the Avenue?"
I sighed.
"Not often."
"Oh," she brightened. "You know Fraziers? They have a lunch special every day- every day it's something different, and it's only five-"
"I know," I said firmly. "I walk by it every day. I see the sign out front."
"Oh."
I looked around for another seat but there wasn't one. I turned back to the fourteenth century.
"So have you been to the Hon bar?"

When I was a little girl A Little Princess was my favorite ever book- the one I read and re-read until my paper-back copy fell apart. Sara Crewe had me when she became enraged upon being interrupted reading.

"Yes," I said without looking up.
'It's fun, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh."
"And do you ever go to David's? The furniture place?"
"I did when I needed furniture."
"You know, David doesn't own it anymore."
"Oh."
"Some young guy does. I mean, David still comes in sometimes but he's supposed to be helping his friend, who's in catering."

I got up and left.

Off to Fight Infidels

2010-08-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

So I'm not going to lie. Writing hasn't been going well. It's been going really, really sucky, actually.
The most of it is it's kind of hard to concentrate on it when I'm not particularly happy. I'm under-employed, constantly short on bills, and the hustle for just a smidge more money sucks up a lot of not only time, but mental energy. Constant worry does not a manuscript make. Then there's the heat. This has been a relentlessly brutal summer of oppressive heatwave after oppressive heat wave. I fell like the dahlias in my backyard look: drooping, brittley curling at the edges. I feel thwarted in Baltimore, thwarted by Baltimore. I'm not thriving.

So what's a girl to do?

Move to Turkey, of course.

My dear friend, the remarkable Ellyn Stokes, got a Fulbright for- what else?- Turkish Language and Shadow Puppetry and has a lovely apartment in the Asian half of Istanbul. Where it should be fairly easy to teach English part time and write, finally WRITE the rest of the time. That's the plan, anyway.

So how does a girl with exactly twenty four dollars and seventy eight cents in her checking account get to Istanbul before Christmas?

Excellent question.

That and all further inquiries should be directed to the new blog, the Sarah Tries to Get Herself to Turkey and Hilarity Inevitably Ensues blog, Was Constantinople, also found in the blogroll.

Enjoy.

Word Choice

2010-08-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

I'm totally biting off my my friend, Supernatural Romance author Brigid Boyce whose blog can be found in the blog-role, for this one.

What words skeeve you out?

I've always hated the word Weird. But that's just child-hood trauma. I got called "weird" so much in middle school, and later by Chris Freeland who could never respect my views on it, that it still causes kind of a knee-jerk reaction where I either wanna curl up fetal or kick someone hard in the shins.

And then there's Detest. It's such a mamby-pamby word for such a stridently emotional meaning. I feel like it should be relegated to things like, "I detest spearmint flavored gum. I mean, I'll eat it if it's there but I prefer ice blue." Despise has a certain menacing hiss in the "ise" of it that conveys "I mean business." Hate has that visceral anglo-saxon brevity and percusive brutality. Like fuck, or kill. Detest is such a wuss of a word. It drives me nuts. Can't respect any sentence containing it.

Eclectic, Foodie and Sensual belong to the same class of words that I feel are mis-used by cultural under-achievers who drive Saabs and listen to Fresh Air. (Not that there's anything wrong with Fresh Air or Saabs.) "Come over to my place! We'll listen to my eclectic c.d. collection while I make you a sensual meal of cornish game hen in blood orange reduction sauce! I got the recipe from the last ever Gourmet! I'm a real foodie!" Oh, dear. That is a dinner party I'd like to skip. You don't want me there; I have nothing original to say about Coltrane or Verdi and I own not one Diana Krall c.d.

And that's my short list. What about you?

Stories From The Trenches II: False Teeth

2010-08-05T18:27:00.000-07:00

Mimi came in every other week to get her nails done and her hair blown out. When I heard her voice, (loud, manic, relentless) I would hide in the back if I didn't have a client.
This was when I was working at a salon that was tucked away on a leafy street in Roland Park. Most of the clientele was (very) upper middle class ladies, but there were more than a few clients who shared their last names with some prominent buildings in Baltimore. And if this job taught me anything about life it's that there's no nutjob like a rich nutjob.

Nearly every time Mimi came in I heard her holler,
"Where's the esthetician? You have an esthetician, right? I want to talk to the esthetician!"
The beleaguered front desk lady would come back to the staff area and say, heavily,
"Mimi wants you."
We would both sigh and I'd trudge after her to the front.
"Hello, Mimi," I'd say cheerfully. "I understand you have a question for me?"
She would blink up at me, as though surprised that the same esthetician appeared week after week, and say,
"I have these three blackheads." She'd thrust her chin out to a grotesque angle so I could see, and there they would be. Week after week. The same three blackheads. Truth be told, she had more than three blackheads. Perhaps these were just the ones she could see. "Can you take care of them for me?"
And every time I'd outline her options: mini-facial, deep cleansing facial, deluxe facial... and every time she'd demand to know the prices.
"Those are too much," she would snap. "What would it cost for you to just- take them out?"
Inwardly I would sigh; outwardly I would smile.
"I can't just do that, Mimi. I have to prep the skin, get it clean and exfoliated first, and then afterwards we need to masque it to close the pore. Otherwise you're at risk for irritation, infection or scarring."
(As an aside I don't even know if this is true. I've been fed the line since I got my first facial at 16. It was beaten into our heads in beauty school and reinforced by every job I ever had. But I've picked my zits willy-nilly in the bathroom mirror, with nothing more than perhaps a dab of benzoyl peroxide, since time immemorial and I've been told I have lovely skin.)
She would sigh explosively and then crane her head towards me again and demand, top volume,
"Do I need a lip wax?"
Loaded question.

One day, six months into our relationship, she finally agreed to get a mini-facial.
It was hard to perform. She talked the whole time.
"Have you noticed I've lost weight? I've lost twenty pounds in the past month and a half. You know diets don't work, don't you? I tried every diet on the market. Finally I went to my doctor and said, 'You really have to give me something.' So he put me on amphetamines."
Aha! That explains so much!
"And they're just wonderful. The weight just melts off because you aren't hungry. And you have so much energy. Of course, he put me on a diet, too. But it's easy to follow because I'm just not hungry. I forget to eat! And my boyfriend...[incoherent story]... so I'm not supposed to drink, but I found a cocktail that fits in perfectly with my diet. So if you're ever trying to lose weight," here she swiveled around and looked me up and down, "the secret is- bloody marys! I drink them all the time. They're so healthy! Sometimes I have them instead of dinner."

"Did you get them out?" she demanded when I was done.
"Sure did. See?" I handed her a mirror.
"Oh I can't see a thing. Can you hand me my glasses?"
"I'm afraid I don't have your glasses. Did you leave them in the reception area?"
"I know I brought my glasses in here," she snapped. She hopped up off the table and began to peer around. Her gown slipped down revealing one and a half middle aged boobs. She didn't seem to notice.

The whole salon was in an uproar over her glasses within ten minutes. Every nook and cranny, every sofa cushion was examined while she flapped around, squacking.
"Did you try your car, Mimi?" the receptionist finally asked.
"Oh I know they aren't in there-" she walked to the door and peered out. "Oh goodness- I didn't mean to leave the top down." She walked out and moment later popped her head in, wearing her glasses.
"They were on the dashboard," she said, "next to my teeth."
A moment later we heard gears grind, followed by the squeal of tires.

On Nervousness

2010-07-20T15:57:00.000-07:00

I often struggle to find interesting things to say about bikini waxing. I understand that there's some prurient interest there, but I did it for so long that lady parts became just so much wallpaper, really.

Here are some F.A.Q.'s that you'd think would launch into naughty and fascinating conversations but... not so much.

"Isn't it weird? Touching people down there? I could never do that."
It was weird the first couple times, yeah. Golly, my first brazilian, (see here and here) I didn't know where to look or where to put my hands. But after a few it just isn't. It was my job. And sometimes I would kind of step outside myself and watch myself working and marvel, "What a strange trajectory your life has taken, Sarah Perrich," but it never felt weird or oogey.
Although sometimes, in the summer when everyone was getting it done and I'd be cranking out forty a week, by the time the weekend came I'd be suffering from what a co-worker of mine termed "Susie-fatigue."

"Have you ever seen any, like, really weird ones?"
Sometimes, yes, one will make me pause and go, "Wow. That's almost... architectural!" but they're all so different that they're all pretty much the same. If that makes any sense.

"Do you ever get so grossed out by like, roast beef curtains?"
Interestingly, I get this question almost exclusively from women.
I can't tell you how much I object to that term. From my experience more ladies have inner labia as long as or longer than their outers. You're all beautiful flowers, ladies. Don't hate.

All dead ends, none of them, to me, particularly interesting. If anyone has any other possibly more fertile angles please e-mail me or leave it in the comments.

I was discussing this problem with Liz and Christine the other weekend, and they had the brilliant idea to talk about how women react to getting waxed. Liz chatters, for instance, non-stop, and Christine gets the giggles.

"Oh, that's good," I said.

Around the time I dropped out of college but before I went to beauty school I took on a temp nanny job. The baby was four months old, day care prices dropped at six months so I signed on to fill in for two months. My first day the mother, a very nice woman of about thirty five, ran me through his nap schedule and showed me where the bottles were, and the stroller and the emergency numbers. Then she took me on a detailed tour of the house. Then she showed me the yard. Then she showed me the contents of the fridge and the pantry and told me to help myself to anything. Then she stood by the door , purse and briefcase in hand, and told me all about her life. She'd met her husband in her thirties, but she'd been engaged before. They'd gotten married quickly because it was important to both of them that they start a family. She'd had four miscarriages before a pregnancy stuck. It had been really hard.
I was twenty years old. I'd met her the week before. I just stood there, floppy chubby baby on my hip, and wondered when she was going to stop telling me things and leave.
"I'm sorry," she finally said. "I have literally never been apart from him for even half a day and I'm just so nervous. I'll see you at four." And she left.

I thought about that moment often throughout my career.
Taking off your pants in front of a stranger so she can rip your pubes out by the root is nerve wracking.
Some people show their anxiety by being imperious little shits. They'll condescend. Tell you how to do your job. Ask questions about your qualifications in doubtful voices. Some show their anxiety by chattering, some by silently staring with an expression of furious determination at the ceiling. Some people, (Christine) get the nervous giggles. Others exaggerate the pain, yelping and hollering and "Oh Lord why am I doing this to myself?!"-ing.
And then a lot of people, like the nervous mama, over-share. And so I heard about mothers who were secretly and shamefully ambivalent about mother-hood, wives who were starting to hate their husbands, girlfriends who were cheating or being cheated upon. I heard about all kinds of slutty behavior. I heard about kids suspended from school, secret bank accounts, abortions and affairs.
On bad days I would sit there and seethe, wondering at the gall of these people telling me all this shit I didn't need to hear. But for the most part I recognized it for what it was, a reflexive attempt by a woman in a very vulnerable position to create instant intimacy in a terrifyingly intimate setting.

Public Transportation

2010-07-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I had to run from Baby to Butler. I missed the train I meant to take- as I reached the dip in the road where I got my first clear glimpse of the stop it took off- so I bought a ticket with change and settled down on the bench with my book. A man sat next to me- too close- and after fiddling for a minute and hitting my elbow twice said,
"Hello."
I glanced at him and then looked back down at my book.
"Hello."
He squirmed some more and then got up, walked across the tracks and walked back and plonked down again.
"Are you from this country?" he asked. He ran his words together so it sounded like he said, "Are you familiar with country?"
I set my finger on my place on the page and looked up.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"Are you from this country?"
I blinked at him.
"Um, yes."
"Oh. Before, when you were talking, it sounded like you might me foreign."
When I said hello?
"I'm from around here." I looked down again. He squirmed and fidgeted. Adjusted and readjusted whatever he was carrying. The man in the book discovered his former fiance was not in fact dead. A pigeon walked by. The tracks began to hum. I did some quick mental arithmetic and decided I could get three more paragraphs in before the train fully stopped. The man nudged me.
"This is your train."
I barely nodded.
After three paragraphs and a quick scan of the rest of the page I stood up and closed my finger in the book to mark my place and began walking to where I thought the door I wanted would stop.
"Hey!" he called out. "Is that tattoo from how many times you've been in prison?"
"Sure," I said, not turning around.
The train stopped so the door I wanted was just about exactly where I thought it would be, which is always a little thrill, and I boarded.

Stories from the Trenches I: Entitlement

2010-06-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

Butler was telling me highly entertaining stories from the trenches of domestic service the other day, and I was swapping him stories of high maintenance ladies.
"Did you like working in salons?" he asked, finally.
"That's a good question," I said, and thought a minute. "I really liked the clients. THe weird intimacy you develop with them after a while. I liked that I got paid, in part, to chit-chat. I liked the energy of a busy day, always something to do, always someone to talk to. But salons are crazy places, and they can get so toxic. I don't miss working in them. No."

I had a boyfriend once who had a mom who was kind of annoying. I loved this man, and rocked myself to sleep at night with fantasies of marrying him, but the idea of then being related to this very nice but very needy woman was a fly on the screen of my mental movie. One of the first nights I was invited to dinner she asked me what I did for a living and I told her and she said,
"Oh you are so lucky!"
"I am?" I said.
"You have the most relaxing job in the world! Oh, I would love to work in a spa! Your blood pressure must be so low!"
I sat there, looking at her. My mouth might have actually been open. Did she think working in a spa was like going to a spa? Because it isn't.
The work was hard but boring. Of all the people I worked for, more were mentally unstable than not. And my co-workers! Bless! I don't believe in nine years I ever worked with anyone who, upon seeing me reading, didn't think, "Oh poor thing is so bored she's reading! I'll talk to her so she doesn't have to!"
The clients, even the difficult ones, were the bright spots in my day. Worst case scenario I'd be getting through the service with my teeth gritted, silently chanting, "This is a good anecdote! This is a good anecdote!"

The more I write, the more I realize Confessions is little more than a story about having a really shitty job. With more gossip and genitals and shit smears than most, perhaps. And the thing is that my time at ***** Salon and Day Spa, the salon featured in Confessions, was pretty hilariously bleak, but it wasn't the craziest job I ever had. It's just the one I blogged about.

So today I'm going to start a series of entries called "Stories from the Trenches" in which I dish about other jobs. Details changed to protect the guilty. Or at least stave off libel suits.

I was an independent contractor working for a hairdresser who'd just opened her own salon in a tiny basement storefront. Diane was a really talented hairdresser, but a lifetime of heavy smoking had shattered her short term memory, left her a little scattered and a little paranoid. She tended to act on emotion. I've dealt with the typical failings of a small salon owner here, and Diane is kind of a textbook example.
Every year in Baltimore the City Paper gives out awards- Best Restaurant, Best Salon, Best Artist, Best Politician- etc. She started talking two months before about how she was expecting to get Best Salon that year and at first, reader, I thought she was joking. I mean, there was serious talent at that tiny salon, don't get me wrong. But it was a tiny basement storefront with cracked linoleum and cobbled together furniture and an embarrassment of a bathroom. The salon moved to a bigger space and looked a bit spiffer a few weeks before the awards, but it was still new, still rough around the edges. There were still issues with getting good desk help. But Diane became ever more vocal in her certainty that we were going to win that years Best award and it dawned on me that- she was serious.

We didn't. Of course not. The salon had been open for a little over a year and had some serious growing pains yet to come. Some slick place with a large, talented team and really nice modern decor won.
Diane pitched a fit.
"Are you seriously upset about this?" I asked. "I think it'll come- just not this year."
"It's wrong," she said, sucking on a cigarette and typing into her blackberry. "It's just wrong. I advertise with them. I have spent so much money advertising with them. They should have given it to me." Baltimore people- one day when you're really bored do me a favor and count the number of salons who advertise in the CP on any given week. She sucked on the cigarette again. "You know what? I'm not advertising with them any more. Screw it. Screw them."
And she didn't.

Good to Read

2010-06-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

I love to read, and I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume you love to read too, or you wouldn't be here. I read for company. I read to escape. I read to put my brain somewhere safe and lovely for a while. I read to live vicariously. I read because it makes me feel intellectual. I read to learn. I read because I've always read; it's what I do.

The current heatwave takes me back to heat waves of my childhood when I would spend whole afternoons lying on my bedroom floor with a pile of books, trying not to move unnecessarily. I'd read a page or two, decide I was too hot to read and stare at the ceiling fan going round and round for a while, turn back to the book to read a few pages before deciding I was too hot to read. Etc. And somehow between the heat and the staring into space and the snatches of childrens' fantasy lit the most lovely, eccentric daydreams would start floating around in my little-girl head.
It's been too hot to do much of anything lately. My room doesn't have air conditioning, and faces south, and is completely unshaded. It maintains roughly the temperature of a warming drawer in a fancy oven. I lay down at night and put the fan on full force and pull out my book, (currently Pickwick Papers) and try to read, but mostly stare at the fan oscillating and daydream.

For the last few years I've written down every book I read in my dayplanner and it's often baffling looking back over those lists.
"I read that? Jesus, I can't remember one single thing about that book."
I'm always on the lookout for that book that's actually gonna stay put in my brain, the one that'll change, a little, how I think or impress me with its turns of phrase or deft characters or humanism.

What are some books you've read in the last couple years that really stuck with you? Fiction, non-fiction, whatever. What's been really worth your time to read?

Here's my top five from the past year and a half:

Any Human Heart by William Boyd
I burst into tears at the last line of the book. Writers will especially like it, I think.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Awful title. I was baffled by it until it was explained somewhere around 3/4's of the way through. "Oh," I thought. And then I thought, "It really makes perfect sense to call the book that, but I still think you could have done better, Stegner." But a beautiful, haunting book that a year and a half later I still turn over and over in my mind.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
I never thought I'd like a Western but my God this book is beautiful. And one of those epic stories in a fully realized world that it's so nice to disappear into for a while.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem is so clever it hurts.

The Brief and Terrifying Reign of Phil by George Saunders
Speaking of clever, I felt like a total rube reading this book. My jaw was literally hanging open and even now if I run into Saunders I fear I'll embarrass myself by grabbing his arm and demanding, "How did you THINK of this?" He makes devastating nonsense worlds that are so water-tight it makes your brain ache.

And those are mine. What are yours?

Words

2010-06-24T17:27:00.001-07:00

Baby's babbling is starting to take on shape. He's still shrieking and coo-ing, but there are percusives that sound suspiciously like b's and d's interspersed now, and it's clear he recognizes certain words. Poor kid's an early walker, and adventurous and subborn and he hears, "Baby! NO!!!!" a lot. He knows what "no" means. Even if he doesn't listen.

I think it's just fascinating, watching a kid learn to speak.

My mother and I moved to Baltimore when I was three, and maybe cause it was such an upheaval more than a few memories from that time have stuck. Most of them are about getting words mixed up.

I remember my first movie- we went to see "Peter Pan" at the movie theater on Rt. 40- the one that later got razed to become a Home Depot. I remember standing in the lobby after and holding my nana'a hand. An elevator opened at the far end of the room and I looked at it with mighty suspicion and tried to hear if it tick-tocked- because I'd conflated elevator with alligator in my dizzy little toddler head.

Sometime that first summer after we moved back in with my grandparents I had a babysitter- which when there's three adults to one little girl is a rare occurrance- and as Franny was putting me down for my nap she said, "Now don't get out of bed or you'll be in big trouble, okay?" I don't know that anyone had ever told me I'd be in big trouble before. My mother always used much gentler language. I lay in bed and stared out the window and turned that word over in my mind, picturing my little blue shovel out in the turtle shaped sand-box. Trouble, shovel. Shovel, trouble. I got out of bed and stood in the middle of my room, heart pounding, to see what this trouble looked like. Nothing happened. I hopped back into bed.

My oldest cousin is only a little younger than me. We were in the back of my uncle's station wagon one afternoon and I announced something to the effect that when I grew up I wanted to be a boy.
"You can't be a boy," someone, probably my mom, said.
"Why?"
"Well, Ryan's a boy because he has peanuts. You don't have peanuts and you never will."
I think I was probably born with a salt tooth, and I naturally found this news very upsetting.
"Why? I want peanuts!"
"You can't have peanuts, sweetie."
"But I want peanuts!" etc. etc.
Later, much later, it occurred to me that we were having two separate conversations.

Bushes.

2010-06-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

My friend Annie is a remarkable woman. I met her seven or eight years ago- she was dating the bassist in my then-boyfriend's band. It turned out her boyfriend was also the middle school best friend of my high school sweetheart. Smalltimore. She lived with a couple other girls in an apartment in Bolton Hill- you know the type. Plaster molding, parquet floors, tranny hookers on the steps, creaking pipes and a general air of decay. She was always making interesting things- costumes and puppets and things, that were just kind of tossed around everywhere. I remember a party at her house one night back in the day- her living room was taken up with this ginormous duck topiary costume. I think it had been made for a parade or something. It was made out of some kind of plastic plant material was big enough that at the end of the night when we were all drunk as skunks Annie and I both crawled into it and sat, a little squished, in the duck costume and discussed at intoxicated length whatever boy I thought I was in love with that week.
Whenever we go anywhere these days Annie'll pick me up and the minute I get in the car she starts asking a million questions- how am I? What's new? Last time she saw me, I was going to go to a movie later. Did I actually go to the movie? How did I like it? And it's very easy and pleasant to spend an hour rattling on about myself in this fashion. And eventually I'll say, "But enough about me, what's going on with you Annie?" and she'll very casually and with little fanfare list all these things she's been up to- teaching parade school in New Orleans or going on tour with a burlesque troupe or learning acrobatics or something else incomprehensibly cool. And as I'm sitting there, feeling silly for having spent a half hour filling her in on my latest batch of soup or whatever, she'll say, "But enough about me. So, did you ever get your phone bill straightened out?"
Annie put out a facebook post a few weeks ago asking for someone to be a bush for an upcoming Ambush Theater project.
"Yes please," I wrote.
And so on a weekend afternoon she picked me up and we went down to Federal Hill, to a Crohns Disease walk and fundraiser.
"So," she said in the car, "the only rule about being a bush is that bushes don't talk."
"I know I'm like, entirely ten years old," I said, "but I was a bikini waxer for ten years and every time you say 'bush' I giggle inside. 'The first rule of being a bush is bushes don't talk.' Giggle."
Annie was afraid we'd have to change in the port-a-pots but there was a building open for our use. We wiggled into striped tights and elbow length gloves and put the bushes on. And if you'd like to hear more about our day, complete with the dulcet tones of my braying laugh, we got interviewed by an NPR affiliate reporter so it's all marked down for posterity.

How (not) to talk to a writer.

2010-06-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

I almost attacked a very dear friend of mine with a butter knife once because he had the nerve to ask,
"So what percentage of your book would you say you have done, now? Like, a third? Half?"
I was reminded of this when I was watching Treme over the weekend. In last week's episode John Goodman's character starts working on a long-abandoned novel in ernest. He sits in his office, staring at the computer screen. He rubs his eyes. He drinks a beer. He moves his computer into the garage. He finally starts writing. His wife finds him out there, hours later and blithely barges in.
"YOu're working on your novel!" she squeals.
He grunts. She putters around, tries to read what he's written. He says it's all shit and rips up his printouts right then and there. Sensibly, she tries to diffuse his tantrum by asking him, kindly, what he wants for dinner. He hollers at her to get the eff out and leave him alone!
"I get that," I thought, glaring at the wife as she looked hurt and went back to the main house. "I totally get that. John Goodman's character, I totally feel your pain."
It was the first time i felt like a writer.

I'd like my writer friends to weigh in, please. What would you like to let the non-writing public know about the care and feeding of writers? Besides, you know. Never asking how far someone is or if they're almost done.

Assistance

2010-06-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

I've recently picked up some work as a personal assistant to a butler.
Well he doesn't actually buttle anymore. And yes, buttle is a word. I just looked it up in my OED, (see: On Avarice )it originally meant to pour out drink but a more current definition is "to perform a butler's duties." After years of buttling, he packed it all in to start a company that places high end domestic help. I get to sort his papers and maintain his databases and let me tell you- it's fascinating work. Did you know that there are personal chefs who specialize in private jets? Lest you need to pack a sandwich for your New York to Miami flight? That blew my mind.
I cannot, for obvious reasons, tell you anything else about the job. But it's a good thing; I like Butler very much, we spend a lot of time swapping war stories of personal service, and the work is wicked fun.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I've set up my office this week. In the process I cleaned out my filing cabinet and unpacked and shelved 12 years' worth of diaries. It's been the most ever fun to just pick a notebook up off the shelf, open it, read a little, and go, "Oh my god! S**** slept with J*** in 2002?!!!! I totally forgot about that! Jeez Louise- we were all at a cookout together last weekend!" But more interesting even than that is what I found in my filing cabinet. I guess for years now when I haven't had a notebook handy I've scribbled things down on pieces of scrap paper or torn out pages of day planners and just stuffed them in the back. Some are banal:
"Went to Dizzie Issie's for dinner with Eric and D******. Jamie Kutner and James Saarsgaard met us for drinks and gin rummy. In bed tipsy."
Others are just, to me, anyway, fascinating.

For three months in 2006 I had a job as a personal assistant to a man we'll call Elliott. Elliott was wealthy, playing (poorly) at real estate development, and spent most of his time, as far as I can tell, fretting about what kind of flat screen to buy and whether to buy his own jet ski for his upcoming vacation. His closet, (which I organized) was full of Ruehl tee shirts and Abercrombie jeans. He subscribed to both of those lifestyle brands. He spent every night out drinking in Fed Hill. He was kind of a douche. A nice douche, but a douche.

3/21- Today Elliott told me he bought a new book off the internet for $1800.
"What is it?" I asked without interest.
"I'm not going to tell you that!" he said, appalled. Then he leaned in and hissed, "use your imagination!"
I'm afraid to.

3/30- Today Elliott went back to bed twice because he was so hungover.
He's also, I noticed, begun to smell pungent. Probably because of his mostly meat diet which he got the idea for from a book called Neanderthin. The idea is that you don't eat anything your Neanderthal ancestors wouldn't have eaten- no processed foods, no bread, no cheese. Mostly he interprets the Neanderthin philosophy by only eating the veg and meat out of a Lean Cuisine. At any rate, the house smelled strongly of acrid meat-sweat.
Later he had me re-pot plants.
"I think they'll grow better if they're in bigger pots."
I think they'll grow better if you water them.
"Do you have dirt?"
"Dirt?"
"Potting soil? For re-potting them?"
"Oh, no. I didn't think of that. Just- see how much you can get done without extra dirt. If I need to run out later I will."
"But if you want me to re-pot these in bigger pots..." Oh, never mind.

That Fresh Feeling.

2010-05-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

You know that fresh diary feeling? Okay, hardly anyone I know keeps a diary, but trust me, there's a little thrill in getting a new one. I've kept a sporadic journal since first grade and I have a bookshelf half full of notebooks. Half a dozen of them, easy, are incomplete because a quarter or halfway through I decided that what I really needed, what would really fix my life was a new notebook full of blank pristine pages unsullied by whatever boy or job was making me miserable at the time. It's kind of like the fresh trapper keeper smell on the first day of school, but with less fear. There's hope and possibility in the smell of blank pages.
I finally set up my office this week, months after moving into my new house, and got the same kind of high. I cleaned out my filing cabinet, the drawers in my desk are nearly empty, I threw out every pen that doesn't work. I feel invincible. I feel like I just got baptized. I feel like I can start anew.

"All right," I said to Julia as I passed through the living room with the hammer and the Endust, "that's done. When I'm rich and famous, if I die in a tragic accident on the back of my handsome movie star boyfriend's motorcycle you can keep that nook like a shrine and charge admission."
She laughed. She's kind like that.

I know I've been remiss in my blogging duties of late, and I'm truly sorry. I think you'll understand why as I organize my thoughts and continue to blog this week. I do, however, have something to share today.
While I was rifling through old papers I found a notebook from sometime between 2003 and 2004 full of things that I did, written in the third person. I think I had a vague idea to turn them into short stories eventually.
Here is one that I found particularly entertaining, and almost topical. So if I may, I'll transport you back to a time when you could smoke in bars.

There was one empty barstool. A man was draped over it, paying his tab, but as he signed his receipt she hip-checked the leather seat and slid into it, sighing, before he had fully turned away from the bar. "Mine," she thought, satisfied. She ordered a drink.
A hand swam into her line of vision as she was frowning over the change.
"Jon Elsrode," it said.
She put her dollar tip on top of the plastic bin that housed the lime wedges and maraschino cherries and gave the hand a limp squeeze. It was connected, she noticed without interest, to a leather jacket, the wrong jeans and a broad, pinkish face. She said her name. He repeated it and asked her if she was Jewish. She shook her head.
"Oh," he said. "I thought that was a Jewish name."
She lifted her eyebrows at the bottles on the rail and took a sip from her bottle. He asked her what she did for a living.
"I'm a waitress," she lied.
"Oh, where?" he asked. She panicked briefly when he lit up with recognition at the restaurant she named.
"Oh man, I love that place!" he said. "Fed hill, right? Man, I go there at least once a month. But I don't think I've ever seen you. What nights do you work?"
She shrugged.
"It varies. What do you do?"
"Well, funny you should ask. I'm in IT. But that's just my day job. I'm really a writer. Not published or anything, but it's really my passion, you know?" She nodded, bored. "I mean, you must understand, right? I mean, you're not really a waitress, right? What are you? An artist?"
She shook her head. "Nope, just a waitress." She scanned the room in the mirror behind the bar.
"Oh- I thought- well, you look like an artist. Do you like to read? Are you a fellow writer?"
"I like to read," she said.
"I knew it! You speak so well. I can tell you're really smart. Were you an English major?"
She shrugged.
"I knew it! So you like to read? What do you like to read?"
"That's a retardedly vague question," she said, lighting a cigarette.
"I mean, like, novels? Plays? Poetry?"
"Novels, I guess," she said. She regretted the cigarette. It was making her feel queasy.
"Oh, yeah, novels are good," he said. "I like Jack Kerouac. But I'm really into poetry. Do you like poetry?"
"I guess."
"Any good poets you like?"
She shrugged, suddenly weary.
"Um, nothing crazy. The standards. Pound, Elliott, Neruda..."
"Aw. Are they any good?" he asked. She turned her head and looked at him for the first time. He had wide blue eyes and a handful of long wiry hairs in his eyebrows. He had a thick silver ring on his right hand and a buzzcut. He was tall and solid and muscular, one of those men who seem to take up much more space than they do.
"You've never read them?" she asked.
"Elliott sounds familiar," he said apologetically. "What did he write again?"
"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? The Wasteland?"
He shook his head.
"Have you read Whitman, Leaves of Grass?" she asked.
"Sorry," he said. "I might've, in like, school or whatever.
"Pound? Cummings? Berryman? Ginsberg? Auden?" He shook his head, pink. "Who do you like?"
"Well," he said, "I actually don't read other peoples' stuff. I'm a poet myself you know, and I think it just confuses me when to read other people's poems. It corrupts mine, you know?"
She shook her head. The man she'd come with appeared in her peripheral vision, across the room. He might have been looking at her but she kept her eyes trained on the poet.
"Hey," he said, "Can I read you some of my stuff, real quick?" She assented and he pulled a leather notebook out of his jacket pocket. "This is great!" he enthused. "You can give me some constructive criticism!"
She signaled for another drink while he rifled through, looking for a suitable poem. "Not that one," he said. "God that one's complete shit. That one's too long..."
She caught the eye of the man she came with.
"Oh, this one," Jon said. "This is called, 'If Jesus Had a Gun.'" As he began reading the man, thirty feet away in a loud, crowded bar lifted an eyebrow. She shrugged and widened her eyes. They understood one another and he returned to the group of boys he was talking to and she to studying her poet. He had an old piercing scar in his lip and another in his eyebrow. The divet under his lip was paler than the rest of his face as though he'd recently shaven off a patch of hair.
"What did you think?" he asked. "Did it totally suck?"
"No, no. That was, um, good," she said. The man had wrapped up his conversation and was moving through the crowd towards them.
"Do you have any suggestions? For how I could make it better?"
"Well, I only heard it once. I do better when I can actually read things." The man came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.
"You ready to leave?"
She spun around to face him.
"Sure. Where we going?" The lights came on full and the bartender cried last call.
"People going to Jason's."
"Okay, we should get beer."
"Brian's gonna bring a couple cases after he closes up the bar."
"That won't be until after three," she said. She caught the bartenders eye and ordered two sixpacks.
"You going to drink all that?" he said. She ignored the caustic edge in his voice.
"Hey, you bring two sixpacks to a party you get maybe two beers. It's for everyone," she said. He held up his palms in surrender.
"Where's this party?" Jon asked as she counted her change.
"Bottom of Chestnut," she said. "You want the address?"
"Sure!" he said and pulled out his leather notebook. He wrote down the number she told him.
"How you getting there?" he asked. She cocked her head towards the man as she counted her change. "Cause," he turned to address the man, "I could take her..."
"I got 'er. You ready?"
"Yep!" she hopped off the barstool and grabbed her bags of beer. The man put his hand between her shoulder blades and steered her towards the door. "Bye!" she called cheerfully without looking back.
"Who was that?" has asked as he pulled the car out onto the main road.
"Jon Elsrode. He read me his poetry."
"How was it?"
"It was called "If Jesus Had A Gun."
The man whistled. "That bad?"
"Yep."
"WHy'd you let him read it to you?"
"He doesn't read other people's poetry. He said it corrupts his own. He'd never heard of Elliott or Whitman or Auden or anybody. I was impressed that his poetry didn't rhyme every line."
He was quiet a moment and then, "You're a terrible person, you know that?"
She smiled in the dark of the car at the affection in his voice and allowed herself a sidelong glance at his knees beneath the steering wheel.
"I know."

And Counting.

2010-05-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

I want to talk about the Duggars. I will say it's topical because watching tv is a great way not to write a book.
Baby and I watch a fair amount of daytime teevee and I've found myself increasingly drawn into the world of that family who has, now, nineteen biological children. And it's funny- I can't watch Big Love, that Showtime show about Mormons because every time I start feeling sympathetic towards a character or start getting sucked into La Sevigny's steely, patrician gaze, I get jerked out again when I think, 'these people are representing fundamentalist mormons. Who hate my gay friends. Who oppose birth control and everything else that makes my life worth living.' And then I just can't get involved. The suspension of disbelief is too great.
But somehow, even when the Duggars trot their litter out to the Museum of Creationism in Kentucky and Michelle, the mama, stands there with the latest one stuck to her teat under a modesty drape proclaiming, "Of course the world is 6000 years old! Of course there's a creator! I mean, how could you possibly believe anything else? It's just common sense!" even then, there's a lurch of cognitive dissonance in my head, but I go back to loving them.
"We have a family rule against dancing." Lurch. Yup, still love them.
"When there's women who are immodestly dressed on the television, the girls are trained to go up to the screen and cover them with their hands." Lurch. Lurch. Yup, still love them.
And why? I know the neglect that happens in large families- my best friend is the youngest of eight, I read Anne Enright's The Gathering- and I think it's outrageous, criminally neglectful for them to have nineteen children. I am socially progressive. I am an atheist and a feminist and aggressively for family planning. These people should have no appeal for me.
And yet, day after day I whisper to Baby- "Our stories are on, mister," and tune in. And feel more guilty that I do when watching porn.
It took me a long time to figure out why I kept coming back, why the store of affection for these people.
"Yeah, why?" Clare asked.
"It's like all those books we read when we were kids."
"Oooooh. Right. They're basically Cheaper by the Dozen."
"Right, but fanatical. Cheaper by the Dozen meets Elsie Dinsmore."
Like many lonely only children from not always happy homes, I spent my whole childhood with my nose buried in a book, emerging reluctantly to play or go to school or swim. I was attracted most to really old books- while Dana was plowing through the Babysitters Club series and preparing herself to have a social life, I was plowing through the Elsie Dinsmore series. I read E.Jean Webster's lesser known Patty series, in which Patty ultimately learns that marching to the beat of her own drummer won't get her married. I didn't just read Anne of Green Gables, I devoured everything LM Montgomery ever wrote and in one of the later books Anne comes out against sufferage.
My elementary school had a wall full of books that had probably been donated in the first years that it opened- in the forties- and there were some good, truly weird ones there. There was one where the five children of a minister decide to combine all their allowance nickels so every five weeks one child can have a really special treat. The eldest gets a manicure and spends half her chapter repenting of her wicked vanity. In another an orphan is sent to live with her possibly hungarian relatives? because she's wild. She eventually learns to behave. All the hungarian? peasant? women wear as many skirts as they possibly can so her burgeoning womanhood is indicated when she puts on wool stockings and accepts modesty as a way of live by donning 17 petticoats or some ridiculous nonsense. In most of the best childrens books, parents are a distant, ineffectual presence. They're dead, or far away- Madeleine, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter- and the children are left to get into all kinds of scrapes in a magical world where children rule. "Boys' Town." The Lord of the Flies, perhaps.
And that's what I respond to in the Duggars. Oh the parents are there, but they're outnumbered 9.5 to one. They benignly smile and sit for interviews about how Michelle remembers every birth or how do they tell their kids apart? And in the meantime the kids are running the show. When the Duggars hit the road it's the teenage girls who are shown packing the bags and making sure the little boys have enough toys. Michelle is shown nursing and making a joke about the chaos and JimBob is shown hair-spraying his hair. Children tumble about, shrieking, hanging from furniture, forming impromptu orchestras, making forts in the gigantic house.
The little girl in me, the same one who lurched when Anne Shirley said her husband should get her vote and then went right back to loving her, loves these people. The show is very much a lonely child's fairy tail, writ small.

The Sporting Life

2010-04-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

My favorite thing about sports is the righteous indignation.
The only time I played sports as a kid was- reluctantly- in gym class. The neighborhood kids came by my house one day when I was in middle school to see if I wanted to play kickball with them at the end of the street. They must have been really desperate for someone to make an even number. I stared at them like they were crazy for a long moment from the other side of the cracked open door before wordlessly shaking my head and running back down to the basement where I had a stack of books and a pile of Keebler Elves ELFudge cookies.

That story reminds me of a story of my father, David. He went to his now-wife's apartment to pick her up for their second date and had to sit in the living room with her roommate while Pam finished getting ready. The roommate had the tv tuned to a fight on HBO and asked David, more out of politeness than anything, if he liked boxing? David looked down his nose and said,
"I abhor pugilism in any form."

Pam married him anyway.

Did I mention that my father was an officer in the Navy for 26 years?

I shudder when I hear that story but a small part of me shrugs, and says, 'yeah, actually, I get the skeeves when dudes wale on each other too.'

I like playing badminton in the right circumstances- at a party, with a beer in one hand, with no one keeping very good score- but for the most part the idea of running around after a ball trying to best someone who is also running around after a ball is a profoundly wearying one for me. Sisyphean, really. And I'm even less interested in watching other people try to get balls away from each other.
Dana met me for dinner recently on a night when her husband was going to one of the opening baseball games with buddies.
"You know," she said as she arranged her coat on the back of the chair, "Derek's friend had extra tickets, and when I said I was meeting you for dinner he said you could come along for free. They were really good seats, too. Right behind the plate."
"Oh, thank you for saying no!" I said.
"Actually I told him the last time I took you to a game you brought a book and read the whole time and he said, 'Yeah, never mind. Have a nice dinner.'"
"Fair enough," I said.

But gosh darn it, sports are grand to get riled up over.
"If that was an interception I'm you're fucking uncle, buddy! Who paid this guy off?"
"Pittsburg? You're from PITTSBURG? Get out of my house."
"Yeah, I'm still mad about the Colts."
"Yeah, after Indiana my [non-existent] bracket's totally fucked."
It's as easy to pick up enough conversational sports talk as it was to skim a book and write a paper on it in college.
"Shame about Webb. I think we woulda had a real good chance if it hadn't been for Webb."
"I think as soon as the Sox games are over Trembley's out."
Last night at a bar I shook my head and said to the fella a couple bar stools down,
"It's heartbreaking to be a fan in this town, isn't it?"
He looked at me suspiciously.
"Yeah, but how long you been here?"
"Twenty-eight years," I said.
"Oh. I was gonna say. I was born and bred here. So you remember Cal Ripken?"
"Correction," I said, "It's been heartbreaking to be a fan in this town since the mid-nineties."
He lifted his glass to me.
"We're doing worse than the Cubs," I said glumly. I know we're doing worse than the Cubs because someone a table over from me in a coffee shop said so. I know that's bad because Peter Sagal made a joke about the Cubs on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! this past weekend.
"Bottom place," he said, shaking his head.
"Where'd you grow up?" I asked.
"Falston. By Harford County," he said.
I shook my head, disgusted. Falston is not Baltimore, not even close.
And he calls himself a local.

On Friendship

2010-04-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

Lou, who you might remember from How It All Began, came into town with his lovely, dreamy-mopey band A Weather yesterday. Our visit, while brief, really hit home that I need to write down more of the shit he says. It's hilarious.

Lou and I met at an anti-prom party at some art kid's house in 1996. He was there with his girlfriend E, and I was on my first official date with my first love, Chris. Lou and I hit it off gangbusters and sat in a corner swapping jokes all night while E grew more and more visibly annoyed. On the ride home, to rile her, Lou innocently said, "Hey, wasn't that Sarah Perrich kind of great? She's really funny!" E turned to him and spat,
"She's everything about you I don't understand."

A friendship was born. Out of spite.

We dated for three months after my senior year of highschool and then settled right into a lovely friendship. Lou came with me on the epic roadtrip to meet my dad and held my hand as I sat in my father's driveway, afraid to get out of the car. Lou has stitched me back together after every break-up, and has offered good advice at every rough patch in my life. Two years ago we got best friend tattoos.

He is a good man. I am proud to call him family.

We were chatting lazily on the phone this morning. He has to decide today which grad school program to accept, and it's a hard decision to make without a crystal ball. From this side of time they look pretty evenly weighted.
"Well, can I throw some of your advice back in your face?" I asked.
"Sure."
"You once told me that if I followed my heart, I would probably wind up unhappy because almost everyone winds up unhappy. But if I don't follow my heart, I'd definitely wind up unhappy. So I should follow my heart."
"I said that?!"
"Yep."
"Man, what a crank!"
"Yep. But the point was a good one. You should follow your heart."
"Man, that's funny. When I was in Portland I got together with my old co-workers and they were telling this story of how at work one day, I came in really hungover and everyone else was running around, you know, working really hard. And I was just standing there. Too hungover to move. And then I burst out with, 'The only thing worse than not being in a relationship is being in a relationship!'"
"Pit of doom!" I shrieked. "Pit of doom!"
"Exactly," he said.
I went to visit Lou at Bard in late '98, when he was dating J. She was already uneasy about me. I was too close to Lou, I think, for her liking, and earlier when she'd complimented my outfit I'd unthinkingly, tactlessly said,
"Thanks! Yep, these are my 'get-me-some' pants." J. heard, "I'm after your boyfriend."
We all went to a party that night in a big jolly group and binge drank and then walked homeward across the campus. I think I sang the whole walk home, and Lou got in a drunken rambling conversation with a newly single buddy.
"The thing is," he concluded, "It's like, being single is a pit of doom, you know? But being in a relationship is just another pit of doom. It's like, you spend your whole life going from one pit of doom to another, you know?"
His girlfriend was walking right behind him. His girlfriend who had spent the night having her nerves fractured watching me flit around the party, wondering when I was going to make a move on her man.
It was hard to sleep that night for the shouting and thumping coming from the room above my couch.
"What are they fighting about?!" I wondered blearily, smooshing my pillow over my head.

On Food

2010-04-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to somethin else I wrote.

Summer skin.

2010-04-16T14:53:00.000-07:00

Cleanse. Exfoliate. Moisturize.
But why?
Cleanse:

The skin is the largest organ of the body. No one really understands it, understand all that it does and why. People who study it all agree that it is remarkably complex and highly evolved. But evolution didn't equip us to live the way we live today in dirty cities filled with polluted emissions, chemical exhalations. Your face is exposed to all manner of air-born gunk not found in nature. It's a courtesy to your skin to de-grime before you go to bed. The flip side is that your skin is a delicate eco-system. It produces sebum, a waxy oily substance, to protect itself, to keep bad things out and moisture in. And, (sorry, germophobes) lots of beneficial flora and fauna live in that sebum, protecting us from bad bacteria and helping (in mysterious ways) our skin to function better. You don't want to mess with that too much. Stripping off the sebum with a harsh cleanser, using germ-killing products is disruptive- it can lead to dryness and sensitivity. (I'm addressing normal skin here- there are skin disorders like acne where the flora and fauna and sebum and everything's all out of whack. This advice doesn't necessarily apply in those cases.)
I always recommend everyone use a creamy, not foamy cleanser. Cetaphil is a good drugstore brand- it can be rinsed off or tissued off. Oil cleansers are great too- oil dissolves make-up, and dissolves excess oil better than water-based cleansers, and without drying. Dr. Haushka makes good ones, but it is so easy to make your own. I agree with just about everything on the oil cleansing method website except their suggestion of using olive oil. I think olive oil is too heavy, and it has a reputation for clogging pores. I find a lighter oil, like grapeseed, almond, walnut or jojoba rinses away very cleanly. Since they tend to go rancid quickly, I break a vitamin e capsule open and pour it in as an antioxidant. And I like to gussy mine up with some essential oil. Ylang-ylang is great for dry skin, eucalyptus or tea tree for oily, lavender for everyone. The instructions on the website are great, and your skin will feel very clean, not greasy afterwards.
There are, of course, nights when you are standing at your vanity, exhausted, and you know you have it in you to brush your teeth or wash your face, but not both. Get a package of face wipes for those nights. (I like these.) They aren't ideal, but they're better than nothing, you can scrub while you pee for maximum time management, and you'll be glad you did when you see how dirty the wipe is when you're done.

Exfoliate:
The design concept behind skin is pretty elegant. Cells are born in the dermis and spend their brief lives being pushed outwards by younger cells. By the time they reach the surface the cells are long dead and the layer of dead skin coated with oil is the first line of defense between your delicate living tissues and the harsh cruel world. Eventually, they flake off and become dust.
Translucent skin is one of those markers of youth that our lizard brains are hardwired to recognize. When we are young, our cell turnover rate is high. Dead skin sloughs off as it should. As we get older cell turnover slows down, our skin oil becomes stickier, dead skin sticks longer, sloughs off unevenly. Skin feels rough, feels dry, and looks opaque. A good scrub or peel, then, will make your skin feel better to the touch, and will make you look dewier, fresher and younger.
There are two ways to exfoliate: chemically and mechanically.
Alpha and beta hydroxy acids exfoliate chemically. Of the two I prefer beta-hydroxy, or salicylic acid which is oil soluble and so can penetrate the pore. Here's a good one.
Retinols and retinoids work, in a general sense, by speeding up skin cell turnover. I'm a fan and I think almost everyone can benefit. Here's a much better explanation.
As for mechanical scrubs, I son't like many that are on the market. They either have bits of ground shell in them, (like the awful St. Ives Apricot scrub. God, why won't that product DIE?!) which has jagged little edges that can create little tears in your skin, or they have plastic beads sparsely suspended in some kind of drying gel base. Yuck. The two best exfoliators are in your kitchen- sugar and baking soda. Sugar is a natural humectant, which means it draws water into your skin. It's also the basis of glycolic acid, so it packs a miniscule chemical punch. If you dampen your skin and dampen your palms and scrub a tablespoon into your face, the sugar will dissolve before you can over exfoliate and irritate your skin. Baking soda isn't moisturizing, but it's anti-inflammtory and feels really good in the summer.

Moisturize
Even if you have oily skin, I consider it, again, a courtesy to your skin to create a barrier between it and the world. There are two basic properties moisturizers can have: they either hydrate or they create a barrier through which water can't evaporate. Some do both. There are so many factors to picking out a moisturizer that will meet all your needs. How oily is your skin naturally? Do you spend a lot of time outside, or inside in drying air-conditioning? Do you like the feel of a thick moisturizer or are you one of those people who can't stand the feel of anything on your face? I can't answer these questions for you but I can steer you towards this product line, which i like because it's well priced, it's non-sensitizing, and she sells samples for, like, 8o cents, so you can try everything out first and make sure it suits. If you're like me and spend half your summer outside, walking and biking a lot, you may want to forgo moisturizer during the day or you'll feel like your face is melting all day. Try, instead, layering a serum, or something like this, a [roduct I like because it is so simple- just a hydrating salt suspended in aloe vera, under a good sunblock. I like this, but if chemical sunscreens skeeve you out, Neutragena's baby sunblock is really good.
Any questions, comments, further product suggestions, concerns, accusations of quackery, or corrections... please do let me know.

Life and Death of a Pimple

2010-04-16T13:25:00.001-07:00

I promised a long time ago to get back to you guys with more skin care information, and now that summer's here it seems like a good time to address that, yes? Before the heat and humidity and summer smog take their toll? Let us begin with...
The Life and Death of a Pimple
A pimple begins life, weeks and months before you see it, as a comedo, a fetal plug of dead skin and congealed sebum, swimming in the womb of a hair follicle. It'll sit there for weeks, months, years even... sebum will flow around it and out of the pore, coating the hair shaft and pushing out dead skin cells shed by the pore lining. And then one day, something bad will happen. The comedo will grow. Dead skin cells from the pore lining won't be able to get past it and will stick to it. Sebum- which isn't oily like you might think but rather the texture of margarine, or soft wax- will get backed up behind it. A blackhead is born. If a certain kind of bacteria is present, infection sets in, and the body attacks that poor pore with all its might. Tissue becomes inflamed, pus forms, and you've got a throbbing, monster zit that you can't stop picking at.
Acne, especially adult acne which is one of the most maddeningly recalcitrant skin diseases, is a problem for the dermatologist. Also, there are skin issues that look like acne but aren't- rosacea, for instance, is a disease marked by red lesions that mimic acne, but aren't true pimples. Treating rosacea with acne products won't help the lesions and will exacerbate the rosacea. For more information about adult acne, I like this book.
But for the occasional break-out, here are a few rough guidelines. Disclaimer: your skin is a beautiful snowflake. I probably haven't ever seen your skin, and even if I had, it's an organ of dizzying mystery. The best dermatologists operate on trial and error. Try some things, see how they work. In all things be guided by your skin, not what I say.
Benzoyl Peroxide, the main ingredient in Pro-Active, addresses the infection, but not the comedo. It can be drying, and I think it's best suited for younger skin.
Salycilic acid, at 1.5 or 2%, is a great exfoliater, and since it's oil soluble it can get into the pore and exfoliate it from within. It's a good preventative for regular but not severe break-outs.
Retinols and retinoids are vitamin A derivatives that regulate sebum production and skin cell turnover from within the pore. Both are pretty good anti-agers, and I think just about everyone should have a retinol or retinoid in her medicine cabinet. They are no good for calming a break-out in session, though, and be aware that they will break you out more for the first four to six weeks of use. Here's a great website with more info.
The most important thing, when you get a honker, is to get the inflammation down. The inflammation is destroying tissue in an attempt to control the infection, and as you get older your skin is less and less able to rebuild the collagen and elastin fibers that hold your skin up. You're much more likely to get scarring, and little pits. So ice, (do NOT heat!) a bad pimple. Take some ibuprofen. Crush up an asprin and apply topically. Use a benzoyl peroxide spot treatment.

So that's pimples. Simple skincare coming up next. As always, if you have any comments or questions, or you're offended by something I've said or think I'm bat-shit crazy, please tell me. Up next, simple skin care suggestions.

Qualifications

2010-04-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

I was at a party on Saturday night, chit-chatting in the kitchen, sucking on a beer I probably didn't need by that point. A friend of mine and his girlfriend came in late, straight from seeing David Sedaris read.
"How's the writing?" T asked.
"Oh, awful," I said.
"Really?" he said. "What's awful about it?"
"Oh everything. Everything seems to go wrong when I schedule a writing session- like the internet blows up or a friend has a crisis or something. I've been trying to organize the information in my head for months now and can't seem to get it to come out right and I've missed all my deadlines and my agent's getting impatient and it- it's a lot harder than I ever thought it would be."
"Really?" said T's girlfriend. "'Cause we just came from seeing David Sedaris and we're all like, 'Writing! Writing seems like fun! We should write!'"
I thought of a q&a with Davis Sedaris I read in the New Yorker where he talked about how he just tried to enjoy the hell out of writing the first draft because that was, like, an eighth of the job and the rest of the process was so unbelievably painful that really, that first, fun draft was what kept him writing.
"No," I said with the authority of an afternoon's worth of fried food and cheap beer, "writing isn't fun. I don't recommend it. It's kind of a hard slog and more than half the time I don't feel like I know what I'm doing."
"Really?" said T's girlfriend, in some surprise. "That's weird. What did you study in school?"
I was feeling salty.
"I went to beauty school," I said.
"Oh," she said. "Well that makes sense. If you'd gone to school for something real- I mean, you know. Like writing, it would probably be a lot easier." She smiled at me sympathetically.
I let that hang and sipped on the completely unnecessary beer.
"I went to school with her-" T said. "You were getting an English degree, right?"
"Yup," I said.
"Oh," she said. "That's weird, then."

Poor thing could not have know that she was echoing a rather nasty loop of internal monologue that had been cycling through my head all day as I sat in a coffee shop trying for the umpteenth time to solve a particularly knotty problem.

Writer buds- any particularly good stories of people putting you down without quite meaning to?

Romance

2010-04-13T05:48:00.000-07:00

Warning! Adult content.
Erin and I sat on her patio the other night, sipping wine and chit-chatting while the sun went down. Somehow in the meandering course of conversation my prom date came up, and I found myself recounting how I ran into him at a party half a dozen or so years ago and he was wasted. Well, let's be fair. We were all wasted. But he was wasted enough to whine, "Sarah Perrich, I wanna have a three way with you and an asian chick!" Oh, well, by all means, buddy. You find an asian lady while I start taking off my pants, okay?
Then Erin reminded me that she had a good awful pick-up line story. She was walking her dog in the 33rd street median. As Frodo was doing his business an old buick stopped at the light along-side her. "Hey," the man inside hollered. "You wanna marry me now, or pick up the poop first?"
Before she could formulate a response the light turned and he zoomed off.
"These stories are fun," I said. "I think I'll blog about them."

My best friend Clare is built like a small-ish twelve year old boy, and dresses like one too. One night as she was walking home very late from her job at a bakery a truck pulled up alongside her. The man driving it leaned out the window.
"He-ey," he said. She kept walking.
"Are you a boy or a girl?" he asked. She didn't answer.
"I'll give you twenty dollars if you let me suck and lick your feet," he said.
"Don't need twenty bucks, mister," she said, getting nervous. (I've known and loved her for sixteen years so I can confidently write that she didn't say this so much as squeak it.)
"Fifty!" he said. She walked faster.
"A hundred!" he said. She turned and walked the other way.
"Sorry!" he called.
That one's a little creepy. But my favorite part about that is he asked if she was a boy or a girl, and she didn't respond, and he kept going without knowing if she was a pubescent boy or a small grown woman.

Which reminds me very much of a time Marc and I went to Fraziers for a drink. We ran into his band manager at the bar and the two of them quickly fell into an intense conversation about things I didn't care about at all. Amps and mics and opening acts and the details of tour and record releases. I stared vacantly at the rows of bottles and sipped my beer. A fortyish man on the other side of me asked me some question and soon I was prattling on with the happy oblivion of a twenty-four year old 120 pound naif convinced that the man twice her age is talking to her because what she's saying is just fascinating. An alarm bell must have been going off somewhere in the back of my head, though, because when he asked me if I was single the lie came out automatically and fluently.
"No, I'm here with my boyfriend," I said. Marc, who'd been keeping half an eye on me the whole time obligingly reached over and squeezed my shoulder before returning to his conversation. He was good like that.
"I have a girlfriend too," the man said. His girlfriend was 30 and, apparently, beyond smoking hot. The hottest girl he'd ever dated. I nodded politely and sipped my beer. He leaned in closer.
"You know what's really hot? Watching your girlfriend get fucked by another man. Ask your boyfriend, I bet he'd be totally into it."
I blanched. The nastiness was so sudden, so unexpected tears came to my eyes.
"Me and my girlfriend do that all the time," he confided. "It's great. Ask your boyfriend." He nudged me. "I bet he'd be totally into it. And," almost as an afterthought, "girls get really into it to."
I turned to Marc.
"We have to go," I said.
"Yep." He got up immediately and threw some money on the bar and steered me out the door by my elbow. He was good like that.

One of my favorite moments of romantic dissonance happened at Rocket to Venus one night. It was a Sunday and mostly empty. My girlfriends and I had a booth and were contentedly drinking beers and swapping gossip and making catty comments about what the other girls in the bar were wearing. As you do. There was a fella named Dave- a very handsome guy in a very (then) cool band who I knew by sight. He was there alone, chatting with the bartender and a young girl who was there with a group of identically American Apparel-ed girls kept looking over at him. She came over and said something to him. He shook his head. When she walked away the bartender leaned over and said something to Dave. They both looked at her, walking away, and laughed. She joined her girlfriends and said something while making excited little flapping gestures with her hands.
A little while later we looked up and she was talking to him again, leaning in, touching his arm. He was looking around wildly. The bartender leaned against the bar and looked faintly amused. We watched them for a minute, also faintly amused. He made a break for the bathroom. She followed. As they passed our table she grabbed his arm. He shook it free and walked faster.
"You should drink more!" she called after him, forlornly. "You should get drunk so you like me more!" She stood there for a minute and then turned back to join her friends.

You guys got any bad pick-up line stories? Share!

On Etiquette.

2010-04-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

I dealt with the most, erm, challenging clients when I worked in Mt. Washington. Naturally. One of my first jobs was at a place called Stars. And God knows, in retrospect, how I landed that job. I was still, I believe, cutting my own hair into an approximation of an inverted bob. I hardly ever wore make-up. I had a wardrobe of thrift store finds that I would mix and match into what I now realize was a truly bizarre imitation of professional wear. I think I showed up for my interview in my then prized outfit- a peacock blue silk armani (armani!) cocktail skirt with a crotch high slit in the side, a michael stars tee shirt, and fancy satin flats. Oh, 21 year old Sarah. Bless you, honey. You tried. But somehow, with crooked uncombed hair and my panties probably showing and mascara probably rubbed into smudges on my cheeks by the time I got there, I landed a job at one of the then few prestigious day spas in Baltimore. (Now there are "day spas" on every corner. Hell- there's a "day spa" in Arbutus. Every hair salon with a wax pot, it seems, calls itself a day spa. But nine years ago, whippersnappers, things were very different.)And because of the location and the prices and the reputation of the spa, I dealt with a much more high maintenance clientele than I ever imagined existed.

I try to give myself a "thinking project" every week, to think about while walking or grocery shopping or carting baby around. Baby's actually a really good sounding board. He doesn't give much in the way of feedback, and he has a nasty habit of interrupting, but you don't get a better captive audience than him without committing some felonies and maybe chopping off some feet. This week my "thinking project" has been to think of good difficult client stories. I read The Help this week, (thanks for the suggestion and the loan, Jane Sneeringer!) and had a revelatory moment where I realized that since the blog, erm, fiasco, I've been squeamish about writing about clients. 'Cause let's just be clear about this, let's just get this in writing: I love 90% of my clients. I care about them. I'm genuinely thrilled when they show up with engagement rings and baby bumps. My heart genuinely twists when they cry. I keep their secrets. I strive to be worthy of their trust.
After summarily firing me, the owners of the salon I blogged about called all my past employers and told them I'd been blogging about clients. (Inethical, definitely. Illegal? Anyone care to weigh in?) And though I told a few stories about some particularly absurd situations involving clients, and called out a few who were beyond the pale, the blog wasn't about clients. It was about the salon. And I cringe to think my clients thought I was blabbing about them.
But while reading The Help, a book about the fraught relationships between the servers and the served, I realized that juicey stories of clients behaving badly are an important part of the story I'm trying to tell and I'm just gonna have to get my head around telling them. Because, let's be clear: I love 90% of my clients. But I have waxed some assholes. (See what I did there?!?!?!!!)

Yesterday I thought about oh, let's call her Ellen, for the first time in years. She was a client from my Stars days. My co-workers claimed that she was the way she was because she was very smart, but I've long maintained that multiple degrees and an impressive job description are not reliable markers of intelligence. And even if she was fluent in law jargon and could read and understand things that would have me reaching for my Elle magazine in two sentences, she was not a bright lady. Just- not bright.

When we got a call from her, if there weren't clients in the front room, whoever answered the phone would put her on hold and holler "Oh my God Ellen's on the phone!" No last name needed. There would be a chorus of groans and then whoever answered the phone would unhold her and begin an exercise in patience. Her MO was to call about two hours before she wanted an appointment. She would call, for instance, on a Saturday at 12 and not understand why she couldn't book a three hour appointment at 2. We would have to explain, every time,
"Well, Saturdays are our busiest days and most of the clients on the book made their appointments weeks ago..."
"So," she would say, baffled anew each time, "No one has time? What about Tami, does Tami have time for me?"
"No, Ellen, I'm sorry but we're all booked. Saturdays are the first days to fill up." She always wanted some combination of three things: a facial, a legwax, a body wrap, but every time she had to go over the prices on the phone.
"How much is a leg wax? Oh. Have the prices gone up? That seems really high to me. I don't think I payed that last time. Really? Well, how much is it for half a leg? How much is a facial? Are you sure your prices haven't gone up? (deep sigh) I just don't know if I can afford everything I want today." etc. (Readers, here's a tip. Don't complain about prices. If a place is out of your price range, a simple "Oh gosh, that's more than I was looking to spend, but thanks!" is enough. Yammering on to salon employees about how ridiculous you think a price is, and how you would never pay that and don't think anyone should is going to result, every time, in that salon employee turning around and yammering on to anyone who will listen about how ridiculous YOU are.)
If we could accomodate her at all, Ellen would invariably show up an unapologetic forty minutes late.
"I didn't realize it took so long to get here," she said vaguely, once, when I pointed out that she'd all but missed her appointment. My mouth fell open but nothing came out. That woman had been driving to the spa for years.
After her service, she would nit-pick the bill and then write a check for the exact amount and leave. She never, ever tipped.
That's not true: she tipped once.
She called on a Saturday, the day before her wedding desperate for a pre-nuptial wax and facial.
"I can do you at four," I said.
"Oh, I can't make it there til six," she said. My heart sank. Six o'clock on a Saturday? Really?
"We close at five, Ellen," I said, but I knew I was doomed. I am a pushover. I agreed to stay late.
The building emptied out. The businesses on either side of us closed for the night and my car stood lonely in the parking lot. I flipped through a magazine and watched the clock tick. 6 o'clock. 6:15. 6:30. I called her cell phone but didn't get an answer. 6:45. 7:00. It was dark out. 7:15. I started turning out lights. I put on my coat and came back into the lobby and there she was. I blinked.
"I was wondering where you were," she said. "Listen, I think I'm just going to get a half leg wax, and I think I want a body scrub, but it says it's $60. Why is it so much? What do you get for $60?"
I turned the lights in my spa room back on and showed her in and went to hang up her coat while she undressed. After a few minutes I tapped on the door and opened it and there she was in her underwear, one foot propped up on the edge of the hand sink, with a bottle of shave gel in one hand, shaving her shins. She looked up placidly.
"I'll be done in a minute," she said. "I'm just shaving what we aren't going to wax."
"Oh." I closed the door and went into the lobby and looked in the mirror and asked my reflection,
"What the fuck? What the fucking fuck?!" My reflection just shook its head back at me, bewildered.
A few hours later I went over her itemized bill for $215 with her carefully. She frowned at it, sighed, and pulled out her checkbook and wrote a check for the exact amount.
"Well I hope everything goes smoothly tomorrow, Ellen," I said. "I'm gonna walk out with you and lock the door behind you."
"Okay," she said. "Thanks for, um, staying late. Oh," she said awkwardly, rifling through her purse, "I guess I should give you a tip." She fished three crumpled ones out and handed them to me. "I guess it should be more but that's all I've got."
It was nine at night. I had been there since nine at the morning and I was tired. I still had to deal with the dirty linens from her service and straighten my room. I was too weary at that moment to hand her shitty three dollar tip back to her and say, "Don't insult us both."
I've been regretting that moment of weakness for seven years.

On avarice.

2010-04-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

I love words.

I met my father for the first time when I was 19. I spent a week with him and his wife that holiday season and before I came down to visit he asked me what I'd like for Christmas. I think he was expecting me to say, you know, "clothes!" or something but I had 17 years of missed child-support payments behind me and I didn't want to waste the opportunity.
"I want a copy of the O.E.D," I said.

Tacos de Lengua

2010-04-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

Man oh man, I had the best tacos last night.

There was a Homicide episode, one that played when I was in high school, in which a detective made fun of his partner for taking spanish lessons.
"What," he said, (I paraphrase) "so you can speak Spanish with the other eight people in Baltimore who speak Spanish?"
Things have changed to the extent that when I later told a friend that I "was wandering up and down Eastern Ave looking for a place to buy tacos," she said, "And you couldn't find one? What, were you blindfolded or just pacing up and down in front of that last pierogi shop?"
Neither, actually. I was just looking for tacos at 7:30 which seems to be a grey time when a lot of the taquerias close.
The joke, for those of you not from Baltimore is that Eastern Ave. used to be the center of the Polish neighborhood, and as it continued East it eventually became part of Greektown. It has transformed within the past ten years and is lined with taquerias, bodegas, tiendas, El Salvadoran restaurants, Ecuadorian restaurants, Guatemalan restaurants... There's still a Polish credit union, and a handful of shops that sell pierogies and sausages, and arguably the best Greek restaurant in town is still in Greektown, but the South East side of Baltimore has a new ethnic identity.

I get a lot of flack from my wanderlustey friends for never having moved away. I hightailed it to the city my sophomore year of college and have been happily rattling around ever since. "You should really live somewhere else, at least once," they say. "For the experience." What about the experience of loving a city, and staying and watching it change?

I was telling someone a story the other day about how when I was eight or nine I went to a Chinese wedding. And I was excited because sweet-and-sour pork was like, my favorite food ever at that point. But these were actual Chinese people and we were served actual Chinese food. Imagine the horror of an eight year old girl confronted by bone marrow and food that still had the heads and feet on it. My friend laughed and asked where that wedding had taken place, and I explained that the church we attended when I was a little girl was on the edge of what was left of Chinatown.
"Baltimore has a Chinatown?" she asked. Except for four years of college, she's lived within city limits her whole life. "Had a Chinatown," I said. "When I was growing up it was all but gone and now you see a few remnants of it around Saratoga but for the most part it's vanished. Like it never existed."

But I'm going off on half formed tangents. I had the best tacos last night. It was a beautiful spring night and I put on a flippy summer skirt and a light cardigan and rode my bike down to Fells Point and oh my god it felt good. I had an hour or so to kill and realized I was hungry. Really hungry. Hungry for tacos. I wandered up and down Eastern Ave, trying not to stray more than a few blocks from where I ultimately had to be. I squinted at menus, trying to decipher them using my Sesame Street Spanish and my high school Latin, and eventually picked a Mexican Taqueria based mostly on the fact that it did not also sell phone cards, which I took as a a sign of a certain amount of culinary pride. I picked a table in the empty restaurant and looked over the menu, trying to decide what I was in the mood for. Pollo? no. Carne? no. Tamales? no lo quiero! Barbacao? posible. But really, I thought, what they're probably going to do best in a place like this is going to be whatever's closest to traditional peasant food. I scanned the menu again and decided that my two best bets were tripe soup with lemon and onion, or tongue tacos. I'd never had tongue before.
"You decide?" the waitress asked.
"Tacos de Lengua, please," I said.
She switched to Spanish and asked me, i think, if I wanted them with cilantro and onion? Yes! And hot salsa? She raised an eyebrow at me. Yes please! Bueno.
I expected tongue to be a lot tougher, like heart can be if not properly prepared. But the meat was butter tender, falling apart like the best barbeque. And though it was beef tongue it had a pleasant gaminess to it, not unlike wild rabbit or very mild lamb, but was dripping in grease, like the best of all possible burgers. I smothered them in the salsa verde and devoured them in about three minutes. Then I forlornly wiped the plate clean with my finger and licked it.

How (not) to write a blog.

2010-03-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

I haven't written in half of forever and judging from my blog stats and e-mails, my readers are getting restless. I apologize, dear readers. I have broken the trust between blogger and blog subscriber, the tacit understanding that I will write two or three times a week. I am a butthead, and I am sorry.

Which leads us to this week's discussion topic:
Writer friends, what does writers block feel like for you, and what do you do about it? When I've sat down to write recently I've felt a little squirt of panic in my bowels and then my brain seems to turn to cotton candy. Cotton candy and it's starting to drizzle. YOU try making coherent sentences out of damp spun sugar.
I don't know what works but I know what doesn't: Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, googling "jobs in antarctica," Shiraz, Miller High Life, crying yourself to sleep, writing wild e-mails to your best friend about how you're a failure and then deleting them, watching a marathon of Millionaire Matchmaker while vaguely hoping that inspiration will strike, eating a whole pound of pasta and then hating yourself, and Cranberry Stoli. I am open to suggestions.

Besides general malaise a part of it is that I had a big family event this past weekend which has been a source of stress for some time, and I have been trying desperately for the past two weeks to write a few funny yet poignant paragraphs about how I always thought my first memoir would be about my immediate family, who as far as I can tell have been auditioning to star in my southern-gothic style autobiography since I was itty bitty. Something witty like that. But it's such a hard note to strike- one wants to be matter of fact, though one feels whiney. One wants to dwell on the absurd yet imbue everyone with the dignity they deserve. And really, I realize as I write this, I am profoundly tired of the "fucked-up-family" narrative. I hated The Corrections. I rolled my eyes through The Glass Castle. I would rather eat glass castles than sit through those wretched movies that come out every holiday where some misfit has to come home for Christmas and deal with her eccentric relatives but then everyone learns the meaning of the holiday. That's my Christmas. Without siblings to commiserate with or the pleasant chaser of redemption mixed with understanding and love. Why would I want to sit through a clumsy Hollywood vision of what I barely endure every year? I can't put my finger on what would make ME want to read what I want to write so- eh, I give up.

And my darlings, since I'm not giving you the goods I give you this:
You remember the forty feet or so of snow we got recently? Robert and I were snowed in together for about a week. With no teevee. We ate frozen pizza and popcorn til we wished we could loosen our jammies and plowed our way through hulu and made ridiculous jokes at each others expense and had a lovely time. But on day three-ish we were running out of things to do so we started entertaining each other with the Craigslist personals. Which is how I discovered this young man.
The first post was typo'ed to the point of near incoherence and I thought, oh boy-oh. Someone shoulda had his laptop taken away before he killed that bottle. 'Cause it sounds like it could be an end-of-the-night, broken hearted rant, right?
But noooo... couple days later he reposted it, cleaned up and with half the lol's. And he's been re-posting about every ten days ever since.
So soak up the pathologically insecure misogyny, dears, and consider how much better you or your loved one look in comparison.

25 Rules for Girls (the dumb ones). You all keep saying you want honesty, so here you have it:

1. Girls are too superficial. They watch soap operas and love movies, and think they’re honestly going to find that in real life, (girls aren't in love, they're in love with the "thought" of being in love) then once something goes wrong, it's the females who run. Relationships aren’t easy, they do have problems, boredom, arguing, and take lots of hard work from both sides. Girls dont want love, they want fun (they're two different things, lol).

2. The reason girls treat nice guys like crap is simply because nice guys won’t talk back. A girl will never mouth off a jerk, because he'll make her cry. Girls are turning nice guys into jerks everyday; what guy wants to be nice when he gets treated like dirt? Funny how girls constantly criticize the nice or nerd guys who play video games and whatnot, yet they never criticize the drunken jerks who always break their heart.

3. When it comes to finding a guy, it’s about looks to most girls. Looks fade, the more you get to know someone the more attractive they become anyway. Yes, there needs to be attraction, but some people go way too far, like girls who demand tall guys (you shouldn't demand a guy be any taller than you). Funny how whenever a girl doesnt like a guy, she insults his looks. Yes many guys seek a swimsuit model but those are the guys who just want sex.

4. I know guys do dumb things too. But its a well known fact that girls are far more pickier and judgmental (guys dont micro-analyze women, like women do to men). Girls always think they can 'do better' (when they cant lol), so it's best to stick to a good guy when you find one. Guys are also better at overlooking imperfections, whereas girls can find all the excuses in the world to reject someone.

5. To girls, this whole dating thing is a game. It's all about telling her what she wants to hear, and doing things the same way they saw it in the movies. You can’t talk about your ex's, religion, sex, politics, world events, make jokes, etc. If two people are going to date, they should be able to talk about anything together. This is why most guys like going "dutch".

6. Girls dont like drama? Lol the entire world knows they live for it. Girls dont like games? No, girls love games, especially 'hard to get', which only scares off the good guys by the way. Girls want honesty? No, they want to be told what they want to hear; every time a guy is honest, girls label him a jerk. Girls dont care what anyone thinks? No, girls care too much what others think. Girls dont like being controlled? No, they love it.

7. Were you and your best friend, best friends right away? First dates are supposed to be weird and awkward; you're hanging out with someone you barely know! Give people a chance; we all make mistakes, have flaws and baggage (though there's a fine line between a flaw and pure ignorance).

8. Many people don’t know this, but men need more affirmation than women do (women constantly get flattery from peers, men don’t). Also, women tend to expect the guy to do all the work and make the moves; No, send him a message or make a move before someone else does.

9. Girls think they have it hard, when in reality they have it easy (for every 1 girl on here, there's 5 guys). Guys are the ones who have it hard; they have to be, say, and do so many things. It's so pathetic how people and the media are always talking about how to "be a man", yet you never hear them talk about how to "be a woman".

10. Girls are too difficult and complicated. They expect too much out of life, people, and just about everything. Guys are the most simple people in the world; we can sit around all day watching TV and be happy, but girls? They want everything. And honestly, no good guy is going to take you out everyday or spoil you (the world isn’t going anywhere). Guys want simplicity, it's practically impossible to bore a guy.

11. A big problem is how people are becoming materialistic. If a guy makes 40K and doesn't take you out all the time, its because he's being practical. Anniversaries, birthdays, holidays are not excuses to buy tons of gifts; sure gifts are okay but it shouldn't be expected. There are couples who live in 3rd world countries who live in huts and have and do nothing...they're just happy to be together.

12. Girls have this mindset that life is a complete joke, then once something goes wrong they freak out and don’t know what to do. Funny how girls always say they can’t stand dependant/insecure guys, yet girls are the ones who constantly say "omg id die without my friends!" (what about family? Those people who put you in this world and raised you?) Speaking of friends, if they don’t like the guy you're dating, who cares, you're the one dating him, not them. But wait! Girls have the "best friends ever!" ...til they both go for the same guy or argue over who's hotter lol. Girls aren't very approachable when they're around their friends by the way...

13. This is one thing girls don’t seem to comprehend: Girls say they can’t stand guys who judge, stereotype, are clingy, negative, whine, are bitter (that stuff is human nature, we all do it, girls especially!). Do you seriously think someone wakes up and decides to be bitter/whiny for nothing? You'll date guys who are drunks, druggies, criminals, controlling...yet you won’t date a clingy whiny guy? Doesn’t make sense. The reason jerks don’t whine is because they have no reason to: they’re jerks, and still get girls!

14. Girls use words like "chemistry, connection, spark, confidence"...yet they can’t define them lol. How can you expect physically unattractive guys to have confidence, when they're constantly being overlooked and rejected for their looks? And the truth is, there's no such thing as a 'spark' or 'connection'. If the guy is hot...there's a spark and connection lol.

15. Girls say they like bad boys or military guys because they feel protected. Lol, protected from what?! Girls do love the bad boy with the 'edge' (till he breaks their heart). You all are going to hit 35 and be desperate for those overly nice guys who you used to make fun of and reject (jerks get girlfriends, nice guys get wives). Ask yourself: who's going to make the better husband and father? And why date someone when you know the relationship won’t go anywhere? You wonder why there's so many single moms, fatherless children, divorces, and abusive relationships?

16. Guys are not attracted (commitment wise) to wild, party, drunk or girls who dress/dance like hookers and post skanky pics around. You dress all sexy in hopes to attract the hot bad boys, when hot bad boys can get any girl they want, so all you're attracting are the ugly guys who can’t get any. Party people are lame anyway; without alcohol, parties, clubs, brawls, and fests they'd be lost, miserable and not know what to do lol. Make fun of those who aren't partiers, but at least they can find other ways to enjoy life, and can have fun sober. Try quitting those scenes and see how many of your 'friends' stay around.

17. Every time a guy mentions the word 'sex', girls run off. Thats pathetic because the entire world knows girls are far hornier and more perverted than guys are, they just hide it. The second you become a girlfriend, you're the ones who want it all day, and if a guy isn’t good at it, is a virgin, or doesn’t do it often, she runs (which is ridiculous, why not just teach each other?). All guys know that 'keeping' a girl is all about how good you are in bed, lol. A big percentage of divorces/break ups happen to due to sex which is sad, and what's funny is it's always the female who calls for it (females do get much hornier in their 30s). Intimacy is very important to relationships, but it should never make or break a relationship. Sexuality is the most natural/normal thing ever, as long as two people like each other, they should be able to enjoy each other. So enough with all the excuses; we all know you want it.

18. Girls tend to think that everything is one-way. It's perfectly okay for girls to be whiny, bitter, complicated, talk about sex, be dramatic...but its not okay for guys. Its okay for girls to do manly things...but its not okay for guys to do girly things. Its okay for girls to post skanky pictures and videos of themselves...but it's not okay for a guy to post a picture of himself in a muscle shirt. It's okay for a girl to reject a guy, but if a guy rejects a girl he's a jerk. It goes both ways. Girls always talk about what they want a guy to do for them, but they never talk about what they'll do for the guy...

19. Many people, once they make so many friends, they forget about values, morals, common sense, and can’t think for themselves. This is why good guys like the 'goodie goodie' girls (it's also why no guy completely trusts his girlfriend lol). Girls seriously think they're going to be "young and stupid" forever: Like when someone tells you not to do something and you do it purposely thinking you're cool; in reality you're just hurting yourself and making yourself look stupid. Sadly, those who can think for themselves, those who can 'think', and not act fake, tend to end up alone and overlooked.

20. Girls have major denial and "grudge" issues. Years later they're still holding grudges. Seriously, get over it. It's hilarious how girls will easily forgive a hot jerk who cheats and breaks her heart, yet she never forgives a nice guy who made one mistake. Typically if guys get hurt they walk away and don’t look back, girls though insist on staying around thinking he'll change when I promise you he won’t.

21. A very important thing girls don’t get: Girls want a real man? Well, men want a real woman! No girl wants a guy who sews, knits, writes poems, or is a cheerleader? Well no guy wants a girl who drinks like a fish, is a fight fan (or fighter), talks like a sailor, dresses manly (try asking a good reputable doctor how safe it is to drink like a fish or fight). Sure some guys don’t care, but the good ones do. If you want us to act like men, then you act like women. Most guys want a traditional relationship and believe in gender roles, they just dont say it because "thats not what girls want to hear" lol. Traditional couples tend to last longer and be healthier anyway, and they dont tend to put their jobs ahead of their family and love life. Sitting in an office all day helping government, companies and corporations get richer and greedier (while people are suffering) just isnt attractive lol.

22. So you may be thinking, "what girl wants to date a guy who talks sh!t about girls?!” I guess you don’t want any guy then, because most guys do it, just not publicly. See, the more ignorant girls are, the more ass guys get, so guys (the jerk ones) want girls to be ignorant. Guys say different things when just one girl is around, as opposed to when it’s all guys (remember, its all about telling girls what they want to hear).

23. Girls tend to get full of themselves every time they have a boyfriend. I can’t count how many guys I know in long relationships who are cheating, yet the girl thinks he's the best guy ever. There are tons of great guys, but there are tons who play nice. Girls give guys too much benefit of the doubt, whereas guys give girls no benefit of the doubt (like I said, no guy completely trusts his gf). Most guys under 30 dont want commitment, and its so easy to tell apart those who just want sex, from the good ones.

24. So what do girls really want? A guy who looks like an Abercrombie model, has the attitude of a linebacker, the heart of a nice guy, gives her the best sex ever, takes her out all the time, and makes her laugh all the time. Sorry but there is no such thing. Do your parents/grandparents go out and laugh all the time? Do they 'never' argue and 'never' have problems? If you can’t handle sitting around doing nothing for weeks at a time, you'll never handle marriage or long term dating.

25. So what do guys want? The keyword is "simple". A simple/uncomplicated female who acts like a woman, can think for herself (and 'think') and isn't superficial. That's it! But that girl is almost impossible to find.

So who wants to be my gf? :D

The Meaning of Waxing.

2010-03-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened yesterday. I took a nap in the early evening and when I came downstairs Julia and a friend of hers had just put a chocolate cake in the oven to bake and were clearing up their supper dishes.
"Oh my gosh the house smells so good!" I said.
"Sorry you missed dinner," Julia said.
"I ate before I napped." I poured myself a glass of wine and went upstairs to have a good phone chat with my best friend and maybe fifteen minutes later Julia came running upstairs.
"Sarah- Sarah, you have some kind of fancy oil, in, like a mason jar-"
"Hang on a sec, Clare, my roommate's talking to me. What?"
"Your oil? In the ball jar?"
"Oh, yeah! That's actually hash oil."
I can't smoke pot, and I'm not just writing that because I know my mom is going to read it. I wish I could smoke pot, (sorry, ma.) I miss it, and I think occasionally smoking it would really help my chronic insomnia, and perhaps alleviate my chronic, low level, just barely controlled anxiety. So maybe once a year I listen to one of my stoner friends, who all say as though collectively coached, "You just haven't been smoking good stuff," and I give it another whirl. And I inevitably wind up rocking in a corner deep in an existential crisis whose tendrils will reach into the next day and probably the day after that. The hash oil was a gift from a well meaning friend last year. I've been holding onto it with the vague notion that I would make pot brownies and keep them in the freezer for when guests came over.
Julia looked at me with a look of utter panic on her face.
"Oh gosh- did you put it in the cake?" I asked.
"No, we put it on the salad! Oh my god I'm so sorry I'll buy you more drugs! I didn't know!"
I laughed so hard.
We've been running critically low on olive oil. Julia found the mason jar and opened it and sniffed it.
"I don't know what it is," she said. "It must be some fancy infused stuff. It smells really- herbal or something." So they tossed it into their greens.
"We have to find out what this is," her friend said. "This salad dressing is SO GOOD!"
They put the cake in the oven, cleaned up the supper dishes and went out onto the porch for a cigarette.
"I had more wine than I thought," said Julia's friend. "I feel really really drunk. Like, I feel so drunk I feel high."
"Me too!" Julia said. "That's exactly how I feel! Man, we didn't have that much, did we?"
Julia's friend thought for a minute.
"No, I think I'm actually high. How would that have happened? Do you think Sarah's oil was- do you think it was pot oil?"
"Oh my God," Julia said, and ran in to find me.
I felt terrible. Especially because Julia doesn't like being high either. I always thought it would be a bad idea to label your hash oil, "Hash Oil." But now it seems like a bad idea not to.
We sat up late watching Comedy Central together after her friend left, and so it was that I saw Chelsea Lately for possibly the third time ever. They were discussing a news bit about a woman who got pulled over while attempting to shave her pubes while driving and one of the comedians on the panel, a particularly grating, hyper woman, went off on pubic hair removal.
"It's just, like, the whole point of it is to make you look like a little girl, right?"
Um... no, sweetie. That actually isn't the point. I think you owe men everywhere a written apology for what you just implied.
I've had lots of clients over the years offer me this objection. And I would like it written in bold on my record that I personally don't care what people do with their body hair. I'm friends with lots of lefty intellectual types and in college and the years after had lots and lots of (cheap wine fueled) arguments about whether women removing their hair was infantilizing or a symbol of submitting to patriarchal norms or whether women are brainwashed into doing it from a young age by the Male Gaze and insidious media messages that systematically make them feel their bodies are shameful, and ladies and gents, I am a feminist. I don't think anyone should feel obligated to shave their legs if they don't want to, and I don't think there is anything unsexy or unfeminine about the fact that women are, yes, MAMMALS. And as MAMMALS we are covered in HAIR. There are people of both genders who are appalled by that biological fact and I call them "idiots." But seriously, it's ridiculous to focus on brazilians all of a sudden as bad for women's self image. Pubic hair is just another patch of hair that has currently gone out of style and it is no more infatilizing, no more of a cop out to what society expects to remove it than shaving your pits.
Or as I used to say to my clients who said,
"I'd kinda just like to take it all off but I'm afraid of looking like a little girl-"
"Honey, I mean this in the nicest possible way because you have a lovely figure. But no one is going to mistake you for a little girl. Not even with their eyes closed. If you wanna take it off we'll take it off and you might like it, and your [boyfriend a/o girlfriend] might like it, and if not it'll grow back."

Rhinestone cowgirls

2010-03-12T07:04:00.000-08:00

"I saw this and immediately thought of you," wrote Brigid. "Take that any way you want."

http://www.theluxuryspot.com/2010/02/23/i-got-vajazzled-and-had-a-camera-crew/

I guess these associations are par for the course when you're writing a book whose working title is "Confessions of a Bikini Waxer." But still...

She's not the first to bring this trend, or this website to my attention. I've been getting e-mails for weeks.

My first job as an esthetician, which lasted three weeks in 2002, (more on that later,) was at a swanky salon in Mt. Washington. Brazilian waxing was brave and new, and, as I recall, technically illegal in Maryland. The big trend was shapes and colors. Waxing remaining pubic hair into the shape of a heart and dying it red, for instance. I can do a passable heart without a stencil, I've done an arrow pointing down, I've done a pot leaf, (girl's boyfriend was reeeaaallly into weed and it was his birthday) I've done some pretty shakey initials. (An 'M,' for, I kid you not Marvin, has got to be the hardest thing to carve out of pubic hair.)I read an article in, I believe, Vogue that year that a trend among the Upper East Siders was to get it waxed into the shape of a box and dyed Tiffany Blue. Which i find horrifying on a number of levels.

But you, dear readers what do you think about vajazzling? I particularly want to hear from the dudes- I think if I were a fella and I'd just gotten a lady's pants off and saw a mons straight out of Britney Spear's Toxic video, I think I'd be a little freaked out. Weigh in!

Moving Along.

2010-03-07T17:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a great way to not write a book: move.

"Why did I decide to move by myself?" I wailed, and started crying. Chris hugged me and held me, patting my back. It was about three in the afternoon on Friday, and he had just come over to visit. I had spent the morning shoving things into boxes and force-flex bags and periodically weeping. I was expecting the back spasms and broken nails, but I wasn't prepared for how much it would hurt my heart to leave. Sometimes change, even the positive healthy growthy kind of change, feels like failure. Failure and loss.
I shook, and made his shoulder damp.
"There there," he said. "You decided to move by yourself because, well, let's see. You're impulsive. You're impetuous. You're stubborn, oh my god that should have been number one. You love making ridiculously dramatic gestures. You're proud. You carry a grudge longer than anyone I know. And I mean, waaaaaay longer."
"Irrelevant!" I sniffled into his shoulder bone.
"Is it? Is it? Also, you're proud. Did I already say that? It bears repeating. You think you're a lot stronger than you are. Should I go on?"
"By all means."
"Hmmm. Proud, grudge, dramatic... oh, yeah. You hate asking for help worse than anything. And if people offer you help you hate taking it. And you-"
"Okay. Cool. Good. Thanks. All better."
"Did I mention the grudges?"
"Would you just pick up a fucking box and carry it to the truck, please?"
"Okay, but nothing too heavy. Actually, if you have something really light, like pillows, or even better like atoms, if you want me to move some atoms for you I'll just do that."

I got an alarming amount done on Friday, and even set up my bed- with sheets and everything!- and collapsed into it before midnight. Saturday morning I went back to old house, had a brief squabble with old roommate over a ladle and a knife, and went to return the u-haul truck. I stopped at a gas station and filled the tank to the contractually agreed level. I bought a pack of gum and a diet coke, and somehow managed to slice my thumb open on the Dentyne blister pack.
"Fuck," I muttered. It was three blocks from the gas station to the u-haul rental place and in those three blocks blood dripped down my wrist, got all over the steering wheel and my diet coke bottle and my other hand.
"Jesus H.- seriously? All this from a pack of gum?!" I muttered, mopping myself with the cuff of my hoodie. I was steering one handed when I pulled into the lot. There were only two parking spaces that didn't require backing up. I angled the truck towards the closer and coasted into it, and side-swiped a u-haul van.
Cru-unnnn-unch.
It was the exact same move that got me grounded for a month in high school.
I looked in the side mirror, hoping against hope that perhaps the crunching grinding sound signified something else. Like a small earthquake or a tree falling over or something. But no: the side of the truck I was driving had rubbed up against the back of the van next to it like a lonely cat against a leg. My truck was still in contact with the van's brake light.
I sat there and felt the blood drain from my extremities. I took my throbbing thumb from my mouth. "Maybe no one saw," I thought with sudden, fierce hope.
A man in a u-haul jacket carrying a clipboard stepped in front of the truck. He shook his head at me.

Horror.

2010-03-03T15:36:00.000-08:00

So it appears New Jersey is trying to pass legislation to make brazilian bikini waxing illegal. All just because some people have been horribly injured recently.
(Here are some links. Read at your own peril... even I find them disturbing. Labial stitching. Shudder.

bad bikini wax 1.
bad bikini wax 2

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29773433/
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/22523558/detail.html)
)
For the record, I think this is alarmist nonsense. It's true that there are a lot of underqualified estheticians out there who hurt people- but this is an education issue. Most beauty schools, as I've said, graduate their students with the barest understanding of waxing. I read a tip on a blog recently, that when you get a bikini wax for the first time you should enquire about how much continuing education your esthetician has had, but in my experience continuing ed is a joke. "Fake it til you make it" is a driving philosophy for practitioners in the beauty industry. And not all waxes are made the same- there are a lot of products that should never touch mucus membranes.
So maybe these things could be addressed, instead of just banning the whole thing? Or is that crazy talk?
Speaking of crazy talk, (see how my segues are improving?!) why did that woman wait so long to go to the hospital?! Did she not notice that her vagina was oozing pus and swollen to the size of a football? That, not personal grooming, seems to be the issue at stake. If she had gone to get her toes done and had to have her foot amputated, would New Jersey be considering banning pedicures?

Limitations.

2010-03-02T09:26:00.001-08:00

It's a time of great frustration for the baby; there are many things he wants to be able to do that he can't. Chief among his ambitions right now involves a certain toy- a 4x4x4, brightly colored fuzzy cloth block with a bell inside it. Kiddo wants to grab this toy and lift it up to his mouth and chew it so bad he shakes with thwarted desire every time he sees it.
His gross motor skills are developed to the point that he can grasp lots of things pretty well. He uses his hands as though he's wearing very stiff mittens, so anything that can be successfully pinchered- very soft toys, for instance, and things with soft handles- can be brought up to his mouth for up to a quarter hour of gumming and sucking bliss. He's had some successes with using two hands to manipulate toys, but smaller ones are easier. This block that he wants so badly is too big and too firm to pincher, and the problem of how to grasp it, where to place his hands and how much pressure to exert so he doesn't wind up batting it out of reach is the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle for him.

(While I was writing that we were sitting on the floor together. I had the laptop on one knee and he was sitting up with his butt firmly nestled into the crook of my other knee for stability. He frowned at my big toe for a minute, which I wiggled for his entertainment, and then leaned forward to grasp it with both his spitty little mitts. High on his hand-eye coordination coup, he gurgled, shrieked, and then pitched himself forward, falling just so his torso was supported by my ankle and my toe was squarely in his mouth. He let out an obscenely satisfied "Gaaahhhhhh!" Tomorrow I will wear socks.)

I keep giving him the block even though I know it will end in heartache. He'll be content for a few minutes flailing his arms at it. He connects, making the bell jingle, enough to be satisfyied for perhaps forty five seconds. Then he remembers that what he really wants out of life is to chew on it, and the struggle begins. He bats it. He puts one hand on the top and one on the side and it rolls away. I bring it back. He wises up and puts a hand on each side and opens his mouth and lets loose a string of drool in excited anticipation... but his hands aren't in the right place and as he tries to lift it to his face the block goes skittering out of reach. "Ehhhhhhgh!" he complains.

"I know, little man," I say to him. "I'm having the exact same problem with segues."

I try and I try to connect all these funny scenes and anecdotes into something that doesn't sound like a teenage girl's diary- and then...! and then...! and then...!- but I wind up feeling like I'm typing with stiff mittens on, and the chapter goes skittering out of reach.

Word Count Blues.

2010-02-27T14:15:00.000-08:00

When we were sixteen, Clare and I went on a canoe trip with a school group. I think the length of river we canoed down was something like seven miles, but we never somehow got the hang of keeping the boat straight and kept swinging from one bank to another.
"Damn it! Wait, you paddle on the left and I'll paddle on the right."
"I am paddling on the left!"
"You are? Maybe that's the problem. I don't think we're supposed to be paddling on the same side."
We caught up with everyone at the end of the day, exhausted, and arbitrarily decided that while everyone else had canoed seven miles we'd canoed eighteen with all of our back and forth.
I thought of that when I did my final word count after six hours of writing: 1600 words. But how much did I REALLY write with all of my back and forth, my writing and re-writing? One sentence I know I re-wrote five times. (Thirteen words. Half an hour.) How many words really go into 1600 words?
I don't know. My brain is mush.

On skin care

2010-02-23T06:35:00.000-08:00

Full disclosure: I am a terrible salesperson. My politics are distinctly anti-consumer culture and anti-conspicuous consumption. I'm uncomfortable pushing a bunch of crap people don't need on them, which has been a handicap in my career in the beauty industry. I've been very lucky that I've never worked in a salon that enforced a retail quota.

Don't get me wrong: I think there's something very satisfying and grown up about washing yourself with something that smells expensive and using a silky moisturizer out of a pretty jar. But the skin care industry is choc-a-block with snake oil, and every person working in it is required by the terms of their job descriptions to get as much of your money from you as possible, so emptor, you better caveat.

When I was thirteen and got my first pimples I went to the library and checked out half a dozen books on skincare and devoured them all. There are some pretty good resources in print- I advise everyone to go to the library and browse through the RL87 section. Paula Begoun sometimes starts spouting crazy, but she breaks things down pretty nicely. It's a few years out of date and only deals with drugstore brands, but a book called How to Wash Your Face is sane and clearly worded in a way that brings tears to my eyes. The people who create and market skin care products make it all seem so complicated, I think the majority of people think it's beyond their grasp, but it isn't. You can arm yourself with the knowledge you need to assess your own skin care needs and have the best skin you can possibly have. If you go to a department store or spa for answers I guarantee you're going to get a lot of pseudo-scientific half truths and hard sells. Even your dermatologist is under the sway of free swag from Neutrogena and Oil of Olay.

This is something I feel passionate about. It's been making me very mad for years.

The standard textbook for estheticians in Maryland, (perhaps the whole of the US? i'll check and get back) is Milady's Standard, and it was written in the voice of a drunk six year old. I used to entertain myself during slow moments in school by circling the typos. One memorable page had 22. There was also very little actual, whaddaya call it, um... INFORMATION! Very little actual information in it. Dry skin requires a moisturizer. You can tell skin is dry by its dry appearance. There are a variety of moisturizers for dry skin available on the market. That's about as in depth as things got. We dutifully memorized a list of common ingredients and whether they were active ingredients or preservatives. And then we were let loose upon the world to sell sell sell.
Continuing ed is equally bleak. Almost every skin care line has a skin care education program for its consultants (factored into the suggested retail price, of course) which boils down to a course on how best to sell the line. I once endured a five day seminar held by Esthederm, which is an over-priced European line of dubious dermatological value which costs hundreds of dollars a month to use as suggested. A hard sell in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods and I was not at the time working anywhere near a wealthy neighborhood. My boss signed us up and presented it to me as a rare treat that I should be grateful for but it was five (unpaid) days of mind-numbing non-information, and since my employer was sitting right next to me taking notes and nudging me when he learned something exciting I couldn't even doodle or read a book tucked into the cover of my information packet. Five days of learning that the extract of a rare flower found only on the slopes of a certain mountain in Belgium soothes inflammation in skin and promotes healthy skin cell regeneration, but not why or how. Five days of learning that this serum when layered under another serum layered under a certain day cream that no, does not contain sunscreen will eradicate sun damage, but not why exactly.
"What's the percentage of salicylic acid in the salicylic acid cream?" I asked at one point. This is an important detail because salicylic acid, (or beta-hydroxy acid ) is only effective when it's concentration is above 1.5% and when the solution it's in is a certain pH. Products can be labeled alpha or beta hydroxy acid without containing enough of the ingredient to effect the skin at all, and since alpha and beta hydroxy acids can be used in negligible amounts as preservatives, some of these creams are completely misleading in their marketing. On the particular cream I was questioning, salicylic acid was second to last in a list of more than fifteen ingredients.
Our instructor, a French lady, looked at me blankly, and then smiled a hostile little smile.
"I'm not exactly sure," she purred. "Enough to be effective, not so much as to be irritating. Does anybody else have a question?"

Sigh.

Driving back on the last day my boss told me that he hoped I had the tools, now, to be more confident in my selling.
"A spa wants to make its rent in product sales," he told me gravely. "I respect that you don't want to pressure the client but you aren't. You're educating them. I've given you time, but your sales are far below the 25% of services we expect."
I looked out the window and unfocused my eyes so the guard rail legs blurred together. Most of my clients were young professionals, just starting their families. How do you sell a school teacher an $85 day cream? How do you then tell her that the corresponding night cream is $105, the eye cream is $95, the serum that optimizes the performance of the moisturizers on a cellular level (what?!) is $110 for half an ounce? The cleanser is $47, the toner, absolutely necessary to remove the residue left by the cleanser is $42, the weekly exfoliating treatment, absolutely necessary to remove dead skin cells so the moisturizers can do their jobs is $55, and that if she wishes to truly realize the full potential of her skin, there are eye treatments, additional serums, masques, spot treatments and body care items for her as well? How do you say that to someone making less than $50K a year with a straight face, especially when you're convinced that using that many products is fundamentally bad for her skin, and will set her up for all kinds of sensitivity issues?
But I had to- it was in my job description.

And continuing in the spirit of full disclosure- I like nice creams. I've moisturized everything from my hairline to my toes every morning of my life since I was fourteen because I believe it makes a difference. I exfoliate more than I floss. My heart flutters a little when a skin care company sends me samples. I may or may not have a small eyeliner problem. I understand the girly pleasures of a well-stocked vanity. But I also understand that the skin care industry is full of crap- cleansers that strip the skin of protective oils and beneficial bacteria, scrubs with drying gel bases full of plastic beads that do little to dislodge dead skin cells, moisturizers full of sensitizing chemicals- and I keep everything very simple.

You know what the best facial scrub is? No joke- table sugar. It's gritty enough to scrub you baby smooth but it dissolves before you can abrade yourself and it's a natural humectant. It won't disrupt your skin and it won't hurt the critters in the bay. I'm dead serious- I use it twice a week, just put a tablespoon into your damp palms and scrub it onto damp skin and rinse well. Rinse your hairline really well too or you'll be sorry and by sorry I mean sticky. Try it for two weeks and you won't even remember what St. Ives is.

But I digress. My point is that you can't necessarily trust the pros. We are largely undereducated and under unbelievable pressure to make sales. The companies that make the products do not actually have your best interests or the health of your skin at heart. The marketing companies are worse, and they are far, far smarter than you and me. So do a little research yourself.

I'll write a blog soon about basic skin care dos and don'ts, and in the meantime please do write with any questions and I will do my best to answer them.

Business 101.

2010-02-19T11:37:00.000-08:00

I am not exaggerating when I admit this: on Wednesday I watched five straight hours of Tabatha's Salon Takeover.

I've been a little down lately. I'm a social person, happiest when I'm surrounded by people, talking too much and laughing too loudly. In this way esthetics was a good fit for me and what I miss most about working in a salon is the constant interaction with people. I miss my clients. I miss hearing about their lives. My new job doesn't provide much in the way of conversation, and writing, I'm finding, is a solitary pursuit.
Right before the second blizzard in a week hit, when I was already housebound and anticipating being housebound for god knows how much longer, I thought I would just shriv up and die from loneliness.

I watched the first episode almost tearfully. I remembered and viscerally missed how all salons smell like hairspray and shampoo, how all break rooms smell like hair dye. I missed the noise- the chatting and blowdryers and clink of combs against barbicide jars. I suddenly, sharply missed wearing high heels.

By the middle of the second episode, while I was watching two stylists squabble over who always got stuck doing the laundry I was over it. The third episode featured the textbook salon owner from hell and I remembered how completely crazy-making my last two years working in a salon had been.

I'm not made for corporate culture: I'm too much of a butt head. I distrust protocol insofar as it relates to me, and I require quite a bit of latitude in being able to make my own calls. I know my failings, and my entire career I've worked in small salons and spas, where the job descriptions are fluid, the management uneven, dental and 401Ks a distant and impossible dream, but where you have to be creative to survive. These are the kinds of salons that Tabatha titularly Takes Over, and I've personally experienced every single issue she dealt with during my five hours with her from the roaches to the prima-dona hair stylists to the paranoid, abusive owners.

Oh, paranoid, abusive owners. I do not miss you.

My friend Jeff owns a successful organic fertilizer company. We were having a conversation about small businesses once and he said,
"The first thing you do as a small business owner, as soon as you can afford to, you have to fire yourself." He meant to hire a manager to oversee the staff and money and then step away. "It's too emotional when it's your baby. You notice that the staff doesn't care as much as you do- and, like, of course they don't- and you resent them. And you get paranoid. And when you don't have a great month you take it out on them. It becomes impossible. You turn into the boss from hell, and you start to hate yourself."

There's a problem that I believe may be specific to salon owners, although feel free to weigh in all of you who've seen otherwise sane people melt down under the pressure of running their own businesses. Most small salons open when a talented hairdresser decides commission is for suckers and opens his or her own place, despite having little or no managerial aptitude. The industry attracts a certain kind of creative personality, and thrives on outsized egos. I haven't seen any numbers, but I would bet that the overwhelming majority of cosmetologists did not attend college. I've never worked for anyone who took so much as a business class, (although the people who ran the salon I blogged about attended regular conferences on how to increase sales.) Ego plus lack of education plus poor communication/management skills plus the naturally quite high stresses of running a small business in a notoriously mercurial industry- it's a set-up for a perfect shit storm of a boss, and Tabatha reminded me that I have stories. Oh, I have stories.

The mini-marathon ended and Millionaire Matchmaker came on. I remembered how hard it is to work on commission. I recalled that breathing in (that wonderfully pleasant smell of) hairspray for years on end elevates your risk of certain rare salivary cancers.
I miss the gossipiness and the company. I miss the technical work of waxing people and giving them facials. I don't miss the chaos one bit.

Unrelated material.

2010-02-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

New post with, whatchacallit. Content! A new post with content coming up. In the meantime, if you click on this link, and scroll down just a tiny bit, you'll find a Review of New Food I wrote, entitled "Spaghetti with Ketchup."

Humiliated

2010-02-12T15:10:00.000-08:00

Humiliated is a story telling event I've been lucky enough to be invited to participate in three times now. (There's a link to the first event on the right hand side. I'm appalled that no one told me my hair was doing that. Does my hair always look like that from the side? I'm wearing it up from now on.) The Valentines Day themed event, Humiliated: Unlucky in Love is coming up at the metro gallery on the 26th. You can come and see me and a half dozen other (largely more talented) folks tell stories about mortification in the pursuit of love for a mere $7. Goldbug provides live music.

Mama- I love you a ton and a half, and thank you for coming to the previous two, but I'm going to tell a dirty story and you might want to skip this one.

Here is the story I told last time: It's the story of how Clare and I made our own alcohol.

The first thing you have to understand is that we were really good kids in high school. Except for a half dozen or so raids on Marielle's parents' liquor cabinet we really didn't drink. We didn't smoke. I didn't try pot or have sex til I was 18, and I was, if not the first in our group, a close second or third. We were really good, academically driven kids.
Clare had Mrs. White for chemistry in 11th grade, and it was well known among the student body that Mrs. Horowitz was a total alcoholic, kept bottles of vodka in the locked cabinet with the chemicals. One day she walked the class through the basic recipe for converting sugar into alcohol, using apples as an example.
A month or so later Clare said, "Hey, why don't we try to make our own alcohol?"
"Okay," I said.
So we went to her house one day after school when her mom was working late, with a ten pound bag of apples.
"Do you have a recipe?" I asked.
"No- but I listened in class. It's not that complicated."
"Okay." We mashed up the apples.
"What now?"
"Now, um, I think we add sugar."
"How much?"
"I don't know. I don't think it matters."
"Okay." So we poured some sugar on top of the apples.
"What now?"
"Now, um, yeast?" We found her mom's baking yeast and poured a few packets into the mash. Then we funneled the goo into an old water cooler bottle and put a balloon on top to trap the CO2, and hid it in a crawl space behind Clare's closet. When she deemed it ready she siphoned it into a water bottle, ("it made a lot less than I thought. I'm surprised!") and we made our Plan.
I had spent the previous month making furtive trips to the cabinet under the dry sink where my mother and grandmother had, for reasons that are still mysterious, four whole ancient, open bottles of peach schnapps. I developed an elaborate rotation system where I would steal a little from each on certain nights. On the appointed day I met Clare at the entrance to the state park. She had a bottle full of, um, brown goo, and I had a bottle full of peach flavored liqueur.

Now in those days, we were really into off-trail hiking. We would just pick a direction and take off, and after a while we would run into some landmark we knew- the fence that bordered the convent, a train trestle, the river... and from there find our way back. So we struck off into the underbrush and hiked around til we stumbled on a spot we particularly liked- a promontory with a large, flat rock overlooking the river, and sat down to drink.

Clare opened the bottle of goo and we looked at it dubiously. It was the texture of gravy, and gave off a smell like a damp basement after a heavy rain. We tried it. It tasted like it smelled.
"Huh," Clare said.
"I thought it would be more... ciderey," I said.
"Yeah."
I had the bright idea to mix it with the peach schnapps to improve the flavor. We drank it all down, and for ten minutes it was really fun to be drunk and then we started to feel horrible ill. The next hour or so is a bit of a blur. We were, of course, lost. I think we both cried. I fell down a lot. We were convinced we were going to have to spend the night in the woods. We were convinced we were going to die. And then, somehow, we stumbled out of the woods and onto Hilton Ave. Ten paces from a pay phone.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. I'm going to have to call my mom to come pick us up."
"Yeah," Clare said miserably.
"Can you be cool?"
"I think so."
"Okay, this is our story. We went for a long hike and got reeeaaally dehydrated. Okay?"
"Okay."
"You can be cool?"
"I think so."
"Do you have a quarter?"
"Yeah. Here."
I called my mother. We slumped against the base of the payphone and waited.
"Hi, mom!" I said, entirely too bightly as I lurched into the front seat.
"What have you two been doing?" she asked, laughing. I looked down. I was covered with mud and bits of leaf mould.
"Oh," i said, "We went for a long hike and got really, really dehydrated and now we're both really tired!"
"Uh-huh."

Mom dropped Clare off and we drove home mostly in silence.
"Okey-doke," I said as I got out of the car. "I'm going to go right upstairs and take a nap!"
"Oh no you aren't," mom said. I looked at her in alarm. "You're going to go right downstairs and take off those filthy clothes and put them in the washer."
"Um, okay." I went downstairs and started the washer. I took off my clothes and put them in. I heard mom's step on the stairs the moment I knew I was going to throw up. Shit. I lifted the lid of the washer, vomited into it, slammed it shut and ran upstairs to my bedroom.

Read. Write. Delete.

2010-02-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

Long form writing is harder than I thought it would be, and I was expecting it to be plenty hard. Twenty pages is an impossible, unthinkable amount of space to fill. And twenty more after that? And twenty more after that? Shoot me now.

Creatively, I am driven by doubt. I don't think I'm very much of a writer. I doubt I can write a book. I delete more than I write. Even my personal diaries, read (one hopes) only by me are almost unreadable with cross-outs and carrots.
"Doesn't it feel good to write, to create?" a friend asked me yesterday. I said, politely, "Oh, absolutely!" But bud, it does not feel good. It feels like trying to run a half marathon when you've only trained for a 5K. It feels like the aftermath of a night of partying, when your brain has had its serotonin drunk, smoked and snorted right out of it. It feels like those dreams where you're trying to run but your legs aren't working right.

I deeply distrust anyone who says they like to write.

Doubt has its uses: doubt trims fat. If I am ever succinct, if I ever tell a story well, it's because I re-read what I wrote and erased everything I had doubts about, and I doubted almost everything. "Boring," says a supercilious jerk of a critic who lives in my head. "Tedious. Are you sure English is your first language? That paragraph is a limp dick if I ever met one. Oh, you thought that metaphor was clever, didn't you, you smug hack."

Unpleasant. But it gets the job done. Yesterday I wrote a good essay. I wrote probably 1500 words and wound up, after three drafts and two incidents where I had to bat away tears, with 800 I'm very proud of. (That mean little critic is proud of them too.) I hope you read it one day.

But, this writing-by-verbal-self-abuse thing I do, while pretty effective for short essays and blogs, might be a tad, shall we say, defeating as I sit down to try to spit out 220,000 words or so. If I'm ever going to get past the first 5000 words I have to gag that inner critic, somehow, but still recognize crap when I write it. How do I toe that line?

I spent a good portion of my past snow-bound week exploring the on-line presence of people who identify as writers- blogs, columns, forums. I was amazed by how LONG some of those pieces were. And it's true that I have a ridiculously short attention span- as a child I seem to have absorbed all the lessons of MTV without actually having access to it- but come ON! "Dear sir or madam," I felt like writing to more than one person, "I would like to offer you a tiny portion of my barely controlled anxiety disorder, that you may use it to excise that whole middle portion of that insufferably long blog entry. You may find yourself crying yourself to sleep tonight, but tomorrow you'll be glad you cut that story of your ex-girlfriend's dog down to two scroll downs. Seriously."

But I'm probably boring you now, especially you who come here to read about pubes. So my writer and musician friends, weigh in: how do you self-edit? How do you deal with the terrible burden of discarding something you made with your own brain just because it isn't good enough? How do you manage to produce under the terrible weight of your own expectations? (in comments or by e-mail. I'm genuinely soliciting advice.)

Best answer wins a chance to write my book for me.

Hi, I'm Sarah.

2010-02-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

Here is a typical conversation I tend to have when I meet people:

"What do you do?"
"I'm an esthetician."
"Oh! What hospital do you work in?"
"No no, not an anesthesiologist, an esthetician. I do skincare and waxing. I work in a salon."
"Oh. How much do you charge for a haircut?"
"I don't cut hair. I do, like, facials and waxing."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"So when you say waxing..."
"Yes. I do bikini waxing."
"Do you do, like, the full..."
"Yup."
"Ewww. I bet you see a lot of really gross things."
"Oh yeah. Like," here I like to lean in, look around furtively and say in a horrified half-whisper, "vaginas!"
"No, but I mean..."
"I know what you mean." Here I generally start looking around restlessly for a fresh drink.

Here's another:
"I'm an esthetician."
"What's that?"
"I do skincare and waxing. I work in a salon."
"Oh. So I can come to you to get a manicure?"
"No. Nope, I don't do nails. Skincare and waxing."
"Oh. Hey, do you know that scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin? God, that was so funny."
"Yup."

Once a couple girlfriends and I went speed dating, which was a whole nother hilarious story, but after the third "date" I took a sharpie and wrote "anesthesiologist" on a piece of paper and drew a circle around it and and a line through it. Under it I wrote "esthetician, from esthetics= skin care and waxing." The "dates" were only four minutes long and three minutes, easy, were being taken up by me explaining my job.

Snow Day

2010-02-06T08:47:00.000-08:00

And if you're wondering how the book is progressing, saying to yourself, "Gosh, now that Baltimore is paralyzed by the SNOWPOCALYPSE Sarah must really be getting a lot of work done," I'll tell you how my morning has gone.
I started out strong with a blog. I pulled out some pages I printed yesterday and looked them over and opened the file I wanted to work on. Then I made breakfast and my first pot of coffee. I checked facebook, and the weather, and facebook again. I lost an hour playing with the nifty stat-counter I installed on the blog, that breaks everything down into neat-o pie-charts. (The overwhelming majority of my readers use Verizon for their internet connection! Alaina! I can see where you live in Germany 'cause there's a little flag on the map! If I click on the flag it tells me how many times you've been to my site! Thanks for reading, lady!)
I returned to the open file. I stared out the window at the snow falling. Sooo pretty. Soooo hypnoootic. Wait. Focus!
I sighed and put the computer down. I picked up Robert's guitar and tuned it and picked out a few phrases of "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring," and had a good long think about why I gave up the violin 16 years ago.
I made another pot of coffee and put on warmer socks.
I sat to write again and got distracted by an idea I had last night. And hour later I submitted 250 words to McSweeny's.
Focus! Stop procrastinating!
Then I wrote a blog about procrastinating.
Now I think I'll half-heartedly shovel the stairs and take a nap.

My first brazilian pt. 2.

2010-02-05T09:36:00.001-08:00

The victim of my first brazilian never came back. I have forgotten her name, now, but where ever you are: I am so sorry.

A few nights later I "borrowed" a wax pot from work. At home I downed half a bottle of wine, and laid a towel on the floor in front of a mirror and I had at. I began by giving myself a regular bikini wax. It took about an hour and at the end my hands were shaking violently and I had several hickey-like bruises, and one abrasion that straddled the tendon connecting my left leg to my groin. At this point I had another glass of wine. And I pressed on.

It was a long night.

I learned many important lessons that night, some of which I could still show you the scars from if we were that kind of friends. I learned lessons about bruising and burning, about how if wax gets all gummed up in a thick patch of hair it will be almost impossible to remove, I learned about pulling too slowly and how much that hurts, I learned about letting the wax cool down as I sat there willing myself the courage to 1,2,3 pull! and what happens then, I learned the exact limits of my hamstrings.

I fell asleep doubting for not the first or last time my choice of career.

A week or so later I had another brazilian on my book. The lady was from New York, staying in a hotel nearby.
"I get this done all the time," she said, "So I'll know if you do a good job."
Who says that? Did she know something?
I nervously made my approach with my wax stick and had at. Now I keep up a steady patter of conversation when I wax people but on this occasion I was silent, furiously concentrating. I was moving very slowly, but having much more success. Was it actually working? Was I actually giving someone a brazilian?
"Could you just hold your leg here?" I said. She said nothing. "Could you-" I looked up at her. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open and she wasn't moving.

"Oh my God I've killed her," I thought. I shook her knee. "Excuse me?" I said, loudly, a note of panic in my voice. She started awake and looked at me.
"Sorry. What? You want me to hold my leg? Sure."
"Were you asleep?"
"Oh yeah. I get this done all the time. I took two valium before I came."

Ahh.

My first brazilian

2010-02-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

You know, I've never actually gotten a bikini wax. From anyone else, I mean. I wax myself every month or so (definitely "or so" in this record breaking and booty-less winter) and count it as my yoga for the week. In the beginning, when I was a little baby esthetician and I worked in a spa with five other girls I wouldn't let anyone touch me down there because I was shy about it. I was worried about if I looked right or smelled right and the idea that someone might be secretly judging my vagina for forty hours of the week was too much to bear.

There are, by the way, estheticians out there who sit around and secretly judge other women's vaginas. True story. My massage friend Stacey told me that she would never let the girls at the spa she used to work for wax her because they would come out of an appointment and giggle to themselves about the unbelievable "roast beef curtain" they'd just had to touch. I've worked with women who shudder at the thought of bikini waxes during the summer- as though they themselves have never been to the gym?- and I privately call these women "unqualified." Or, days when my righteous indignation is a little higher, "assholes." Why would you get into this line of work with that attitude? There were other career opportunities. Go back and talk to your high school guidance counselor.

It's true that to be a good bikini waxer one has to be far less squeamish than the average jane. Lady parts secrete things, and there are tampon strings and occasional farts and things to politely ignore. But I feel strongly that anyone who has a vagina, which presumably secretes things and occasionally sports tampon strings and is situated near where farts come from should be sympathetic. And a lady who gets a case of the grossed out giggles from protruding labia? GO HOME. You obviously can't handle your job just clear out your locker and go home.

Okay I'm off the soap box and back to the plot. I never got waxed when I worked with women who would have waxed me for free because I was far too shy. By the time I got over that, and realized that after a while vaginas barely register, I was proficient at waxing myself. For the last 5 years I've been the sole esthetician on staff whereever I worked and damned, damned if I'm going to go somewhere and pay $60 plus generous tip for someone to do to me what I can do to myself for the price of some wax and half a bottle of yellow tail.

So I've never had a bikini wax.

In beauty school the curriculum is geared towards teaching you to pass the state board exam, and the state board exam is geared towards making sure you know better than to cause an outbreak of diphtheria or whatever. Wash your hands. Wear gloves. Use hospital grade disinfectant. I graduated with very little waxing experience. A few handouts on different eyebrow shapes, a few exhortations to hold the skin taut, and we were let loose upon the world. (If you've ever had a very bad wax, or gone home from the salon missing half an eyebrow, this is perhaps why.) At my first real job a very nice lady came in and while my boss watched I slowly, painfully, ineptly waxed her legs. It took me two hours. And legs are easy! All the hair goes in the same direction! The biggest problem with waxing legs is it's effing boring! The first lady who ever came to me for a bikini wax, (God bless you for ever coming back, Betsy) was pretty dang hairy. A year later I'd be able to do her in fourteen minutes flat, which is on the long side for me, (she's mediterranean) but that first time took me closer to an hour.

One day, that first year, I came back from lunch and Tami had booked me a brazilian.
"Tami," I said, in a panic, "I can't do brazilians."
"Oh, you can't? I thought you were doing them." Tami was a lovely woman, and a talented esthetician, but she seldom if ever paid attention.
"No. No, not even close. Can you do it?"
"No, honey. I have a facial."
"We have to call her back, then."
"Oh, I didn't get a number. She said she was just around the corner and she'd be in in fifteen minutes."
My heart started pounding and stress sweat was prickling in my armpits.
"You'll be fine," Tami said tranquilly. "It's not hard. If you can do a regular bikini you can do a brazilian."

Not true, friends. Not true.

The girl came in and took off her underwear and I hoped she couldn't smell the fear on me. I'd done her eyebrows before and we had a good reporte. She said she was nervous because she'd never had one of these before. Did it hurt?
"Oh, not much," I said.
I did a full regular bikini wax on her, (i.e. I removed all the hair to right inside the underwear line) and took a deep breath and hands shaking, started in on the labia.

It's hard, those first few bikini waxes, to know quite where to look, or where to put your hands. That was the first vagina I'd ever touched that wasn't mine and the whole thing felt very... impolite.

Added to that I was terrified, and it was obvious within the first few minutes that I was royally screwing something up, though precisely what or how I did not yet have the experience to say. Twenty minutes later she had slightly less hair on her labia, but what was left was gummy with wax. I was about to cry.

"Okay!" I said. "We're done! That's a brazilian!" Hey, she'd never had one. How would she know?

She left, I made Tami check her out. I went into the bathroom and gave in to a small, shuddery panic attack.

End pt. 1, stay tuned for pt. 2.

Dirty tricks.

2010-02-03T07:10:00.000-08:00

You know how there are cameras on some roller coasters that snap your picture on some terrifying dip or curve, and at the check out line you're encouraged to buy, like, a mug with your screaming, centrifugal force-tossed face on it? Sometimes I want to install a camera above my waxing table. Not in a pervy way- I'd install it right above where the lady I'm waxing lays her head. I'd spread the wax (in the direction of hair growth) and press the strip of muslin firmly on top, all while making soothing chit-chat and then I'd hold the flesh of the thigh taut with one hand and with the other I'd.... PULL! and at that moment the camera would go off. Click! And on the lady's way out she'd have the option to schedule her next appointment and buy a tee-shirt with her "Oh, Jesus CHRIST!"-face on it that says, "I survived my bikini wax."

Lost my touch.

2010-02-02T06:48:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I worked at a spa that routinely does body treatments: scrubs and wraps and things. I confess I looked at the boy lying before me with some trepidation. He looked up at me quizzically and wiggled.
"Yeah, you're gonna love this," i said. "We're gonna be great friends after this." I unsnapped his outfit and pulled his kicking legs free of the feet that were made to look like little yellow duckies. He looked up at me in alarm. "Quack!" I said, a trifle too cheerfully, waving the duck-foot in his face. "Quack!"
He wasn't buying it. He frowned deeply to let me know as much.
I rubbed my hands together to warm them and held the tube of cortisone cream to my belly for a minute to warm it. He grabbed a spit cloth and started chewing it.
"Here we go!" I said in that same bright, false voice. "We're gonna start with your belly!" I blew a raspberry on his midriff to put him at his ease. He giggled. I spread the cream onto his rashy middle and he abruptly stopped laughing and looked at me with eyes that said, eloquently, "J'accuse! J'accuse!" He restrained himself, however, and uttered, simply and devastatingly, a single "Gaaaaaaaauuuggghhh." He punctuated this by kicking in my direction several times repeatedly.
"I know, I know," I said, grabbing a chubby little leg and rubbing more cream into the crevices and dimples around his knees. "You're doin great, buddy. This'll be over in a minute." He began to weep. "Hey hey hey, little man," I said. I picked him up and laid him belly down across my knee and handed him a terrycloth bear. I lifted his romper over his head and rubbed the cream onto his back. He let out a long fart and I lifted the edge of his drawers to check. Clean. He began to wave his arms violently.
"Hey, hey," I said. "You know, ladies used to pay me hundreds of dollars to do this to them." He sniffled. And rubbed his eye with a balled fist. "And they didn't cry!" I sat him up and took his bear away from him and rubbed cream into his arms. "Actually, there was one lady who did, once, but she was in the process of getting a divorce and her husband had hidden the assets." I pulled his arms into his sleeves again and started to snap. "You would think after weeping on me, a perfect stranger, for an hour and a half she would've given me a reasonable tip, but no." I snapped up his crotch and laid him back down on the mat. He frowned up at me and chewed the edge of his spit cloth sullenly. I sighed and squeezed out a tiny amount for his cheeks.
As soon as I touched his face he screamed. I sighed and picked him up and smelled his chubby little neck. It smelled like baby shampoo and hot spoiled milk.

Stuckedness.

2010-01-29T12:05:00.000-08:00

I am in a state of profound stuckedness.
I thought for the better half of the week that I would be able to relax and just write when I had some kind of steady income figured out, and a job to add structure to my days and weeks. (It's hard to focus on the task at hand when you're fretting about what to wear to an interview and checking you bank balance before you go to the store to buy canned beans and bread.) But that's all settled, and even without money taking up precious brain space I'm stuck. I've been sitting at the kitchen table since ten with my laptop open and printed out pages of a few versions of the first chapter spread around me, going, "Huh."
I'm pretty good at a quick character sketch, and at wringing every last drop from an anecdote. I have the list of blogs before me, and they create a nice narrative arc. I have in my head hundreds of usable scenes and people I can mash together to flesh this out. But to string together all these sketches and anecdotes and blog entries to tell a larger story, to create something bigger than the sum of these parts... huh.

I am becoming intimately acquainted with the patch of brick wall slightly above and to the left of my computer screen.

In my early twenties I had a friend who read Tarot- she claimed she'd inherited a gift for it from her Dominican grandmother and it's true that she was spooky right. She would lay out the cards in formation, and look at each of them and think about the meaning of the card, and what it meant that it was in that position , and then she would just sort of clear her thoughts and let her eyes go unfocused like with those magic pictures from the nineties and the message of the cards would come to her. So she said.

The right way to begin this book is hovering on the fringes of my consciousness. Just out of reach. Maybe if I keep staring at this patch of wall it will come to me.

Have any of you, my dear writer friends, been in this particular headspace before? Did, by any chance, a glass of cab sauv help you out of it? I'm going to try that, anyway. I'll let you know.

There's been a story about writing floating around in the back of my head since this started. Since it doesn't look like I'm going to accomplish anything else today I'll just tell it to you, okay?

My grandfather wrote a little bit. (He was a profoundly lonely man.) One night when he deemed I was old enough he read me an essay he'd written about frogs. This was a very long time ago, and I only heard it once, but I remember that it was about a pond by his house in his native North Carolina, and about lying awake at night as a boy unable to sleep for the heat and the frogs. He had very bad arthritis as a young man, and spent a few years of his early adulthood bed-bound. The frogs would keep him company when he was too restless or in too much pain to sleep. He described the development that was creeping up around the pond in the past decades, wrote that the last time he'd been to North Carolina he woke in the middle of the night, unsettled. He lay in the dark listening to the sawing chorus of the bugs, trying to tease out what had woken him. He realized that it was the silence coming from the pond- there were no more frogs.
I was flattered that he was reading to me, but nervous. I was concentrating so hard on being an attentive audience I think I missed half of what he said. I was also vaguely concerned there might be a quiz after. You never knew with him.

Oh, it's important to note that I had just discovered that humor was the best thing around for diffusing tense situations. Which means I would have been in about sixth grade. When I was in sixth grade my grandfather was becoming seriously ill, a fact I was and wasn't aware of.
We had a long-standing joke throughout my childhood, my grandfather and I, that my snoring kept him up at night.
"I think you actually lifted the roof off the house last night," he'd growl.
"I don't snore!" I'd shriek. "YOU snore, silly!"
"Well something was rattling the windows last night, and it was coming from your room and it sounded an awful lot like snoring to me."
"WAS NOT!" I'd holler, apoplectic with mock rage.

He finished reading the essay, and I was disconcerted that it didn't have a punchline. (He was a very funny man.) He took off his glasses and looked at me with his sternest expression.
"Well?" he said.
My head swam.
"It was really good," I said. He kept looking at me. His expression didn't change. It was a quiz, then, of a kind. And I didn't have any idea what the answer even looked like. "It was really good, but it seems to me that after all that with the frogs my snoring shouldn't bother you."
He levered himself off his bed with a grunt and took the sheaf of paper to his dresser and put it down with a thunk.
"Get out." He said.
Crap. Wrong.
"But..."
"Nope. Get out."
I knew when to scram. "I really liked it!" I called from outside his room. His door closed. His tv turned on. I retreated to my room across the hall, sorry as hell but not entirely sure what I was sorry for.
He never let me see anything he wrote again, and I don't know what happened to it all when he died.
That's it- no punchline, no quiz.

Passion of a Bikini Waxer

2010-01-25T08:12:00.000-08:00

Almost every lady I've ever intimately waxed has asked me, "So, um, what made you want to get into this line of work?"
I have to fight down the urge to say, "Lesbian tendencies. Just kidding!"
But no, even if I had lesbian tendencies, I can't imagine anything less sexy than bikini waxing. Every now and then a fella will ask if he can come in and watch his girlfriend get her stuff waxed. I always say "no." No thank you, I'm not getting paid enough to be involved in your sex life. Please wait in the lobby. I believe there's a Details magazine there that might interest you. Because what I'm about to do to your lady friend is only slightly sexier than childbirth.
I usually parry the question with, "Well, you know, it's a short leap from the humanities to the service industry."

But what made me want to become a bikini waxer?

I didn't, really. I came at it sideways.
Maybe my path started that day in a 300 level English class when a girl across the table from me said, in all sincerity,
"So you know how poems are divided up into, like, paragraphs? Wait, are they called paragraphs when it's poetry?"
"Stanza," said the teacher, wearily.
I saw my future that day and it made me want to weep.
Or maybe it started two years before. The state school that was my safety was giving out phenomenal scholarships for a few years around the time I graduated from high school in an effort to attract humanities students to a math and science focused college. My new friends and I sat around in the common room of my dorm one night in the first weeks of that first semester and asked each other, "So, where were YOU supposed to go?" NYU, Stanford, Tulane, Brown... we'd all gotten scholarships and grants, but nothing to beat the deal, in our solidly middle class parents' eyes, that UMBC was offering. But still, maybe I would have transferred, or stuck my shoulder to the wheel to get into a really great grad program if it hadn't been for Ms. Poem Paragraphs opening my eyes.
"I am not," I realized that day, "cut out for academia."

So when my boyfriend dropped out of school to devote more time to his band, I dropped out too. "I'll just take a semester off," I thought. "To reassess."

One semester bled into two, and my mother started nagging me to DO something.
"You can't babysit forever!"
I don't know where the idea of beauty school came from, but it stuck. I looked into it: to go to school to do hair took eighteen months. To go to school for esthetics took four and a half.
Sold!

Beauty school was a wretched experience. I was a bohemian misfit. I cut my own hair into a jagged bob. I didn't wear make-up. I lived in the city. My boyfriend was a thirty year old soundguy who grew his own pot. I read books for fun. I was pretentious as shit. Most of the other girls came from privileged backgrounds, had long and meticulously colored hair and a genuine passion for facecream and make-up. Three of them were saving up for boob jobs. One of them had a daddy who was going to buy her a spa as soon as she graduated. I ate alone a lot. I watched them giggling and forging lifelong friendships from across a great divide and wondered what the hell I had done.
I graduated, valedictorian of my class, and eventually found a job I liked and made a friend at work. I learned to do brazilians on the job, (later I'll write about that) and found I had the knack for it. I'm not squeamish, I'm merciless, quick and thorough, and I can keep up a patter of conversation as though nothing is out of the ordinary, no! Nothing at all! Can you just hold that labia out the way please? Thanks! So anyway...

So what made me want to become a bikini waxer? I was 20 and I didn't know what else to do.

Changing the names.

2010-01-24T07:09:00.000-08:00

Make no mistake: I am TERRIFIED of the people I wrote about in Confessions of a Bikini Waxer. If the book is ever published I will move out of Baltimore if I can't get in the witness protection program because these people will retaliate. I'm less afraid of lawsuits: all names and identifying details are being changed and A. assures me her company has an excellent legal team, than I am of coming out of a restaurant one night and being run over in the parking lot by a car bearing a rainbow sticker and blasting showtunes.
I spent a few e-mails whining "Can't we just fictionalize it? I mean, c'mon. This blog is one bad-boy boyfriend and inadequate mother away from chick lit! Pleeeaaassse?!" But A. firmly and gently said, "Yeah, no."
I hear Alaska is very nice for two months out of the year. Two out of twelve ain't bad.

I'm indulging in such theatrics because I spent the morning CHANGING THE NAMES, which is harder than I thought. It's one of those tasks that I allotted a generous half hour for and two hours later I was trolling through Parent's Magazine's List of 100 Top Baby Names scratching my head with the end of my pencil, three sheets of paper covered with crossed out possibilities gathering coffee rings before me. The names need to be evocative of the characters, and close enough that I don't get confused writing but not too close, or rhyming. No ex-boyfriend's names or good friend's names because that's just confusing. No switching characters names, like calling George "Michael" and Michael "George." Nothing anachronistic: no 65 year old men named, for instance, Cody. When I made up a list of all the people I mentioned in the blog and all the people I'll probably write about in the book it was in surplus of twenty boy's names and twenty girl's names. At one point in despair I thought "Fuck it! Everyone's getting named something like Peanut or Index Card." I felt better after some toast and pressed on.

For a brief moment when I was writing the blog I experimented with putting some of the entries on Blogger for my friends who weren't on myspace. I changed the city and I changed all the names of the characters to the characters from Friends. I named the salon "Central Part" (get it?!!!) and the six main characters were Ross, Chandler, Joey, Monica, Rachel and Janice. (No one felt like a Phoebe.)I found myself seriously plotting how I'd pitch this idea to A.

I got it all done and scrawled the 43 names in columns next to their original counterparts on the white board above my desk. I leaned back in my wheeley chair and looked at it and thought, "Yeah. They're still gonna try to take me out."

The Life and Death of a Pubic Hair.

2010-01-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

One summer ten of us got a house at the beach for a week. We were all close friends, in our mid to late twenties, and no one was married yet. I remember that trip fondly as some of the best fun I've ever had. At the end of the week we held a house-wide talent competition. Ellyn was crazy into belly dancing at the time, so she gave us a demonstration. John had spent the week sketching each of us, and he displayed his drawings. Doug gave a comedy performance. Eric played a song he'd written. And I got up with a piece of posterboard with diagrams on it and gave a lecture entitled "The Life and Death of a Pubic Hair."
It was a hit, and not, I think, solely for the bucket of Daiquiris we were well on our way to finishing, although that certainly loosened up the crowd. My lecture, silly as it was and containing as many off-color references to pudenda as it did, taught my friends a some very basic information about body hair- the kinds of things they didn't even know they didn't know.

I spend so much of my time thinking about body hair that it surprises me how mysterious it is to people who aren't in my line of work. It surprises me how many absurd myths live on in common knowledge.
I was waxing a woman, once, who held multiple masters and a PhD in physics from Hopkins.
"If only I hadn't shaved my upper legs when I was a teenager," she sighed. "I wouldn't have to get waxed so often now."
'Seriously?' I thought. 'I get that you aren't a biologist, but can't you apply some of that expensive Hopkins-brand critical thinking to this?'
But I'm pretty passive, especially when it comes to telling people who are technically much smarter than I am that they are wrong wrong wrong, so I just smiled, blandly, and said "Mmm-hmmm."

I read that shaving makes hair grow back thicker and darker in "17 Magazine"
when I was fifteen and it scared the shit out of me. I'd been shaving my legs for 2 years, by then, and had barely mastered the trick of going over the my ankles and the tendons on the backs of my knees without scraping off strips of skin.
"Oh my God," I thought. "I am doomed! I am going to look like an ape by the time I'm in senior year!" All that trouble, all the hours a week I spent trying not to tip over in the shower and the anguish of getting to school and realizing I'd missed a whole calf and that EVERYONE COULD TELL, and it was making the problem worse? That was too unfair. I ran to the library, (this was a gajillion years before google) and an hour in the stacks confirmed my suspicions.

There's nothing you can do to hair to make it grow back thicker. Not waxing, not tweezing, not shaving.
Hair gets thicker and darker because as you get older your endocrine system pumps up the androgens and androgens make make hair thicker and darker.

"But," I've had more than one woman say, "I started shaving my legs when I was thirteen, and I barely had any hair, and by the time I graduated high school my leg hair was out of control."

Yup. That's called puberty. Welcome to womanhood! It just gets more fun- by the time you're thirty your endocrine system is going to be kind of bored with routine hormone regulation and is going to stay up nights while you sleep and think of ways to fuck with you. "Eyebrows," it'll order, "make a break for the hairline! And I need a chin hair, half an inch long, in an unlikely part of the jawline. Also, I notice that the public hair hasn't reached the knees yet; can we do something about that?"
And on and on.

Hair is our first line of defense against the world. It helps us regulate temperature, and keeps debris out of our eyes. It's designed to be disposable: hair are the pawns in the chess game of protective biological mechanisms vs. the hostile world. The average lifespan of a pubic hair is six to eight months. Four to seven of those months are spent actively growing: the follicle coils keratin into a rope and pushes it out of the pore at a rate of about a half inch a month. When it's long enough it stops growing and starts slowly dying. A few weeks later it falls out. The follicle, exhausted, rests for a few months and then starts pushing out another. All of this is on a very elaborate timer. In other words, a follicle is designed to produce a hair at a set interval, and even if you pluck the hair out it won't start to make a new one until the predetermined time.

What this means on a practical level for the lady looking to get her bits waxed, is that if you get a wax, within a month to six weeks depending on your unique biology a third of the hair will have grown back enough to be troublesome. How quickly it grows back depends on where in the active growing stage we wax you: it happens sometimes that a lady will come in to get waxed right before a vacation or a cruise or something, and a week later she's fuzzy again and she has to go buy a razor from the hotel gift shop. That's because while she was getting waxed, a third of her follicles already had a good start on making a hair. I can't wax hair that's under the skin. The twice-yearly, only before vacation bikini wax is generally one of the worst wastes of money- if your honeymoon is coming up plan on getting three waxes, a month to six weeks apart before hand. You will get much better results, because if nothing else we can more accurately determine an optimum window for waxing. It will take at least four months after a wax for your hair to be fully grown in.

One of the big selling points of waxing is that it makes hair grow back finer and thinner. This isn't quite a myth, but it's misleading advertising. For many people it's true: repeated trauma weakens the follicle and the follicle produces hairs that are thinner, weaker. Repeated trauma can even cause a follicle to stop producing hair, but some people, (I'm lookin at you, my eastern european girls!) have tenacious follicles that will never say die.
"But my mother started waxing her legs when she was sixteen, and now she barely has any hair!"
Yup. That might be waxing, or it might be menopause.

I can't remember, now, who won the talent competition. I remember that Sakinah was judging, and there were rounds and rounds of increasingly hilarious (or was it, again, the daiquiris?) threats and promises. I remember pitching a dramatic fit about being robbed, and then we all went out and sat on the beach, our last night, and looked at the stars.
"Next year I'm going to do 'Life of a Pimple,'" I said. Someone groaned.

There's a lot of misinformation (and dare I say it, deliberate obfuscation) in the beauty world, and if anyone has any questions about skincare or waxing or make-up, I invite you to submit them to me, either in the comments or by e-mail.

Productivity.

2010-01-19T11:33:00.000-08:00

I keep hearing the same advice over and over about writing.
"Just set yourself a schedule," well-meaning friend after well-meaning friend says, "and stick to it and write every day."

As a chronic insomniac I tend to get the same kinds of advice from well-meaning but well-rested friends. "Oh," they say as though coached, "Try valerian!"

Oh my well-meaning, well-rested, not-trying-to-write-a-book friends: if only it were that easy. If only a schedule made a good writer and valerian were strong enough to conquer whatever it is that keeps me up at night, heart pounding and on the verge of panic.

There's this lovely, gently sad bit in an Elizabeth Gaskell novel where Deborah, an aging spinster recounts that as a child her parson father made them write down at the beginning of the day what they thought would happen, and at the end of the day what had actually happened.

Column A and Column B.

I was supposed to be up with a belly full of coffee, wearing fresh clothes, teeth brushed by nine so I could sit down at the kitchen table to look over the notes my agent sent me yesterday and begin cleaning up the first chapter. (Or possibly prologue: that's in dispute.) Perhaps at 12 I'd turn my attention to the blog. At three I'd run to the store, and then come home and clean the house while cooking dinner for my guests, who are arriving at six. By which point I was to be showered, perfumed, and meticulously eye-linered.

I got out of bed at nine and checked facebook.
"Really," I thought then, "if I don't get the shopping out of the way it will stress me out and I won't be able to get anything done. And I should probably at least get the chopping done, because that always takes longer than I think. And really I should cook the risotto, because it'll form better balls if it sits awhile. I'll do all that in the next two hours and then sit and write until it's time to shower."

It took me an hour and a half and three grocery stores to find sage, the one crucial, non-negotiable ingredient in my menu. Apparently sage is the last of the seasonal ingredients and Giant in Waverly and Eddies in Charles Village only stock it during the holidays.

I got home and chopped the shallots, crisped the bacon bits and cooked the ground turkey.
"Might as well do it right," I thought, and took an hour to slowly brown the butter. During that hour I checked the New York Times online, Al Jazeera English, Go Fug Yourself, and Facebook. I crisped the sage, and when the water in the herbs had foamed out I threw in the shallots to soften.
I checked my e-mail.
"Oh, shit!" i thought, and quickly fired off three e-mails to a photographer, a comedian and a possible videographer for an upcoming variety show I'm writing/producing. I put the rice into the pot to toast and peeled and cut up the squash.
12:30.
I tasted the turkey, salted it, and after a moment's hesitation grated some nutmeg over the meat. What's the worst that could happen, right? I tasted again. Oh my god that's good.
I threw a parmesan rind into the simmering stock and dumped a cup of white wine into the risotto and sat down to read A.'s notes while the liquid absorbed.
But wait- the squash! Should I do a citrus glaze? It works for carrots, and I have two blood oranges to get rid of... I put the squash in the oven to roast in oil and sage while I puzzled through how a blood orange reduction would go with the rest of my meal. I cut one open and it was dry. That answers that.

I sat down again and remembered that A. had told me to contact a particular blogger, so I got the address and started composing a "Hi! You don't know who the hell I am..." e-mail.
Oops! Time to pour stock over the rice.
Back to the e-mail. I wrote it and sent it.
2:00. Holy hannah! How did that happen?
I realized I had a few more e-mails to write and sent them out. A hula-hooper called me about the variety show and I talked to her for a while.
The rice was almost done- I finished it off with a little cream and some parmesan and took it off the heat. The squash was fork-tender and delicious without citrus. I washed the salad greens and responded to an e-mail from a fellow writer. I made a little parfait in a cup of rice, turkey and goat cheese to make sure my concept of stuffed and fried risotto balls would work. Oh yeah.
The notes! Sit down to write!
But the blog- and cleaning the bathroom- and sweeping the kitchen floor- and ironing my dress-

And oh! the unthinkable, impossible distance between Column A and Column B.

Creative Thinking 1

2010-01-18T05:45:00.000-08:00

"Dear Steve," I wrote, battling iphone's auto-correct for every word,
"I've been following your successes as they're posted on fb and congrats. I was wondering if I could ask you: since you've gotten such pos reviews, have you written anything? If so, did you feel anxious about writing songs? If so, how did you quash the anxiety, or use it to your advantage?
Thanks,
Sp"
Steve is a friend of mine. Thanks to a mis-spent 20's dating (or "dating") peripatetic, ill-shaven musicians I have a fair number of singer-songwriter friends (or "friends") with eponymous bands, but of them I admire Steve's music the most. His band Steve Hefter and Friends of Friends of Friends's Six Song Demonstration is on heavy rotation on my i-pod. And he's literate and thoughtful. So after a week of anxiously staring at my laptop screen trying to breathe normally, I wrote him.

"Hey sarah!

"The reviews are from a website run and staffed by people I know so they're not quite as objective as I wish they were. So, may not be able to field the question as effectively as you'd have previously thought?

"But I have gotten really positive feedback/ reviews in the past and the writing has come-- with varying degrees of difficulty--or it hasn't. As long as I don't have some professional expectation or agenda linked to it, I generally do better. The moment I hope to impress, fucked.

"Hope you're doing well!

"-Steve"

Well, that was helpful.

How it all began.

2010-01-17T05:50:00.000-08:00

I wrote a blog about work once, and it got me fired.
This blog is about a blog.

Lou never read Confessions of a Bikini Waxer while I was writing it, but that's okay because I haven't listened to half his c.d.'s. Months after I got fired and took the blog down, I cut and pasted it into an e-mail for him. He called a week later.
"Sarah, this is so good!" he said. "Julie and I are reading them together, a couple a day. They're so good and funny!"
"Aww, thanks, buddy," I said, pleased but aware that he's my best friend and has to say things like that.

It was a grim Christmas for both of us. Julie's gone, and I'm out another job, (more on that later) and the week before Lou flew back into town I fell in the snow and tore a ligament in my knee. We were a coupla sad sacks, drinking together in a bar.
"You need to go back to school, Sarah," he said. "You're too smart for this shit. Go back for writing. You're a great writer!"
I gave him a look which I hoped conveyed how ridiculous I thought that was and ordered another champagne cocktail.
On Christmas morning I opened his gift: The Elements of Style, illustrated, by Strunk, White, and Kalman. (Quick aside- this is the most heart-achingly stylish book about grammar I've ever seen. It's elegant from its restrained and concise advice to the glue in its binding.) On the inside cover he inscribed,
"To the best writer and the best friend I've ever known. Now you can do it in style. Love, Lou."
"Aww," I thought. "He's really going out of his way to boost my confidence and give me a hobby."
Lou left for New York a few days after Christmas and I went back to trying to figure out what to do with my life.

A few days after New Years I came home to find an unexpected e-mail in my inbox from a literary agent in New York. She was a friend of Lou's from college, she explained, and had run into him over the holiday. When she told him she was looking for new talent he sent her Confessions, and she thought it had real potential to become a book. Would I be interested in talking to her about it?

I put the laptop down and burst into tears.

So while nothing is set in stone I have a project: to try to wrangle the blog into a book. The first step, said A., (I use her initial to protect the innocent) is to write a sample chapter and a proposal. I thought- eh. I'll bang that out in a weekend. No probs.
A week and a half later I have seven pages out of twenty for the sample chapter sort of done, and in trying to outline the book I have wallpapered my office in post-it notes but accomplished very little else. Lou, buddy, I have a lot to thank you for, chief amongst them the nervous breakdown I'm about to have.

This is a blog about a blog, and about writing and what I'll do to avoid it.