So, what this woman did was, she started her very own escort service, because she found other escort services were “lazy, seedy and incompetent.”

That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Good ol’ American entrepreneurship.

And take down a top government official while you’re at it.

Because we don’t do things half-ass here. No, no. Full-ass only.

We watched “The Count of Monte Cristo” this weekend.

That guy had problems.

And the movie is like “Pollyanna” compared to the book. In the book, he has problems like you don’t even know.

“God will give me justice,” is the mantra of the wrongfully accused throughout the movie. The tortured, the starved and the wrongfully accused: God will give me justice.

Our hero, the faux-Conte, lost faith in that mantra quite quickly.

Fair enough.

We wondered, throughout the faux-Conte’s ordeal, about our own 21st-century justice-based mantras. That the right thing to do, the healthy thing, is to let it go. That we should find peace with whatever the injustice may be and forgive it. Surely the offender will live a sad life, trapped in a life that is devoid of love, and that will be his punishment.

Reminds me of that time I vandalized my ex-boyfriend’s car. That was all about peace, love, forgiveness, and letting it go. All over his tires.

We wondered about our justice system and the fine line between justice and vengeance, and who draws it, and if there’s a difference at all, and either way, who is entitled to deliver or exact it. We wondered about the difference between “letting it go” and “getting walked on.” Surely there are times, we thought, when the Lord gives us the privilege of enacting a bit of vengeance, because even She understands that you have to stand up for yourself.

Which is not to say that I should have vandalized my ex-boyfriend’s car. That was probably a scooch over the top.

But just a scooch.

So we wondered: When is it that vengeance is ours for the taking?

When is it ok, we wondered, to pull our best Conte de Monte Cristo?*That’s a line from “Count of Monte Cristo,” by the Noisettes.

November is built a lot like the Dudley Doo Right cartoon. About 4 feet of torso and two feet of legs. He could easily be mistaken for a troll doll because of his hair, but Dudley Doo Right is much more comparable to his proportions.

I didn’t notice this strange alottment of body parts until he pointed it out to me.

“I have back problems anyway because I’m all torso,” he said.

“Ohmigod, you are all torso,” I said. “I never even noticed before. Jesus, how the hell do you even hold yourself up?”

He looks like he needs some sort of external support beam installed.

I texted him about it one morning after some drunken shenanigans the night before.

“I never realized how funny looking you are,” I wrote. “You and your ten-foot-long torso.”

“So that’s what you were thinking about when you woke up, was it?” he asked. “How funny looking I am?”

Pretty much, yeah. I was thinking about this little jig he had danced on the sidewalk the night before and thought, “Shit, he’s a funny-looking kid.”

“Oh yeah?” he said to me a few days later. “Well your ass is the equivalent of my ten-foot-long torso.”

The thing is, that was a compliment.

I’ve been told this before, about my ass. That it is sort of in a class of it’s own, separate from my other appendages. That it stands out, if you will. I’ve never fully embraced this opinion of my ass. I grew up in the United States of Skinny. We don’t embrace big asses here.

“Oh my,” I said to him. “I think I need to make a huge mental shift. (as I has only used it for such things as sitting, etc. Purely functional as opposed to extra-curricular.) (That’s a lie, I have used it extra-curricularly) I feel as though I need to start thinking differently about my ass. I never realized it was so significant.”

“Yup,” he said.

An ass of consequence, if you will.

Six weeks after the love of my life died, a friend looked at me and said “Get over it.”

Six months after the love of my life died, a man, who was neither a friend nor a man of quality, looked at me and said, “Get over it.”

He assumed I wasn’t over it because of my lack of sexual activity since my dad’s death. Because clearly, a healthy girl moves on from such a loss and then engages in lots of free love.

Had I been a dog, I would have looked back at both of them, cocked my head to side and perked my ears, because I just didn’t get it.

Because grief, for some reason, is not an emotion we are allowed to feel to its fullest extent. Grief, along with its Debbie-Downer batch of siblings, such as anger, sadness, and everyone’s go-to favorite, depression, always tends to get the short end of the emotional stick.

They are the only emotions that are greeted with some sort cure of solution or fix-it suggestion. Their sunshine-y counterparts, however, are welcomed with open arms, because they have the Healthy Seal of Approval. As if they are more legit.

The Healthy Seal of Approval is the foundation of the “Get Over It” and “Move on” movements that are so en vogue. In their more P.C. form, they are referred to as “The Healing Process.” Don’t get me wrong, I love a good healing process, but I also believe that every emotion should be allowed to run its course- I believe that is the foundation of the healing process.

There is much talk right now about “Moving On.” Now that it’s been a rock solid ten days since the Virginia Tech Massacre, the “Get Over It” and “Move On” movements are doing their very best to stifle all the grief and the fear and the anger, because those are unhealthy emotions. We must find a way to move on.

Everyone stop. Stop all your moving on and just breathe. Find your grief and your fear and shake hands with them. What color are they? What shape are they; do they have a texture? Breathe and feel your grief. When it is ready to subside, when it has found a place to fit inside the puzzle of all your experiences, it will settle in and we will all be able to stand up straight again. Of course we will bend a bit, there will be a different canter to our gaits, because there is more to carry.

For all those kids have experienced, the least we can do is allow them to grieve in their own time. Including the kids themselves, and the faculty, and the families, and everyone else. You are allowed to feel every single last human emotion to its fullest extent. There is no time limit, and there is no judgment on the value of the Debbie Downer emotions. Every emotion is there for a reason. If we didn’t need it, it wouldn’t come to us.

You are allowed to grieve.

Do you want to know what I did yesterday?

Yesterday, at the end of the work day, while I was doing 65 down a five-lane freeway, I put on a full face of make-up, using the rear view mirror and my finely-tuned make-up application skills, which have taken 20 years to perfect, but required that I steer with my knee as my hands were occupied, so that I could go and pick up my cell phone from a boy, who is not my boyfriend, or a boyfriend-interest, in the parking lot of an old folks’ home, because that’s the only place that’s between his work and my work.

And then I came home and went, Shit. Now I have to wash off this goddamn mascara, which is something I hate more than anything in the universe. I will clean my apartment, pluck my eyebrows into oblivion and tweeze out every single leg hair individually just to procrastinate washing off my mascara.

But well worth the application.

I’m sure they loved me at the old folks’ home.

Last night, I ate an entire thing of Ben and Jerry’s.

Did you know those bastards claim there are four servings in one little container?

What a bunch of morons.

Scene: Mother and young son, pondering the value of school

Mom: “It’s Friday. Do you want to play hookey today?”

Son: “Yes. I want to be a hooker.”

Don’t we all, kid.

My most favorite things about Spring
are
halter top strings
meandering down the center of a bare back
Standing next to spaghetti-strap spring dresses
and exposed legs
and flip flops
and all that blossoming proof that God took one look at Adam and said,
“Shit. Do over.”

“I’m going to Wendy’s; do you want me to pick you up anything?”

It’s almost 2 p.m. and we’re finally getting around to eating. My office doesn’t have any windows, so time is usually not a determing factor in when I eat, as I am usually oblivious to any sort of time passing, seasons changing or general variations in weather patterns.

“Do I want anything,” I repeated. “No. Wait. Yes, yes I do. I do want something. I’m concentrating on eating; it’s my new thing. Eating.”

She stared at me.

“Eating is your new thing?”

“Yeah, just trust me on this one, I’m really concentrating on eating regularly.”

When she mentioned Wendy’s, all my anorexic alarms went off, even though they have been out of commission for almost 20 years. They haven’t gathered a shred of rust, and their sound and tonal quality are still perfectly tuned. Fast food is a particular offender. It’s like those car alarms that go off when you merely look mischieviously at the hood ornament. Regular food sets them off too. It makes things like basic nutrition really difficult.

That was supposed to be funny. I think it probably wasn’t.

At any rate, I’m concentrating on eating.

“Ok, but here’s the thing,” I said. “I walked out of the house today without my purse, so I have to pay you back tomorrow, is that ok?”

She stared at me.

“You walked out of the house without your purse?”

“Yes, I walked out of the house without my purse and I’m concetrating on eating; I have a shrink to work me through these things, no worries,” I said.

She stared at me.

Such is the way of things when you walk around in see-through skin, and don’t know enough to shut your mouth about your therapy, or your various neuroses. The staring responses usually shake me a bit- I firmly believe that everyone suffers from various neuroses, but the staring response leads me to believe that maybe they don’t. Maybe I really am a head case.

She stared.

“You seemed a lot more together before those two statements.”

We laughed, because we thought that was funny. It really was funny; it didn’t have any malicious intent or overtones or undertones or whatever to it. It was a way to diffuse a somewhat uncomfortable moment. Mental health is always uncomfortable. Not necessarily for the mental health-ee, but for the people around them. Anyways, you probably had to be there, but it was supposed to be funny.

I think it probably wasn’t.

She said, “Are you going to e-mail him?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about NO,” I said. “First of all, you’re insane, and second of all, there no way in the good Lord’s world that he would remember me.”

“How do you know?”

“One, because I’m a genius, and two, because when I went back to visit the summer before fifth grade, me and my first-grade best friend called him and she basically had to beat him over the head with every memory in the universe to get him to remember me,” I said.

And three, because it’s not about wanting to talk with him or reconnect with him or ask him about his kids and his wife. I don’t care about any of the above. I really don’t care about how he’s doing all. I think I’m supposed to.

But I don’t.

It’s not about that.

It’s about looking at pictures of a Stepford, storybook life and thinking that if the road had forked differently, I would be the one standing next to him in the pictures with two little munchkins at my feet and a mom haircut and a little house and a husband and all the things that I learned make a girl worth something.

It’s about thinking that the lack of all those things in my life isn’t my fault. It’s about proving that a fork in the road was my downfall, and that the boy who was destined to validate my dollar value grew up somewhere else, and that is why I ended up without all the things that determine worth. It’s because of a fork in the road. Not because I am inherently flawed.

It’s about finding hard proof that I could have been worth something.

It’s about finding hard proof that maybe I’m worthy of love.