“You dirty little whirlwind

All caught up in the flesh of a girl.”

That’s a little more TV on the Radio- a song called Dirtywhirl

Today, I’m 31 years old. Want to know what I want for my birthday? Come closer.

I want a serenade…of sorts.

I want a very specific man to whisper, with his lips pressed against my ear,

“*I can barely move
For want of room
And I’m forgettin’ to breathe”

(with one hand tangled in my hair and the other…)

“But the sight of you
Has me instantly
Remember my needs”

(his mouth within striking distance)

“…I’m smellin’ your sweet…
Should I spend the next six hours
Tryin’ to get you
Off your feet?”

(yes)

“Oh no girl, just pretend
There ain’t no one else around

So let’s break it down”

(hands moving my hips…wherever…) 

“Watch a room full of roosters
Turned to cocks runnin’ wild
Scramblin’ like hungry dogs
Towards you, child

See those boys tryin’ to sweat you
Watchin’ grown men cry

Like you’re shakin’ it”

(pressing, pressing, pressing) 

“Put somethin’ in their eyes
…Wide open eyes

Well here I am
Just a man
Is this light flattering?
Did you notice my crown of feathers
And check out my vital vibrant comb?
Oh puff chest out and play strong”

(couldn’t miss it)
“Grab you by the hair and pull you along”

(wish you would)
“Or do I just talk to you
And tell you what I really
Really really want to do”

(please….)

“Stop because you think that you
Know where this is going
Couldn’t stop it girl
If you knew where this was going
You don’t know the half, girl”

(I’m betting on it)

“You seem so so smart
Ooh, but you’re so wrong”

(please prove me wrong)

“Let’s pursue this argument in darkness
Curtains drawn, limbs entwined

Now you’re two hours away
From starting your day
And you can’t be late
So let’s get straight

Let me wear you out
Let me wear you out.”

(That’s my birthday wish.)

*Lyrics to “Wear You Out” by TV on the Radio

“Do you think he’s in love with me?”

“Of course he is, I mean, how could he not be?”

“Right. But how can you tell?”

This is a tricky question seeing as she has never met him in her entire life.

“Because he hung out with you for so long. Dudes don’t do that unless they are in love with you.”

“Ok, but I acted retard* all night, so how could he be in love me?”

“What? You were so not retard, nothing you told me was retard.”

Yes, but I only gave her the highlights that made me look genius. I refrained from telling her how I chatted him up about my purse being too big. That, my friends, was retard.

“He said he had a good time with you at the end of the night,” she said. “You are the only person I know who can take that and turn it into ‘I was retard’.”

Not true. She could do it in a heartbeat.

“Ok, but what is our strategy, because I can never see him again,” I said.

“What? I thought you wanted to see him again, why can you never see him again?”

“Because I can’t. I have to hide behind a pillar and pretend I’m not there.”

“Ohhhhh, I see. You do that thing that I do where you can’t talk to boys you like.”

“Exactly.”

“We can overcome that. We can design a training program that will prepare you.”

“But who is going to be the technical expert? I feel like we’re not qualified.”

I feel like we’re not qualified, said the retired sex columnist. There’s one more sign that proves Armageddon is coming like a nightmare.

“I think we can do this. Between the two of us, I feel like we can design a quality program.”

“What if we do the Cyrano de Bergerac thing, and I wear an earpiece and November has the other end and he tells me what to say?”

“I don’t know, is November good at hitting on boys?”

“He probably knows what boys want to hear. Wait, scratch that, he’ll probably tell me to flash him my tits and say, ’something, something, do it in the butt.’ That’s not a good plan.”

“No, we’ll have to scratch that. When are you going to see him again?”

Silence.

“Wait, does he have your number?”

“No.”

“Right.”

Retard (pronouned ruh-TARD) is a special word to us, although we try to avoid using it in mixed company, as it is quite offensive. We use it in honor of one of our fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, to commemorate the time she was trying very hard to yell at a man, in French, and tell him that he was late for their appointment, or “Vous etes en retard (ray-TAR).” Instead, she told him “Vous etes retard (ruh-TARD)”, which translates into absolutely nothing. God bless her. He probably thought she a little bit retard.

Jesus is coming.

Wanna know how I know? Because I’ll tell you.

The temperature keeps changing by about ten degrees everyday. There was a frost yesterday, when the weekend before it was in the 80s. That’s God fucking with us, because he’s about to blow our shit out of the water. He’s gonna be like, “Armageddon, bitches, how you like me now?” And that’s when we will all be sorry that I constantly say things like “Christ on a cross” because I will be the first one to burst into flame.

Actually, probably not. I mean that I probably won’t burst into flame, not that everyone won’t be sorry if I do. We all like to brag that we’re going to burst into flame, but really, we’re mostly decent people. I can’t imagine God would kick your shit right out of heaven for stuff like pre-marital sex or harmless unanticipated make-out sessions in bars when you were mostly a decent person you’re whole life. Plus, I’m pretty sure God invented unanticipated make-out sessions in bars. They taste too much like sugar-coated gumdrops to come from anything else.

Really they usually taste like beer and cigarettes, but you can see what I’m getting at. If not, go make out in a bar and report back to me. Even if God kicks you out of heaven, you’ll be like, “It was worth it, suckahs.”

And you better hurry, because I’m telling you, Armageddon is on it’s way any day now, and Jesus is going to land, and you’re going to be like, “Shit. I should have made out.”

I’m telling you, Jesus is coming.

Look busy.

We had to take this personality quiz, and in one of the questions, we had to choose which superpower we would prefer:

 A) Flying

B) X-ray vision

C) Superhuman strength

D) ESP

E) Invisibility

Ok, we didn’t have to take it, we just did because we were bored. But this question, it sucked the boredom right out of me, because it was really hard. I got stuck on D and E. ESP vs. Invisibility. That’s huge.

We thought very seriously about the pros and cons of the two superpowers. How exactly were they defining ESP? That made the decision so much harder. Was it ESP meaning that we could see the future, or ESP meaning that we could read people’s minds? Or was it both, and if so, would we be able to control the reading of the mind part? Because what if you couldn’t, and then everytime you got on the metro, everyone got all up in your head at once? That would drive you crazy really fast. Plus, I don’t really want to know what people think about me. I figure there’s a reason we have an inner monologue, so we should keep it that way.

My friend’s husband pointed out that if you could make yourself invisible, then everytime a shitty co-worker looked they were going to talk to you, you could be like, “There’s Fred, that jackass,” and just disappear before Fred got to your cube. That seemed quite appealing. Only then I would just get lazy and disappear all the time, Fred or no Fred. I would use it as a tool for avoidance.

We’ve discussed this superpower business before, only we were only talking about being able to teleport people places, and make them naked when they get there, or being able to set shit on fire with our eyes. ESP and invisibility weren’t contenders. This made things much more complicated.

And even though I think the naked teleporting would be a really good superpower, there wasn’t a write-in box or anything sort of “other” option.  I thought that showed a general lack of creativity and forethought on their part.

But the quiz we were taking was for the CIA, so I stopped thinking that right away. Because they probably already have people who can read your mind, and they probably were doing it right then, and they probably shoot you on sight for thinking bad things or something.

That’s probably also why they want to know what superpower you would want to have. There’s just doing an inventory. Because maybe they already have enough mind-readers and they are in need of a few invisible people.

I finally chose invisibility.

I feel like it’s a supply/demand thing. You can never have a shortage of invisible people when you are running an international spy ring.

The deal is, a friend of mine designed this blog for me. Fortunately, he is a genius. Even more fortunately, he is also very tolerant.

You may note that every single comment on the blog has suddenly disappeared. That’s because I asked my Tolerant Genius Friend to switch the blog to a different software- before today, we were using bBlog. The extra ‘b’ in there stands for brain surgery. Now we are using software that is much easier for a non-technical girl such as myself to operate.

He very graciously did this after I also had him change the design of the blog at least eight times. I do believe the design your looking at now is the third variation of the ninth design.

 I intend to move all the comments over tonight. It may be a slow process.

 Thanks as always, for everything.

Mela

There’s this girl I know, and I secretly hate her, but only part of the time.

There’s no way to escape her; she’s a permanent fixture in my life right now and there’s nothing I can do about it.

It took me a while to realize that I secretly hate her, because she was very covert in her expressions of animosity towards me. Plus, other times she’s really normal to me, so that’s why I only hate her part of the time.

It wasn’t until she started saying things like, “So, do you like that hair color on you?” that I realized she was doing her very best to make me feel small.

Prior to that, we would have discussions ranging from Prince’s home state to the appropriate names for yoga poses, and each time, she would come back to me hours later, sometimes days, and say something like, “I looked it up, and I was right.” And I would always have to be reminded what the hell she was right about, and then I would think, “Huh. I didn’t realize it mattered.”

That’s when I realized that I bother her.

My therapist pointed out to me that I bother her because she’s jealous of me. For whatever reasons she has deemed to be deserving of jealousy. Hence, there is the constant need to prove me wrong and insult my appearance and my accomplishments.

Ooooooo. Someone’s jealous of me.

How empowering.

I have power over her. I can make her feel bad by just walking in the room. The angel on my right hand whispered to me that this was not a compliment. The devil on my left hand agreed, yet still felt disgustingly smug about the whole thing. The hybrid in my head went, “Really? What the hell is she jealous for?”

The question answered itself.

“I wear bigger earrings when I’m around her now,” I told my therapist. “I laugh a little more and tell all my stories, even the ones that are only borderline interesting. I make myself sound really exciting, I do my best imitation of a ‘40s movie star.”

Because those are the things that bother her. So I embrace them, and exaggerate them, and pin all the things that make me Me onto my sleeve.

That topic segued nicely into a discussion about my niece.

“Everyone says my niece is so much like me,” I said. “They say she’s taking after her Auntie Mel, because she dances whenever she hears music, and she’s always singing; she just does that little baby jibberish talk, but she sings all the words. And every time they say that, I think, ‘Please little girl, don’t turn out like me. I hope you turn out to be a shy, conservative little girl with a stable office job and a lovely husband. Whatever you do, don’t turn out like me.’”

My therapist did that thing where she just stares at me, so I kept talking.

“When she turns 30, who do you think they want her to be like?” I asked. “Her Auntie Mel, who is loud and boisterous and a crazy artist, or her mom, who is happy and creative and lovely and refined and has a happy, stable life. Nobody in their right mind would choose me. They would be so sad if she turned out like me.”

My therapist kept staring, but I know how to stare her down when I want an answer, so she finally said, “When you talk about those traits in reference to the Jealous Girl, you talk about them with such pride, but with your neice, you talk about them with such shame.”

Well, yes. I suppose I do.

There’s this girl I know, and I secretly hate her, but only part of the time.

There is a bit of a conflict here.

Up until this point, sex was the driving inspiration behind every word I tapped onto the screen. There were days when I woke up and thought, “Shit. What the hell am I going to write about today?” Because there are days when a girl isn’t relating everything she thinks to sex. Not consciously, anyway.

So I would think and think and think, and say to myself, “You have your whole commute to come up with something, so think really hard.” Some of my favorite posts came out of the commute brainstorming sessions.

But now I don’t have to write about sex everyday, all the time, or try and relate every single thought I’ve ever had to sex.

There are funny stories I’d like to tell you, like the time we went to a stripper Christmas party and played movie trivia. I’ll probably tell it later.

But right now, there are a million other things to write about, like my penchant for earrings that are three inches long and two inches wide, the little anniversaries of my dad’s chemo stopping, his heart beating irregularly, his fall, and his hospitialization, which are ticking away like a bomb towards the anniversary of his death, like the anxious way I respond to people who appear vulnerable, the way I cry on cue when I see pictures of my niece.

And these are all things that I am arrogant enough to think you want to hear about. Actually, I’m scared that you don’t.

As a side note, I just saw a commercial for Domino’s Oreo Dessert pizza. Jesus. That is some serious shit.

So, I suppose, one should prepare for some very pensive, non-sexual shit that is all about me, the girl, and not me, the girl who writes about sex.

I can do that now that I don’t have an editor.

Although I do think that he reads these posts and thinks, “Shit, Mela, don’t you give these a once-over before you post them?”

Nope.

Bet you wish I’d give you the password, don’t you, Editor dear?