waterloo

We are being mercilessly hurtled on a train bound for London and another airport parting, arms and legs entertwined and heavy with sadness, when a reckless epiphany hits me. We don’t have to do the right thing. Not when the Right Thing involves the painful cut of separation.

"Let’s run away," I whisper and as soon as the words are out, it’s like a personal game of chicken to see how long I can keep my head under water with this unlikely feat of derring-do.

"Where?" He says, lazily tracing his finger along my upper arm. We’ve played this game before and he knows the routine. We talk about the fantasy of never having to be separated again. We imagine the moments when we’ll wake up next to each other every day, stubbly cheek to rumpled hair, molasses-slow voices mumbling about who gets the coffee machine going this time. But those conversations are usually late at night, curled under our duvets, three thousand miles apart. This time, it’s different. This time, there’s a glimmer of light shining, the shimmer of a silver train waiting.

"France."

Suddenly he seems more alert and I know he understands me. Because we’re pulling into Waterloo Station in ten minutes. Waterloo station, with its soaring open-air departure tunnels that shoot trains into blinding sunlight. Waterloo, where everyone is rushing somewhere else, distractedly smoking a cigarette or pulling along a gaggle of unruly children. Waterloo, where no one will peer at our tickets and say, "Don’t you two have lives and families and jobs to be getting back to?" Waterloo, where trains leave every hour for France.

"We could be there by tonight," he says and his arms pull me closer to his warm chest so that I can smell the chocolate cookies on his breath. I think about hugging him goodbye at Heathrow, not having these arms around me for another two months, and suddenly something in me breaks.

Something fair, and judicious, and responsible cracks, and releases a delightfully dangerous toxin into my normally rule-abiding brain. I am drunk on an exhilarating sense of simply not caring.

"We could. We should." I don’t think he expects this answer. I say his name, low, in his ear, and pull back to stare into his moss-green eyes. They start to shine, the way mine must be shining. "I have almost a thousand dollars in the bank," I say. I know it’s my rent money, to be paid in less than three days. But the tendrils of this wicked recklessness curl around that notch of honest guilt and clamp over its mouth.

"I have almost a thousand pounds," he says.

"My parents will be waiting at the airport in New York tonight," I whisper, and cold shards stab my heart at the thought of their rising panic. Of their anxious faces as they watch passengers streaming out of the gate, none of them with their daughter’s eyes or walk or smile.

"I know," he sinks back into the train seat, and his willing concession brings me back to the brink of heady danger.

"But… the south of France. We could go to some village."

"Any place with a name we like?" he says, as his fingers absentmindedly curl a loose tendril around my ears.

"And we could wander up to the nearest farm and ask if they need any help."

"If they have a little room we can sleep in. We could work for our food."

My hands have found their way to the smooth curves of his cheek, and I am falling into the rising excitement of his eyes. For this moment, we are serious. We can see ourselves living far removed from our respective worlds, worlds we are trying so hard to mesh, worlds that are jarring and nationalistic and separated by a cruel ocean. The south of France changes that.

"What about our families?" he says, even though the strong way his arm is curling around my waist tells me that in this moment, he doesn’t care.

"We could send them postcards."

"From the south of France."

"Dear mom and dad, sorry, we couldn’t take the separation, we’ll call you when we have a permanent address." We both laugh. It shatters a certain intensity, but then my heart drops another inch in my chest because I know it’ll be months until I am again within kissing distance of that mouth, of that laugh.

"What we’re talking about here," he says slowly, "is the here and now. Being together and sod the rest."

"Like Anna and Vronsky," I suddenly recall. We fall quiet for a minute.

"Only," he smiles, "without you plummeting to your ironic death at the end." We laugh again, and kiss with that passionate optimism that marks the beginnings of every great love affair, certain that only good things are crowding at the wings of our future.

"So what we’re really talking about here is running away," I say. And without meaning to shatter the dream, I have dragged the moment of truth to the harsh light.

"Yes. And I think I want to run away with you now," he says, three inches from my face. "Could you?" he asks.

"Yes," I exhale, "because I can’t say goodbye again, because I just don’t care what the consequences are, I..." and then I stop. The consequences. The life we’re planning.

Something flashes before me - the life we’re planning. My mind has wrapped around those words now. I can’t take them back. My cozy apartment that waits for his arrival in New York. The sweet, simple wedding we will share with our families. The lazy weekend mornings we’ll have, the late nights rolling under the covers, the winters spent in each other’s warmth. The afternoons returning from work to curl onto the couch and plan dinner, plan saving accounts, plan a family of our own, plan a life together.

These beautiful angelic visions have sustained us for three months of separation, of longing, of the bureaucracy of immigration. They perch on one shoulder, staring reproachfully at these wicked intruders. These reckless little demons of instant gratification, of shucking off a young life well led, of selfishness and defiance. A tiny cottage in the south of France. Working at a vineyard. Knowing, and owing, no one but ourselves. But most pressing on my shoulder, the most tempting prick of devilishness - not having to wrench ourselves from each other’s arms and say goodbye in order to eventually be together forever.

"No," I say suddenly, and I deflate. I cannot believe myself, pulling away from the only crazy cliff I have ever considered. How can I say no to daring and adventure, to being wholly selfish and thoughtless? How can I choose to say goodbye, choose to submit myself to three more months of pain, instead of doing something as simple as emptying a bank account and boarding a train?

"I love you –" I start, but I can’t finish, because my throat seals itself with an angry fist of tears. I push through it. "I love you and I don’t want to run away, I want to live together in the sunlight, not..." The tears spill onto my cheeks. His hands catch them.

"It’s okay," he says as he envelopes me, and I don’t have to explain anymore, because I know if I hadn’t turned our little raft away from this temptation, he would have been the strong one and led us back to the life we so desperately crave. The right thing. But I still cry, and a small hiccup of grief escapes my lips.

He pulls my face in close, cradling my cheeks with those warm strong hands, his blood pounding through his wrists so strongly that I can feel it on my neck, near my own pulse. He whispers in my ear, telling me we’ll be together soon, that the months will fly by, that the little apartment in New York will be ours forever. He whispers things about morning coffees and late night snacks, about weekly movie dates and weekends at the coast. All the beautiful someday-platitudes we tell each other to cut swathes through the gnawing loneliness.

And then we kiss. We kiss as though we invented the art, and I feel something else slowly filling the vacuum of that soaring reckless disregard. I feel my breath rise and fill my lungs as his mouth toys with mine. I feel the way his hands make my body arch towards him. This time, the noise that escapes my lips is a tiny gasp of pleasure.

And suddenly, I know the one thing we can do to somehow console ourselves from turning away from dizzying heights of sinful freedom. With ten minutes to arrival in the station of our fleeting lost dream, we make out like teenagers until we’ve forgotten all about angels, demons, and the south of France.

black fur and make-believe

Mouschka looked more like a ratty urban fox than a stalwart German Shepherd. She was the runt of the litter and though her paws and her ears proved her breeding, her body was woefully undersized. Her parents' owners said she was purebred, but hey, this was Africa, it's not like the AKC was making the rounds, right? In fact, for all our trying, I don't think we ever really owned a purebred Shepherd. But in the beginning or end, that didn't really matter.

Mouschka was loyal in that unique doggy way and it more than made up for her size. Anything that I played with, anything I touched, even my favourite trees in the yard were guarded with slavering devotion and some pretty fierce growls for a dog so puny. I had one of those rollerscooters that I often left carelessly in the middle of the driveway, but the gardener was hardpressed to put it away when a fifty pound snarling street rat was standing over it. Antoine - that was the gardener - had an otherwise friendly relationship with Mouschka, but anything that was mine was untouchably holy. Even, ironically, his water can that he used for his twice-daily prayers. He let me use it, once, for a pretend game, and he couldn't get it back for Mouschka's growls.

Mouschka was already slated for the sweet nightshade of lethal injection, because of her several painful maladies, when she got hit by a car. My mother's car, to be exact. She - Mouschka, you understand, not my mother - had this irritating habit of racing after people's heels, not so much that she bit them, but only for fun. On one of the driver's nights off, my mother came home from a school meeting to pick me up for a dinner with Dad. I was waiting on the steps, watching her pull in.

She usually didn't have to honk because Seidou, the night guard, would have seen the lights through the metal gate and started to swing it open to the dusty street. But he was in the bathroom so Beatrice came running out of the house to open it. Cue, as usual, the delighted rat-dog chasing at her heels. I can barely remember the sequence of horrific dominos as I watched from the garage door steps but when Seidou also rushed out of the side entrance to hold the swinging gate open, Mouschka naturally crossed the driveway to play, and that's when my poor mother felt the bump rolling under the front left tire of the Mazda and when I started screaming. They buried her in the fields across from the house and Mom started smoking again, after having quit for six months.

No dog I ever owned had been quite as loyal as Mouschka, but Champion certainly tried. In fact, when I refer to Champion, I usually say, "that dog was dumb as a bag of hair but boy, was he loyal". What made Champion especially noteworthy in our morbid history of sudden pet death was that he didn't die. This isn't to say that I know whether he's still alive - my parents had to leave him with their French neighbors in the Congo, after being transferred to the urban life of Cairo where the poor beast wouldn't have fared well.

No, Champion's uniqueness goes beyond his ability to simply survive our family for more than a few years. He went from Tunisia, where he was the only puppy to survive his young mother's litter, to Houston, where he routinely threw himself at our wooden fence and got terrified by bluejays on his food bowl. The bane of Champion's life was the pool at that house in Houston. It was all he could do to not die from terror every time I swam in it. Instead, he would run relentless circles around the perimeter, barking hysterically. If I sank under for more than a few seconds, the moron would throw himself into the water and try to rescue me, all one hundred pounds of smelly wet fur and frantic claws. Sometimes, I think just to keep himself in the game, he'd bark maniacally at the automated pool cleaner that skimmed the bottom all day.

After Houston we dragged him to Kenya, which is really where he earned his reputation for both stupidity and loyalty. My father, mocking my thirteen year old choice of name for the dog, called him Prince Stupid instead of Prince Champion, and after a while, the dog started answering to Stupid, or Stoop. He had a really hard time with our Kenyan houseguards, who were part of a company that provided security. The guards were almost never the same, week after week, which threw the insecure Shepherd into a frenzy of misplaced protectiveness. He was fine with them if they stayed at the gates, but when Mom would open the kitchen window and called "ASKARI!" for them to come get their evening tea, he'd become the snarling picture of terror that belied the cowardly baby he really was. Because Stoop was beyond training, we just had to advise the guys to walk slowly and look forward and promise them that he was really too much of a big whiny baby to hurt them. I don't think they believed us.

Stupid as he was, though, I loved hanging out with him, putting my bare feet on his back as the black thick fur heated up in the sunshine and the rattle of his breathing tickled my toes. Mock him though I did, he was a good dog. But it wasn't the askari threat that proved the mettle of that stupid loyal Shepherd, though. It was Kirby. It was the menace of beauty that was our first and only Terrier.

From the minute we brought Kirby home, the little Jack Russell was the only apple of my eye, the wiggling crafty little beauty that I couldn't stop hugging or praising or playing with. A less loyal or patient First Dog, on seeing their abject demotion to Second Dog, would have retaliated. But it was in this graceful slide from favor that Champion really proved his utter dogginess. Kirby was everything he wasn't - smart, quick, fearless, impossible to catch, impossible to reprimand, and the barking howling begging darling of my heart. As a young puppy, he thought it the pinnacle of hilarity to climb onto the slumbering Champion's back, grab his black ears with those sharp Terrier teeth, and growl.

I wouldn't have thought it possible for a dog to sigh but Champion actually sighed. He'd lumber to his feet and trot obediently around the yard with the snarling clinging Terrier trying to start a fight on his back, and then with one powerful throw, he'd fling Kirby to the ground and look at him with long-suffering brown eyes, then climb back onto the verranda and fall asleep again in his sunny patch. My father, who hated the impertinence of the Napoleonic little Jack Russell, suddenly developed a wealth of affection for Champion and started referring to himself and the Shepherd as "the Dogs in this family". It was a joke that gained even more ground when Dad and Champion went to the Congo while Mom, Kirby and I went to Houston for a year. That was the last time I saw Champion.

Kirby, on the other hand, continued to be both a darling and a menace in my life. Our townhouse in Houston, while spacious, wasn't nearly enough to contain his zest and mania. He broke collars to chase squirrels, peed on furniture as sulky retribution, bent the venetian blinds in the fury of throwing himself at the window to bark at yardmen, and humped the plumber. It was in Houston that we discovered that Kirby was epileptic, but his strong muscles and heart were something our vet expressed amazement at and the reason that Kirby wasn't put on daily Phenobarbitol.

His trip to Brasil with my mother, after I'd left for college, was to be his last adventure. The fits had gotten worse, and when my mother took him to the state kennel to get stamped to leave Brasil (and come visit me in New York), he had another terrible attack. The vets there, thinking he had rabies regardless of my mother's furious insistence to the contrary, demanded to keep him overnight for "observation". Keeping him overnight in an unsupervised and strange kennel, though, prompted another fit that, unsoothed by my mother's worried hugs, led to the heart attack that killed him.

I like to joke that Kirby's incessant dashing and yapping is what gave him epilepsy in the first place and this is admittedly a funny thought, but I cannot think of that early morning international phone call without getting a little emotional. Insane or not, Kirby was the first dog I'd picked for myself and loved with unparalleled fierceness, and that love was the crux all the reasons that my parents continued to give me pets, even when those poor maligned creatures could do nothing but love me briefly and die suddenly.

Like Jade. She stands out in the morbid timeline as being the truly sweet one. We named her Aquaba Jade - aquaba means "luck" in an Ivorian dialect. She was the consolation for the loss of Mouschka, and she made the move to Tunisia with us. It was a particularly hard move because Ivory Coast had felt so much like home, and she was the perfect dog for it. We spent hours in the lush wilds of the backyard in Tunis, where I'd play solitary games of being Artemis with Jade as my loyal wolfhound.

But one day when I was at the school I found loathsome and miserable, Jade ate rat poisoning that she'd found buried in the yard. She died a gruesomely sudden death in my father's arms, on the way to the vet, and to spare me the horrific details, my parents told me she'd gotten pneumonia and passed away quietly during a nap. Somehow this was meant to ease the pain of yet another pet torn from me, and they didn't tell me about the rat poison until years later. Perhaps because when we'd moved in, I had been helping the gardeners search for all of the deadly stuff in the yard, and we'd all missed just that one packet. Perhaps I would have blamed myself, and losing her was hard enough.

They were all, though, dogs to the truest definition of the word. Jade was the classic Shepherd. Loyal but fun, quiet when you needed to just rest your tear-streaked face in some warm black fur, and a companion in every imaginable game. Champion stayed true to me even when my heart had abandoned him to the fickle genius of Kirby, and he's pictured most in my memory as napping on the warm brick tiles of that verranda in the afternoons, and the regular rise and fall of his breathing as I rested my feet on his back, under the glass table where I did my homework. Mouschka was mercilessly mocked by careless friends for her runty size and her hair-loss (and the heel-snapping thing was both annoying and her downfall) but she was the perfect size to cuddle with on the deckchairs surrounding the pool and she loved going on long walks. And Kirby - well. Kirby was crazy and fun and smart as a whip and a complete handful, but boy howdy did I love that dog.

Boy howdy did I love those dogs.

afternoon gods

We weren't trying to be bad. It just occurred to us. We stood on the beach in Tolo, my cousin Jacques and I, with the lapping Mediterranean bay enticing our bare feet, and asked the dockhand how much for the paddleboat.

I don't remember how much it was. At fifteen, I had small amounts of cash given to me on vacations and what I spent it on was more important than how much it was. We were about half a mile down the beach from the apartment my parents had rented in the sleepy Peloponnesean town, and it was early afternoon. The accomodating Greek sun was slanting down through the citrus groves that blanketed the curved mountains around us. Ask my parents for permission? Why?

Besides, Jacques was a year older and thus much cooler than me and it wasn't cool to ask your parents for permission to skip around the bay in a paddleboat with your cool cousin. So we paid the weathered dockhand for two hours of paddleboat ownership and got in, setting a course for the chunky little islands that ringed the sparkling bay.

I wore a denim bikini, a fact that my cousin found hilarious as he kept teasing me to take the top half off. Our summers together had started when I was ten or eleven, young enough to run around the pebbled beaches of Greece wearing nothing but a sand-packed little bikini bottom, shrieking at the waves and at Jacques' impish insistence that yes, I was positively surrounded by deadly jellyfish. But at fifteen, I'd long grown into my bikini top and an adult sense of propriety, so I just punched him in his scrawny tanned arm and paddled harder.

The waves rolled us forward, closer and closer to the little monastary island of Koronis. We were almost halfway around the western side of it, our furiously paddling legs bringing us to the tempting lip of the open sea, when we saw the nude sunbathers, stretched out like content iguanas on the scorching rock, getting sprayed by foamy waves that crashed onto their refuge. Laughing and embarassed, we kept paddling into deeper blue water. At first, I tried to sound nonchalant about my unease, as the waves pushed under the paddleboat with growing intensity. But with typical teenager bravado, it took my water-splashed shrieks to make Jacques agree to turn the rudder bay-ward and to calmer waters. Boys, when it comes to their delight in girls' terror, will be boys. And cousins will be worse.

We zig-zagged towards Romvi, the bigger island in the bay, and found the true treasure there. The island was a natural marine reserve so when we pushed our battered little paddleboat onto the shore, we found ourselves utterly alone, with a jaggedly steep rock path climbing up into the hill of the island and several ominous caves whose murky depths disappeared at high tide. I stuck to the glass-clear waters, pulling on my flippers and mask to get closer to the bottom of the bay. Jacques climbed up the face of the hill, not saying much on his descent except to shamefacedly pull the cactus prickles out of his heel and calves. I laughed at him, salty water stinging my throat.

For hours, Jacques and I sunk lazily to the bottom of the shallow sunlit sea floor and shot up to the surface for air. We played ridiculous games underwater, like seeing who could stand on moss-covered rocks longer, or uselessly jinxing each other when we'd point to the same thing simultaneously. It never felt cold, the water in Greece. It always felt like a dappled magic carpet that made you weightless and perfect. It was coming into the brisk seabreeze above that shocked you, sending your skin into rashes of goosebumps and leaving a harsh ringing noise in your ears. Diving down again was the only comfort. So dive down again we did.

As my feet searched for a place to stand on the seafloor, I very nearly stepped on a live sea urchin, a treacherous little ball of pain that Jacques diverted me from by throwing himself, full-bodied and in slow motion, into my body. After a moment of angrily confused tangled limbs and a water-filled eyemask, I saw the tiny little enemy gliding gently along, kicking up the sand that was his crafty disguise. I stole a nearby empty urchin shell as a vengeful memento.

Finally, the sinking sun ducked behind the hill and abandoned the sandy shore where our boat was grounded so we dragged the boat back into the surf, pointing our cycling legs towards the colorful crowded harbor. It was only as we paddled closer, skin stretched dry from the salty water and shoulders turning pink, did I realize we might have a problem. When we gave the boat (and the extra hour's charge) back to the squinting surly dockhand, Jacques started translating his chastising rant.

"Tio Angelo," said my cousin in our shared Portuguese. "He says Tio Angelo's been looking for us." There was that pit, that teenager's moment of dread, when they know they're in trrrroubbbllle. As we scurried back silently down the beach in the pink hues of twilight, I saw at least five or six fisherman looking at me as though they'd recognized my father's frantic and gruff description of his precious daughter. Looking as me and shaking their heads a little, this daughter that had disobeyed!

There, in the distance, was my short and obviously angry dad, the pounding of his leather sandals along the sand roughly equatable to the pounding of his terrified overwrought heart. He nearly cuffed my cousin and he looked at me with mingled relief and fury. "Hours!" he yelled, "HOURS. We didn't know where you were." He didn't know where I was, he kept repeating on to our hung heads.

There was so little use in explaining that it hadn't been done out of surly rebellion or gleeful mischief, that it had been a genuine mistake. There was little point in telling him about the glorious clear waters of Romvi, the startled and naked Europeans caught sunbathing on the monastary island, the frantic brush with prickly pain on the bottom of the sea. My mother and father were, justifiably, furious with us for not telling them, for not being careful, for our reckless childlike irresponsibility. We could have drowned! We could have gotten hurt! We could have been carried out to sea! All consequences that had been nonexistent to us when Jacques had suggested we rent a paddleboat, and I had first squinted into the harbor and said, "let's go to those islands!"

It was, in my memory, the first time I remember seeing the consequences of my stupidity, the effect it had on my parents. Later that night, my mother, gently forgiving me the way she always did, shook her graceful head a little and said, "you should have seen him, storming up and down the beach. You could have given him a heart attack." That she was lovingly rubbing my shoulders as she said this didn't make the cold shock of culpability any less jarring.

Like so many Greek stories before, realization had come a moment too late. The good intentions had still been a road to Hades. It had been a quiet attack of imagination-strewn nerves for a mother, an afternoon's nightmare for a father, pacing the rooms and pacing the shores, while the trickster gods of Greece keeping their beloved daughter frolicking below the dancing waves.

Tolo, Greece, July 1995.

one hundred

It's sixty degrees and balmy here in Zoo York. I'm wearing my new grass-green cotton blazer and Stuart's enjoying his new job and we've got friends coming to dinner to celebrate, well, anything we want to celebrate. So I thought I'd give you guys a treat, should you want it -

- an 100 Things for the new season. My last list, written in 2003, was so hopelessly outdated and childishly pretentious that it was time to write a fresh one. Hopefully this one has a little less posturing, a little less structure, and is thus a little more enjoyable and honest.

Interested?

1. I cannot pronounce the word "drawer" correctly. Everyone else says "droor" while I say "drahhr".
2. I like to read the dilemmas in Randy Cohen’s Ethicist column, cover up Cohen’s answer, see what I come up with, and then compare.
3. I’m proud of my cute feet.
4. I watch Katie Couric in the mornings. She reminds me that there are chirpy people that have been awake for hours.
5. I asked Jason to give me a Thing about me, and he said, "you laugh like you mean it." I thought that was good.
6. I’ve only had two bee stings in my life: one, on the mountain roads of Crete in 1988, and the other, at the McDonald’s on Memorial Drive in Houston in 1994.
7. I am a quick liar and very good at it, but it’s karmically balanced, because I almost always get caught.
8. I won a speech competition in 1996 with a dramatic piece about child abuse. It was SO DRAMATIC.
9. I’ve kissed 42 men in my life. Most of them were frogs. I married the prince.
10. I’m addicted to cheddar cheese.
11. I know how to square dance, having learned at the age of 9 from my Texan grandparents at a now-defunct barbeque place called Texas Tumbleweed. I loved that place.
12. My family has the following three nicknames for me: gorda, titiu, and zuzuca. No, I won’t explain them.
13. My earliest memory of career ambition was wanting to be an architect, before I found out how much math was involved.
14. My dumbest injury is this: I was making pancakes, and I leaned down to look at the underside of the pancake and touched my nose to the edge of the hot frying pan.
15. My mother likes to tell people how I recognized some pewter spoons at the British Museum because Roald Dahl wrote about them in The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar and Other Stories. Secretly, I like this story too.
16. I was born at 2:30 am, on August 31, 1980, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
17. I know how to knit, make pasta, print color and black-and-white photographs, play squash, ride horses, play the piano, and bake a perfect quiche.
18. I have a birthmark on my stomach that I think looks like a maple leaf.
19. My future pet names are Caspian (for a dog) and Albion (for a cat). Steal them and I will totally cut you.
20. I climbed Mount Kenya and complained the entire way.
21. I love getting new cell phones.
22. I was a cheerleader and a drill team dancer in high school. This is often a source of taunting or blackmail among my friends.
23. One of my pet peeves is people treating me condescendingly because I’m young.
24. Even though I know nothing about cars, I really love Car Talk on NPR.
25. I like the smell of someone smoking pipe tobacco.
26. My mother wanted to name me Samantha and craved oranges while she was pregnant with me.
27. I’ve been known to rip up a page of notes if I don’t like the way my handwriting starts out.
28. I’ve lived in: Argentina, Aruba, Morocco, New Jersey, Cote D’Ivoire, Tunisia, Houston, Kenya, and New York. I’ve been to: Uruguay, Brasil, Mexico, France, England, The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Switzerland, Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, and most of the Eastern United States.
29. Most people, when they hear this list, say, "Military? Diplomat?" It’s oil – my dad worked for Exxon.
30. I grind my teeth in my sleep.
31. I’m not much for video games, but I’ll go a couple of rounds on any game I can drive or beat people up in.
32. I smoked for four gloriously irresponsible years. It’s been 3 months. I miss it, and still consider myself a reformed smoker.
33. I sing aloud in the car, and I don’t care if other people see me, which drives my mother batty.
34. I have two older half-brothers, both of whom epitomized "cool" for me, during most of the eighties.
35. I snobbily ignored The Simpsons until college. I was an idiot until college.
36. I’m finally learning how to sew from my mother, who has been the undisputed genius of the sewing machine for my whole life.
37. Being married to a Brit is awesome because we can eat cheese on toast with baked beans once a week and I get to say "BUGGER!" around the house in my awful American accent and he loves me anyway.
38. Until I was about 20, I fought my curly hair every day. Now I encourage it to do its thing and it looks great.
39. I’m terrified to the point of paralysis by even the most harmless of bug life.
40. Here is a spectrum of things I hate, from the marginally disliked to the violently loathed: cold pizza, broccoli, Ann Coulter, Catholicism, tapered pants, Jimmy Buffet.
41. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 11. I said it was because I liked rollerskates better but the truth is, I was scared. This is a pattern of denial and stubbornness that you can find running rampant through my life.
42. I have read the Douglas Adams books. My life is consequently better.
43. I can be a real hypocrite sometimes.
44. I think there’s a fine line between appreciating the good things in life and being a spoiled snob. I like to think I walk that line every day.
45. When I was four, some kid pulled out a chunk of my hair while playing duck, duck, goose. It was really traumatizing.
46. When people tell me I talk a lot, I usually brush it off but deep down, it hurts. It implies that what I’m saying isn’t worth hearing, otherwise they wouldn’t have noticed.
47. I have very vivid dreams that I will immediately tell Stuart about, first thing in the morning.
48. I have a natural aversion to all things cultish, like Star Wars and comic books, even though most of my friends are unabashed geeks of this stripe.
49. I wish I knew how to: drive a manual transmission car, sail, install lighting, garden, play the drums or the fiddle, speak Italian and Greek, and make bread.
50. My maternal instinct is a force to be reckoned with. I call this force "my ovaries".
51. I’m learning to drink two litres of water a day.
52. I used to want to be editor-in-chief of the New York Times. Now I want to be a good person with close friends and a family, a novelist, and happy.
53. Even though I’ve complained about my last name for most of my life, when it came time to switch to Stuart’s, I became suddenly attached to it. Thankfully, he understood.
54. My favourite flowers are tulips, lilacs, and magnolias. I also like hydrangea, snapdragons, and irises. I even like roses, provided they’re the cheerful English kind.
55. When I’m having a bad day, I like to buy People Magazine or US Weekly. It’s crap, but it’s comforting.
56. My eyes turn greenish when I cry.
57. When I was a teenager, I used to sneak sips of port from my parent’s liquor cabinet.
58. I used to think my parents were kidding when they said my Russian piano teacher in Cote D’Ivoire was working for Moscow. Now I realize they weren’t.
59. I always quicken my pace when I’m half a block away from our apartment.
60. I have an agent. This never ceases to amaze me and makes me feel like a complete and utter hack when I say it aloud.
61. My two best friends from high school, Erin and Rachel, are still two of my best friends. Two of us are married, two of us are in law school, and we all share a serious affinity for the Police.
62. Once, at a restaurant during a one-day layover in London, my chicken-breast exploded herb butter all over me. My mother and I still laugh when we remember this story.
63. Aside from everything I’ve said about cultish pop culture, I’m a die-hard Buffy fan. Remember what I said about hypocrisy?
64. I’ve never had much interest in going to California, and until I have a good friend in every city, I probably won’t go. It costs the same to fly to Europe.
65. I’m still a little surprised that I’m living in New York and making a life here, just as I said I would when I was 13.
66. Once, Erin lost a word for a whole month, and she finally remembered it, but every time I try and tell the story, I forget the word. She never does – I just asked her. It was "speculate".
67. When I was little, my favourite color was lavender because I thought it was cliched to like pink. Now, I love all colors but am partial to crisp shades of green and warm shades of yellow.
68. "But I am le tired" never isn’t funny.
69. Stuart was one of my blog crushes way before any of us met him.
70. I don’t worry much about the world, because I think it’s the height of arrogance to assume all the catastrophe will happen during my puny lifespan. That said, I wish someone would do something about diabetes.
71. When I say I don’t like seafood, most people (correctly) assume it’s because I’m stubborn about trying it. However, this is, in this case, untrue: due to respect for my seafood-loving friends, I have tried almost every single thing that swims.
72. My favourite shoes in the world are Brazil’s Havaiana flip-flops. I have three pairs and I can’t get enough.
73. I like really violently gruesome threats, like, "I’m going to rip your arms off and beat you about the head with them" or "fuck that in the EAR", mainly because I’m 5’2" and who would believe me?
74. I saw my first snowfall in the Atlas Mountains, in Morocco. This is indicative of the weirdness of my life.
75. My dad and I used to "speak Spanish" when I was a toddler, which meant we’d just babble back and forth incoherently. We thought it was very funny.
76. Galoshes are good for keeping your feet dry from rain. Also, from my killing rampages. See? Violently gruesome threats.
77. I dated a gay guy once. Yes, I knew he was gay. Yes, HE knew he was gay. In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid idea.
78. I have "vaults" with some of my friends, where we can be as cruel and catty as we want and it stays within the bounds of the "vault". You don’t want to look in there.
79. I love llamas. It’s inexplicable. I just do.
80. In the eighth grade, I played Lucy in "You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown". It was the pinnacle of my acting career.
81. I love summer downpours, driving in Texas, and running at sunset.
82. I probably quote Eddie Izzard too much, but I don’t care.
83. I vote democrat, inform myself on the issues, and then get on with my life as best I can.
84. My favourite authors are, in terms of sheer quantities read and enjoyed and in no particular order Roald Dahl, John Irving, Phillip Pullman, Michael Chabon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, JK Rowling, Kate Atkinson, Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and then John Irving again.
85. I am immensely proud of how much I’ve read, of how addicted to reading I am, and so is everyone else with as prolific a habit as I have. If they’re trying to be humble about it, they’re lying.
86. I only like white towels.
87. I know next to nothing about sports, but I particularly like attending baseball, soccer, and tennis games.
88. I love England, but everyone loves England, except I love England in the sense of it being Stuart’s homeland and thus someplace new to explore and eventually understand.
89. I wear a men’s watch because I like the weight.
90. The idea of homeland, while I’m on the subject, is very complicated to me. My blood is Belgian, Irish, and Greek, while my adopted cultures are American and Brasilian and my childhood was spent mostly in Africa. Like I said – complicated.
91. Stuart and I have this thing about the letter E. My phone texted him an "E" one day, for no reason, and ever since then, we say it to each other every day. We don’t really know why.
92. When I meet new people, I have to quell the impulse to talk at a mile a minute, especially if they’re quiet.
93. I don’t like the word "nice". I don’t think it describes anything, and I think it should be exiled from our vocabulary.
94. I think if there was a song about me, it’d be Billy Joel’s "Vienna".
95. I love the Bronx Zoo.
96. My mom and I have talked about pot, and traded stoner stories. This is awesome.
97. I wrote a short book when I was six about a mouse named Emily. It was very detailed, stapled, and illustrated.
98. I’ve had five dogs in my life – four German Shepherds (Jade, Mouschka, Aquaba, and Champion) and a Jack Russell (Kirby). Four of the five died young, 2-3 years. Champion lived to a ripe old age and proved Darwin wrong because he was dumb as a bag of hair.
99. I’m an accessory fiend, currently in possession of about 50 pairs of shoes, 28 purses, 3 pairs of sunglasses, 6 wallets, 6 hats, 8 pairs of gloves, 3 brooches, and god knows how many scarves.
100. My real name is Christina.

part four ... The Present

here is a small dried flower from a walk you went on, across the entire city, from midnight until dawn.

here is the catch in your throat when you hear her sing the songs she's written, even when they're not for you.

here is the list of places you made together, that you'll one day visit, down to the minutae of hotel room prices and attractions you want to see.

here is the funny way she pronounces the word "crayon" and the way her eyebrows arch slightly when she's applying lipstick.

here are his keys on your keychain, here are yours on his keychain.

here is the cup of coffee she makes you every morning, buying that gross fake creamer because she knows you secretly love it but would never admit it to your other friends.

here is the curl at his temple that simply refuses to join the rest of his hair.

here is the way she answers the phone, inflecting her 'hello' exactly the same way every single time.

here is the tip of his tongue, that sticks out the left side of his mouth when he's working at his drafting table.

here is the tiny furrow in her brow, the shadow that crosses her eyes, when you make her angry in public.

here are the the truckloads of one-word exchanges that signify the important events in your life - the shorthand of your knowledge of each other.

here are the exhausting tears that come from fighting, and here is the unique kind of nauseating pain that surfaces at the thought of losing someone.

here is the moment you wake up, open your eyes, and see yourself reflected in someone else's.

here, this is love. except, there is no perfect love. the future always looks rosier than it turns out to be, and the past leaves scars that defy the very definition of the word 'past'. the present, that minute, is the only thing that can really live up to the expectation of perfect love. anyone who says they haven't loved... hasn't looked hard enough at the tiniest of movements, the simplest of actions, and found what they're looking for.

there is no formula. no one is perfect. nothing stays the same. except your little batch of quirks, and words, and memories, and intimacies. so here. this is love. enjoy.

part three ... The Future Perfect

she'll meet him during her off-year, when she flees to another city and lives with some crazy friends of hers in a mid-twenties attempt to recapture the wildness of youth. he'll be dating someone else, someone completely wrong for him. she'll know it the minute their eyes lock across the room, the two minutes he helps her with her bag. they will look into each other's eyes and see a kindred spirit. her friends won't believe this is possible, she who is so afraid of love. but when she says his name on the phone to them, they'll know he's the one.

"are you two together?" her friends will ask.
"no," she answers, with a new depth in her voice, a new honeyed dimension to her quiet southern accent.
"so what is it?"
"we're friends," she'll say. but she'll hear his voice coming down the hall over any other din. he'll seek her out at every party. he'll stand next to her, dangerously close, just to smell the clean freshness in her curly hair or to see the way she fiddles with her collar, rubbing the point between her thumb and middle finger. they will not be able to divert the current of electricity between them.

she will be torn between her privacy, her natural reticence, and the lure of his companionship. he will be torn between the girl he's dating who doesn't understand him, and the girl he's not dating who knows the words before he says them.

they will sit at a kitchen table together in the waning summer heat and drink countless beers. they will talk about their childhoods. they will offer to drive each other on errands, only to experience the forced intimacy of her tiny car. skin will brush against skin when they pass each other. the ticking clock in the dingy kitchen will mean more to both of them than the mere passage of time.

one night, at a concert, with the ever-distancing girlfriend a mere ten feet in front of them, he will turn to her. his hand will be on her small, firm shoulder.

"i have to tell you something," he will say as his voice cracks under the strain of being both quiet and loud at the same time.
"no," she will respond because she knows what he wants to tell her. she will move away because she's afraid. but these fears can't last long.

perhaps they will finally kiss in the parking lot. perhaps it will be at the grocery store on another contrived errand. perhaps, they will find themselves driving far away from the town they live in, distance themselves from their daily life to build up the courage to fall into each other. it will happen with the delicious clasping satisfaction of two magnets finally allowed to click. perhaps he will hold her small, porcelain face in his guitar-calloused hands and find it hard to breathe. perhaps her eyes will well up with the kind of tears she rarely allows herself to cry.

one thing is for certain in this future she does not yet know. that first kiss will be completely unavoidable. it is written the moment she walks into that room and sees the light in his eyes. the moment he saw her push her glasses up by touching the corner with the knuckle of her forefinger, a gesture which will reduce his heart to shreds in its delicacy and subtlety.

one thing is for certain in this future that none of us know. they will fall in love. it will be inconvenient. painful. complicated. emotional. but it will be the first kiss to end all first kisses and they will live happily ever after.

for beth and josh, my greatest inspiration

part two ... The Conditional

he talks quietly on the phone, this late at night. his voice is always scratchy from cigarettes and whiskey. she know he's in bed because she can hear his beard rustling against the pillow.
"tell me more about the Weekend," he asks. how many times have they talked about this, she wonders. but the stories and promises have, so far, kept them happy together with seven thousand miles separating them.
"we'll lock the door," she starts.
"mmhmm."
"and kick my roommate out for the weekend."
"we'll just have a couple delivery menus and some beer."
"and sex," she adds.
he laughs - his voice always goes up an octave with his laughter.
"and sex," he says. "lots of sex."
"eleven months worth of sex."
"it's been that long?" he asks.
"it will have been, when you come home."
"jesus," his voice sounding sad, "that's too long."
"well," she reminds him, "when you left, it was supposed to be forever."
"when I left, I didn't realize how terrible it really is to be alone."

her mind snags on this, still disbelieving his affection, still unsure that he could possibly mean the wealth of caring and faith he's shown. she probes, knowing any minute it could go too far, she could ask too much, and his openness would dissipate like tendrils of steam.

"well, and now?"
"I don't want to be alone any more. I'm tired of the hermit act. I want to be there for someone. and I think I want it to be you."
"and our weekend of sex," she jokes, bringing it back to the light side, knowing his boundaries.
"and our weekend of sex," he replies, with smiles in his voice. "we can just stay in bed the entire time."
"no internet," she says.
"no phones."
"no friends," she says.
"no television."
"just food," she laughs.
"and sex. and cigarettes."
"and the ny times." she says.
"nah, the paper is distracting," he points out, "from all the sex. how about just NPR. you have a radio in your room, right?"
"yeah."
"it'll be perfect. and can we be naked the entire time?"

she pulls a drag from her cigarette, and closes her eyes, gathering memories of their last few nights together, before he left. when it all came tumbling out in the desperate flood of goodbye. the way he first kissed her on the couch, electric. how he resisted her body out of confusion - awkwardness - and then pulled her in to him, him endearingly wild-eyed, and sank into their first time together. the way his legs entwined with hers when they finally slept, his furrowed brow in the morning, his arm stubbornly locked around her waist, hand on her belly.

she breathes out smoke, hearing his mouth take a drag of his cigarette.
"of course we can. it's our lost weekend. we can do whatever we want," she replies.
"yeah. I can't wait," he smiles.

part one ... The Past Progressive

he sits across from her at the tiny sun-dappled table but his legs are long and they sneak under her chair. for her part, legs are crossed, her ankle bone resting lightly against his shin. the only contact. the coffee mugs before them have been drained, but periodically she picks up hers, tipping it back to lick some of the sugar from the sides. he watches her pink tongue flick into the mug.

"so how's old new york these days?" he asks. his long arms stretch out across the table, his chin tips up and his back arches the slightest bit - a habit of his she is well familiar with, something he never realizes he's doing, as if refocusing himself into the room.

"the same as it was when you lived there. it's good to get away," she smiles, tapping a cigarette out of the pack, leaning in and shoving a curl away from her face as she lights it on the little red candle. she's inches away from his hand, palm-down on the table. he almost lifts it to hold her hair, she sees, and he thinks better of it.

"take those ridiculous sunglasses off, we're indoors," he says. she pushes them to hold back the curls and smiles at him.
"it's sunny in here," her eyes scan the little cafe. she takes a long drag and curls the right side of her lips, letting the smoke out towards the open window. he almost regrets asking her to lift the shades, now being subjected to the full force of her liquid brown eyes. the first thing he really noticed about her, years back.

"remember," he starts, picking up the thread of the little game they play when they meet again, once a year like clockwork, "the time in your hallway?" she grins a cheeky smile back.
"it was before we went to that salsa club," she prompts.
"you were wearing that red thing, with the strap around the neck."
"the halter dress. and heels. and nothing else."
"right. and that nook, in your hallway-"
"you broke the mirror hanging there," she laughs. he's glad she still doesn't care, after all these years, about the mirror they broke.
"well, you had your legs wrapped around my waist, I didn't have the best balance," he countered.
"you held on just fine," she grins, remembering the strong way his hand always cradled the back of her neck.
"and you pulled my belt out of my pants, remember?" he asks.
"yeah, well, you undid the only hook holding my dress on."
"that was something else, that nook in the hallway. you almost tied me to the coat rack with my belt."
"it would have been fun. then I could have done whatever I wanted," she laughs again and his eyes narrow through his glasses, just once, like a bird flying past a sunbeam.

"to be fair, we shouldn't talk like this," he says, his eyes less searching and open than before. his hands pull back off the table, his chin tilts up again, the shift is all but physically tangible.
"I know. they're just memories."
"and you're the keeper of them."
she doesn't answer.
"but I've got the car, it's outside," he smiles at the thought of her hair flying in the wind, zipping around the city's tiny streets again in that car - she was always terrible with the stick - "and we can stay at our old place."

it's nice, she thinks, looking at his long lazy body and rumpled clothes, these once a year reminders. the red dress is gone, the nook in the hallway long occupied by someone else, someone undoubtedly less passionate and crazy. but the car, and the time of year in their city, and the cobblestones gleaming with fresh rain -

"let's go, then." he sees the playful flicker her delicious eyes once more before the sunglasses come down and the cigarette is extinguished. outside, the car is waiting.

Adaptation

Everyone has anxiety dreams of walking through identical bland hallways, running into the same faces like a sick broken record. For some people, this is where they wake up. For me, it was the first day of middle school in suburban Houston, Texas. I’m what people call a TCK – third culture kid. My father worked for a major oil company and for all of my childhood, home was wherever we laid down our posessions. Before I arrived in Houston at age eleven, I’d only lived in the United States for two years before elementary school. Not even American by blood – my parents are Brasilian and Greek. This is the complicated pedigree I’ve lived with my whole life, and I wouldn’t change it.

But that first day in Houston, looking at a sea of American kids who’d grown up together, I wished with eleven year old fervor that I wasn’t so different. I wished that the teacher didn’t introduce me as, "A girl who’s lived in Africa!" and I wished my classmates didn’t translate that into harmlessly cruel middle-school-speak as "that African girl". I wished I didn’t have to explain that no, I didn’t ride elephants to school. I wanted desperately to be back in the relative safety of overseas International schools, where everyone has a different skin, religion, language, and where conformity was impossible and thus not in high demand.

But I wasn’t. I was in suburban Houston. And when my incredibly generous and understanding parents saw how hard it was, they told me I’d have to learn to adapt. It sounds like an easy concept, but everyone learns by trial and error. How I adapted, indeed how I always adapted in the seven different countries and schools, was more of a mutation than anything. After being teased about my glasses and my precocious reading habit, I started wearing contacts and joined theatre. After being called a geek, I spent more time at malls than the museums of my childhood raptures. In the three years we lived in Houston, I passed as a remarkably well-adjusted American teen. That is, bratty, self-involved, a little lost and bordering on flaky.

When we got the transfer to Kenya after ninth grade, I remember feeling a secret relief that I could return to the "other" me. The younger, more innocent girl who loved books, talked to her dogs, made friends with everyone, and dragged her parents to every temple in Greece, blabbing into the video camera about which god or goddess had been worshipped there. So what was adaptation, I asked myself later? Which me was me – the mall-hopping American teen, or the gregarious geek? Was it both? When I returned to Houston for senior year of high school after two refreshing and life-altering years in Nairobi, I started to grasp the difference between adaptation and mutation.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my relatively unique childhood, which I often have to trot out begrudgingly for bewildered newcomers to my life. Yes, it was marvellous and hard. Yes, I learned about cultural tolerance from such a young age, it’s a natural language to me. Yes, I can travel almost anywhere in the world and feel at home. But I’m not comfortable with the idea that my father’s career as an accountant has made me more culturally aware than any brilliant American who’s never left the continent. After all, I didn’t choose to go overseas and live a different life. What I learned about myself overseas had nothing to do with language or tolerance or riding elephants. Rather, I learned that life is tough and it’s not going to be comfortable. I will not always be surrounded by the familiarity of place, and my character cannot be sustained by geography or conformity. Living a life as mobile as I did offers the temptation to sleuth out the modus operandi and toe the appropriate lines. But I learned by trial and error that place, and character, are what you make of them.

Adaptation is not about staying true to your surroundings, or molding your character on those around you. That’s simply mutation, a trait exclusively claimed by chameleons. True adaptation, and true character, is about staying true to yourself perhaps in spite of your surroundings. Understanding yourself isn’t something handed to you at birth, not even for the carefree and stable children whose life I coveted everytime I saw my life in boxes and a plane taking us off to another strange place. When I was younger, I used to tell my parents that I’d give my own kids a home whose walls they’d known since infancy, friends they’d grown up with. But even those children need to learn what standing firm means, and I was lucky enough to have a strong dose of that reality from an early age. That is more important to me than languages or exotic countries.

My life, having not chosen it or the places it took me to, doesn’t make me better than anyone else. I’m loath to accept that interpretation. I’m often bewildered by the impressed reactions my background garners. Coming back to the States, finally seeing myself as an American, and choosing to continue my life here on almost foreign soil, was a difficult decision for me. I had the opportunity to go overseas again after graduation from college and I chose this country, over all the others I’ve lived in, because I’ve learned how to adapt here. How to appreciate its culture as much as any of the others I’ve seen. But I wouldn’t have come to that decision without realizing the value of what my other life gave me.

I may be more versatile with foreign ground because of my childhood. But that’s a surface benefit. Fluency in French doesn’t make me a stronger person, or provide me with the character and backbone I’ll need to succeed. What most prepares me for the world, as I embark on law school and life, is the benefit of knowing the difference between fitting in, and fitting into yourself.

the Art of charm, part three

charm and love

unless you are a barbie or ken doll – anatomically outrageous and completely lacking in the reproductive bits – you’re familiar with the concept of romantic love. and while a lot of people use the word "charm" in relation to romantic love, what we all secretly know is:

love is a muddy horrible war zone filled with limping casualties, dangerous and completely unmarked landmines, constantly shifting enemies, and at the end of the day you’re lucky to be leaning back-to-back with one of your fellow soldiers, exhausted and scarred, passing back and forth a flask and talking about your childhoods.

however, all that unadulterated bollocks about love being fulfilling and spiritual has a point, because we all keep coming back from more like violent alcoholics, slurring our speech and demanding our fix. we come back time and again, even if its with the wrong person, at the wrong time, at the wrong place. that battlefield of love provides us with something we desperately need and want above all other things.

and much like sticking a daisy in the barrel of a gun aimed at your face didn’t much help that you had a gun aimed at your face, charm and grace can somehow make the agony of love prettier, lighter, more likely to cause good memories. and hey, maybe sometimes a daisy can stop a war, eh?

with that in mind, we’re going to take a trip through three stages of falling in love, point out the pitfalls and landmines, and show you how charm can help win a few scuffles here and there.

stage one: first date

atmosphere: nervous, exciting. he’s taking her to a restaurant, she’s wearing her lacy undies. these lacy undies will be an ongoing theme – keep an eye on them. not like that, you’re in class, behave.

pitfalls and landmines: you don’t know each other at all, essentially, and every word or phrase or joke you make is subject to about seven hundred thousand interpretations, all by the woman. and ladies, men simply don’t understand subtlety, so you think you’re showing him how gaga you are for him and he thinks you simply fancied a good meal and plan on mocking him later to your friends. two major pitfalls – how do we avoid them?

ladies: the key to being charming on the first date is really just be yourself. remember those guy friends you have that you can always flirt with and link your arm through without thinking twice? okay, be like that. because that’s really you at your flirty best. remember – there is barely any gesture too overt, short of taking your top off at the table and slathering your breasts with olive oil. men are dolts – show them you like them by actually flirting. radical, n’est ce pas? we usually do well on the date, so I will reserve most of the practical advice for the men.

gents: look, we know you’re a little nervous. try not to fidget, also, we know that you’re all essentially sweet creatures and you try and run around on the first date doing all the chivalrous things. don’t. it makes us feel like we’re being encircled by a pack of anxious chihuahuas. if you get to the door first, lovely, hold it open. if not, please don’t push a lady into oncoming traffic to hold the door/pull our chairs/get our coats/hail the cab. and when it comes to the check, if she says more than once that she insists on splitting it, FOR GOD’S SAKE let us pay for ourselves. most importantly - actually listen to her instead of fidgeting, opening doors, and fighting to pay the bill.

stage two: dating

atmosphere: ever seen two animals circling each other in the forest, unsure of their relation to each other? it's kind of like that, yeah. status of the lacy undies – lads, you shouldn’t be seeing the grannypanties at this point, she should still be trotting out her skimpy marvels. and women, he should still be making a relative effort to tidy up when you come over.

landmines and pitfalls: this is the time you will look back at with longing and nostalgia once you’re firmly entrenched in the relationship, although all you can think is how confusing and unclear it all is. the point is, this phase is quite fun when done right. some of the dangerous areas are: communication, meeting-of-the-friends, and sex.

communication: here’s the thing with dating – it’s violently unclear who calls whom, for what, and when. I’ve often bemoaned that there should just be a guidebook for this, because women end up fretting over whether or not THEY should call, email, or text and men end up having no idea when they should call or when they’ve called too much or what they said wrong and before you know it, it’s all gone to shit. so. the way to make sure this landmine is as charming as possible is – DROP THE RULES. if you’d like to see someone, call them. make it clear that you’re not simply calling for sex, like saying, "hello, I’d really like to see you, are you busy _____?" this is well-done and to the point. after half a dozen or so dates and/or you’ve slept together, it’s cute to slip in a little something sexy about the other person, to show them you’ve been thinking about them naked. yes, it’s bold. and yes, it always works. but the main point with communication is you spend more time fretting about what’s appropriate, when really, the other person es loco para ti, so just call them whenever and they’ll probably just get hot thinking about seeing you next. and that's charming.

meeting-of-the-friends: my, this one is dangerous. women think men compartmentalize too much and keep us as their "dirty secret", and men are completely freaked out because they know women keep few secrets from their girlfriends. the charmed way to handle this snake-in-a-basket is… get the friend thing out of the way early. the more it builds, the more nervous both parties are going to be. I’d say a month or so into dating at the very latest. pick a neutral kind of meeting, for instance, or if you have an enormous group of friends, try and filter it down, introduce him/her to some of the key members before you thrust him/her before a council of twenty five of your topshelf mates. also, especially if you’re very tight with your friends, avoid dragging your new love to every single friend-event, because while it’s great for you to have your mate along with your friends, it might actually be rather nerve-wracking for him/her. and if you’re the one meeting the friends – it’s sort of like being in the grip of a boa constrictor. just relax, don’t tense up, and maybe you’ll slither out intact. they will absolutely be sizing you up, make no mistake about it. if you can all just accept this and get to know each other, you’ll probably even like them – hell, you like your date, right? but if you tense up and wig out and act insecure and try and impress, her/his friends will see right through it and dislike you forever. no pressure, kids.

as for the secrets thing, lads – there’s simply nothing you can do but be charming and acknowledge that women tell their women friends everything. I suggest, to avoid conflict, that when you’re confiding in your ladyfriend something that really is quite personal, explicitly suggest she not tell ___ and ____, because otherwise, honestly, she will.

sex: sex while dating can be awkward even while its thrilling. you’re not really doing it often enough to really get into a rhythm, but you’re quite excited and eager. the other pitfall is that people are trying to impress each other, so they fall back on sex moves that worked with other people. sounds terrible, but it’s true. the most charming thing you can do in bed is be creative and original. forget everything you’ve done before – look at your new lover like an empty canvas. explore their body, find out which little bits work for whom and which should be avoided. this will make you far more memorable in the eyes of your new lover than simply switching on the "sex moves I know!" button and trying to fiddlingly align his/her machinery to yours. sex will get better – but then much later it’ll get worse.

stage three: the transition from dating to relationship

atmosphere: charged, wildly oscillating mood swings, but comfort and attraction combined. note, lads, she’s still dragging out the lacy undies for you, but not quite as often. girls, you've seen what his roommates are really like.

pitfalls and landmines: oh dear god everything. this is honestly, the most traumatizing and difficult because the notes played are starting to get serious. women and men choose to commit very differently. often, in this stage, the woman is thrilled with the level of closeness and comfort she's attained with you and wants to move closer, spend more time together, and exchange 'i love you's. men, often, are very happy staying crazy about you but the word love and time make them balk like untrained foals, mostly because they have some cockamamie notion that you're going to tie them to the bed and register them in your name forever. essentially, this transition is the gnashing rocks of a cliffside for a boat - they can be avoided, but they're deadly if you hit them at the wrong angle. frank, honest advice, and there's only two pieces of it:

talk, talk, talk: people often call this the three-six month mark crisis. it may seem incongruent and ridiculous, because for three months prior its been nothig but sex and fun, and now all of a sudden it's talky talky talky. but no matter how distasteful it may seem to say, "yar, i didn't like the way you did this," or "i'm sorry, what i need from this is _____", but because you're not used to it, it feels hard and unnatural and scary. or else you're trying to stall the relationship at permanent dating, and that's just not realistic. a few ways to be a charming discusser - always bring up a problem in a safe, non-threatening location. in front of a bar, on the way to a friend's house, and on the subway are all unacceptable, as is drunk or post-sex. another thing - don't use namby-pamby passive-agressive language. ever. say: this is the way things are, this is how i feel, how do you think?

listen, listen, listen: there's nothing less charming in the world than someone that's already made up their mind about you. this is the point in the relationship when you start to recognize someone else's flaws, weaknesses, and your own distaste for those things. so instead of resigning yourself to resentment over these things (which causes wrinkles which are distinctly uncharming) always remember to listen to him/her the way you did when you were gaga and gooey-eyed over them. ask them questions about what they're thinking, and then remember what they're not saying, as well - that they've made it this far with you, they obviously care about you even though the sexy undies are starting to slip and you've already cried on their shoulder. insecurities and demons will try and tell you that everything's going badly, bail now, cry now, doubt now. don't listen to them. listen to how much you like your mate, and how the best parts of you - the most charming parts of yourself - have been luminated by their smiles.

most important in this phase is that: remember to be the best person you can be, remember to keep putting that same charming dainty best foot forward that you did on your very first date. or else you'll just get bogged down in how hard it is to get serious about someone, and you'll completely forget why you're reaching for that goal to begin with.

and finally, as a quick bonus, remember this. relationships, no matter how passionate or serious or perfect or rocky or loving or tumultuous - they only go two ways: you stay together or you break up. and if the latter should happen, petit hiboux is always ready with a contingency plan.

the extremely abbreviated yet practical Art of Charm and Break Ups

1. take their number out of your phone.
2. call your friends.
3. drink, complain, cry, make out with a stranger, repeat.
4. thank your friends.

the Art of charm, part two of three

the Art of charm and friendships

you might be thinking, why do I need to charm my friends? I’ve belched national anthems in front of them and held their hair back while they chucked up half a bottle of vodka. but charm can be a delightful party favor and an effective way to keep your friends coming back for more. here are a few do’s and don’ts that will lead your friends to think you’ve sprouted charm virtually overnight.

1. DO make a mental list of 5-15 people that take a high priority in your life. if you’re not the Instant Messaging type, make sure you email/call them at least once a week to keep in touch. if you’re the scattered type, make little notes, like "E has a problem with her mother’s new boyfriend," or "make sure to remember F just started new job", or "listen to T prattle on about the new puppy". remember to ask them about their lives, not just ramble on about yours. this is what friends appreciate – when you call them and ask them specifically about the details of their life. it’s kind of like being some sort of celebrity. only with less paparazzi.

2. DON’T make plans you can’t keep, otherwise known as flaking out, especially with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. while it’s alright to flake out every now and then on your daily/weekly friends by saying, "dude, I’m seriously too beat / dude, I’m going to get laid / dude, I’m dead broke," it’s not okay to do this to casual friends or long-time-no-see friends. since these types of friends do not know your vie quotidienne, they will simply think you are a stupid flake who didn’t want to see them in the first place. this will set you back in their estimation. this is counter to our plan of charming the collective pants off the world.

3. DO play charming host/hostess any time your friends are visiting chez vous. simply flopping down on your couch, kicking off your shoes and turning on the telly is inappropriate when you have guests, unless your guest is the same best friend that watched you tinkle in the baby pool when you were three and break your teeth by biking directly into an oak tree at age fifteen. when you have friends over, DO make sure they’re comfortably seated, their thirsts are quenched and any other needs are satisfied. if they don’t know where your bathroom is, don’t simply send them in the general direction with a wave – walk them there. make sure you have food/drinks/ashtrays at your house, or else just don’t have your friends over, you lazy slob. DO tidy up a little if possible, because there’s nothing friends like less than sitting on a couch full of your dirty laundry and empty potato chip bags. if you’re like me, you’ll light some candles and make sure the bathroom smells fresh, as well as decorate the bedroom with fresh flowers [current rotation: orchids] if it’s that kind of visit. lastly, if you’re having a small get together, DO introduce one set of friends to another. there’s nothing more annoying that simply expecting complete strangers to mingle over punch. get off your lazy ass and exchange their names to get them started. as a side bonus, their chances of going home with each other will greatly increase and that means they’ll always think of you fondly. which, again, along with the global-pants-charming-off, is sort of the point.

4. DON’T be a sloppy malicious blabbermouth. no one likes a tattletale, and while it’s okay to discuss a mutual friend’s love life/job/slovenliness without malice over a pint, the rule is don’t say anything about an acquaintance that you couldn’t tell them to their face. for instance, the following conversation with a member of your circle is appropriate:
you: what do you think of B’s new boyfriend? I’m not sure about his dancing skills! (laugh)
friend: oh, I KNOW! we’ll have to tell B to give him some classes!

this alternate conversation is almost without exception, completely inappropriate:
you: what do you think of B’s new boyfriend? honestly, I think he’s
a consummate asshole and B deserves to be slapped for dating him.
friend: oh, I totally agree.

why is it inappropriate? because while your gossip-partner might agree with your casual dismissal of a mutual friend’s boyfriend, he/she may not necessarily care who else hears about your out-of-line assessment of someone else’s private life. she may be, in fact, one of those careless blabbermouths that bring down empires. this is where the "say it to their face" rule applies. if you could tease B about the boyfriend’s dancing faux pas, then it’s alright to remark on it to mutual friends "behind B’s back". otherwise, keep those juicy bits of gossip strictly limited to those two or three friends with whom you have an understood vault. then, by all means, luridly gossip away. I know I do.

5. lastly, DO remind your friends and loved ones on a regular basis how much they mean to you. not just in gestures, like remembering their birthday or rule #1, but also verbally. it’s a harsh world out there, always looking to give one a thrashing, so there’s nothing quite like hearing from a friend how great they think one is. so, when you see a friend you haven’t seen in a while, give them a big hug and a smile and tell them you’ve missed their friendly presence. make sure when a friend is down on themselves, you remind them how smashingly fun and wonderful you think they are. if you see a funny greeting card that reminds you of someone far away, send it to them for no reason. if you are one of those emotionally crippled human beings that has a hell of a time expressing any type of deep or caring emotions, and run screaming away from words like, "love" and "close" and "need", then stop reading this immediately – you may become successful, shrewd, wise, or rich but you’ll never be charming. for the rest of you, frequently reminding your pals that you think they’re a right-on group of individuals is both a nice way to perk up their lives, and thus a way to assure that people will be around for YOU when you need them. it’s a give and take, yeah?

those five brief tips should help you navigate the fun but often fraught-with-faux-pas landmines of the friendship world. that you’re a generally good person and not a complete raging misanthrope, of course, is essential to success. but even good people fail on charm, and so these five nuggets of charm should help you elevate your goodness to mythic levels. from now on, you will no longer be described as "yah, bob’s a good chap, I suppose" because no one can think of what you’ve done wrong, but rather, "man, that bob! such a good guy, always with a smile and a kind word. no get-together is the same without bob, eh?" which, of course, is your ultimate goal.

the Art of charm, part one

you might think that charm is simply a false, pandering method employed by politicians, ballroom dancers and martha stewart. you’re wrong. charm is an almost forgotten art, like the art of courting and sewing. the art of charm serves a delightful double purpose – while it manages to bring joy to the world around you, it’s also a ragingly effective way to get what you want, all the time. hence, "living the charmed life".

now - while I may be a simpering dilettante in many other arenas of life, I pride myself on being effortlessly, ruthlessly, and meltingly charming. as such, I’ll go ahead and call myself an "expert", since you’re more likely to listen to me if I have credentials. now, there are a few basic areas we need to cover, and then you’re ready to go into the world and emit charm. today, this panel will address …

charm and the stranger

let’s face it. unless you live in a tiny, particularly friendly village in the wilds of canada or some other godforsaken province, where you’re related to everyone and no one has grueling 9-to-5 jobs and mortage payments, chances are you’ve had unpleasant interactions with strangers before. I will use an important and universal example to briefly demonstrate how charm can come in handy in a pinch.

situaton: you’re standing at your local deli counter and you quickly mumble a grumpy tired request ciggies and coffee, like this: "mumble mumble camel lights and coffee black with sugar, three". you’re not particularly being grumpy to your deli man, you’ve got nothing against him. you’re just bloody exhausted and your mother was nagging you on the phone this morning and you couldn’t find your favorite black shoes so you had to wear brown ones that throw your whole outfit off-kilter. for whatever reason, you can barely stumble out a decent human greeting to the man providing you with two of your most treasured addictions. when you reach into your pocket, you realize you’re 50 cents completely short. your deli man shrugs, takes back the hallowed cigarettes, and dumps your cofffee. what’s it to him that you don’t get your fix(es)?

alternate situation: go back to the point where you come in tired and grumpy looking for your cigs/coffee. leave in the bit about the mother and the shoes, but this time, when you open the deli door and the deli man looks up at the jangly noise (for there’s always a jangly noise), do something different. smile at your deli man. you can smile ruefully, as if to say "isn’t it sodding early in the morning?" or you can smile cheerfully and imply "I am genuinely happy to see you, man who serves me coffee, even though I don’t know you". doesn’t matter how. but smile at him. open your tired, grumpy, spoiled mouth and say "hello!" when you walk up to the counter. now your deli man will respond with, "hello!" in return. now say, "I’d like a pack of camel lights and a black coffee, three sugars please." don’t simply mumble the product names and make the deli man feel like nothing more than a robot retrieving sellable goods. use the inbetweeny words as well. now - when you dig around in your oversized bag and realize you are fifty cents short, the deli man is more likely to agree when you promise him to swing by on your way home and give him the requisite small change which is admittedly not keeping his business afloat. you will walk out of the deli establishment with BOTH your fixes intact.

see how charm affected the situation? what has happened now is that the deli man understands that you are treating him like a worthy fellow human being. he stands behind that smelly counter all day, dealing with snippy horrible monsters of people who simply come in and bark their demands at him, even though they make four times what he makes and go to the shore on the weekends. but now the deli man recognizes you as someone who treats him well, and it never hurts to have a deli man on your side. my deli man even gave me a starburst when it was my birthday because I’m always so sweet to him and I ask about his wife who was ailing last month.

some other situations in which charm and interactions with strangers collide:

1. smile at people with whom you make eye contact on the subway. if you at least acknowledge that you’re both riding into the bowels of hell on a one-way train, someone might actually yield a seat to you, or not shove you into your own cup of coffee while trying to exit the train.

2. when talking to customer service people on the phone – paying a bill, reserving a flight, solving a retail dispute – be incredibly nice to them. speak full sentences, do not yell, and make it clear you understand that your ripped shirt/unsatisfactory plane seats/high bills are not personally their fault. these people, these disembodied voices, have been known to bend over backwards to help you if you apply the right amount of charm and understanding and speak like a decent educated human being instead of someone barking at a disobedient dog who’s just tinkled on the sofa.

3. don’t mock taxi drivers, their countries, or other taxi drivers. you’re in their car and the doors are locked. this isn’t a matter of charm, it’s a matter of stupidity. if you have a conflict with the direction the driver is taking or the way he drives, simply politely lean forward and address it to him. this will dramatically increase your chances of a. surviving and b. not being thrown in some karmic version of hell for being a nasty twit to foreign taxi drivers.

in conclusion: using simple methods of politeness, mutual acknowledgement of humanity, and a winning smile will take you miles when it comes to interacting with total strangers you’ll never see again. because even people that you may never see again can actually better your life and do things your way. when people do things your way, you're generally happier. this, in turn, will prove to yourself and the world that you do, indeed, live a charmed life.

stay tuned for: the Art of charm and friends, next.

open love letter to the naked city

open love letter to the naked city

dear new york city,

i met you when i was a young child, too young to understand the immensity of your beauty, but i loved you nonetheless the moment i laid eyes on you. i remember the moment, at the age of seven, when my brother drove me over the george washington bridge. it was crisp summer day, an egg-fried-on-the-sidewalk day, and you looked pearlescent, shimmering like a dying man in the desert's famous last mirage. i looked at the zippertooth edge of your skyline and thought, one day that'll be home.

new york, i love your streets. i love the thumping beat, the continuity of the rivers of asphalt that connect every new yorker, that connect harlem to the upper west side to hell's kitchen to chelsea. the corridors that weave through downtown, then snake out of that jumble into the quaint lanes of the west village. i love the endless straightness of park avenue, when you look north and it seems that the end of park avenue must be the end of the world. i love the race-car curves of FDR, and the river promenade of the west side highway. your streets are your arteries, your throbbing veins, the constantly moving highways of your life force.

i love your buildings, new york. the majestic originals, sure - the chrysler with its delicate silver latticework and the almost coy way it deflects sunlight, the empire state building in all of its solid soaring thereness, nonchalantly ignoring all the other soaring buildings of new york, knowing it's been there since the beginning. but i love your other buildings, as well. the gorgeous gothic of the natural history museum. the white splendor of the met. the grumpy utilitarianism of the pan am building. the modernistically slanted citibank building. and the nameless buildings, as well. the line of wildly different facades that make up the west side of the park - like grandmamas jostling to watch their children in the park. the over-the-top quaintness of the west village brownstones. the whistling canyons of downtown, with their anonymous towering dominance. your buildings are the curves and peaks of your essence.

i love, most of all, your people. i love their tough shells and the kindness and humanity they think they're hiding. i love catching the flow on one of your streets on a crowded sunday, new york, and simply moving with the people. here, on your streets, i may walk ten blocks with a complete stranger and most likely never see them again, but we've shared a block of our lives. every interaction on these streets, however insignificant, comes with an unspoken contract. i live here, you say to your fellow stranger, and so do you. we may have nothing else in common, but we hold different parts of the same thread in this crazy life. people you may never want to associate with, you still rub elbows with on the subway. i have stood closer to people on the subway than i have to some lovers. does it matter? no. we're different looking parts of the same intricate latticework that is new york. sometimes i stand on your streets and watch your family go by, and my mind can't handle the beauty and complexity and sheer volume of this enormous tribe. your people, new york, are your crowning jewels. we stand here every day and say, "take away the rest and we're still new yorkers."

thank you, new york. for a girl who never left her bags in one place long enough for the contents to settle, this september makes five years that you've graciously let me call you home. sometimes i think i don't deserve you. and sometimes i think you don't deserve me. we're lovers that way. but all i need to do is leave the city, and then humbly cross one of your sprawling bridges, look at the zippertoothed, jagged beauty of you, sunning yourself in this inprobable, almost inhospitable bend in a river, and i know you've still got me hooked.

i love you.