10. It’s better to eat little bits of everything than large amounts of one thing. If that fails, try large amounts of everything.
11. Respect isn’t something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It’s something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated and focusing on your mission.
12. Keep your friends close. Buy your enemies something cool.
13. Why spend $200 once a week on therapy when you can spend $150 once a year on a psychic?
14. “Sometimes a dog smells another dog’s tushy, and it just doesn’t like what it smells.”
15. Family first. Work second. Revenge third.
1. A stained, tattered checkbook. Because you just never know.
2. My new iPhone, along with my old broken iPhone, because I can’t risk having someone find that iPhone who would know how to fix it and then see all the images I took of my own butt purely to educate myself.
3. An eyebrow pencil because I overtweezed my eyebrows like every child of the nineties and am now stuck with what my sister calls balding caterpillars. Weak eyebrows = weak presentation. It’s like having a bad handshake, but worse because it’s right on your face.1
4. Advil, Lexapro, Mucinex, Klonopin, and Tamiflu, for emotional security. If you have any spare pills, I will take those, too, just to up the diversity of my portfolio. To be clear: I rarely take them. It’s a knowledge-is-power situation. Sort of.
5. Business cards. For women as diverse as Ingrid the Muscle Whisperer and Sandra Fluke.
Once I was sitting in a Barnes and Noble café at 9:00 P.M., absorbed in a book about olive oil and waiting for a friend, when a business card appeared on the table. Handwritten, it said, “I just want to go down on you. I ask nothing in return. I will come to wherever you are. Please call me at: 212 555 5555.” Later, dying of morbid curiosity, I pressed *67 and dialed. “Hello?” He sounded like Bruce Vilanch. I could practically sense his dying mother in the background. I ripped the card into tiny pieces, afraid of what might happen if I kept it in my possession. I so badly didn’t want that guy to eat me out that it seemed destined to happen.
6. My building newsletter. The average age of our building’s residents is eighty-five. The first night I slept in my apartment, I awoke at 7:00 A.M. to what can only be described as cackling. From my corner window, I could see three or four elderly women on the roof (enough to constitute a coven) wearing white hand towels on their heads and safari hats atop the hand towels, running through a choreographed routine.
The only neighbor close in age to me is a nine-year-old named Elyse. Hoping to be a writer/baker someday, she took it upon herself to start the first building newsletter. There, she details holiday events, stoop sales, and the status of ongoing elevator repairs. She highlights exceptional neighbors. (UN translators! Opera singers!) Her prose is minimal and breezy, her layout festive. My only critique is that she’s not settling into a regular publication schedule.
Elyse was not responsible for the memo about how to properly dispose of adult diapers that circulated last March.
7. My wallet. I bought my wallet while high off my ass on legal prescription drugs in the Hamburg airport. It is decorated with clowns, cars, and dachshunds and is uniformly beloved by children and Japanese women alike.
* * *
1 Since writing this, I have discovered dyeing my eyebrows, and life is approximately 63 percent better.
I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN there was something wrong with my uterus.
It was just a feeling, really. A sense that things were not quite right down there. The entire system. At a young age, four or five, I would often approach my mother with a complaint of stinging “in my area.” Her cure-all was Vaseline, which she applied with a scientific distance. “Remember to wipe well,” she reminded me. But I swore that wasn’t it. I appreciated that she never used embarrassing pet names when it came to my private parts, unlike some other girls whose mothers say “pinky” or “chachi.” In middle school, as my body prepared to menstruate for the first time, I could feel an electric current, an energy that felt wrong, intersecting lines of pain traveling through my pelvis and lower abdomen.
I got my period for the first time the summer before ninth grade, and that fall I took a dance class with my friend Sophie, whose mother was French and therefore encouraged ballet as exercise. Every Tuesday we would take the train to Park Slope to spend ninety minutes with an instructor named Yvette, whose mane of Flashdance hair, bell-sleeved shirts, and chipper demeanor could not mask how disappointed she was to still be doing this in her late thirties. In a windowless studio with scuffed wooden floors and a crooked Merce Cunningham poster, we learned modern ballet routines, running back and forth to the strains of “Nine to Five” and “Daydream Believer.”