The Remedy

Okay, I've swapped my tunic for a wrap cardigan.

Last time I was home, I grabbed some old home movies, thinking they might be fun to show Slim.

Well, the first one we screened featured me, at 3, throwing my legs over my head and "showing the camera my vagina!"

"Do you remember what we talked about yesterday?" my mother asks from off-camera. "How if you're riding in your stroller, and not wearing underpants, you need to keep your legs together?"

"Sades, enough with the vagina," says my dad.

"Harry, put her underpants on her," says my mother.

Last night, went with some gals for pizza at Lucali. Midway through, fielded a call from a friend wondering whether to break off a fling pre-or-post dinner. Points in favor of both; he decided to do it pre-prandially and weather the awkwardness of the meal, in the interests of honesty. Poor everyone. These details can be mined for absurdity, but everything under the sun can just as easily be tragic. See: any short-story collection written in the past ten years.

Then I went to go stay at Slim's house, which was a major concession as I have a long history of hating sleepovers and faking migraines to get out of them. (See: five fourth-grade slumber parties.) He has this immense room with 12-foot ceilings which sort of made me feel insignificant and afraid; plus a bunch of roommates. Maybe it's the fact that in my house growing up people were always stirring and shaking and yelling, but I relish the luxury of living alone, undisturbed by other people's rumblings and the sputter of the burner and the creak of the pipes and other guilt-inducing signs of wakefulness.

We used to spend summers with my granparents in California. There was, in that house, an unspoken competition to get less sleep than anyone else; as a result, no one went to sleep before three, or got up after five. I daresay everyone felt obscurely virtuous, but for an outsider, the experience was tantamount to a sleep-deprivation experiment. Last night reminded me of it.

Then when I awoke (S goes to work at six these days) I was confronted by a row of Georgia O'Keefe prints.

Seriously: enough with the vagina.