Is that… Sarah Palin and a polar bear? God bless America.

It sounded too fun to miss.

Based on the description and video, we were expecting performers with prepared routines and costumes. But that is not what we found. Apparently, when they did this event last year, they had fifteen preregisters competitors. But this year, they had zero.

So unfolded one of the more uncomfortable forty-five minute periods in the history of communal experiences. There were about two hundred of us standing around wondering if the show would even happen while the bearded MC dude begged people to sign up with increasingly desperate rhetoric.

I was having one of those cartoon internal dialogues, but instead of an angel and a devil, I had the two facets of my personality: Moderate and Awesome.

Moderate: “Huh, I hope some people sign up.”
Awesome: “Dude. We have to do this.”
Moderate: “We’re not prepared!”
Awesome: “Look around. Nobody else is either.”
Moderate: “But what about all these people? What will they think?”
Awesome: “What do you think I think they’ll think? ‘Awesome!’ If we do this, we will be legen-Barney-Stinson-dary. And we don’t get this kind of awesome-tunity every day. If we don’t do it…”
Moderate: “We might regret it forever! That’s not very moderate. So really, doing an air sex performance is…”
In unison: “Optimal!”

While this was going on internally, I was browsing through my iPod for inspiration on good air sex songs. This gave me cover when people asked me if I was going to sign up: “well, I’m looking for a song.” I wanted something clever and maybe subversive. I scrolled past Blink-182 and thought, heh, “All The Small Things.” I scrolled past Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch” (“you and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals”) and thought, “too obvious.”

Then I scrolled to OK Go.

A bit of background: TKOG introduced me to OK Go, before the treadmill video, because, although she claims not to be into music at all, she somehow knows lots of cool bands. And there’s this quote that we always laughed about: someone asked the bassist, “You think people are going to have sex to this album?” and he replied, “I fuckin’ hope so.”

Suddenly I knew. It had to be “A Million Ways.” The vocals are perfect. The bass line is perfect. The beats per minute is perfect. It would be “OK Go in the backyard, fucking.”

(Comment fodder: What song would you pick for an air sex performance?)

But I wasn’t going to just dive into it. They way I see it, the fundamental challenge with air sex is that sex is normally a back-and-forth, but unless you’re doing a group act, you’re not going to get anything to play off of. So I would need a game plan. I started thinking about different acts I could pantomime and what parts of the song would fit them. Pretty soon I was jotting down a screenplay on my smartphone, cutting and pasting lines of text to get the order right. Once I saw I was actually going to be able to put something together, that’s when I signed up.

Perfect is the enemy of good, but it is the ally of awesome.

The bearded MC kicked off the performances. His routine was pretty funny: increasingly exaggerated and physically implausible masturbation motions; pantomiming having trouble opening the condom wrapper. Then came the first contestant, and it was announced that I was up second. Second! “Actually, that’s good,” I thought, “I’d rather go early before the bar gets set too high.” I was getting really nervous and trying to mentally rehearse my routine, but from what I saw, the first contestant was amazing. He was tall and well-built, totally charismatic, and he really explored the space of the stage. He was spinning his invisible partner all around and hitting it from crazy angles. At one point tossed her way up in the air, checked his watch, judged the landing like an outfielder, and caught her on his pelvis. The judges teased him but they loved it. Crap. Why couldn’t I have gone first?!

My heart was pounding, but with the crazy lights, I couldn’t see the audience very well, which helped me focus internally. Then the opening guitar chords lanced through the room, the bass started pounding, and I started my routine.

Oh yes, my routine. Here is, verbatim, the choreography I had typed on my phone:

Intro:
Standing still
Bite neck
Kiss

1st verse:
Her going down on me
Makeouts, taking off shirt, watch, glasses

1st chorus:
Face away from crowd on my knees, cunnilingus
Pull her down
Fall to floor

2nd verse:
Feeling her up on floor
Putting on condom

2nd chorus:
Thrusting to 1000000 cruel

Bridge:
Going down on her

3rd chorus:
Her Legs up, thrusting

Outtro: doggy style, collapse

The idea was to go nuts during the choruses, timing the motions to the catchy “one zero zero zero zero zero cruel” backup vocals. I started with some makeouts and feel-ups. Then I undid my belt buckle and had her going down on me in time for the first words of the song: “Sit back.” (Optimal!) In the first chorus, when I gave her oral on my knees, I faced away from the crowd, so my face wouldn’t be waggling against nothing, and so it’d be different than the bridge. The condom went on without a hitch in the second verse, and then, you know it, “one! zero! zero! zero! zero! zero! zero! cruuuelll…”

I basically stuck to my script. But you don’t have to take my word for it. One of the girls I’d just met took some pictures and video. That’s right, THERE IS VIDEO. You all will totally vote for me if I run for office in thirty years, right?

The last note of the song, I collapse on the floor with my head practically hanging over the edge of the stage. The crowd goes wild. I’m legitimately panting. I see the MC coming with the mic. I start to try to pick myself up, but he says, “no, no, it’s cool, man, just stay there,” and plops down on his stomach and elbows alongside me for some post-game analysis.

Then the best part was the commentary from the judges.

Female Judge: “I want to congratulate you. Of all the acts I’ve seen, you were definitely the most task oriented. Other people do acrobatics and stuff, it’s very fantastical, but you just got down to business and gave us some really focused floor-humping.”

Guys, she called me “task oriented.” You know what? I’ll take it. I’ll take it to the bank.

Male Judge: “I just want to check with you about something. At the beginning when you were making out, it looked like you took a big bite out of her cheek?”
Me: “Well, you know, I was thinking, Twilight, vampires are in this year…”
Male Judge: “So then you got on your knees and started going down on her, you started playing with her breasts, that was fine. But then right before you moved from that, it looked like your fingers sorta went for her ass. And I just wanted to say, you know, if you’re going to go into that area, really take your time, give it the attention it deserves.”

I came down from the stage to a sea of adoration. People in the crowd were excited to recognize me! Women I’d never met were telling me I performed really well.

Moderate: “Wow, remember when I thought we’d be embarrassed in front of all of these people?”
Awesome: “Quiet, we’re too busy being me!”

The next day, I was giddy. I kept wanting to call Air, but I knew I should play it cool. Also my abs were a little sore.

The Verdict:
1. Busting out of your shell is awesome. Being fearless is awesome. Being the star is awesome. I wonder if this is what feels like to be Muscles every day.
2. Meticulous planning for the win.
3. Sex is fun. I mean, obviously, but laughing about sex is great. Maybe it’s all the Dan Savage podcasts I’ve been listening to lately, but I’m feeling really sex-positive right now, and it’s wonderful.

Over at Life As A Human, some musings from my first 100 miles of running.

NTKOG Year 2, #8: The kind of masochistic utter slave to hair removal who, not content with using specialty products to rip off fifteen layers of epidermis (and attached hair), gets a little, uh, weird with it.

I am: a sucker for test-driving pretty much every item I see at CVS with that alluring little “As Seen On TV!” sticker. Vidalia Chop Wizard? Couldn’t live without mine. Ove Gloves? Practically have erotic dreams about ‘em.

I am not: surprised, therefore, that I finally gave into the allure of SmoothAway: a revolutionary hair-removal system, consisted of a pad “covered with superfine crystals that buff away unwanted hair, leaving your skin so soft and incredibly smooth”.

The Scene: Sprawled out on my bed, of a Thursday evening, giggling with girly mad scientist glee while opening the SmoothAway box and gazing at — sandpaper. I mean, it’s sandpaper, right? That’s what we’re talking about here.

The contents of the box were unimpressive. A flexible pink plastic mitt with a few ovals of extremely micro-grit sandpaper meant to attach to its face. But it’s no secret that I’m into painful body hair removal — heck if there were a spa in the city that specially trained, like, Argentinian swallows to peck out errant chin and nipple hairs, I’d be there — so pasted the microcrystal paper to the mitt and started a-rubbin’.

$14.99 -- plus $6.99 in Shipping and Handling. Or, uh, eight bucks at CVS.

The thing I like best about As Seen On TV products is, gosh, the thing I like best about most endeavors: that first moment — the lean-in, as it were — when what you’re about to experience exists simultaneously in the realms of fiction and reality. The exhilaration of infinite potential. A phrase that sounds a little too elegant to describe the actual tableau: my too-large bearpaw awkwardly crammed into the flimsy pink mitt, lowering tentatively over my sun-bleached arm hair (the last memento of summer!), rubbing five times clockwise then counter, and then –

Holy frig! It totally, totally worked!

Is it possible? An As Seen On TV product that works as well as advertised?! …well, sort of. Fifteen minutes of fierce rubbing left my arms weirdly (but not unattractively) hairless, and exfoliated within an inch of their lives.

Alas, though, the hair-removal panacea was not to be. Sated with the initial glee of the experiment, moved the mitt to attack the few days’ of accumulated stubble on my legs, and — nothing. Glued a new pad on the board, in case my excessive vim had already dulled the microcrystals and — ouch! More painful nothing. In a fit of grim curiosity, more than anything else, decided to test the packages claims that SmoothAway could quickly and painlessly remove armpit stubble.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever spent upward of ten minutes vigorously rubbing your armpits with an abrasive pad, but if that’s what the marketing specialist qualifies as “quick” and “painless,” then I have a feeling she spends most of her professional life writing copy for ballgag disinfectant. On the bright side, though, the treatment did detract from the appearance of stubble on my pits. ’cause who’s going to notice a little underarm stubble when the whole region is inflamed seventeen shades of fire engine?

Yes, I did test SmoothAway on my bikini line. No, we’re not even going to talk about it.

After spending something like an hour experimenting with my new toy, came to the conclusion that it works by more or less disintegrating hair into a  fine powder with said microcrystals. Also, because of the broad-swath application method, while SmoothAway was decently effective at clearing areas of thin, fine hair, it doesn’t have the same brutally effective nuclear-winter-for-all-body-hair results as more exacting methods, like shaving or waxing.

That said, if your arms make it look like you’re turning into a werewolf, or if you want to, like, thin out peach fuzz on your stomach (is that a thing people do? feminine grooming puzzles me — I honestly have no idea), and dip a baby toe into s&m at the same time, there are worse solutions.

Also, for what its worth, if you ever get the idea: “Hey, if super-fine grit sandpaper works on my super-fine hair, maybe regular hardware store sandpaper will work on thicker hair!”? Don’t — don’t follow that inclination. Unless you want to experience the rare thrill of developing a bruisy rash on the back of your calf.

No comment on how I know that.

The Verdict: Every time an As Seen On TV product doesn’t work as I’d always dreamed, a little sliver of my hope for humanity withers away. At least I still have my Ove Gloves.

What “As Seen On TV” products always send you guiltily reaching for your debit card?

On Secret Society of List Addicts, check out vacations I’d send myself on if I weren’t so broke I actively have to choose between food and laundry. (Hint: I always choose food.)

NTKOG #207: The kind of modern-age guru who – when casting around the darkest corners of her psyche – realizes, hey, there’s an app for that. (And at $1.99, spiritual well-being comes cheap!)

I am: wary of New-Age jiggerypokery, including but not limited to: hypnosis, “self-esteem” and quinoa.

I am not: trying to get competitive, but I might be the most unenlighted person I know. Hey, how many first kisses have you had in Wal-Mart parking lots?!

The Scene: A late evening bus from New York up to Boston, obsessively cataloguing my neurotic thoughts while hungover college students dozed in the seats around me.  In a last-ditch effort for serenity, tried to meditate my twitching, vibrating self into an uneasy physical rest.

Suddenly, a (recyclable, eco-friendly) lightbulb! Hypnosis! Signed into the App Store to check out the free trial contenders: a half-hour program for improved self-esteem (um, no) and another for restful sleep. Jackpot!

Once I downloaded it, wriggled into a comfortable position and plugged in my earbuds as deep as they could go. The closer to your soul the better, right?

After some bird chirping and gong ringing, a disembodied man’s nasal voice started speaking to me from deep within my ear canal. “Close your eyes and relax,” he told me. “Picture yourself outside in your perfect place on a beautiful day.”

All y'all desert rats know what I'm talking about.

As I sunk lower in the bus seat, he directed me to shine an imaginary sun on each of my muscles in turn as they melted into utter relaxation. “The sun warms your face” – slack-jawed, I drooled on myself – “and now it shines on your chest and stomach” – I slowly dripped another six inches lower in the seat – “and now it warms the toes on your left foot. Really feel each little toe relax!

Wait, what?! You mean – you mean the left foot that’s currently crunched at a 160-degree angle to avoid the risk of accidentally making contact with some other dude’s bare foot? You mean that one? Oh, man, Relaxo Towne Express! Choo choo!

I pulled myself up haughtily in the seat and it took fifteen more minutes of deep-ear blathering (something about candles? a sunset might have also been involved?) for him to liquefy me back to a Capri-Sun-commercial-esque puddle of relaxation.

Just as I started to enter the velvety blackness of welcome unconsciousness, Disembodied Voice dropped to a whisper: “You are now completely relaxed. You will leave your unconscious mind open only to my voice. You will absorb every bit of the very important information I am about to tell you.”

On the count of three, you will chant your Visa card number...

Wait. What. The. FUCK?!

My whole body jerked upwards like a marionette, wild-eyed and desperate to protect myself against Disembodied B’s attempted brain-rape.

Disappointingly, he just wanted to tell me lots of stuff about how I’m a good person for trying to take control of my unconsciousness, and how restful sleep is this big noble gift I’m giving myself and how I’m basically a Chivalrous Knight of Olde for vanquishing my fear of unconsciousness with this free trial iPhone app.

I’d already sunk halfway under the chair in front of me, murmuring incoherent agreement (“Yes I am great!”) and was three milliseconds from sleep when, damn it all, the Disembodied Bastard trotted out the old healing sun motif yet and – curses upon you, you nasal bastard! – directed my personal consciousness-sun to wake me up, muscle group by muscle group, and face the day alert and alive.

Dude. Psyche-blocked.

The Verdict: A two-pronged upshot to today’s tale, loves. First: I obviously found some aspects of hypnosis at least somewhat relaxing, and so am interested in re-trying it in a more appropriate physical context. Despite the fact that this experience suggests I won’t be able to turn my conscious mind off for long enough to experience much joy. (What else is new.)

Second: When I started the hypnosis, I felt especially well-dressed for the part, because I was wearing a long, floaty hippie skirt – one of those loose, elastic-waisted numbers. NOT THE CASE. Between all the relaxation puddling and jerking abruptly upward in my seat, after the half-hour course I realized that, without noticing, I’d managed to roll my skirt entirely off my hips. Yes. I was sitting bare-ass on a bus seat.

Cue two full hours of TKOG attempting to subtly stand up enough to readjust the skirt without a) flashing the couple behind her, or b) waking the girl next to her. Both of which I ultimately did. No fewer than four times.

Yeah, maybe I should have bought that self-esteem hypnosis course after all.

NTKOG #190: The kind of girl who, skipping any preliminary song and dance, strides into a random restaurant, storms the customers-only restroom, and, y’know, does what she came there to do?

I am: so barely resisting a pun about squatters’ rights.

I am not: physically capable of using the restroom in any facility without a ten-minute production that begins with explaining that I just need to wash my hands, ends with apologizing profusely to any available staff members, and requires several pep talks in between.

The Scene: The Burger King along my bus route, heading home from a semi-productive afternoon in Cambridge. Although my home is only a ten-minute stroll away, felt the first yearnings of a vortex-ripping pee. Generally, I have no problem using public restrooms — it’s how I use them that’s the problem.

As Co-Worker and The Ex will attest, any simple request on my part (to use a restroom, say, or bum a stick of gum) generally begins with a brief history of the Mongol Empire and ends with a spirited sestina on the finer points of socialism. I have a hard time getting to the friggin’ point, is what I’m aiming at here.

Moreover, I’m not convinced this is a terrible personality trait. After all, no one likes to be used. Surely the Burger King employees who have to clean said restroom would appreciate at least proper thanks from the dudes who use it? NONETHELESS. Dashed through the empty restaurant, under the gaze of two bored employees. Almost in the clear when, mere feet from the door, the gentleman behind the counter called: “Welcome to Burger King.”

Threw the door open like a shield and barricaded myself inside. Mortification clenched my stomach like an icy fist. After a few moments, its fingers unfurled, I turned to face the stall and — promptly vomited. For like fifteen minutes straight.

Uh, guys? Do you believe in karma?

The Verdict: The song and dance is who I am. DON’T TRY TO CHANGE ME, BABY.

Also: No, turns out the attack wasn’t strictly karma. I was felled with a food poisoning that shall be rated Mature, for violent hallucinations, moderate gore and extreme profanity. I was also so sleep-deprived at one point that I left a glass tumbler on the floor. Which I subsequently stomped on, like Godzilla demolishing a mid-level Tokyo high-rise. It was kind of fun at first — I raised my arms and bellowed wildly, destroyer of worlds, hazard to glassware. But then I yanked a big shard out of my foot and spent twenty minutes fluming blood all over my fresh laundry. Which actually kind of takes me back to my karma theory.

NTKOG #176: The kind of impulsive total masochist who — facing the perfectly normal issue of pubic hair grooming — acts on the unthinkable impulse.

I am: often seized with irrational desires to do things that are somewhere between SUPER-APOCALYPTIC (jumping into subway tracks) or merely very, very bad ideas (huh, what does paint taste like?).

I am not: sure which category this fits in.

The Scene: My bathtub, where usually only good decisions are made. After an extremely lackluster Wednesday, headed home early from writing to take a marathon soak with a glass of Beaujolais. Confessional: once I add even a drop of wine, my bathtime becomes a little surreal. Enter TKOG, singing Mountain Goats, staining the mounds of bubbles pink with Beauj, creating a whole sudsy universe. This time, though, I was arrested by the site of my catastrophic recent Brazilian, where hair again grew lush and unencumbered, with no consideration to the bone-melting pains I took to remove it.

Considering I promised y’all a vajazzling post, this simply wouldn’t do. Brainstormed a few methods of hair removal. Trusty ol’ razor (trusted primarily to incite ingrown-hairs); Nair (with its chemical smell and insidious capability to fire-ravage sensitive skin); self wax kit (and run the risk of spending the rest of my life with a strip of wax glued to my nethers). Then I was seized with a weird urge that’s been with me since high school and that, for once, I allowed myself to act on. I chose the unthinkable option.

I plucked.

Okay, I’m going stop for a moment while you grab a pair of tweezers and pluck one of your pubic hairs. Now try that again roughly ten thousand times, over the course of two hours, two listens to Tallahassee, and the rest of a bottle of Beauj.

I don’t really think I need to tell you how painful this was. Though midway through, I remembered the time I accidentally bit out one of a guy’s pubic hairs. He had curled up into a protective ball and banished me from the room — something I thought was a bit of a friggin’ over-reaction at the time. A quarter of the way in, I wanted to call him and apologize. By the time I got to halfway through, realized that on the strength of that episode alone, he’d probably never want to hear my voice again.

But I finished what I started, and frig it if my skin isn’t mega-smooth. In fact, because I could take my time and control the pain, I actually found this more pleasant (though significantly more time consuming) than getting a Brazilian. Which is probably only a sign that I should get plastered before my next waxing session.

The Verdict: Dude, you know what I’m afraid of now?

NOTHING.

NTKOG #168: The kind of lushed-up beauty queen who — not content with pedestrian water — bathes herself in the brew of the gods. Or Newcastle. Whichever’s cheaper.

I am: definitely on the dirty hippie side. I can take nary a step without granola crunching under my be-sandaled feet.

I am not,: however, especially convinced that any beauty products work better than plain ol’ evil chemicals.

The Verdict: The last morning of the aquapocalypse, staring with grim disbelief at my lank, frizzy locks. Some combination of tentative showering (what with the whole e. coli scare) and unseasonable humidity had transformed my usually lovely hair into a prop from a Poison video, and it was time to demand change.

Since I was already on a personal quest to replace all of my (potentially tainted) water with booze, cracked open a bottle of Newcastle before my morning shower. The hiss of carbonation reminded me of a tip I’d read in TeenBeat back in the late ’90s: Catherine Zeta-Jones (then an unknown Welsh hottie) maintained her glossy dark mane by rinsing it with a weekly six-pack of brew.

Sounds reasonable to me. Popped in the shower, went through my normal routine, then slowly decanted about ten ounces of beer onto my hair, pausing only to massage it into the roots.

Let me clarify the thought process I’m about to reveal by fully admitting that my mind was in a highly non-functional state. Seven in the morning on a Tuesday, sipping a beer in my bathroom and thinking about TeenBeat magazine — my brain-dead alibi is airtight, right?

So as I massaged the foaming brew into my follicles, two overwhelming observations. First:  holy sweet frig, that mess burned. Booze flooded my eyes and shot up my nostrils in immense quantity. And y’all moralizers can call alcohol a drug all you want, but, dude, clearly not a real one as it is not. made. for. snorting.

Second: glancing at the puddle of beer pooling around my ankles, was shocked at how much it looked as though I’d urinated not just prodigiously but with great fluency and creative zeal. For some reason, my morning brain-paralysis found this situation impossible to parse. Worse, I felt cheated. We’re on the express train to TMI Towne here when I admit that there are few things on this earth I love as much as that first morning pee. Your kidneys have just buckled down for an uninterrupted eight-hour filtration jam, bladder full and tender like a pimple on the verge of popping and — bam, lurid hue, full of discarded nutrients. Pee so thriving with life that if you did it outside on the grass, a tree would immediately sprout up in a friggin’ Narnia-style tableau. Truly, it’s one of the few universal joys, yet there I stood, ale pickling my eyeballs, staring at what looked like an award-winning morning pee, yet feeling no release or sense of accomplishment.

So. That’s how my Tuesday started. Twenty minute self-monologue about peeing, following by imagining hot late-’90s Catherine Zeta-Jones standing in a puddle of her own ersatz urine, before finally rolling into work twenty minutes late, reeking like a hobo, with hair so dry and frizzy I had to wear it in a dang ponytail. Yes I win at everything forever.

The Verdict: In a heroic effort to fully de-tangent, my honest review of beer-rinsing your hair: sounds great in theory, but only made my hair worse than before by making me smell like happy hour while doing nothing to tame my frizz. Not a hint o’ gloss in sight. Though, to be fair, attempting to get up a good gloss in very curly hair is by and large a fool’s errand, so if any blown-straight brunettes want to attempt this, they might have a happier resolution than I. Or at least make fewer allusions to allegorical Christian literature as a means of expressing their searingly intense thoughts about morning pee.

NTKOG #158: The kind of semi-masochistic slave to grooming trends who thinks nothing of stripping down and letting a stranger slather her vulva with hot wax, then rip it out.

I am: a functional groomer, not an aesthetic one.

I am not: afraid of pain. Just a week ago, I was bleeding prolifically from the throat, both nostrils and left eye and barely even paused to tweet about it.

The Scene: A little salon in Cambridge with wildly positive reviews for their (decently priced) Brazilian forays. I popped in on Marathon Monday to schedule an appointment, and was told the lead waxer could see me in half an hour — was that okay?

Uh, for some values of okay. Went outside to phone Mom with my last will and testament, then engaged in an impromptu salon on the history of pubic grooming. (“What the heck is a landing strip?  Are there little guys with flags showing the penis where to insert?” Uh, not quite, mom. Or else my landing strip would be a pubic-hair arrow pointing to some non-celibate chick’s vagina.)  Then returned to the waiting room, through which was piped that New Age-y flute-and-gong music — unpunctuated, I noted, with screams. So that’s good. After a while, my waxer stepped out and introduced herself, then demanded I strip below the waist.

I like a person who knows how to get down to business.

"Why, what a charming studio! Oh please DO massage steaming wax into my genitals!"

I explained that this was my first foray into s&m grooming, and she frowned with a glimmer of satisfaction: “I’m not going to lie to you. This will hurt. But no one has died from it yet.” I chuckled confidently while she smeared the first layer of (really warm!) wax onto the top of my pubic triangle, then ventured onto the scary don’t-shave-here place.

After a minute or so, she scraped up the edge of the wax, then pulled it up and — look, guys, I consider myself a Dudely Dude Who Can Handle Shit, so please understand it pains me beyond words to admit — I SCREAMED. This was no girlish shriek or beleaguered grunt. I yowled with the deranged desperation of a dreamer trying to wrench his body from sleep. Oh sweet goddamn mercy how I screamed.

My waxer eyed me disapprovingly — “I cannot wax if you jump like that” — then continued without a pause, ripping, ripping, ripping. After what felt like ages, I estimated we were about halfway done and begged her to stop for a moment so I could see the results. Electric pink and bumpy, only one-eighth of my skin was finished.

You don’t realize how much real estate you have down there until someone is ripping out the weeds inch by inch.

“Do you want me to stop?” the waxer sighed unsympathetically. Yes! Yes! Obviously yes! But instead, I asked if she wouldn’t mind grabbing my book out of my bag so I could focus on something other than the pain. And while reading significantly helped, I’ve never felt my intellectual/physical divide quite so literally: laying on a table and reading Barthelme while I paid a woman to rip out my pubic hair with steaming wax. I would have laughed about it if I weren’t so busy still friggin’ screaming.

The worst part of it — I mean, other than the raw eyelash-curling pain of the thing — was its relentlessness. Even when I wasn’t writhing in pain, the knowledge that at any moment the ripping would recommence was soul-crushing. It felt as though the cycling of smearing and ripping and screaming would continue in perpetuity, long after my body had perished and the stars had grown cold. It was grim, dudes.

Finally, after forty-five (FORTY-FIVE!) minutes, she threw away the last hair-studded strip of orange wax and gently massaged a palmful of baby powder into my shrieking skin. “Now,” she smiled, “Doesn’t that feel better?” Uh, I guess. But not as great as it’s going to feel when I never do this again.

The Verdict: So technically the skin is baby smooth. But there are lots of smooth things in this crazy world — peaches, baby cheeks, politicians’ lies — so why go to such trouble and expense to fire-ravage my pubic foliage?

I don’t understand our culture’s obsessive hatred of pubic hair in the first place. Okay, so you occasionally have to pick it out of your teeth, and a little utilitarian trimming never hurt anybody, but to all the fervent pubic hair haters out there, I shake my trembling fist. You know who had pubic hair? EVERYBODY GREAT EVER. Andrew Jackson had pubic hair. Harriet Tubman had pubic hair. Jesus Christ — lord and savior or historical figure, your pick — had pubic hair, by gum, and you know who else is going to have pubic hair?! This guy! Starting in about six weeks, anyway.

NTKOG #145: The kind of shameless body-confidence zealot who thinks nothing of stripping down, oiling up, and circumnavigating the globe in naked lunges.

I am: one of the nakedest people I know, when I have my druthers.

I am not: around people during any of that time. Add one pair of eyes to the mix and you’ll find TKOG swaddled up like a Seventh-day Adventist.

The Scene: Healthworks, my erstwhile gym, a tony all-women’s affair a few blocks from my house. Because of the warm, accepting estrovironment, locker-room etiquette in the gym has a crunchy co-op feel to it. It’s not unusual to see two naked women striking up a warm acquaintanceship while lotioning. Half the ladies in the place saunter nude to the shower, towels slung carelessly over one shoulder. And it is a well known fact that a single stitch of clothing compromises the integrity of your post-work-out stretches.

A set of speakers in the ceiling pipes in nonstop classical music — rippling piano arpeggios, sprightly flute solos — that, combined with the frolicking naked women, creates an atmosphere not unlike a deleted nymph scene from Fantasia.

Totally accurate depiction of a typical woman styling her hair at my gym. Ignoring the fact that I'm on crack and thought there were nymphs instead of lady centaurs in Fantasia.

I, however, have never been party to the nudity. Cue TKOG, hunched by her locker, dressing out fast and traumatized like sixth-grade gym, hands scurrying around mostly under my clothes to remove offending undergarments. Furtive and neurotic, I am the unwelcome oboe squawp in the tranquil symphony of feminine flesh.

Not anymore, guys. NOT ANYMORE.

Last time I was at the gym (longer ago than I’d care to admit), when I caught myself middle-schooling up the back of my shirt to remove my bra, forced myself to rip the shirt over my head. As I stripped, the nymphly background music took on a farcical silent film air. My nakedness was running a Keystone Cops chase after my dignity and closing in fast. A few breathless seconds later, and there I was. Starkers.

Redressed in a flash, worked out hard, then vowed to enjoy my après-workout nakedness in leisure. After I wadded up my drenched clothes in my bag, stood there for a few moments, streaming sweat under the air conditioning, before padding nakedly to the shower. Walking back, nakedly. Lotioning, nakedly. Hell, I even stretched a little.

And you know what? Nobody judged me. Nobody even noticed.

The Verdict: Regardless of what Bowling For Soup says, high school does end, dude. In fact — it’s friggin’ over. People aren’t staring through your clothes, trying to score points off of what they see under there. If anybody has something to gain from ranking your imperfections, it sure as hell isn’t some random old lady five lockers down. Everything is going to be okay.

Good riddance, undressing paranoia. Now I can save my neuroses for things that really matter. Like whether people notice when I accidentally-on-purpose take the slightly larger chocolate chip cookie.

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You guys! It’s the last-ever TMI Thursday! The end of an era. Guess now you’ll never know what days of the week to fear random bodily fluid gross-outs on my blog.

Mom, please don’t read this. I’m serious. Don’t read it. Don’t read it. Everyone else, just blame LiLu and her amazing TMI Thursdays.

NTKOG #139: The ultimate Woo Girl. I mean, we’re talking MySpace picture-takin’, pink-liqueur-swillin’, Cancun-on-spring-breakin’ “holy frig someone swab out this girl’s throat and SEND THE PETRI DISH TO THE SMITHSONIAN” Woo Girl.

I am: to the archetypal sorority girl as Valtrex is to the archetypal sorority girl’s herpes. Natural enemies, dudes.

I am not: sure I should be sharing the following story with the internet. Helloooooooo, prospective employers slash bedfellows!

The Scene:  A sleazy little Barcelonan tourist trap named Chupitos. The word “chupito” is diminutive form of the word “chupa” which means — if I’m correctly recalling the “verbs you’ll subsequently use to make sexual innuendo” unit of Honors Spanish II — “suck,” and the whole mess comes together to mean “shots.”

Oh, and shots there were aplenty. The bar serves over 300 of the little bastards for a mere two Euro apiece. Each comes with its own little gimmick. Flaming shots, bob-in-whipped-cream shots, shots that are boiled and from which you drink only the alcoholic vapor, one fantastic shot in which a plastic drinking straw is blown into a bubble that you must teabag until your mouth (and hair) are flooded with sticky-sweet banana liqueur — all these shots are considered good wholesome fun, of course. There is only one shot the name of which is whispered in horror by all: The Lewinsky.

THE LEWINSKY.

Kiss-Ducker had seen the spectacle before, and explained it to me. Basically, a large dildo is strapped over a can of beer and covered in whipped cream. The victim is blindfolded by the bartender and, after a little build-up, has to attack the creamed-up sex toy and shotgun the beer.

Guys, I’m going to let the sheer disgustingness sink in with you for a minute. Even the threat of mixing beer and whipped cream would be enough to turn off the normal human — let alone the fact that it’s ejaculated from a communal dildo. It’s unsanitary. It’s disgusting. It’s unthinkable.

Oh yeah. I was all over that shiz like — well, I mean, consider the source material and write your own joke. (Seriously, Mom, STOP READING.) Unfortunately, before I could ask Kiss-Ducker to order the shot to “surprise me with,” a pair of flamboyant midwestern dudes shrieked out their own order for a Lewinsky. The bar staff mumbled dramatically for twenty minutes (“un hombre?!“) before they served him his heart’s desire:

Um, can we please elect a first female president who gets her own sex scandal so we can have equal-opportunity grody novelty bar shots?!

“Wait a minute!” I shrieked to Kiss-Ducker. “That’s what I was nervous about?! Shit, I could whistle Battle Hymn of the Republic with that in my mouth.”

It was a carefree, cocky TKOG who, twenty minutes later, feigned meekness as the bartender blindfolded her. (“It’s my birthday!” I explained halfheartedly to a group of American sororstitutes who’d overheard Kiss-Ducker’s order. “My friend told me she got me a special shot. I wonder what it is?!”) I mean, okay, the hygiene isn’t fantastic, but whatever, guys. I got this.

The weight of the whole bar’s attention was like a wet wool coat on my skin. Oiled-Up Bartender spun me so my back was to the bar, then leaned his lips all the way into my right ear. You. Are Monica Lewinsky. I am President Bill Clinton. You have concerns about your career… Then he spun me around and pushed down my lips to meet:

See that nose on the right-hand side? Yeah, that's mine.

You guys, I’m not going to harp, but let me just say that the fact the dildo is BIGGER THAN THE BARTENDER’S HEAD is no trick of perspective. It was wider than anything I’ve ever considered. Like, go ahead and touch the tip of your middle finger to your thumb. Now move it out an inch. Now another inch. Haha, no, I’m just fuckin’ making conversation, kids – go ahead and curl up your hand into a fist and punch the back of your throat like fifteen times. Yeah. That’s what we’re talking about.

The crowd laughed at first, but as the shot went on (and on and on and on), the chuckles faded to nervous titters to the heavy silence of a group, en masse, pointedly ignoring the grotesque. Finally, by a small miracle, the beer can was empty and I could flee upstairs to clear beer off of every square inch of my friggin’ torso. And thus ends the tale of the Lewinsky.

Except not really. For the next two days, I could barely swallow. At first I assumed it was some sort of communal dildo fungal throat disease. Then, in a moment of exasperation, I explored the back of my throat with my fingers and realized that the dildo had punched a hole through the back of my damn throat. The soft skin behind my uvula felt and looked like the gapped seam of a pillowcase around a hole that stuffing’s coming out of.

Oh, and now I probably have esophageal herpes. Woooooooooooooo!

The Verdict: Yeah, I — I don’t know why I thought this would be funny to do. Turns out that just because something is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and sort of NC-17-ily cinematic doesn’t mean you ought to do it.

Also, if some of you noticed the date today and halfway through this entry started smirking to yourself, I see what’s going on here — she’s just trying to fool us into believing that she’s tasteless enough to do something this horrific!, then, uh, fooled you into thinking I was joking?

NTKOG #134: The kind of free-wheeling jetsetter who is so unfazed by travel that she considers it not only necessary but natural to drop trou and — eek! — pee while on a voyage.

I am: that chick whom no one ever sees entering or exiting a restroom. True story: for the first nine months of our relationship, The Ex never saw a shred of evidence that I experienced normal bladder function. He found it disconcerting.

I am not: actually a big germophobe about it, but regardless of all my other feelings about peeing in public, I’ve always been distressed by the idea of using the restroom on any form of transportation. Where does it go after you flush?!

The Scene: On the Amtrak before my Barcelona adventure, approximately 30 oz. of Diet Coke out of Boston and half an hour from Penn Station. The pressure on my bladder was medium-urgent, like the urgency to confess to a former lover that you’ve kept their Pandora log-in information and sometimes listen to their custom stations (sorry, The Ex, but I’m never logging out). In any normal circumstance, I would have waited for the anonymous crush of Penn Station to slip into a public restroom stall, far away from the eyes of my fellow travelers who, by this point, had come to know me by my clothes and throat-clearing and incessant typing.

As I walked to the front, my lack of train-legs caused me to accidentally hip-check a few people in aisle seats. When I stopped to apologize to a mid-20s bottle blonde whose bottled Frappucino I’d jostled, the train threw me elbow-first into her forehead. Yeah, TKOG, unobtrusive restroom visit. Mortified, I ran into the stall and locked the door as quickly as possible. Very quickly. Perhaps … too quickly?

TMI disclosure: because I’d left myself a totally prudent seven minutes to pack for the ten-day trip, when I’d dressed for the day, I threw on my go-to swingy knee-length skirt and a massive pair of granny panties. I mean, we’re talking old-school. The elastic waist basically came up to the bottom of my bra. So before I could sit to, y’know, expurgate, I had to loose myself from the underwear of doom.

In a moment of sheer silliness, I caught the hem of the skirt in my teeth to hold it away while I found the elastic of the underwear, then began the process of unsheathing myself. Right as I’d wriggled the underwear down to my knees…

CLICK. TTTTSSSSSSHH. SLAM.

The door slid the entire  way open, revealing my debauched disrobing cancan to the first eight rows of the car. Bitchface nestled her Frappucino between her knees and — god, I wish I were exaggerating — caught my eye before slow-clapping.

Yeah, this bore exactly zero similarity to my own accidental flashing. Just thought the picture was cute.

Did what I went there to do and made a monumental effort to slink back to my seat without making eye contact with anybody. It was an uphill battle, though. Don’t think I didn’t consider hiding out in the restroom until we got to New York. Or maybe flushing myself down said toilet and just walking the rest of the way…

The Verdict: Seriously, considering my myriad issues with public restrooms, it might be time for me to consider a potty-training refresher course. Or charm school. Or just not telling the internet about my not-infrequent restroom failings.

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TMI Thursday! Other restroom stories abound! Offer some praise to the goddess LiLu for bringing this great weekly festival into our lives!