This morning, I was cruising around on Facebook looking at photos that friends had posted, and found myself sighing over pictures of Diane. Diane and I were on exchange in Taiwan together, and she was a model before, but things really seem to be taking off for her now; it’s picture after picture of ‘this is me in a tv commercial in India’, ‘this is me on three magazine covers in China’, ‘this is me on a photoshoot in ____(exotic location here)___’ and she always looks so gorgeous and elegant and put together that it makes me feel a little wistful and sad, and yes, a wee bit jealous that I have never photographed well and will never experience her exciting, jet-setting lifestyle .

Then, I went to Starbucks to pick up coffee for the office, and as I was walking back to the car with my hands full, my pants fell down.

I should stop dreaming after ‘elegant’ and settle on ‘not humiliating myself in front of crowds of people’.

This last weekend, my parents both asked what I would like for Cthulhumas–all of a sudden, I’m thinking belts are a good idea.

Christ.

On Saturday, I met up with Carrie for some much-needed girl time–we ended up going out for breakfast at Peso’s, where we were promptly each served a plate of blue corn pancakes approximately the size of Mount Everest. Tiny sherpas leading goats burdened with butter bravely scaled the sides, intent on spreading their message of milkfat deliciousness across the land. Skeletal, unhappy harpies screeched their mantra of the benefits of a low-fat diet from the peaks, heaving pine nut boulders over the sides. Men train their whole lives to ingest something this mighty, so what chance did we stand, sleepy and slightly buzzed as we were? I tell you true, a mighty battle was waged, but ultimately Pancake Mountain prevailed.

No sooner had we admitted defeat than a sloshed gentleman named Nate perched on a barstool next to us and told us that he wouldn’t show us his breasts immediately because he wasn’t easy, but perhaps over time we’d get lucky. As you can see, luck is merely a matter of perspective.

He then proceeded to ask us how thoroughly we tended to shave ourselves before a big date, informed us that he shaves everything in the boxer-brief zone, and intimated that he thinks the girl sitting on the other side of him was a total bitch. Every other sentence was “I just hate her” because she’s one of those girls with a stick jammed so far up her ass that she actually has to wedge her pancakes AROUND the stick in her esophagus. Nate, for all of his drunken, slurring ramblings, was quite entertaining, though he never did end up showing us his breasts.

After breakfast, we hopped into massage-y chairs and got Halloween pedicures while the little asian ladies presumably made fun of us–mine made shaving gestures at my leg and giggled maniacally, and I was mortified–did I miss a spot? Am I legally required to move farther north, strip naked, and live as a Yeti? When she turned away, I quickly checked my leg; smooth and hairless, like a mexican rat dog. So I’m not quite sure what she was laughing about–all I know is that I’m safe from being Mrs. Eegah for a while yet. AND I’ve got dark purple toenails with tiny glitter spiders on them; I can put up with a little mortification for cute feet. Only a little, though.

After our pedicures, Carrie and I went to the costume shop in our super-fancy foam flip-flops to break her cycle of picking out a costume on the day of the event she’s attending–when you do that, you’re stuck with a selection of the crap that no one ELSE wanted.

I still think it’s funny that the same costumes we sold in the porn store are sold by mainstream stores as Halloween costumes–there’s a reason that skirt only hangs an inch below your vagina! However, it stopped being as funny when, while I was waiting for Carrie to try on and model one of her selections, a group of young teenage girls all showed up in line holding fuck-shop costumes. One of them mentioned “Oh my god, this is nothing like what I wore last year, in seventh grade.” She had a firefighter costume that was essentially a low-cut top, high-cut leg swim suit with a hat. I wanted to shake her and say “Honey, no. HONEY, NO.” At fourteen, you’re far too young to be selling yourself as a sex object. This next sentence may make me sound older than I am, but seriously, when did kids stop being kids? She disappeared into a booth to try it on, and the girl working at the shop and I exchanged meaningful looks–she’d previously informed me that (at eighteen) she couldn’t believe all of the young girls that were coming up to her with very short, low-cut costumes, and marveled that their parents would allow them to leave the house looking that way.

Now, I’ve always believed in the transformative power of the costume; when I was Firefighter Costume’s age, there was nothing I wanted to be for Halloween more than Elvira–she was too cool for school, and I was not a very popular kid–glasses, braces, short, unruly hair, mom still had dominant control over my wardrobe, and it didn’t help that I was a total teacher’s pet–it was not an easy road I traveled. But if I could just borrow some Elvira mojo for the Halloween Dance, people would finally see how cool *I* could be. My mom laid down the law–Elvira’s dress was unacceptable, but I could wear a regular witch costume in its place if I was dead set on being her.

And I was. With the black dress, long black wig, Elvira makeup, and a bra stuffed out so far it actually poked into another dimension, I believed myself transformed. Disguised. I shut myself in the bathroom at home and pretended that my young teen crush, Tyler McAllister, wouldn’t recognize me and would ask me to dance, and then we would fall in love forever and ever. I pressed up against the bathroom wall, and looked at myself in the mirror, and I could picture it all so clearly. Of course, what actually happened is that everyone still recognized me, I didn’t get asked to dance by anyone, much less my teenage heartthrob, and I got a rash on my chest from all of the scratchy paper towels stuffed inside my top. What was the point of this story again? …I like stories.

Oh yes, the point is, even in my delusion, I never transformed myself into a WHORE as an underage girl. Also, that it’s funny that I can’t remember a lot of the details of the most wonderful things that happen to me unless I write them down or save mementos of the day, but even though no one caught me pretending to dance with Tyler in the bathroom, I can remember it clear as day; my mind hangs onto things that I do that I know for a fact I’ll be embarrassed about later. MY OWN BRAIN IS AGAINST ME.