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to change my entire life. I’m going to let myself love something and admit to it. I’ve already started with my son, Leo. Next I could move on to a dog, and then a man and after that an outdoor deck. If I can do this—it will change my life. It won’t change the story or the message boards from that show, because that shit is on the Internet and written in Internet stone.
    I’m not just saying that now to prove to the four people on the message boards that I’m not bad. Well, maybe I am. There’s sometimes something to be learned from those four people. But don’t get all happy about it, Vermontbeerboy09.
    For all the animal lovers reading this, I’d like to add that as I write this there’s a black-and-white bunny named Liza under my couch, a kitty named Arthur nursing on my earlobe, a dog named Georgia at my feet eating its own throw up, and a potbellied pig named Inez soaking in my bathtub. *

Piles of Idiots
    D avid and I are in the car on our way home from a pool party, trapped in a classic 405 traffic jam. It’s the hellish kind that makes people either jump out of their cars and start sucker punching anyone with their window down or turn on the radio and listen to
The Dr. Laura Program.
Dr. Laura is a conservative talk show host who loves to yell at young girls. She’s the Bobby Knight of self-help, a feminist nightmare, and I listen to her every chance I get.
    Today she’s taking a call from a young girl from Arkansas looking for advice about inviting her uncle to her wedding.
    â€œWell, my mom doesn’t want him to come to the wedding because he used some inheritance to buy cocaine, but it’s
my
wedding and—”
    Dr. Laura cuts the caller off. “How old are you?”
    â€œI’m twenty-three but I’m—”
    â€œI’m not having this discussion with you.”
    â€œI know you say not to get married in your twenties but—”
    Dr. Laura cuts her off in voice so calm it gives me a chill. “Ask me the names of the boys I dated in my twenties.”
    â€œI know, but—”
    â€œAsk. Me. The. Names.”
    There’s an inhale that sounds like the girl is about to burst out sobbing. “Uhm. What were the—”
    â€œ
I don’t remember because they didn’t matter because I was in my twenties!
”
    Normally, when Dr. Laura lays into a caller I start banging my tin cup on the bars: “
Get her, Dr. Laura! Cut her!
” But I couldn’t have disagreed more. I’m grateful that I didn’t marry any of the boys my path crossed with way back in the 1990s, but I certainly would never say they didn’t matter.
    David has always maintained that anything that happened to me between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine is either too sexual or too depressing or both. Given a choice, he’d rather not hear about any of it.
    I just went to a pool party in a practical, long-sleeved, fully skirted swimsuit made popular by lesbians in 1910, yet David still has this idea of me as a crazy party girl with my shirt flipped up
Girls Gone Wild
–style. Yes, he’s found things like “anorexic workout” in my browser history, but I’m still at my core an empowerment feminist. In my twenties, I had hairy armpits and believed that stilettos were invented by men to ensure that women would be rendered wounded animals that wouldn’t be able to run away too quickly. I’ve always found David’s image of me as this vapid blond sexpot a little flattering, though, so how good a feminist could I really be?
    There
is
one story that I could see him using to build a case that I was a crazy wild child. If he could get past the part of the story that begins “This one time I had sex with two guys in Amsterdam,” he’d see that my three-way story isn’t an after-hours story. It’s a coming-of-age story. A story about self-discovery and two friends, Emad and