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woman’s ponytail holder beside your bed. It was there, next to a chewed-up piece of pink gum the size and shape of a cat’s butthole.
    When you see an unfamiliar hairband in your bedroom, it’s like you can see your entire life getting small enough to fit into that little elastic loop, like the conclusion of an old-time movie where the final moment is slowly irised out by blackness until it disappears.
    Shaking, I decided it was time to get out of there. I was gathering the last of my clothes into a garbage bag when something on the floor caught my eye. There, upside down on the rug, was my copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . I reached to pick it up and felt something sticky and wet on my hand. I turned the book over and noticed some sort of clear goo spread across the picture of the sad lady in the purple shirt. I was confused until I noticed the culprit just a few inches away on the floor, small enough that I hadn’t seen it when I walked in: a little bottle of Astroglide lubricant that had tipped over and oozed out onto my book.
    My friends and I have debated the meaning of this. What we didn’t debate, because it truly isn’t debatable, is that finding your copy of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love covered in your ex-boyfriend’s lube is a perfect poem of an image, a hateful little sonnet composed by the universe to memorialize the end of your relationship.
    I’m still on the fence about lunch. But after years of reflection, I’m sure of one thing: I should have smeared the cakes.

Bar Method and the Secrets of Beautiful Women
    W hen I was a teenager, I was so worried about my flat chest that I didn’t think at all about my butt. Of all the mistakes I’ve made in my life, this may have been the stupidest. In fairness, it was the ’80s, and boobs, like cocaine, reigned supreme. How was I to know that one day, coke would be replaced with molly, and boobs would be overshadowed by butts?
    I didn’t just neglect thinking about my butt; I was completely unaware that butts were on anyone’s radar. In my head, God had put our butts in the back for a reason: mainly, because we weren’t supposed to worry about them. Little did I know, our butts were in the back so men could talk about them without us knowing, until it was too late and we’d already spent our whole lives eating balls of mozzarella as if they were apples.
    Large breasts were the goal, and when I had an unexpected Hail Mary boob growth spurt at the ripe old age of twenty-one, I relaxed; I believed I now had all the equipment I needed to be considered Desirable TM . Unfortunately, the same year that I finally grew breasts (pretty good ones, too, if I can own that for a moment), Out of Sight was released, and Jennifer Lopez became a superstar. It was the cultural tipping point for butts. Oh, the irony. I suddenly realized that men would be, or—holy fuck—had been concerned about butts for years. I found myself turning around in front of a three-way mirror, really trying to see my own ass for the first time. It filled all three of the mirrors.
    I have a softish, curvy, 1970s Jewish mom body. I’m in my late thirties (the very latest ones), and my butt is kind of a vague trapezoid. I know Gwyneth Paltrow has said her butt is her least favorite body part also, but I think we all know she is impossibly full of shit, even though I have both of her cookbooks and buy every magazine she’s on the cover of and think of her all the time and sometimes think of her right before I go to sleep.
    Nevertheless, I wasn’t terribly concerned, because my boobs still seemed to work a kind of magic on men. Then I met Mike, and although I suppose you could say that overall I worked more magic on him than I’ve ever worked on anyone, since he actually wanted to marry me, I never felt that any of it was particularly boob-related. I never got the sense he was a boob guy. He just didn’t seem as enthused about my breasts as the