I go to my meeting with the professor I work for, where he tells me I spell badly and I tell him he can check his own voicemail from now on then and he sticks his tongue out at me like a kid.

I try not to be impressed by my ability to reduce this 62 year old tenured faculty member to an 8 year old.

Yet how can I help it?

Verily, I am a comedic genius.

After over a year of trying, today I was made permanent employee of the University of California at Berkeley.

No wonder I am so damn depressed.

Since my depression continues essentially unabated, I have decided to put it to work. From now on, I am Feelin’ Bad For Breast Cancer.

I am looking for sponsors, so if anyone has a dollar or two to spare for this very worthy cause, please drop them my way. Every hour that you pay me to feel bad is another hour of funding for breast cancer research.

Breast cancer is the number 2 killer of women in America, after I think lung cancer. I am not depressed enough to go after lung cancer though. I don’t want to die of breast cancer and I don’t want any of you to die of it either. And hey, even boys can get breast cancer (though obviously that is slightly more rare). So come on, kids. Think of my sad sad tears of sadness and open your wallets to rescue some boobs.

I’ve been dizzy all day despite being empirically unpregnant, in a red and final way. I must be pregnant with a ghost child who will not be shaken by this reasonable and scientific flood. And that is what I will tell people, word for word, as an explanation, when I gain 200 pounds and go around wearing caftans.

I’m so sad, so sad these days. These past three days. I’m not even writing this to you, really. I’m just writing it down to push it away like a plate. It’s one good reason to be pregnant, because a fetus explains so many things. I just want someone massive and quiet to zip my head up inside his coat. I need some kind of wall, despite what Robert Frost says about that.

Somewhere on his little cliff, my ghost fetus is watching the waterfall with his slanty eyes, and craning his head over his white shoulder to look up at where my heart is, and saying “…Mom?”

She sees him through the restaurant window, uncertain through the wavering glass and grime. He finishes eating and pushes away his plate, carefully untucks and folds his napkin, lays down some money and leaves the table.

She skulks inside when the waitress isn’t looking and his plate is hers. She brings it and his glass behind the restaurant and sits them on the metal lid of one of the trash cans to study. Some strings of meat left on the bone. A lot of green beans. Two untouched potato wedges. She unbuttons and rolls up her sleeves, then slides the potato wedges down the insides of her forearms in slick trails. She circles the meat around her ears. She unbuttons her blouse halfway and scoops up a large handful of green beans which she rubs into her chest like camphor; what�s left of his beer gets sprinkled onto her kneecaps. She takes off her shoes and stomps the soles of her feet into his napkin, feeling tiny food particles getting stuck between her toes.

She redresses herself and goes back to their room; removes her clothes and climbs into bed. The scent of food will mingle with the smell of her skin. When he comes home, he will know immediately: like a dog, she has rolled herself in his dinner.

In the beginning, there was the male orgasm. The female orgasm was sort of a fortunate afterthought when it happened.

Then my mom’s generation came, pun intended, and started squawking about equality in all things. Suddenly, we had noticed we were getting the short end of the stick and men were to blame.

Research began. We discovered, or anyway named, the G-spot.

Don’t know where your G-spot is? No problem.

Here is a pamphlet.

Here is a book.

Here is an instructional video tape.

I am teaching a seminar on how to find your own G-spot.

Here are some conveniently shaped toys designed to discover that spot.

Check this out! A map to your G-spot!

In 3-D!

With convenient labels!

For $20, a woman will come to your house and show you where yours is.

Some universities now offer a G-spot major.

Hurray! Success! Now every woman can find and use her G-spot. Sort of like teaching a Girl Scout troop how to use a stud finder. So what’s the problem? We provided you with all kinds of instruction. You STILL haven’t found it? No, you definitely HAVE one. We all have them. Just root around in there. There are special plumbers you can call. Here’s a dowsing wand. Go to town. Take your time. Use mirrors.

Still nothing?

Well, I wash my hands of you. Clitoral orgasms are a thing of the dark ages. A straight woman who doesn’t use that G-spot – look, I don’t know what to do for you at this point. It probably atrophied and fell off. Or maybe you’re some kind of genetic freak. Or more likely just stubborn. And repressed. And Republican. And Catholic. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a self-actualizing seminar to teach about the dangers of meat, eyeshadow and Jane Austen novels.

Happy birthday, Carthage!

Pisces Horoscope

A pleasant outing could get delayed or cancelled due to an event entirely out of your control. Rather than having a fit, dear Pisces, you and your friends could seize the opportunity to do something completely wild and different. You could take in a matinee of the scariest movie in town, for example, or finally try out that Ethiopian restaurant you’ve been hearing so much about. Today brings a perfect opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons.

I pre-ordered season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD.

It’s that kind of life I’m having.

For a while now I have been unhappy about my eyebrows, mainly due to how several of my friends have in recent months expressed in one form or another their intense hatred for the caterpillars quote ruining my face. I look around and see how every woman I know without exception (and even some of the boys) are plucking and shaping away like sheep in shearing season.

Well last night this whole topic was somehow broached over dessert with Em and the Lad. I explained how I feel like a tomboy most of the time, partly due to the fact that I pretty much dress like either a pre-adolescent girl or a teenage boy and don’t have a hairstyle – or a hairdryer – and cannot figure out how eyeliner is different from a sharp stick in the eye. But also partly due to my increasing unease with these enormous, unwieldy eyebrows taking up, I am sure, fully half my face.

Em pointed out that Audrey Hepburn of all people had thick eyebrows though, and while I scoffed at the time, I snuck around Google today and looked her up. Sure enough.

Obviously, Audrey shaped hers as well. And maybe I’ll still go that route. But in the meantime, I am so pissed off when I think about how long I have wasted feeling ashamed of my own face.