• girl talk

Girl Talk: Love Lessons That Last A Lifetime

That video I posted earlier this morning of the 4 year-old girl who was heartbroken to be moving away from the boy (teacher, I think?) she was so in love with kind of hit home for me. Like our young heroine, I, too, moved to Japan at a tender age, leaving behind a boy I was pretty in love with. I lived on a Navy base in Korea at the time and Young was a little Korean boy whose dad was our base doctor, if I remember right. Anyway, I came across his photo when I was home for the holidays and showing my husband a bunch of old family photo albums. In the picture, I’ve just finished a performance of a community theater production of “The Wizard of Oz” and I’m dressed in a little green munchkin costume with rosy cheeks and my red hair pulled back into two pigtails. I’m holding a red carnation, which was probably a gift from Young, who is standing next to me dressed in blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt, with a little dirt smudge on his face. The two of us are looking at the camera ever-so-shyly, like too-forward a glance or too-bright a flash might make our young love dissipate in a cloud of smoke. It was only a few months later that Young did what, to this day — with the exception of my husband’s proposal to me — remains the single most romantic gesture anyone has ever made toward me. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: My First Pole Dancing Class

I am not sexy.

That could be the takeaway if you’d been a fly on the pole — er, the wall — at my first pole dancing class this weekend. There are a great many talents I have in this world. But strutting sexy and swirling around a pole are not some of those gifts. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: I Don’t Need To Be A Bitch

Recently, I put myself in a tangle that I will be the first to admit was stupid: I took someone’s bait when I just should have kept my head down and my mouth shut. And this chafed like a subcutaneous rash. Ugh … you did it again! You need to have more control over yourself!

I sat with this for a few days, wondering why I keep letting myself keep doing this. One of the things I admire about my boyfriend is when emotions are running high, he can just check out — deescalating a situation like a good police officer. Me? I take that bait. I escalate. And you know what? It wasn’t worth engaging in. The woman who was baiting me was just being a bully. She was trying to intimidate me and demarcate lines of power, which pissed me off. I’m not keen on authority that I don’t respect.

Then something brilliant occurred to me last night: I can’t control petty behavior and I can’t control what other people’s defense mechanisms are, but I can change the way I see situations like this. And the way I see it now is I don’t need to be a bitch to get what I want. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: One-Nighters Are Not For Me

I have had my share of one-night stands. In fact, a significant percentage of the people I have slept with in the nearly 10 years since losing my virginity have been one-time deals. There was that guy at Mardi Gras — hold on … have to ask my friend what his name was … damn, she doesn’t remember either. Laird! His name was Laird, right? Anyway, there was Andrew, my realtor, who showed up at my apartment in the middle of the night and I was like, “Hey, why not?” The second guy I had sex with was also a one-night stand — his name was Sean. He was really good-looking and when it was over he said it had been “lovely” and I remember he had a cute face, but I cannot remember how we ended up in bed together.

What I also didn’t remember, until recently, was that most of these one-night stands didn’t make me feel very good the next day. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: The Phone Call Rule

At brunch on Sunday, my friend Liza explained to me what she calls “the phone call rule.”

“Now that I’m out of the ‘one-night stand’ game, I have a rule that if I hang out with a guy that I’m dating, even casually, and we engage in intimate activities, I tell him that I would appreciate a phone call from him the next day.”

“Really?” I asked, my jaw kind of dropping.

“Yeah. I politely tell him that a phone call the next day represents respect,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be a long phone call, or anything. I just want him to ask me if I’m doing OK or tell me he had a good time or whatever. Is this really too much to ask?”

My first reaction was, “Yes.” Then again, this is coming from a girl who felt weird asking a guy I had just engaged in “intimate activities” with to help me find a cab at 3 a.m. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: I Dated A Psychotherapist

If you had brain cancer, would you date a neurologist? Would you sleep with a chiropractor to ease your chronic back pain? Around my twentieth birthday, I was hit with a sudden onset of crippling depression and anxiety. After two years, several doctors and a veritable rainbow of colored mood-altering capsules, I still felt hopeless. With no cure in sight, I fell for a psychotherapist. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: Why I Wore A Playboy Bunny T-Shirt In High School

There’s a period of time in high school that I’m not particularly proud of and, remarkably, it’s not the time I wore sparkly blue nail polish to prom: it’s when I wore my Playboy Bunny T-shirt. I’d half-forgotten about that thing until I read Playboy is selling official “Playboy Bunny costumes” in honor of their 50th anniversary. My knee-jerk reaction was to laugh. I mean, what a ridiculous costume. Do women actually feel sexy dressed up in a corset, cottontail and bunny ears?

Then I remembered I used to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the Playboy Bunny logo. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: Boys Like Bald Girls

When I was 21 I was diagnosed with cancer. It really sucked – and not just because of the whole “life-threatening disease” thing. My prognosis was good, as my doctors had caught it early and the type I had was considered extremely treatable. The worst part about cancer was the wrench it threw in my plans. At the time of my diagnosis, I had just started an amazing internship where I was required to work anywhere between 40 and 60 hours a week. My 22nd birthday was three weeks away. Summer had just started and I’d had big plans to work hard all day and play hard at night. In short, multiple surgeries and months of hospital visits was not what I had in mind. In the end, though, cancer might have been the best thing that ever happened to me. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: It’s Time To Keep Some Things Under Lock And Key

There are real downsides to writing about your life on the internet. For one thing, “sharing” — in the form of your deepest feelings or the most benign observations — starts to become a knee-jerk reaction every time something happens. A particularly awesome development on “Lost”? Tweet your reaction during the commercial break. Feeling inexplicably sad because the person you have a crush on doesn’t seem to give a s**t? Tweet “FMLFMLFML” and then pen a blog post about it the next day. Eventually you realize that your internal filter — the part of you that says, “I think I am going to keep this to myself” — has switched off. That’s what’s happened to me. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: I’m A Loner

I probably won’t go to your birthday party. Or your housewarming party. Or your Halloween party, your Christmas party, or your July 4th barbecue. It’s nothing personal. I like you. I really do! And I’m super-nice and friendly. I really am! If you’re in need of a professional introduction, or want to borrow a book, or just desire someone to listen while you talk, I’m your girl. But you shouldn’t expect I’ll show up in a social setting, charm your friends, and be the life of the party. I’m a loner and I won’t be at the party. Keep reading »